Best Picture Nominee Review Series: Michael Clayton

Best Picture nominee Michael Clayton (2007)
This is a guest post from Robin Hitchcock.

Michael Clayton seems like an unlikely Best Picture nominee: a legal thriller that I would have sworn was adapted from an airport novel if I didn’t know that it was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.  Can’t you see yourself reading this plot description on a dust jacket while you half-listen to gate change announcements? Michael Clayton is the fixer for the elite Manhattan law firm Kenner, Bach & Leeden, making the deals and greasing the wheels for the tough cases that need to go away and stay under the radar.  But when he’s sent to clean up the mess when his firm’s legendary attorney Arthur Eden goes off his medication and starts sabotaging their defense against a billion-dollar toxic tort class action, Clayton is reunited with his long-dormant conscience… and it might cost him his life. 
It’s a film completely lacking in the epic trappings or topical social commentary usually characterizing Best Picture nominees, especially back in 2007 when the field was still only open to five films.  Sure, it has a slick look, dashes of symbolic pretension (sorry, I have no. earthly. clue. what the horses mean) and an over-the-top and sometimes offensively unrealistic portrayal of mental illness, but it seems a more likely contender for heavy basic-cable rotation than for Best Picture.
Except for the part where it is really, really good.
Tilda Swinton’s phenomenal, Oscar-winning performance as Karen Crowder, general counsel for the toxic tort defendant United Northfield and villain of the story, does much of the work of pulling the film into the prestige league.  It’s the best kind of supporting acting: a tremendous richness of character is developed in a few short scenes, leaving an impression so great it is hard to believe she doesn’t appear in more of the film.
Swinton demonstrates incredible control, imbuing characterization into the barely perceptible twitches of individual facial muscles.  [It’s worlds apart from Tom Wilkinson’s scenerey-chomping (but also nominated) performance as the unbalanced Arthur, which makes that character seem even more out of place in the film.]  In one of my favorite scenes, Karen awkwardly contracts with a hit man with a light-voiced forced professionalism that gives me flashbacks to my worst phone interviews, while reading over a stolen memorandum held in a hand stuffed in a plastic bag. She seems so comfortable with her improvised evidence-prevention, and it stands in such strong contrast with her hesitant negotiations, that we learn a great deal about what lines this character has already crossed that have brought her to the point of contract killing.  Even Swinton’s HAND can act, when it’s hidden away in a plastic bag.
It’s a terrific performance in a rich role, but unfortunately some of that richness of character is rife with sexism, or at least relies on the sexism of the audience.  We first see the character breaking down in a bathroom stall, pouring sweat broadly staining the pits of her conservative blouse.  Her first dialogue is anxious practice for an interview discussing her recent promotion to general counsel as she dresses in the morning.  Karen sits on her hotel bed in a practical nude bra and slip, posture slumped enough that some rolls of fat form on her midsection.  Rarely is a half-dressed woman so de-sexualized in Hollywood film, and that captures our interest, but only because it relies on our presumption of sexist exploitation.  So much of the complexity of the character is derived from our sexist expectations of what a cold-blooded corporate killer would be like and the “feminine vulnerability” (a phrase woefully common in reveiwers’ discussions of Swinton’s performance) of Karen Crowder.  Swinton’s performance is strong enough to transcend this and actually earn the mantle of “complex villain”, but it is nevertheless problematic from a feminist perspective.
And my brow furrow deepens when I consider the only other female role with any meat to it—Anna, one of the class action plaintiffs (played by Merritt Wever).  Anna is a young, painfully naïve country girl, and her “purity” draws a deep love from Arthur, who calls her “God’s perfect little creature.”  Arthur’s love for Anna inspires his crusade to expose U/North’s guilt.   [Sidebar: As a lawyer, I hate hate hate when characters are portrayed as heroes for betraying their clients when they find out they are guilty.  That is not heroic. It is unethical and WRONG.  I’m looking at you, Perry Mason! And Matlock, you oughtta be disbarred! /rant]  So: female character that only exists to provide motivation for male character? Check! But why stop the sexist cliches there?  Anna is flattered by the (creepy and grossly ethics-violating) attention that Arthur gives her, even after he strips down and professes his love to her while she is being deposed about HER PARENTS DYING OF CANCER.  She accepts the plane ticket to New York he buys for her even though she’s never been farther away from home than Milwaukee, and has to lower her voice to an awed whisper when she recounts that the ticket cost eight hundred dollars.  Anna’s simplicity and innocence stands in start contrast to Karen’s ruthless professionalism, creating an unpleasant dichotomy where the dumb, docile country mouse is “God’s perfect creature” and the professional, competent city mouse is Pure Evil.  I doubt this message was intentional, but it still grates. The lesson is that passing the Bechdel test (Michael Clayton flunks on the second prong) not only appeases us feminists but helps avoid undesired inferences of sexism.  
Despite these shortcomings, I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Clayton. The movie is worth watching just to bask in the awesomeness of Tilda Swinton’s performance, which truly is one for the ages, but it’s got plenty else to recommend it as well. It’s gripping, good-looking, thought-provoking, and hey, George Clooney’s face is on screen like 90% of the time. 
Robin Hitchcock has a card in her wallet that proves she’s an attorney, but she practices writing more than she practices law.  You can read her series of reviews of wedding movies at her blog HitchDied and her reviews of everything else at The Double R Diner.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: There Will Be Blood

Best Picture Oscar nominee, There Will Be Blood
This is a guest post from Lesley Jenike.

