Bitch Flicks – Page 34 – The radical notion that women like good movies

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week – and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

“Jessica Jones” Is An Awesomely, Aggressively Feminist Superhero Series by Heather Hogan at Autostraddle

The Uncomfortable Violence of The Hunger Games’ “Mockingjay” by s.e. smith at Bitch Media

The Film That’s Taking on Campus Rape—And Winning by Vienna Urias at Ms. blog

The (Danish) Girl Everyone’s Talking About: Movie Review by Evan Read Armstrong at BUST

‘Mustang’ Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven on Creating a Sisterhood, Representing France at the Oscars by Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood

The Women of Hollywood Speak Out by Maureen Dowd at The New York Times

The Hollywood Reporter’s New Cover Shows Hollywood Continues to Erase Women of Color by Jamie Broadnax at The Mary Sue

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

Trans Women of Color In a Theater Near You: ‘Mala Mala’ and ‘Tangerine’

This repost by staff writer Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Depictions of Trans Women.

Whenever people who aren’t queer make a film about queers, I’m always very wary about seeing it. Over 30 years ago, I had made up my mind to go to my first queer bar, but stopped in a revival movie house to see a film beforehand, which contained a surprise: an explicit male-male rape scene. The victim was the main character, in a jailhouse. His attacker was his cell mate, a grotesque, possibly mentally disabled, bald giant who had some teeth missing: he smiled as he came and sent a shiver of revulsion through the audience. No reviewer had warned about this scene, probably because this portrayal of a queer character was typical for the time. After the film was over I didn’t go to the bar. I just headed home instead.

Maybe sitting through years of shitty queer characters in films and TV has sensitized me, because, even though I’m not trans*, I often get a similar, sickly feeling about films and TV with trans* characters made by people who aren’t trans*, most recently the two (or maybe it was one and a half) episodes of the Emmy-nominated Transparent I watched when (cis) people I respect raved about it. The trans women I’ve known seem very unlike the long-suffering main character (played by a man in a dress: Jeffrey Tambor, who is winning awards for the role). They also don’t seem like the martyr played by Jared Leto (another award-winning man in a dress) in the clips I’ve seen from Dallas Buyers Club. The trans women I’ve known also aren’t the metaphorical punching bag Transamerica‘s Felicity Huffman (for once a woman — though a cis one — in a dress: perhaps why she didn’t win as many awards) played either.

In the first few scenes of the recently released documentary Mala Mala (directed by Antonio Santini and Dan Sickles) about trans* women in Puerto Rico I briefly had some trepidation when the camera (the striking cinematography is by Adam Uhl) couldn’t resist (like director Abdellatif Kechiche with his star in Blue Is The Warmest Color) an objectifying focus on the ass of trans activist Ivana. She tells us she wanted her hips and thighs to resemble those of the Latina women she admired, even though her frame is quite slender. Though proud to be Puerto Rican (and often acting as a spokesperson for trans rights there) Ivana considers herself “made in Ecuador” where she had her procedures done.

But the film has enough different types of trans* people (including some drag queens and others who don’t consider themselves women: I would have liked to see interviews with the dark-skinned Afro-Latinas we see in performance) and spends a lot of time letting us get to know them (without seeming to waste a moment) that I forgot about the fascination with Ivana’s butt. We first meet Ivana when she is distributing condoms to trans women sex workers on the street. We get the low-down on what sex work is like for trans women from Sandy who tells us she and other trans women have to be more beautiful than the cis women sex workers on the street or they won’t attract clients.

Some of the trans* people we also get to know are: an older woman who laments what she sees as a lack of reflection in younger trans women, a drag queen with an interest in corporate law whose role model is Marilyn Monroe, a trans guy who isn’t able to get testosterone, and a drag queen who carefully differentiates herself from “prostitutes” and becomes a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race. By focusing on nine people who often have differing opinions, the film gives us a taste of the richness and variety found within the trans* community. And because the film stays focused on these nine, we see them go through transformations that transcend the physical. Sex worker Sandy allies herself with Ivana, while also wondering why the funds set aside for trans* women in Puerto Rico don’t do more for them. They band together with other trans* women to form a new trans* rights group with Sandy telling us that they will wear shirts up to her necks and pants that cover their legs (in contrast to her usual short, low-cut dresses) so legislators will focus on their faces and what they have to say. Kickstarter-funded and executive-produced by veteran of the New Queer Cinema Christine Vachon, Mala Mala is beautiful to look at (from Puerto Rico’s green hills and blue ocean to neon tinted street scenes) and is one of the best and most moving films–narrative or documentary–I’ve seen all year.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rftiozFCa8″ iv_load_policy=”3″]

Tangerine, a comedy (directed by Sean Baker who also co-wrote the script with Chris Bergoch) that had its premiere at Sundance is about trans women of color sex workers and has been getting some surprisingly glowing reviews. Maybe because I kept comparing it to Mala Mala, I was disappointed. I can see what people reacted to: the two main characters, Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) are vivid and funny (and played by talented, trans women). The film is also stunning to look at: co-cinematographers Baker and Radium Cheung give us a Los Angeles that has never looked more crisp and unforgiving in its sunniness, especially amazing considering the film was shot entirely on iPhones (equipped with special lenses, but still). Perhaps those who love this film were reminded of the early work of John Waters or Pedro Almodóvar, but those two, at least before they became big-time directors were part of the milieu they made films about, which isn’t the impression I get about Baker (who has also worked as a TV producer). Some of the interplay between the characters seems pretty generic: the plot, if there is one, focuses on Sin-Dee trying to track down the woman (“A real bitch with vagina and everything”) Sin-Dee’s pimp, Chester, “cheated” on her with. Waters and Almodóvar didn’t have the tightest plots in their early films either (one of Waters’ films centered on Divine getting “cha-cha heels”), but the details seemed more acutely observed–and nobody said about their films, when they were first released, that they seemed like anyone else’s.

Tangerine has some good comic moments: I was especially taken with a scene, shot from the inside of the front windshield, of a blow job received during a car wash and Rodriguez’s peerless reading of lines like “I promise, I promise” in response to Alexandra asking her to not cause “drama.” But we see how little we know about Alexandra and Sin-Dee’s interior lives when we spend time with Armenian immigrant cab-driver, Razmik (Karren Karagulian). Unlike the rest of the characters, Razmik has the ability to surprise us and to make us wonder what he’s thinking–or what he’ll do next. A film with trans women actresses this good shouldn’t have a cis man be its most interesting character. If trans women start making their own films with iPhones, maybe we’ll see characters that match these women’s talents.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALSwWTb88ZU” iv_load_policy=”3″]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

“Get Back In Your Kennels, Both of You”: The Bitchy Diversity of ‘The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’

The traditional family is marked as a hostile space of enforced hypocrisy.