I’m one of those hothouse flower film enthusiasts who feel relieved whenever Citizen Kane comes on Turner Classic Movies, as if it were a remedy for my chronic migraine. I’m oddly grateful to Ted Turner (my undergraduate commencement speaker and an American mogul/eccentric much like Kane and Plainview) for TCM, though I find myself muttering after I’ve clicked back over to, say, some Jennifer Aniston rom-com, “What happened to Hollywood?” Sure, it’s a cliché of a question, but the answers are myriad and complicated, having mainly to do with changes in the culture and in the medium itself. There are certain images, ideas, and obsessions that are inherent to our collective identity as a nation, and every once in a great while contemporary filmmakers who happen to have the money, the talent, the connections, and the audacity, explore them with varying degrees of success. P.T. Anderson’s 2007 Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood is one if those movies, a masterpiece in the tradition of Welles’ Citizen Kane and, yes, I can without hesitation tell you that I absolutely adore it. Classic Hollywood lives on.

There Will Be Blood is loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! Though I haven’t read the novel, I do know that while adapting the material for his screenplay, Anderson chose to concentrate on the troubled and troubling relationship between Daniel Plainview, a self-made oilman played to perfection by a John Huston-inspired Daniel Day Lewis, and his more politically and emotionally progressive “son,” H.W., rather than the Teapot Dome Scandal of the 1920’s; it was an important and effective choice. During the first ten minutes of the film, Anderson provides us with all the exposition we’ll need through a largely dialogue-free sequence in which we’re witness to the crudity and danger of early American oil exploration, our main character’s relentless vigor and drive, and H.W.’s entrance into Plainview’s life as an infant orphaned by an oil-well accident. The final scene in the opening sequence is masterful: Daniel Plainview alone on a train with H.W. as a baby tucked into an open suitcase. H.W. plays with Daniel’s mustache as Daniel looks down on him with tenderness. Right from the start, Anderson is confounding our initial assumptions about Daniel specifically and about turn-of-the-century oilmen in general, by juxtaposing ruthlessness with familial love and loyalty. This is, after all, a movie in which conflict is created and developed via a collection of Biblical proportioned antagonisms—father v son and brother v brother. The film ultimately ends with the dissolution of any real (or imagined) family connection between Daniel and H.W. in lieu of a philosophical (and literal) battle of sorts between two conmen—Daniel Plainview the oilman, and Eli Sunday the preacher (played by the excellent Paul Dano. Dano, who can go toe-to-toe with the finest screen actor working today, is definitely one to watch.)

It’s important to pause here and mention changing views concerning the portrayal of women, minorities, the disabled, and the disenfranchised at large in American films. If we consider some of our American cinematic “masterpieces,” we often find them absent vibrant female characters, for example (think The Godfather, Citizen Kane, and Chinatown to name just three). As much as I desperately want to see my gender portrayed with respect, honesty, and integrity, many films that deal with the great American mythos don’t have much room for female characters, simply because women haven’t been a part of, and are often still excluded from, the creation story we tell ourselves—a story of brutal boots-on-the-ground capitalism and, negatively speaking, punishing exploitation. It’s a Judeo-Christian story in which the individual male forges his path through the wilderness, an anti-hero who, despite his great wealth and power, can’t overcome his subsequent moral corruption. What’s important to recognize is that the marked absence of “the other” in these films is a comment on an institutionalized patriarchy that extends beyond our everyday interactions to the very heart of our cultural mythos. There Will Be Blood is yet another film that further cements a white male-dominated American story of origin.

But what makes this particular film so thrilling is that it’s ultimately much more than a postmodern cop to an earlier American form; it’s a visceral, earnest portrayal of the forces at work in opposition to, and in support of, our American fantasy of self-sufficiency and self-reinvention. Anderson creates a highly stylized world in which a boy can seemingly spring from Plainview’s oil well, sans womb, in a sort of male Immaculate Conception. It’s a Cain and Abel world (though the twentieth century has already obscured the moral clarity of earlier epochs) where blazing fire erupts from great swaths of desert and where men, faces blacked by oil, seem to crawl up from the earth’s very crust. It’s a film that leaves us wondering which of the two “brothers” is more evil: Paul or Eli? Daniel or Henry? What I mean is, at its core, There Will Be Blood describes the convoluted love/hate relationship between capitalism and Eli Sunday’s frontier-style Christianity. Who will win in this war for men’s (and women’s, I guess) souls?

Both Daniel and Eli vie for the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of Little Boston’s citizens, most effectively illustrated in the scenes between Daniel, Mary Sunday, and Abel Sunday—Mary and Eli’s father. Mary is really the only female character who gets any airtime in There Will Be Blood and, like the rest of the movie’s characters, she’s given a name with Biblical significance. As an innocent, she’s a likely victim and both her religious family and the faithless Daniel Plainview, attempt to use her as an example. When H.W. tells Daniel that Abel “beats her [Mary] when she doesn’t pray,” we watch Daniel’s wheels start to turn. As a slap-in-face to Eli, Daniel invites Mary to stand with him at the well’s christening, instead of allowing Eli to lead his “congregation” in prayer, and later, at the picnic, Daniel makes a point to tell Mary he’ll “protect her” from her father while Abel’s still in earshot. We could interpret Daniel’s gestures of warmth and affection toward Mary as genuine—after all, he was willing to take orphaned H.W. on as his son—but Anderson doesn’t shy away from also suggesting that Daniel is perfectly willing to use the cult of familial loyalty to win trust for financial gain—a savvy ploy we see time and time again in films like The Godfather, Chinatown, and, yes, Citizen Kane. It’s an ultimately destructive ruse and Daniel falls victim to it, naturally, in the end.

When H.W. is made deaf by another oil well accident, Daniel finds him to be a less than effective business partner, though Anderson and Day-Lewis endow the character with so much fervent contradiction, it’s hard to tell how Daniel really feels about his son’s handicap. Later, when a stranger approaches Daniel to tell him he’s his long-lost stepbrother, we can tell, in his own convoluted way, that Daniel is looking for an opportunity to trust—somebody, anybody—while he claims, of course, to have disdain for “these people.” And finally, after his own self-delusion proves, well, illusory, and he’s bereft of his “son” and his “brother,” (dispatched by his own hand, no less), we watch Daniel rage further into a kind of Charles Foster Kane-type isolation. The film closes with a terrifying scene that frankly verges on bathos (it takes place in Plainview’s private bowling alley of all places) in which Daniel forces Eli to submit, aloud, that he is “a false prophet” and that “God is a superstition” after Eli attempts to extort money from his old enemy.

Anderson has proven his tremendous potential with There Will Be Blood, so much so, I wonder how, after plumbing the bloody depths of our Great American Hang-ups, he could possibly top its achievement. It’s a difficult film and most likely not to everyone’s taste, but it’s a film I’m certain will age well thanks to its satisfying complexity and nuance. “Give me the blood,” indeed!

Lesley Jenike received her PhD from the University of Cincinnati in 2008. She currently teaches poetry writing, screenwriting, and literature classes at the Columbus College of Art and Design. Her book of poems is Ghost of Fashion (CustomWords, 2009). She reviewed the Oscar-nominated film, A Serious Man as part of our 2010 Best Picture Nominee Review Series.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: No Country For Old Men

Best Picture Oscar Winner, No Country For Old Men
This is a guest post from Max Thornton.

Cormac McCarthy doesn’t understand women.

Statements like this are responsible for the ever-growing dent in my desk and the permanent lump on my forehead. McCarthy is a very highly respected writer. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize. He’s a MacArthur Fellow. He’s been compared to Faulkner, Joyce, and Melville. Can you even imagine a female writer garnering such acclaim without writing a single prominent male character, and then telling Oprah, “I don’t pretend to understand men”?

The Coen brothers, happy to say, make no such nonsense generalizations about 50% of humankind. Not only did they create one of my favorite female characters of all time in one of my favorite movies of all time–Frances McDormand’s Best-Actress-Oscar-winning turn as Marge Gunderson in 1996’s criminally non-Best-Picture-winning Fargo–but they often portray prominent female characters in their films: notably in Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Burn After Reading, and last year’s True Grit.

The union of Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers is, aesthetically and thematically, an excellent idea. No Country For Old Men the novel, with its sparse and evocative prose, reads like a treatment for a Coen brothers film. Violence, greed, fate, and the average joe who gets caught up in criminal activity are all recurring Coen motifs, even if the unremitting bleakness leaves almost no room for their characteristic gallows humor. However, as Ira Boudway’s Salon review puts it, in the novel’s milieu “[w]omen exist mainly to show primordial attraction and inarticulate loyalty toward men; men are more at ease sawing off shotgun barrels or dressing their own bullet wounds than they are in the presence of women, children or their own emotions.”

That’s as true of the film as it is of the book. In McCarthy’s portrayal of rural West Texas, 1980, women are receptionists, secretaries, loyal wives, and not much else. A handful of women make single-scene appearances in this movie to serve coffee or give motel room keys to the three main characters: average joe Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), old Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones, sporting a permanent worried frown that makes you want to hug him and feed him Snausages), and serial killer Anton Chigurh (a spine-tingling Javier Bardem). The only woman who really has something to do in the film is the wonderful Kelly Macdonald, whom you can witness being wonderful to the max in the terrific Boardwalk Empire (roll on fall!).

Of course, when I say “something to do,” I mean “a grand total of ten minutes’ screentime, all of it oriented to onscreen husband Brolin.” As Carla Jean Moss, Macdonald bears an expression of chronic worriment to rival Jones’s, and almost all of her scenes require her to do nothing more than fret at Brolin, asking him for guidance or expressing concern for his safety.

In a way, Carla Jean ties the film together, but she does so solely in terms of the male characters: she is the only character to share screentime with all three of the main characters (who never appear onscreen together). Occasional hints are dropped regarding her life outside of the men–“I’m used to lots of things. I work at Wal-Mart”–but, frustratingly, these are not expanded in any way. Only in her final scene does she talk about something other than Llewelyn.

Those three main characters are all men with a mission. Llewelyn’s mission is as simple as staying alive: stumbling on the scene of a drug deal gone kaput, he swipes a satchel full of cash, and in that singularly ill-thought-out action of basic greed he finds himself a hunted man, pursued by the chillingly ruthless and single-minded Chigurh. He in turn is hunted by Sheriff Bell, who is haunted by an existential crisis born of his age and sense of his own mortality. Of the three, only Chigurh operates within a clear and unambiguous moral code. Bell feels overwhelmed by the unremitting violence of his county and plans to retire, and Llewelyn dooms himself with an act of kindness (returning to the scene of the drug deal to help the wounded man who had earlier begged him for water, thus gaining the attention of his pursuers); Chigurh, though, shows no weakness or indecision, but complies fully with a set of inflexible rules.