This post by Brigit McCone appears as part of our theme week on Depictions of Trans Women.

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, is a family on wheels. The bright, pink bus that carries three drag queens across the Australian Outback becomes a homely, domestic space, not because of the harmony between the central trio, but because of their acceptance of friction. In their bickering intimacy, the trio model an ideal of accepting surrogate family, all of whose members are allowed to express themselves fully. Bickering and bitchy humour become the symbol of that freedom of self-expression, as much as the trio’s flamboyant, Oscar-winning costumes. There is no toning down to cater to the offended sensibilities of homophobic or transphobic onlookers. Hugo Weaving’s Tic/Mitzi and Terence Stamp’s trans woman Bernadette play the long-suffering parents to Guy Pearce’s abrasive and bratty Adam/Felicia. In the cramped interior of the bus, there is no escape, only a slow journey toward accommodating each other. The fact that there is never a question of romance between the central trio adds to the family vibe of their camaraderie.

The film also openly acknowledges tensions along the transfeminine spectrum. The tension between Felicia and Mitzi’s feminine personas as theatrical performance, and Bernadette’s feminine identity as an integral part of herself, fuels a running feud between Bernadette and Felicia. Bernadette disdains Felicia’s artificiality as “a bloody good little performer, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” while Felicia torments Bernadette with her “real” name, Ralph, and teases Tic about his marriage to a woman. In their sexuality and gender expression, the group defies easy categorization and perhaps this is the point. To define is to limit. Each of the trio is a work in progress. While tensions between transfemininity as authentic self-realization and as artificial performance simmer between Bernadette and Felicia, Felicia’s own dualities are neatly summed up by Tic: “There are two things I don’t like about you, Felicia: your face.” This conflict is never neatly resolved with an easy moral, but instead accommodated within the broader philosophy of bitchy diversity and tolerated friction that makes the surrogate family work. In the role of Bernadette, meanwhile, Terence Stamp inaugurated the dubious tradition of big name, cismasculine stars playing trans women as a novelty, a demonstration of acting prowess and a marketing gimmick. Stamp’s performance, however, surely ranks among the finest in this genre: restrained, sensitive and toughened at the same time, with an innate dignity and waspish wit that plays well off Bernadette’s more theatrical companions. Casting a cismasculine performer suits the role of Bernadette particularly, since her difficulty in passing as visually female is a part of her character’s ongoing struggle to be recognized for her authentic self.

The contrast between the Paradise of wish fulfillment and infinite self-realization, represented by the flamboyantly decorated bus and the flamboyantly decorated bodies of its occupants, and the harsh desert landscape with its equally harsh standards of small-town conformity and heteronormativity, is the central conflict of the film. Invited to perform for four weeks in Alice Springs, in the middle of the conservative Outback, Tic finds himself returning to face the wife and son he abandoned. Bernadette, by contrast, is fleeing the tragedy of her lover Trumpet’s death. The manner of his death, asphyxiating on his home peroxide, walks the tight-rope between farce and tragedy that the film so excels at. The bittersweet, clashing tone is established by Hugo Weaving’s opening performance, in full drag: “You’re a discontented mother and a regimented wife… I’ve been to Paradise, but I’ve never been to me.” Butch customers play pool and ignore the performance, while Weaving’s drag alter-ego Mitzi gets a can to the back of the head as she walks offstage. Dressed as brightly throughout as birds of paradise, the friction between Paradise and reality is ever present. The trio stifle in the narrow confines of their wheeled refuge, but the outside is a space of danger. As a forfeit in a game of Snap, Mitzi and Felicia wear full multi-colored drag in rural Australia – being hassled in bars by transphobic patrons is a reminder that the element of daring is never far away from unrestrained self-expression. The trio wake to find their bus spray-painted with the slogan “AIDS fuckers go home!” with Tic admitting that “it’s funny you know. No matter how tough I think I’m getting, it still hurts.”

Transfemininity is a protective badge of defiance and toughness, while its wish fulfillment is as hard-earned in a hostile world as Adam’s dream of climbing the hostile terrain of Australia’s King’s Canyon in full drag. As Adam/Felicia is held down and threatened with violence by a transphobic/homophobic crowd, she breaks down in tears and is told by Bernadette to “let it toughen you up.” Her fellow queens have rescued her when she needed it most, showing the caring and solidarity that underpins their bitchy surfaces. The queens will fulfill their dream to conquer King’s Canyon, ceremonially owning the Outback both by this feat of endurance, and by a flamboyant reinterpretation of Outback nature as drag costumes in their Alice Springs performance. The film itself can be read as a similarly flamboyant reimagining of the traditionally macho genre of the road movie, playfully proposing drag as the ultimate journey to self-realization. Breaking down in the desert and practising their drag performance, they are invited to join an Aboriginal Corroboree. Performing a full drag act for the Aborigines, the possibility of an intersectional solidarity between different categories of outsiders and marginalized minorities is suggested, with the didgeridoo accompanying “I will survive.”

The nuclear family is a space of tension and enforced performance for each of the trio. Adam’s abusive uncle tries to swear him to secrecy, while his mother helps him to get the bus Priscilla in the hopes that a trip to the Outback will help him to overcome the “phase” of his gayness and meet a nice country woman. Bernadette is denied the dolls she really wants by parents who insist that she play with traditionally masculine cement mixers, rejecting her and never speaking to her again after she has “the chop.” The traditional family is marked as a hostile space of enforced hypocrisy. Having internalized this vision of nuclear family, Tic cannot reconcile the flamboyance of alter-ego Mitzi with his own narrow ideas about the butch role of husband and father: “Do you think an old queen’s capable of raising a child?” The bus Priscilla’s bitchy diversity serves as a more authentic space of family, because freedom of expression is its watchword. The outside world’s appearance of tradition and conventionality can be deceptive however, covering hidden depths of flexibility and souls who are “starved for entertainment,” like the rural rescuer-mechanic Bob who loves the transfeminine “Le Girls” revue and whose acceptance of unconventional femininity is modelled in his relationship to his Asian “mail-order bride,” Cynthia, as well as his trans-attraction. Cynthia is perhaps the broadest caricature in the film, an exotic dancer who speaks in broken English, and makes “a complete fool of herself” with her compulsive exhibitionism. Bob’s gentlemanly urge to shelter and protect her, however misguided, cannot be separated from his chivalrous urge to protect Bernadette in the pair’s tentatively blossoming romance. The film has no time for respectability politics. Acceptance must be universal, even for the broadest stereotype or most confrontational caricature, otherwise it is worthless. That is the credo of bitchy diversity.

As Tic faints after being watched by his son performing in wild drag as Mitzi, he is told by his bracingly no-nonsense estranged wife that “assumption is the mother of all fuck ups. Don’t bitch to me, bitch to him.” The nuclear family is thus proposed as a potential space of bitchy diversity, where Tic could bitch freely to his son and become a positive role model through the very fact of his freedom. His son accepts his father fully, warmly applauding his drag performance and asking if he has a boyfriend at the moment, while matter-of-factly announcing that his mother used to have a girlfriend. After owning the Outback and reimagining the traditional family, the queens go home, no longer cowering in the city as a defence against the country, but positively choosing it as a homeland of their own, just as Bernadette positively chooses Bob as a home for her heart. The road movie comes to a jubilant all-singing, all-dancing climax to the strains of ABBA’s “Mamma Mia.”

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAshNAfOHTg”]

Brigit McCone wants to roam the Australian Outback in a dilapidated bus. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas.

‘3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets’ and the Aftermath in ‘The Armor of Light’

Marc Silver’s documentary ‘3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets’ which airs on HBO Monday, Nov. 23, won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and is an attempt to remind us of the particulars in the shooting of Black, suburban teenager, Jordan Davis, on the third anniversary of his death.

The following is partly a modified repost.

Enough unarmed Black people have been shot by white people (including cops) in the past few years that, except for the most famous cases, the circumstances of each shooting has begun to blur into the others. We hear a victim’s name that sounds faintly familiar and we have to ask ourselves, “Wait, what happened to him (or her) again?” We know the victim ended up dead but we forget what took place before–and in the few cases in which the killer is put on trial, what took place afterward.

Marc Silver’s documentary 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets, which airs on HBO Monday, Nov. 23, won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and is an attempt to remind us of the particulars in the shooting of Black, suburban teenager, Jordan Davis, on the third anniversary of his death. The three and a half minutes of the title refers to the total amount of time Davis and his friends were in a car at the combination gas station and convenience store when he was shot and killed by a white man, Michael Dunn, who had parked next to their vehicle. As is mentioned in the film, the media glommed onto the dispute between the two being about “loud music” when the shooting was, at its core, about white fear of Black people.

The film focuses on Dunn’s trial (the verdict of which I had forgotten) in which he famously claimed that Davis had a gun (which no witness saw and we see police tell Dunn in their own video “There were no weapons in the car,”) and so used the same “stand your ground” defense (in which one doesn’t have to be threatened to shoot and kill but just to “feel” threatened) under the Florida law which was the basis for George Zimmerman’s acquittal. Dunn had, according to his fiancée, Rhonda Rouer, downed many rum and cokes before the incident (they had just come from his son’s wedding reception) so was probably driving drunk–and could have been pulled over for doing so. But of course no additional consequences exist for grabbing and shooting a gun while under the influence.

Dunn, with his dead eyes, a mouth that always seems on the verge of a smirk and a voice that sounds like that of a mild-mannered cartoon character is not a bright man, as his jailhouse letters and phone calls (excerpts of which we hear over stunning footage of Jacksonville: the cinematography is also by Silver) attest. We hear Rouer at one point tell him firmly that they should discuss the legacy of his actions (he postures himself as some kind of cultural hero) “at another time.” She was probably cognizant that whatever he said to her could be used against him. He readily admits to being a killer but repeatedly denies he’s a racist, though his remarks about other prisoners and the teens, including Davis, in the car he shot at say otherwise.

In spite of his claims, and his high-priced attorney trying to sew doubt in the jurors’ minds (and media coverage of the trial giving equal time to the defense’s arguments, no matter how specious) we come to understand Dunn shot and killed Davis because the teen annoyed him. Throughout the trial and outside the courtroom, Dunn expresses as much remorse for this killing as another person would for swatting a mosquito or a gnat. He’s an extreme example of a mindset that many white people in the US have, including those in Jacksonville, and we hear (briefly) from another local racist (who also probably doesn’t consider himself a racist) outside the courthouse and see, in beach footage, one woman’s swimsuit bottom is decorated with a large Confederate flag.

The courtroom drama of 3 1/2 Minutes is as compelling as that of any narrative film. Outside the court, the film features Davis’s parents, Ron Davis and Lucia McBath, talking about their son and even includes home movies of when he was a baby, so I didn’t expect the moment I started to cry would be during Rouer’s testimony. She was, after all, the person who partied with Dunn in their hotel room after she knew that he had shot Davis (the film never reminds us that the two drank more and ordered pizza after the killing) and apparently she never told Dunn to turn himself in (Dunn was arrested when they returned home, but only because a witness noted his license plate). In the jailhouse calls with Dunn she’s supportive and talks about how much she loves and misses him, as Dunn, convinced he’ll be acquitted says the first thing he’ll do when he’s out is “make love” to her. When she’s first sworn in, the camera focuses on her shaking hand (she even raises the wrong hand) as she takes the oath. With her final testimony we find out why she’s so distraught. In her earlier testimony she had told the jury about the conversation she and Dunn had before she had left the car to go into the store (a little before he shot Davis) “He said, ‘I hate that thug music,’ and I said, ‘I know,”’ and the resignation and hopelessness in her voice at that earlier moment takes on a deeper meaning.

I’m not sure why I cried during her testimony. Perhaps because if more white people told the truth (the bar is so low) either about their actions or about those of their fellow white people, more of the victims’ families might see some justice.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKbCoRA__UI” iv_load_policy=”3″]

We don’t see much of the anti-gun advocacy, Davis’s mother, McBath, took up after Davis’s death, except a brief look at her testimony before Congress, in which the oily piece of slime known as “Ted Cruz” counters her. We never hear much of what she’s thinking during the trial: the in-depth interviews are with Davis’s father. In 3 1/2 Minutes we mainly see McBath cry and sometimes pray, which I’m sure she’s done plenty of, but is not all that she’s done.

To see the aftermath of the trial, watch the excellent and multi-layered documentary The Armor of Light, the first film directed by Abigail Disney who has had a prolific career as the producer of films including She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, Pray The Devil Back to Hell, and Vessel. Much of the film’s promotional materials emphasize the trajectory of Rob Schenck, a white Evangelical minister and fixture of the far right, who comes to see his “pro-life” views must include a stand against the National Rifle Association (NRA). But the more interesting person in the film (who gets about equal screen time) is McBath. Her dentist father was part of the NAACP in 1960s Illinois, so McBath immediately understands the racial aspect of her son’s killing and others like it, but Schenck doesn’t bring up race until the film is more than half over. We in the audience see a marked difference in how a white congregation and a Black congregation react to his new rhetoric against guns and the NRA.