In perhaps the movie’s most famous scene, Chigurh asks a too-observant store owner, “What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?” When the owner calls the toss correctly, the hitman abides by the coin’s ruling and lets him live. By allowing external cues–the sound of a toilet flushing, the ringing of a phone, the result of a coin toss–to determine his actions, Chigurh presents himself as an instrument of fate. In fact, he can be read as the personified figure of Death itself, hunting down his victims with absolute implacability, killing or sparing them on the basis of chance outcomes that invoke chaos theory and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Over the phone, Chigurh offers Llewelyn a deal: “You bring me the money, and I’ll let [Carla Jean] go. Otherwise she’s accountable, same as you.” Even after Llewelyn is dead and the money has been recovered, Chigurh’s moral code demands that he honor the terms of this deal, and he hunts down Carla Jean.

If Chigurh is, as I read him, not Death itself but a man who believes he is enacting the works of Death on earth, then Carla Jean is the one character to call him out on this. Llewelyn, the store owner, bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson)–all operate within Chigurh’s framework, trying to trick him or compromise with him, accepting the rules he gives them: “You need to call it. I can’t call it for you. It wouldn’t be fair.” Only Carla Jean refuses to engage, declining to call the coin toss and telling him, “It’s not the coin [that determines your actions]. It’s just you.” It’s a fascinating glimpse into her character, which remains frustratingly underdeveloped, because recognizing the arbitrary nature of the rules does not free her from them.

The film’s final scene is of now ex-Sheriff Bell talking to (or possibly at) his wife Loretta over breakfast, aimless in his retirement. He describes his dreams of his late father, who “was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up…” His world has no place for an older man, for a sense of morality or law as he knows it. He might well be asking himself the question Chigurh asks of Wells, moments before killing him: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

Fargo ends similarly, after all the action and thrills are played out, with a moment of intimacy between law officer and spouse. The tone of the two endings, however, could hardly be farther apart: Ed Tom Bell ends No Country a defeated man, adrift in a harsh and incomprehensible world, with death the only blessing on his horizon; Marge Gunderson ends Fargo smiling, sharing in her husband’s little triumph, and saying, “Two more months.” Fargo offers hope and redemption for humanity in the suggestion that there is indeed more to life than a little money, whereas the philosophy of No Country For Old Men is summed up by an old white man complaining bitterly about “the money, and the drugs…[and] children[…]with green hair and bones in their noses.”

The offer of redemption, I think, makes Fargo the superior film. It’s telling that the Academy, an institution frequently criticized for demonstrating the reactionary politics of a bunch of complaining old white men, chose to honor the film with no female protagonist and no redemption. 

Max Thornton is about to move halfway across the world to be a grad student. She writes words at Gay Christian Geek. 

YouTube Break: Peggy Olson on Women in the Workplace

Ah, Mad Men. I have such mixed feelings about the show, which is part of the reason I haven’t written about it here. Yet.* With seasons 1-4 now streaming on Netflix, and with the fifth season premiering sometime in 2012 (delayed while star Jon Hamm inked a 3-year, 8-figure deal), now is a good time to really look at the show. (Hint.)
Here is a cheeky little ad the FX network created for the show, highlighting feminist fave Peggy Olson.

If you haven’t seen Mad Men, how do you feel about this advertisement? If you’re familiar–or a fan–devoid of its context, doesn’t the ad appear to be promoting the very sexist ideology the show attempts to critique? (Oh, right, but it’s ironic, which excuses it from everything, am I right?)

*Stay tuned for our announcement and Call for Writers for Mad Men Week here at Bitch Flicks!

From the Archive: The Power of Representation

Given the Obama administration’s embarrassing failure to discuss—hell, even mention—the War on Women, I thought Amber’s following post, which was first published here on February 16, 2009, would warrant rereading.  

This Is What a Feminist Looks Like?
Representing President Obama as a “Super-feminist” has ignited a debate over who the savior of feminism ought to be (see here for a good overview), and likely sold a lot of copies of Ms. magazine’s January edition. Praise for the new president’s political aspirations regarding women’s rights isn’t contended; it’s how the feminist magazine chose to portray Obama: tearing open his Clark Kent clothes to swoop in and rescue us. It’s the representation that has people peeved.

For our purposes here at BF, two articles were published last month—the weekend before the inauguration—about the impact the movies had on Obama’s election. Not that the movies got him elected, but how roles black American men play in the movies have a real effect on the people who see them, and how we can see, through the movies, our own cultural values reflected back on us.

If you ever question how important representation in film really is, I think these articles make the point well. While they specifically focus on male presidential aspirations (and on the unique history of black Americans), they also remind us how pop culture permeates our society and informs opinions and values.

The New York Times published “How the Movies Made a President,” written by A.O. Scott and Manhola Dargis, in their Film section. The article provides an overview of black male roles, from the “Black Everyman” of the ’60s to the “Black Messiah,” currently played and re-played by Will Smith.

Make no mistake: Hollywood’s historic refusal to embrace black artists and its insistence on racist caricatures and stereotypes linger to this day. Yet in the past 50 years — or, to be precise, in the 47 years since Mr. Obama was born — black men in the movies have traveled from the ghetto to the boardroom, from supporting roles in kitchens, liveries and social-problem movies to the rarefied summit of the Hollywood A-list. In those years the movies have helped images of black popular life emerge from behind what W. E. B. Du Bois called “a vast veil,” creating public spaces in which we could glimpse who we are and what we might become.