What goes unsaid in the conversations of right-wing, white men and the repeated montage of white guys at gun shows is the connection between gun violence and masculinity: the popular fantasy articulated by many of the men to be “a good guy with a gun” who stops “a bad guy with a gun” by shooting him, something which even many police officers rarely, if ever, do. While the men talk about “protecting their families” I thought about all the women who are threatened or killed by guns their own husbands, boyfriends, and acquaintances point at them, a concern to which these men seem purposefully oblivious. Instead, they talk about the government taking away their guns with the same vehemence they would about government taking away their balls.

Also fascinating is McBath’s meeting with Schenck in which both cite Bible passages to make their points, but which concludes with McBath in tears telling him, “It’s vitally important that you help. They will listen to you.” McBath states later, when she is alone on camera that although she doesn’t “condone” abortion, she would never interfere with another woman’s reproductive choice, but feels like she and Schenck have some common goals around guns, saying, “This is what this is all about: fighting for life.” We see her (again) testifying in front of Congress, and she eventually quits her job to devote her time to being the spokesperson for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.

I couldn’t help being a little cynical about Schenck’s intentions. He keeps citing the Bible and Jesus for his newfound, anti-gun mindset but with his long support of right-wing politicians (including members of the Tea Party) I wondered if he had read any of the many Bible passages in which Jesus ministers to the poor, the people those same politicians build their careers disparaging while defunding public programs meant to benefit them.

We see the slow, frustrating course McBath and Schenck have ahead when Schenck meets with three other anti-choice stalwarts (all white men, of course) across a table and tries to persuade them the NRA is antithetical to Christian values, asking, “Is that a pro-life ethic?” Two of the men yell at him in response, but he seems to sway the third, a triumph we can’t help hoping will repeat itself at other tables across the country.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSP0Soy8ACk” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

‘The Assassin’ We Want To See

Because ‘The Assassin’ packs nearly every kind of arty, intersectional-feminist fan’s fantasy into one movie. It centers around a woman of color (it takes place in China in the middle ages and its director is Taiwanese, so most of the actors are Taiwanese too) whose main scenes are with other women of color (this film has relatively little dialogue but passes the Bechdel test with no problem).

I was out of town for a long weekend and then catching up on what I had missed when I found out Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s The Assassin was having its last showing (a late matinee, not even an evening show) in my art-house-friendly town. I wasn’t even aware the film had begun its run. I dropped everything to see it, and if this movie is playing nearby, so should you.

Because The Assassin packs nearly every kind of arty, intersectional-feminist fan’s fantasy into one movie. It centers around a woman of color (it takes place in China in the middle ages and its director is Taiwanese, so most of the actors are Taiwanese too) whose main scenes are with other women of color (this film has relatively little dialogue but passes the Bechdel test with no problem). The main character, Nie Yinniang (Qi Shu) is the assassin of the title, an action heroine (or maybe an anti-heroine: for much of the film we don’t know) with beautifully choreographed martial arts scenes: this film unlike some other films of the Wuxia genre doesn’t feature the ridiculous airborne hijinks that defy suspension of disbelief.

The Assassin, as a historical costume drama also shows off its high-born characters in sumptuous period robes, their homes decorated with curtains and tapestries as fine, if not finer than their clothes: we even see some of the palace intrigue through these gauzy, wafting borders, as if we, like the main character are spying through them. And this film is stunningly shot (by cinematographer Ping Bin Lee): one of the only subtitled films in which I missed at least a little of the dialogue because I was too busy looking at what was onscreen. The Assassin even has a little, old-fashioned black magic in its plot, which made me love it even more.

What the film doesn’t do is pander to a Western audience: the story is apparently well known in China in many different incarnations, but not in the US. Still, I much prefer a film that makes me sometimes wonder what’s going on to one like The Walk with its over-explanation and bad performances obfuscating its emotionally-fraught (my palms and even the soles of my feet were sweaty) 3D action scenes. The Assassin isn’t in 3D, but the moves are so fast, smooth and quiet they’re like dance captured on film (although these scenes probably use some form of camera trickery I couldn’t spot it). The camera astonishes elsewhere too. At one point we are looking, in a long take, at a curtained alcove of the Governor’s palace and we suddenly see Yinniang standing there, listening in the shadows, and we’re not sure if she just appeared or if we didn’t notice her before.

We watch much of this film as a dance performance. Yinniang is often silent: more than one critic has compared her to the sometimes ambiguous main characters in Westerns. We know that she is trained as a killer and see her kill at the start of the film, but we also see that she won’t murder a target in front of his young son. Her teacher, a nun says, “The way of the sword is without compassion,” but we don’t know, for the majority of The Assassin, if that way will turn out to be Yinniang’s and are often looking at her face–and her actions–for clues.

In other words, we’re looking at a taciturn, complex main character not uncommon in movies about men (especially Westerns) but pretty much unheard of in films about women (not just her teacher but also one of Yinniang’s fighting opponents is a woman). At the behest of her teacher, Yinniang returns to her hometown to kill her cousin, Tian Ji’an (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Chen Chang), the independent Governor of her home province, but her mother, not knowing the reason for her return puts her into the fancy, movement-constricting robes other women wear. We see Yinniang trying on the outfit and then wearing her signature black coat and wrapped boots for the rest of the film. And unlike other long-haired women action-adventure heroines she actually has her hair tied in such a way that it won’t get in the way of her fighting.

We find out later that Yinniang was at one time betrothed to her cousin and the two were given matching pieces of carved jade to formalize this arrangement. When she makes her first attempt on the Tian Ji’an’s life she leaves behind her piece. “She wanted me to recognize her before taking my life. She wanted me to know why,” he says.

But the film doesn’t waste much time portraying Yinniang as heartbroken, though her quiet, watchful demeanor is in keeping with the trauma she has endured, in both the separation from her family at a young age and her conscription into killing. At the same time, she also has a romantic interest (Satoshi Tsumabuki) who, from the expression we see on his face, seems to realize no woman is as hot as the one who pushes a bad guy in front of you at the right moment to stop an arrow that was headed for your chest.

Hsiao-Hsien Hou won “Best Director” at Cannes for this film, so I don’t understand the lack of fanfare for The Assassin now. In contrast to several acclaimed films I’ve seen lately, I was never bored during The Assassin and wished the film lasted longer. At the matinee I spotted three, youngish Asian women (three more than I would expect at that showtime, in that neighborhood) in the audience as the lights came up, one of whom was beaming at what she had just seen. If only film distributors and male critics would realize a lot of women like (and unlike!) her would love to see this terrific-looking, well-acted, martial-arts film about a complicated, Asian woman who is nobody’s victim or martyr.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSoXoOAY1zU” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Author/Screenwriter Amy Koppelman on Sarah Silverman and ‘I Smile Back’

“Redemption is always something that comes up, and I never understand that — why we need to find redemption or have redemption in books or movies.”

Amy Koppelman didn’t have an easy time getting her second novel published, and it’s not too difficult to understand why. I Smile Back is a painfully blunt look at living with mental illness and addiction, and takes place largely inside the head of Laney (Sarah Silverman), a well-to-do stay-at-home mom whose husband, Bruce (Josh Charles), is making a fortune in insurance. It’s clear that Bruce loves Laney, and her elementary school-aged children, Eli (Skylar Gaertner) and Janey (Shayne Coleman), need her. Abandoned as a child by her own father, Laney struggles mightily with the day-to-day responsibilities of parenting and being a partner. She finds herself drawn to illicit sex, drugs, and turmoil. She seems to have everything, so it’s sometimes difficult to empathize with her plight.

Reading Koppelman’s poetic prose, with its heavy use of repetition, metaphor, and ellipsis, and its painstaking exploration of Laney’s unhinged mind, one doesn’t think, “Hey, this would make a good movie!” So it’s surprising that it does, in no small part thanks to Silverman’s raw performance.

Koppelman co-wrote the screenplay for the independent film adaptation of her novel, and the movie, directed by Adam Salky, is every bit as brutal as the book, if not more so. I spoke with Koppelman about how the unlikely film project came about, about its unique power, and about her new novel, Hesitation Wounds, which came out earlier this month.

Bitch Flicks: I heard a little bit about how this happened, how this turned into a film. I was hoping you could talk a little about that.

Amy Koppelman: I was driving up the West Side Highway to pick my son up from school. This was around five years ago, and I heard Sarah on the Howard Stern Show, and she was talking about her new book, her memoir [The Bedwetter], and she was talking about sadness. Or she was talking about loneliness and a sense of home. I think. This is what I remember. And I remember thinking, she’s gonna understand Laney. I have to get this book to her. I think all of us, whether you’re a writer or a carpenter — just as a human being — you just wanna be understood. So the whole project started with me wanting to get the book to her, because I knew she would understand what I was trying to say with Laney. And the miracle is that she opened it, and read it. And a couple of months later, we met at a hotel for coffee, and I was looking at her, and I just said, “If I adapted this, would you…” — and I think she felt bad for me cuz, you know, it was a paperback original. I couldn’t get a hardcover. The book was rejected over 80 times — “Would you consider acting in this?” And I think she just said, “Sure!” to be nice to me, because I remember going home and telling my husband, “Well, she was just humoring me.” But she said, “If it doesn’t suck.” And so I called my screenwriting partner, Paige Dylan. That was a bar I thought we could achieve. The “If it doesn’t suck” bar. That was how it started. It was written for her. Only for her.

When you’re writing a book like this… It certainly doesn’t strike me as something like “Oh! she knew this was gonna be a film from the beginning,” because so much of it is internal, in Laney’s head.

I never write thinking about things becoming movies. It was just one of those things. A couple of times in your life, you’ll experience magic. Maybe you’ll fall in love, or… and I just heard her, and it was really just one of those moments. I just thought, no, we can figure this out. Anything that’s lost in terms of internal dialogue, the amazing thing is that you can see it in her eyes. Every nuance comes out in Sarah’s performance.

The film, to me, almost seems a little bit harsher than the book.

You read the book?! Oh my God!

Yes, after I saw the movie I read the book.

And you thought the movie was more harsh?

Yes. Perhaps because it’s Josh Charles, and there’s something innately more sympathetic about.. You know, just seeing him. You want to like him. So her distance from him, her betrayal of him feels…

Right. Well, you can’t turn away in a movie.

That’s true, too.

And yes, he has the most compassionate eyes. It’s funny, the movie was done for only $400,000 so we only had one read-through and one like soup lunch to talk about it. His only real note was, what kind of man, if you really love your husband, would see your wife in the state that Laney’s in at the end of the film, and not help her? And I do think that you see, and you understand in the film, with him not going to her and helping her, how he had to make that decision. And I think in a way that’s more harsh, because in the book he doesn’t have the opportunity to say goodbye or not say goodbye. She makes the decision. I think for anybody who’s loved a person like Laney, they’re usually a very magnetic person, and somebody that’s really fun to be with, and when they’re up, there’s no one more exciting. So I think you hold onto the hope that that’s who they are, and if you love them enough, and you give them enough stability, that you can make them better. And I think in his eyes, you see him realizing that he has to protect his family, and he can’t make her better. I never thought about it. That’s why it’s more harsh. I always thought it was maybe because in the book there’s a little more humor? But it is because you realize… you see in him, he can’t fix her.

I hadn’t read the book yet when I saw the movie, but it hit me very hard. I’ve seen movies about people struggling with addiction and depression, and was wondering why I Smile Back has this power to it. And I think a lot of our expectations for a film like this are sort of gendered. If this was a film where the main character was a man, maybe we would expect it to have a different arc. Without realizing it, I really expected it to have a redemptive arc, because she’s a mom, and I think partly because she’s a woman, I thought she was going to get it together at the end for her kids. So that was harder.

I think that’s why she’s a very hard character to like. Because women, particularly moms who do the things that she does… A man who goes to Vegas and sleeps with some hooker to blow off steam, or has an affair with his secretary, I think we understand that. We almost forgive that to a certain extent. Not the case-by-case thing. You’ll say to your friend if that happens, “What a dick,” but I think societally we understand that much more than we understand a woman who has a loving husband who’s kind to her — who she loves — just fucking to escape. That’s still a taboo. Women are not supposed to fuck to escape. They’re supposed to have a need that’s nurturing, so I think that’s very hard for the Laney character. It was very important to me in the book, and as we were writing the movie, the thing that was most important to me was that you would know that Laney loved her children and loved Bruce, and she still loved them — for a while the book had a horrible title — I think it was called “A Single Act of Kindness” because in her mind she thought she was doing them a favor. I think we think that she’s going to be able to stay with her children because she loves them, but she can’t figure it out.

I think that’s how it really is for a lot of people, so I appreciated the brutal honesty of it.

Yeah. That’s good. It’s not for everybody.

Yeah. I guess not. It’s the kind of thing I like, if it’s about a real struggle that people go through and it reflects what that’s actually like.

Redemption is always something that comes up, and I never understand that — why we need to find redemption or have redemption in books or movies. I know for me, when I can read something or see something that’s able to articulate feelings or thoughts that I’ve had that I haven’t been able to access the words for, it gives me such a sense of relief. It makes me feel so much less lonely. And so that’s where I find redemption. The idea of a quick fix redemption, I’ve never gotten anything out of that.

That’s a very Hollywood thing, though. I guess if this was a studio film, there would have been pressure to include that. There wasn’t anything like that, was there?