We hear from the likes of Elizabeth Banks and Katherine Heigl that the only roles really open to them—genuinely talented, lovely young actresses—are that of sidekick, buddy, and romantic object. It’s not that there haven’t been good, meaty roles for women; there have, for sure. But what movie roles do young girls imitate? What fictional figures can women look up to?

The Root’s “Hollywood’s Leading Man: From Sammy Davis Jr. to Dave Chappelle’s Black Bush, how pop culture tested the waters for a black president” offers a more nuanced and contrarian view of the power of pop culture (and reminds us of the egos of those who really believe their art makes a difference). The article surveys the satirical representations of a black president as representative of the racial divide in America, but cites the series 24 as a shift—although one not without its problems—and questions how television and cinema will change.

So now that we have a black president, how will we react to media portrayals? Will there be pressure among writers and producers to create black leaders who feel real and black-led administrations that feel plausible? Will we, as viewers, be able to enjoy over-the-top portrayals of black presidents, such as Terry Crews’ wig-wearing wrestler in Idiocracy, as merely fun entertainment, devoid of racial and social commentary?

Might we perhaps see a black actor playing the lead in a complex drama like The West Wing, or a romantic comedy along An American President, where the president gets to be a fully fleshed out human, and not a cardboard icon? And isn’t it about time that we saw a portrayal of an African-American president who just happens to be a woman, too?

I, too, would like to see that woman. And I think we’d all like to see her on the cover of Ms., wearing a t-shirt that reads “This is what a feminist looks like.” 

Kickstarter Helps Young Filmmakers Bypass Studio System

We received the following press release in our e-mail inbox. Please consider supporting Michek’s film. Fundraising officially ends Saturday, August 6, 2011.
 
Independent filmmaker Alyssa Michek uses kickstarter.com to fund It’s All In My Head, a short film about breaking-up told from the woman’s perspective.

Silver Spring, MD — Independent filmmaker Alyssa Michek must raise $5000 online to fund her short film “It’s All In My Head” in 30 days or less. The 25-year-old filmmaker is directing and producing her first professional short film. With experience directing student films, “It’s All In My Head” is her most ambitious yet, spanning five locations, shot on 16mm color film, with a professional cast and crew. Without a website like kickstarter.com Michek’s film would most likely never be made.

Kickstarter is a new way of funding creative projects “powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method where projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands.” Instead of pitching to a studio, creators pitch to the kickstarter community, then use their network of supporters and self-promote in order to fund creative projects. In the first week Michek raised almost $1,500 and with 15 days left to go she is almost halfway there.

To promote “It’s All In My Head,” Michek, a DC native, is offering DC area residents access to special events. For a pledge of $150 spend a day on set. For $200 be an extra in the film with an open bar. With a pledge of $250 the backer and a guest will be VIPs at the film premiere.

“I’m a feminist,” says Michek, “and I think female perspectives are often under-represented in mainstream films.” Her film will center a woman’s story and encourage male viewers to identify with her, as the only fully realized character. “I wanted to come at this with a female perspective, but also have it be universal.”

“It’s All In My Head” is a 20-minute short film exploring the break-up script and how our culture shapes our concept of love. The film follows Alex and Michelle through their break-up showing the highlights of their relationship in flashbacks with voice-over from Michelle commenting on the relationship. Michelle criticizes the typical break-up speech and its excuses. She imagines herself in classic films that have shaped her concept of love and dreams a happy ending interspersed with contemporary film references. When she comes back to reality she finds that life is not like the movies.

“I do think our expectations and our concept of relationships are very much shaped by pop culture” says Michek “and most movies create unreal expectations.” With her film she hopes to combat and comment on these expectations and the culture that creates them.

Fundraising for “It’s All In My Head” ends August 6, 2011. If Michek does not meet her goal, she gets nothing. If all goes as planned, the film will shoot at the end of August and beginning of September and should be finished by the end of the year. Those interested in supporting the project should visit http://kck.st/nEZV4W to learn more.

For more information about this project or to schedule an interview with Alyssa Michek, contact her at alyssamichek@gmail.com or at itsallinmyheadfilm@gmail.com.

Kickstarter site: http://kck.st/nEZV4W

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Film Corner! Review of Delhi Belly from Shakesville 

The Hermione Granger Series: Feminist Criticism of Feminist Criticism from The Funny Feminist 

Stop With the Twi-Hate Already (Thoughts on Comic-Con and Twilight Boycotting) from Seduced By Twilight

Girls on Film: Comic Con’s Push for Geeks, Heroines, and Women-Driven Discussion from Movies.com

Arranged: Life in Left Field from Dancing with Pain

Marilyn Monroe Sculpture Puts the Wind Up Chicago Art Critics from Guardian UK

Without Men: All About Men at the Expense of Latinas from Wonderinginlove 

Sigourney Weaver: “Every Woman Has a Secret Action Heroine in Her” from Jezebel

A Brief Oral History of Melissa McCarthy’s Huge Bridesmaids Performance from GQ

Lucille Ball Hitting the Comic Stands in August! from BUST Magazine

Five Feminisms from Women’s Football from Feminema

Share links of what you’ve been reading!