No. Somebody asked Mike Harrop, the producer, who was great, “Did you feel pressure to change the ending?” And he had such a good answer. He said, “We always knew the movie we were making wasn’t going to be for everybody, so we made it on a budget that could sustain itself.” I do think it’s funny. When you asked me about the beginning. I do read reviews that say “this is an obvious play for Sarah Silverman to make–” I laugh because no, that wasn’t what any of it was. She really just did us a favor really, and for some reason just let this part of herself be exposed. There was no calculation behind it. It was a little tiny movie.

I’m a big fan of hers, so I was not surprised that she was so good in it, and it never occurred to me that this was some sort of calculated career move.

Yeah, but that’s the sort of snarky reviewers would say “Well, this time of year we get the addiction…” and I just think, if that makes you feel better, to look at it that way…

It also seems too small. It’s a low budget film, and she’s not — I think she’s great in the film, but she’s not the kind of name actor — It’s not Richard Gere playing a homeless guy.

There’s not a big Hollywood machine behind it, or even a big quasi-independent studio machine behind it. It just was a movie that should hopefully find the right audience of people who understand it and who will in some way feel less lonely, or less alone, whether they’re like Laney, or they love somebody like Laney.

Do you want to talk about how much of the book is rooted in personal experience?

The books that I write are very personal, in the sense that all the self-loathing and doubt and sadness and fear — those are all mine. All the ugliness of thought. But I don’t do any of the things that Laney does. As I say, I’ve been sleeping with the same guy for 25 years, and the only drugs I do are Zoloft and Wellbutrin. Thank God for Zoloft and Wellbutrin. [laughs]

Of course, yeah. There’s so much discussion about representation in the media. Do you feel any sense of responsibility to represent women in a particular way?

It’s the only area in my life where I am 100% pure. I write these little tiny books. I know that the chances of them getting published are small, so I don’t think about those things. I just think about being honest.

I wanted to ask you about your new book, Hesitation Wounds.

Thanks. Hesitation Wounds has the most of me in it, and I really care about the book, and I’m really scared that no one’s gonna review it, so no one’s gonna know about it. [laughs] It’s about a woman who specializes in treatment-resistant psychology, so she’s the last stop on the crazy train when the regular doctors can’t figure out the correct chemical cocktail, you go to her, and you hope that she can figure it out. She does a lot of electroshock therapy, and she gets this one patient, Jim, who reminds her of her brother. She’s forced to realize how much of her life she has not really allowed herself to live or to love because she’s so scared of being hurt. Her brother killed himself when she was young. I think it’s really a book about forgiveness of yourself for surviving. I think for many people who suffer from depression or alcoholism and mood disorders, getting better and surviving… I think sometimes we all feel guilty, and I think I’m scared. I know that for me, it’s been years and years since I had any real issue with depression and having to change medication, and there’s not a day that I don’t look over my shoulder wondering when it might hit me. It’s a book about living in spite of knowing that everyone you love is gonna leave you one day. But it’s worth it.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week – and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

Aziz Ansari’s Hilarious New Show Tells Stories Rarely Seen on TV by Amy Lam at Bitch Media

10 Awesome Feminist Films From the ’90s by Gisselli Rodriguez at Ms. blog

Documenting Women’s Stories: November 2015’s Crowdfunding Picks by Laura Nicholson at Women and Hollywood

For A Year, Shonda Rhimes Said ‘Yes’ To All The Things That Scared Her at NPR

Shonda Rhimes On Running 3 Hit Shows And The Limits Of Network TV at NPR

Watch 25-Minute Conversation with Gina Prince-Bythewood on ‘Love & Basketball’ & Indie Filmmaking Challenges by Tambay A. Obenson at Shadow and Act

10 Female-Directed Movies on Netflix That You Need to Watch Now by Allyson Johnson at The Mary Sue

Reese Witherspoon Gives Glamour Awards Speech: Female-Driven Films “Are Not a Public Service Project” by Ashley Lee at The Hollywood Reporter

Why Catherine Hardwicke Started to Fight Back Against Hollywood Sexism by Ramin Setoodeh at Variety

The ‘Ishtar’ effect: When a film flops and its female director never works again by Rebecca Keegan at LA Times

What have you been reading/writing this week? Tell us in the comments!

The Illusion of Beauty in ‘Flesh and Bone’

This is a guest post by Giselle Defares.

The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, the experimental modern ballet in your local theater–audiences are enthralled with elegant women who can dance on two toes. The entertainment industry repeatedly tried to accurately capture the dance world with various results. From Showgirls (1995) to Center Stage (2000), to Black Swan (2010), most of the time it’s a shallow portrayal of the drama in the dance world. In the TV landscape there are the documentaries: Misty Copeland’s A Ballerina’s Tale and Sarah Jessica Parker narrated City.Ballet. Yet the scripted TV shows didn’t fare well. CW had a modest hit with the “reality show” Breaking Pointe, ABC Family tried it with Bunheads, and in the Netflix catalog there’s the Australian show Dance Academy. It’s hard to engage an audience outside the theater. However, the pay cable network Starz likes a challenge and created their ambitious project Flesh and Bone.

The executive-producer, former dancer and brains behind the show is Moira Walley-Beckett who previously wrote for AMC’s Breaking Bad. She recounted to USA Today that for the leading role she was determined to find a dancer who could act, instead of an actress who has to endure rigorous training to execute the complicated ballet routines. It seems like a callback to the dance classic The Red Shoes (1948), which starred the renowned ballerina Moira Shearer. Yet after auditioning over a hundred girls Walley-Beckett became disillusioned. The network and Walley-Beckett decided to cast a wider net, searched abroad and that’s when they found the fabulous Sarah Hay. According to an interview with WWD, Hay was raised in New Jersey by artist parents, and she commuted every day of the week to train – first with the New York City Ballet, and then with ABT itself. After graduating she struggled to fit in because of her “curvy” physique and decided to try her luck abroad and became a soloist at the Semperoper Ballet in Dresden, Germany.

Flesh and Bone was created with a multiple season arc in mind and there’s certainly a lot of material to explore. From competitive jealousy to body image issues and pushing your personal limits to get to the top to the realization that your dream is not what you’ve envisioned over all those years. It turned out that the show was quite a gamble for the network and incredibly expensive; think rehearsal time, space, choreographers and physical therapy for the dancers. It seems that other shows in the Starz line up, such as Ash v. Evil Dead, got the preferential treatment. It was only a couple of weeks before the show premiered that Starz announced that Flesh and Bone would be an eight-episode mini-series.