YouTube Break: Reality Rehab With Dr. Jenn

Back in March, we featured Jennifer L. Pozner’s book, Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, as a Quote of the Day. I just ran across something awesome: a satirical and hilarious video series called, Reality Rehab with Dr. Jenn, in which Pozner hosts a mock-reality-rehab show. Her main responsibility as host involves revealing and critiquing reality TV stereotypes by attempting to help those stock characters “learn how to be three-dimensional human beings again.” The featured stock characters include The Desperate Bachelorette, The Angry Black Woman, The “Real” Housewife, The Top Model, The Slutty Bitch, The Douchebag Dude, and The Gangsta Guy. I’m posting the trailer below, but definitely go to her site, and check out the entire series!



Bio from the Web site:

JENNIFER L. POZNER (“Dr Jenn”; Executive Producer) is the author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, and the producer and cowriter of this Reality Rehab project. She is founder and Executive Director of Women In Media & News and editor of WIMN’s Voices. A widely published journalist who freelances for corporate and independent print and broadcast outlets, Jennifer is also a noted lecturer on women, media, politics and pop culture. Jennifer has appeared as a media commentator on NBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC News Now, GRITtv, Democracy Now!, National Public Radio, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She has served as an adviser for and has been featured in several documentary films, including I Was a Teenage Feminist and Miss Representation. Jenn is extremely indebted to and impressed by the entire Reality Rehab team, who worked entirely for free to pull this indy project together. This is her first time writing and producing a video project…she hopes you enjoy it! (Tell her what you think on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.)

Guest Writer Wednesday: Incendies

Incendies: Lebanon Is Scorched, Burned and Blistered

To say that the Middle East has been scorched, burned and blistered by war is an understatement. In Incendies–a ground-breaking diaspora film, set in both present day Canada and in Lebanon in the recent past–we get to see in painful detail the intricacies of how the war burned many families into horrific mangled messes.
The idea of return is common among diaspora films of the last few decades. Usually the protagonist of the film returns to their family’s place of origin and discovers the rubble and ruins that have been vacated by their parent’s generation. Usually we do not see the atrocities that happened, but we are told that they are too terrible to talk about or to show. The protagonist walks around looking traumatized which, I have to admit, despite my devotion to these films, is part of the growing pains in the development of a genre.
Where Incendies distinguishes itself is in the crafting of a story that really is too terrible to tell and too terrible to witness. And then it makes us witness every terrible moment of it.
A cinematic moment. The image comes first and the explanation comes much much later.
The brilliance of Incendies is not simply in the visceral moments of violence–the shock of a child being ripped from her mother’s arms before the mother is burned alive–it is in the crafting of a story that makes visible the back and forth of retaliation: like an equation where each variable, each action has a predictable and increasingly despicable reaction. Details were planted early in the film and later revealed their terrible significance. At the same time, the film avoids didacticism, and instead reaches for and finds mythological resonance.
Violence and pain become sources of empathy and identification for the audience.
The film is based on a play written and directed by seasoned writer, actor and director extraordinaire, Wajdi Mouawad. He is of Lebanese origin and has received the highest accolades for his creative work in Canada. The Incendies stage play has traveled the world and has received rave reviews. Mouawad directed a film in 2004, Littoral, that was also an adaptation of a script he had written and directed for the stage. His initial transition to film was bumpy. Littoral was similarly a story of returning to Lebanon to burying a parent. Unfortunately, it was heavy in dialogue and the emotional tone of the film was forced. This time, Mouawad’s story has been better cinematically served by teaming up with director Denis Villeneuve. Villeneuve has spent the last decade working on the project of cinematic representations of violence. Even with an Oscar nomination in the Foreign Language category, Incendies is doing far better than its distributor had expected.
Seen through a feminist lens, the intersecting oppressions on the protagonist’s life do not simply come from the war planes overhead–which are never named, but are likely from Israel. The old world familial relationships that are what could loosely be referred to as pre-capitalist are further entrenched rather than displaced by war. The political, religious, and gender divides as well as ideas about honor and group loyalty are part of the web that entraps the protagonist. The story is written with non identical twins, a boy and girl, returning to Lebanon to search for their father and brother while uncovering their mother’s past. Each child is able to search in different spaces based on their respective genders, further revealing a splitting in the already fractured narrative.
The now classic diasporic subject returning to the ‘homeland’ and looking.
The incredible violence we witness in the film is shot and edited with emotional rawness and, importantly, respect for women’s bodies. The rape scene is a good example; we are first told through dialogue that it is going to happen. We see the woman sitting in a chair and then see the rapist enter the room. The camera cuts to a close-up of her face as she is waiting, then cuts to a close-up of the rapist’s face as he looks at her. It cuts back to her on the ground crying. The editing implies the act of rape, and reduces the voyeuristic impact on the audience. Instead, we share in the victim’s anticipatory fear and in her pain afterward.
The protagonist is played by Lubna Azabal, a Moroccan actress who is a contender to be the next generation Hiam Abbas.
Hiam Abbas is the Arab world’s Meryl Streep.
The press releases claim that the film is set in an unnamed Arab country. The film itself evades realist details that would pin it to an exact location: the cityscapes are not Beirut, because they were shot in Jordan. The prison which is referred to as “in the South” is undoubtedly modeled after the notorious Khiam prisons in Lebanon, but in the film it is given a new name. The Nationalist party and its leader are fictional, although they occupied a similar position in the ideological landscape of Lebanon. License plates on cars are from several countries. The protagonist is modeled after Souha Bechara, a famous Lebanese freedom fighter who was in prison for assassination and sang through her solitary confinement. Unlike the character Nehal, the historical figure of Souha did not have children. Obscuring, renaming, and deliberate obfuscation are perhaps the historical equivalent of mythological strokes in narrative structure. The lack of geopolitical specificity is perhaps what allows the film to breathe the symbolic into the Lebanese situation. Make no mistake – some things are obscure, but the important details situate the film with utter literalism in Lebanon over the last few decades.
The film is traumatic to watch and perhaps cathartic too, especially for anyone from the region. I sobbed at least six times. The film allows a flood of memories to return, and stimulates after-film conversations about things people have repressed for years. In one of these conversations someone asked why the mother would bring the memories of violence onto her children. “They live in Canada, they don’t even speak Arabic, why do they need to unearth a painful and terrible history? Why not live in ignorant bliss,” she asked. What are the assumptions operating here? Do those in diaspora ever really live in ignorant bliss, when they are raised by parent(s) who have been through trauma, and war trickles down through their actions onto the children somehow? In Incendies, the children were raised without a father and without an extended family on either their paternal or maternal sides. The film asks us to think about whether their lives were ever really free of violence, even though the violence may have been displaced and unnamed. Traces of violence and the reality of unknown origins haunted them. The film suggests both that there is violence implicit in the return of the exile and the inevitability of that return. In this story, the boundaries between ‘here’ and ‘over there,’ past and present, families and strangers are found to be more permeable than many would like to think.
Vicky Moufawad-Paul is a curator, artist, film programmer, and the Artistic Director at A Space Gallery in Toronto. She earned a Masters of Fine Arts from York University, where she conducted research on the visual culture of Palestine. She was previously the founding Executive Director of the Toronto Arab Film Festival, and has worked at the Toronto International Film Festival Group. She was a member of the Visual and Media Arts Committee at the Toronto Arts Council, a founding member of the Advisory Board of the Palestine Film Festival, and a member of the Board of Directors at Trinity Square Video. Her writing has been published by Fuse Magazine, E-Fagia, the Arab American National Museum, and the Journal of Peace Research. She was also a contributor to the anthology Decentre: concerning artist-run culture/a propos de centres d’artistes (YYZ Books, 2008). Moufawad-Paul’s video art has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Movie Preview: Life, Above All

 

I saw a preview for Life, Above All when I went to see Woody Allen’s latest misogyny-fest, Midnight in Paris. For the record, I mostly hated Midnight in Paris–and should review it as the sexist piece of crap it is–but I’m trying to find examples of positivity in the film industry these days. The only truly great thing about attending Midnight in Paris was discovering the upcoming Life, Above All (now playing in New York and L.A.) and the upcoming Take Shelter–holy crap that’s a freaky trailer.

Michael Shannon scares me.
Anyway, the official Web site synopsizes Life, Above All as follows:
Just after the death of her newly-born sister, Chanda, 12 years old, learns of a rumor that spreads like wildfire through her small, dust-ridden village near Johannesburg. It destroys her family and forces her mother to flee. Sensing that the gossip stems from prejudice and superstition, Chanda leaves home and school in search of her mother and the truth. Life, Above All is an emotional and universal drama about a young girl (stunningly performed by first-time-actress Khomotso Manyaka) who fights the fear and shame that have poisoned her community … Directed by South African filmmaker Oliver Schmitz (Mapantsula), it is based on the international award winning novel Chanda’s Secrets by Allan Stratton.

The trailer itself gets me teary-eyed. I watched it and realized how rarely mother-daughter relationships grace the screen in a way that doesn’t portray the mother as smothering and ridiculous and usually insane, and at the very least, just … shitty. (See: Black Swan, Carrie, Mommie Dearest, Phoebe in Wonderland, Gone Baby Gone, Fish Tank, and the upcoming Ansiedad. Add screen portrayals of the Mother-in-Law to the list, and it’s a disturbing clusterfuck of epic proportions.) 

While a few reviewers argue that Life, Above All ignores the government’s responsibilities in the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa (like the film failing to mention former president Thabo Mbeki’s sympathies with AIDS denialists in the 00’s), I’m excerpting from several positive reviews that focus on the interpersonal relationships in the film:

By Liz Braun:

Life, Above All is an historical snapshot of the AIDS crisis in Africa and an indictment of sorts of the government bungling that allowed the epidemic to overwhelm South Africa. The culprits (ignorance, poverty, big pharma, religious and political leaders, etc.) are not so much the focus; the point of this quiet, heartbreaking drama is all those children left to cope, especially the orphans.

By Nora Lee Mandel:

Rather than focusing on the usual corrective lessons on the transmission and treatment of HIV/AIDS, the family’s struggles play out within systems of traditional care and limited modern medical facilities that are strained to the breaking point. Chanda rails against the stoic comforts of religion and receives only discouraging advice at an overcrowded clinic. Her illiterate and exhausted mother falls prey to the greed of a charlatan doctor, a demon exorcism, and horrific neglect by her revengeful sister, who has not forgiven Lillian for her flouting of tribal marriage traditions for the sake of love.

By Manohla Dargis:

Chanda’s silence is unnerving, as is the absence of tears, and while her calm conveys a preternatural strength of character it also suggests a lifetime of pain. No child, you think, should have to pick out her baby sister’s coffin. But she does, taking in the horror of the funeral home and its metal table without flinching and then pushing forward, still dry eyed, still determined, taking on life with an appealing (and enviable) toughness and grace that make this difficult story not just bearable but also absorbing. As the weight of the world bears down on her slender frame, she becomes the movie’s moral compass and its authentic wonder: the child who is forced to be an adult yet remains childlike enough to feel real.