Flesh and Bone centers around the young and talented ballerina Claire Robbins (Sarah Hay) who escapes her tormented family life in Pittsburgh, when she hears the news that her soldier brother Bryan (Josh Helman) returns from Afghanistan, to try out for the fictional New York’s American Ballet Company, which she makes on her first attempt. Once she’s accepted in the corps of the Ballet Company, she struggles with Kiira (Irina Dvorovenko), a principal dancer who is almost at the end of her prime, her roommate Mia (Emily Tyra) who isn’t quite as talented as Claire and the larger-than-life artistic director Paul (Ben Daniels) who’s is still dealing with the loss of his own talent and sees in Clair his golden goose to a revitalized career.

Many have described the show as a “dark and gritty” ballet series. Of course there are the obligatory shots of the ruined feet and bloody toenails and the tedious exercises at the barre, but the framework is focused on personal drama. Comparisons are easily made with the aforementioned Center Stage and Black Swan. What they have common is that they’re focused on the art form ballet as the essence of drama. In all three stories, the audience sees the conflict, stress, and the cutthroat competition within a ballet school or company. Yet, compared to the other stories it almost seems that there’s no silver lining in Flesh and Bone.

Flesh and Bone doesn’t avoid the major clichés. Claire is the naïve girl who follows her dream and loses her innocence in the big city. There’s the tough, rich girl Daphne (Raychel Diane Weiner) who also dances as an exotic dancer and who has a questionable friendship with a Russian mobster (Raychel’s tattoo of “Take No Prisoners” inspired the art department). Paul has a Latino rent boy who gives him affection and keeps calling him “Papi.” Claire’s predatory brother has big bad wolf engraved on his forehead. There’s an arc with the overly polite homeless man Romeo (Damon Herriman) (he walked straight out of The Fisher King) who lives outside Claire’s building and develops a small obsession with her; there’s Charlie from Center Stage (Sascha Radetsky) as Ross, who plays a straight bad boy who wants to get in everyone’s tights. And so on.

Since the show is aired on a pay cable network, sex and nudity make an appearance. For some the nudity could be gratuitous in order to give the show a more edgy character. At first glance, it seems that Claire is exploring her sexuality in unconventional ways. In the pilot, the audience is introduced to Claire’s new roommate, Mia, as she rides a nameless guy on the couch, which she later instructs Claire to sleep on. Paul sees no problem in using his dancers as escorts to get what he wants (all for the sake of the company of course), and there’s the exotic dancer subplot. Dancers are relatively comfortable in their bodies so being nude isn’t a far stretch.

The sex isn’t just sex; it’s often revolved around power plays and personal liberation. It’s interesting to see Claire navigate sexuality, because she seems terrified of the men she encounters and looks envious at other women who unapologetically use their sexuality. The crux of the story is Claire’s damaged psyche and how she’s able to free herself from the horrible abuse she endured. It must be said that Hay is an intriguing actress yet sometimes Claire’s passivity throughout the series becomes rather frustrating to watch – especially in the incestuous scenes between Claire and Bryan. The writers tried to incorporate the atrocities of under aged Russian sex slaves into the mix but they didn’t flesh out the characters. So once again a minor storyline fell flat.

So why watch Flesh and Bone? The astute attention to detail in the ballet scenes, the charismatic and talented dancers, the customs, heck even the opening credits are amazing. Hay has a fantastic screen presence and gives it her all with what she has been given. Daniels certainly enjoys his role as Paul and was marvelous in the moments where he was able to show what the stress of such an high-profile job does to a person when the mask is off. Dvorovenko nailed her part as the coke-addicted prima ballerina and Tyra milked her screen time for all its worth as Claire’s bitchy roommate. Despite the cliché role, Herriman is really compelling as Romeo. It’s unfortunate that Starz decided to create a limited series, therefore the (melo)drama was weighed down with loads of clichés and many supporting characters fell flat.

Will Flesh and Bone dance itself en pointe into our cultural lexicon? That remains to be seen. However, a niche audience will always be enthralled with the illusion of beauty in ballet.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8wKm3grIxc”]

Giselle Defares comments on film, fashion (law), and American pop culture. See her blog here.

‘Heart of a Dog,’ Not the Life of a Wife or Widow

Anderson was working on her film, ‘Heart of a Dog’ (in theaters now; it will be shown on HBO at a later date) when Reed died and she then took a year off before finishing the documentary. The film contains a loosely connected series of stories and images but is mostly a meditation on grief and death with a focus on her dog, a rat terrier named Lolabelle. What it isn’t about, at least not directly, is Reed, though he has a cameo in the film.

When Lou Reed died just over two years ago, a lot of people focused on the person he had spent his last years married to, performance artist, musician and composer Laurie Anderson. I’m always very wary when the public reacts to the private lives of well-known people, whether commenting on Halle Berry’s latest divorce or on Anderson, who has been internationally known since the early 1980s, but whom many seemed to first take notice of as Reed’s widow. She reacted to this sudden thrust into the spotlight (Anderson works and tours constantly but Reed’s was a more familiar name and face) with a rare thoughtfulness and grace. She wrote about how she and Reed met and came to be married with humor and a distinct lack of sentimentality (after their impromptu wedding, she had to rush out to perform in a concert). Still I hoped the demotion from being known as an acclaimed artist in her own right to being known mostly as the wife of a famous, dead artist didn’t last.

Anderson was working on her film, Heart of a Dog (in theaters now; it will be shown on HBO at a later date) when Reed died and she then took a year off before finishing the documentary. The film contains a loosely connected series of stories and images but is mostly a meditation on grief and death with a focus on her dog, a rat terrier named Lolabelle. What it isn’t about, at least not directly, is Reed, though he has a cameo in the film. When Anderson talks about “we” and “us” in relation to the dog we can presume she is talking about Reed, but she never mentions him by name. While Anderson describes in detail the last moments of her mother’s life, anyone looking for a similar scene about Reed (Anderson has written about his death, but doesn’t include it here) will be disappointed.

I admire Anderson’s resolve in not letting the voyeuristic tendencies of the public dictate the content of her work, and, as a longtime fan, was prepared to defend this film against the sexist snark I’ve seen directed toward it in some reviews. One male critic complained the narration was delivered in a “sing-song” voice, which is a little like complaining that Bob Dylan’s vocals are “too nasal.” Anyone who has listened to any of Anderson’s work (although she is a performance artist, most of her recorded work is audio; Dog is only her second full-length film after Home of the Brave, a filmed concert from 1986) will recognize the cadence she uses in the narration here, first describing a dream in which she gives birth to her dog. Doctors present Lolabelle to her in a pink blanket saying, “It’s a girl!” She explains that the birth had been a kind of performance because she had arranged for the doctors to say scripted lines and for the dog to be sewn into and then removed from her abdomen–which caused Lolabelle considerable discomfort. Anderson explains, “She wasn’t a puppy.”