By Mary Corliss:

Two years ago, a drama with a seemingly forbidding subject — an illiterate teenage girl, pregnant with her father’s child and hellishly abused by her drug-addicted mother — won over critics, audiences and the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The film was Precious. Now comes Life, Above All, which deals with the tragedy of AIDS in South Africa, as seen by a 12-year-old girl named Chanda. At the end of its world premiere at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, critics cheered like schoolkids, giving it a 10-minute standing ovation.

By Alison Willmore: 

… when its focus narrows onto Manyaka and her mother (Lerato Mvelase), their deep mutual affection and the terrifying sacrifices they’re ready to make because of it, the film sings, becoming a moving tribute to love holding fast against suffering. The ending, which offers a hint of relief, is unfiltered, frankly unbelievable melodrama, but something grimmer and more measured would be intolerable after everything that comes before.

Quote of the Day: Judith Mayne

Directed by Dorothy Arzner by Judith Mayne
 
We have yet to talk about Dorothy Arzner at Bitch Flicks. But her work demands attention in any discussions of feminist film theory. While I haven’t seen all the films she directed, I can say with confidence that most, if not all of them, pass the Bechdel Test. (Which has become somewhat of a feat these days, with the misogynistic drivel churned out and sponsored by The Never Ending Hollywood Backlash From Hell.)
To give myself a reprieve from summer blockbuster depression, I’ve been rereading Judith Mayne’s book, Directed by Dorothy Arzner, and I’m especially captivated by her take on Dance, Girl, Dance. Of course, that famous speech in the film always gives me chills. But first, a little background: 
In the early to mid-1970s, when Arzner’s work was brought to the attention of feminists, her films were deemed particularly important for their criticism of Hollywood films “from within.” Pam Cook and Claire Johnston described how the universe of the male was “made strange” in Arzner’s films, how women’s “rewriting” of male discourse subverted the established conventions of Hollywood. At the time Cook and Johnston’s essays were published, film theory was very much preoccupied with the notion of “making strange,” with the possibilities of a Hollywood film that critiqued itself and its own assumptions. Cook and Johnston brought a strong theoretical approach to Arzner’s work, while other critics of the era were simply delighted to find a woman director among all of the men in Hollywood film history.

Mayne points out that Dance, Girl, Dance is probably Arzner’s most well-known film and is a staple in feminist film theory. She summarizes the plot as follows:
The plot of Dance, Girl, Dance concerns the differing paths to success for Bubbles (Lucille Ball) and Judy (Maureen O’Hara), both members of a dance troupe led by Madame Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya). The dance troupe performs vaudeville-style numbers in bars and nightclubs, much to the chagrin of Basilova (who bemoans her status as a “flesh peddler”). Bubbles has “oomph,” a kind of dancer’s version of “it,” and eventually she leaves the troupe and enthusiastically pursues a career as “Tiger Lily White.” Judy, in contrast, is a serious student of ballet, and the protegee of Basilova. However, it is Bubbles who gets the jobs, and she arranges for Judy to be hired as her “stooge,” i.e., as a classical dancer who performs in the middle of Bubble’s act, and thus primes the audience to demand more of Bubbles.

Toward the end of the film, Judy stands on stage and refuses her role as stooge. She defiantly crosses her arms and moves closer to the audience, and she gives the spectators a piece of her mind: 

Go ahead and stare. I’m not ashamed. Go on. Laugh! Get your money’s worth. Nobody’s going to hurt you. I know you want me to tear my clothes off so’s you can look your fifty cents worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you. What do you suppose we think of you up here–with your silly smirks your mothers would be ashamed of? And we know it’s the thing of the moment for the dress suits to come and laugh at us too. We’d laugh right back at the lot of you, only we’re paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and make your screamingly clever remarks. What’s it for? So’s you can go home when the show’s over and strut before your wives and sweethearts and play at being the stronger sex for a minute? I’m sure they see through you just like we do. 

I love that moment. I love it because she critiques the men who look at women as sexual objects, and the women who do so as well. I love it because Dorothy Arzner directed this film in 1940. It’s now 2011. And I can’t even imagine a speech like this existing in a current Hollywood film. (If you can think of any that make such astute observations about sexual politics, please, clue me in.)
Mayne further complicates this famous scene in her analysis of it, so I’ll leave you with that, and the always impossible-to-answer questions surrounding self-objectification as either a form of empowerment for women, or as nothing more than internalized patriarchal exploitation. Or neither. Or both. Hmmmm:

I see Judy’s confrontation less as a challenge to the very notion of woman as object of spectacle than as the creation of another kind of performance. Oftentimes the scene is discussed as if the audience were exclusively male, which it is not, even though Judy addresses men in her speech. When the camera pans the reactions of the audience to Judy’s speech, the responses of women are quite clearly visible. Women squirm uncomfortably in their seats just as surely as men do, and when release occurs in the form of applause, it is a woman–Steven Adams’s trusty secretary–who initiates it. Arzner’s view of performance and her view of the relationship between subject and object were never absolute; women may be objectified through performance, but they are also empowered; men may consume women through the look, but women also watch and take pleasure in the spectacle of other women’s performance.

Thoughts?