The story/dream comments both on the role of dogs and cats as surrogate children (especially for those of us who aren’t raising kids) and of our own manipulation of our animals, so they will seem more child-like to us. Other sequences are less evocative: Anderson talking about the distinctive qualities of rat terriers reminded me of every dog person who has bored me with arguments about the superior traits of whatever breed of dog they happen to have. And Anderson’s illustrations of her dog’s entrance into the Tibetan Buddhist version of purgatory are striking and detailed, but perhaps not the best vessel for her talent.

When Anderson brought up her Buddhist beliefs I cringed a little. As a white person who has spent a fair amount of time in rooms full of white, privileged people who are also interested in Buddhism, I would gladly live the rest of my life without hearing one more of them begin a sentence, “My teacher says…” And I would recoil even more from a documentary narrator who intoned, “My pastor says…” Godard’s Goodbye to Language, in the scenes of his own dog, Roxie, showed more of the mystical dimension of our relationship to our animals than any of the “spiritual” talk in Heart of a Dog does.

To be fair, Anderson’s other work shows she is much more than a woman who loves dogs and has a Buddhist teacher: her most recent live installation featured a man who was imprisoned in Guantánamo. And in the film, her unique storytelling style is a perfect fit for the death of her mother who, “in a high voice I had never heard from her before,” formally thanks everyone gathered in her room for coming and hallucinates animals looking down at her in the bed from the ceiling. Anderson also tells a harrowing story from her childhood, but when Anderson mentions that she never really loved her mother, we never get more than a few hints about why.

I’m always complaining about films that have great cinematography and acting and an inadequate script, but besides the snappy animated version of Anderson we see at the start of the film, Dog’s visual components can’t equal the high points of the narration. After the umpteenth scene that has superimposed rain droplets streaming down, like tears on a face, over vintage footage of Anderson and her siblings as children or a contemporary rural snowscape, I wanted to say, “Okay, we get it. Let’s move on.” This film’s disjointed structure and emotional reticence would make a better album than a movie. An album also doesn’t demand an engaging overall story to hold our attention, but many of the scenes in this fairly short (75 minute) film had me (briefly) nodding off.

The film would probably connect more with an audience if Anderson had included more references to her and Reed’s relationship, but I respect her refusal to make this film about death about his death. Heart of a Dog, even as a love song by Reed plays over the closing credits, is a reminder that Anderson was much more than a wife and remains much more than a widow.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnKVjZfKhYs” iv_load_policy=”3″]

‘Supergirl,’ “Fight or Flight”: No One Puts Kara in a Refrigerator

Its blend of superpowered silliness and reflexive cultural commentary with a sincere emotional core is nearly Whedon-esque. And no, that’s not a bad thing at all.

Supergirl takes another solid step with its third episode, “Fight or Flight.” The special effects (a nuclear lightning bolt duel, our hero grabbing a handful of molten lava) still look cheap, but Melissa Benoist still shines as Kara/Supergirl, whether she’s playing goofily smitten (with James Olsen, played by Mehcad Brooks), brokenhearted, or spoiling for a fight, and this was the most well-paced and exciting episode yet.

It features a cameo from Kara’s cousin, Superman, who steps in when Kara takes on Reactron (Chris Browning) a nuclear-powered bad guy out for revenge against him. Revisiting a familiar comic book trope, Reactron decides to get to Superman by murdering his cousin. His plot comes surprisingly close to working, but this is Kara’s story. She’s not destined to die in order to motivate the male superhero’s transformation, as she makes clear.

Reactron flees from his first encounter with Kara after she short-circuits his nuclear core. He kidnaps engineering genius and asshole boss Maxwell Lord (Peter Facinelli, lining up another plum role after his great work on Nurse Jackie) and forces him to help fix his nuclear suit. With the help of scary glowy red-eyed Hank Henshaw (David Harewood), Alex (Chyler Leigh), Winn (Jeremy Jordan), and James, she tracks Reactron down, but with his newly repaired suit (thanks, Mr. Lord!), he gets the best of her, and seems about to finish her off when Superman steps in.

When Kara finds out that Supes arrived at James’ behest, she expresses not gratitude, but hurt and disappointment. She makes it clear to James that she needs to learn to stand on her own, to make her own story, and not be a supporting character in her cousin’s tale. Which is all great, especially when she proves that her faith in herself is well-placed.

Better still, the script, by Michael Grassi (Lost Girl) and Rachel Sukert is a little sharper than usual, and the direction, by Dennis Downs, a bit snappier. Kara also has to deal with the interview she gave, as Supergirl, to her unwitting boss, Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart, proving herself as integral to the show as Benoist). Cat isn’t running a puff piece, and the whole office is on edge because she’s writing it herself and getting hilariously stressed out in the process. (Nice plug for Bulletproof Coffee there.)

Hank gets annoyed with Kara for giving the interview, especially for mentioning that Superman is her cousin (after being goaded into it by Cat’s sexist questions). He wonders if she’ll do a reality show — “Keeping Up with the Kryptonians” — next.

Lucy Lane (Jenna Dewan Tatum), Lois’ sister, James’ ex, and a possible romantic rival for Kara, made her debut this episode, but Maxwell Lord is a more intriguing new character. I haven’t read the comics, but I did read Lord described as a villain in stories about Facinelli being cast. He does seem like a villain, but he’s a clever one. While James Frain chews the scenery as Theo Galivan over on Gotham, Facinelli’s Lord is surprisingly subtle and complex. Like Cat Grant, he’s an overly demanding and dismissive boss, but also like Grant, his arrogance isn’t completely unearned. It’s not surprising when the show hints at a romantic history the characters share.

This all bodes well for the series, which is actually starting to build some narrative momentum, in addition to hitting all the right notes about empowerment and representation that we want to see in a superhero show about a young woman. Its blend of superpowered silliness and reflexive cultural commentary with a sincere emotional core is nearly Whedonesque. And no, that’s not a bad thing at all. If this keeps up, I could easily go from merely admiring the show’s not-so-subtle subversion of a misogynistic culture to flat-out enjoying the damn thing.

Recommended Reading

Supergirl Premiere: The Enemy of My Enemy Is Super

Supergirl Episode 1.2, “Stronger Together”: Boozing with RGB and Saving Snakes

“I’m the Bad Guy”: Flipping the Romcom Script in ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’

From the GBF to the pretty-ugly conformist-nonconformist girl, from positional superiority to “Hubble,” ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ expertly raises every clichéd plot twist and trope in the romcom playbook, before stripping them bare in favor of honesty, moral courage and the belief that life really does go on without a man. Surely that’s a message we can get behind?

Following on from “Why Pretty Woman Should Be Considered a Feminist Classic,” comes the eagerly awaited second installation of my thrilling series: “Julia Roberts Films That Other Writers On Bitch Flicks Hated But That I Actually Really Liked And Here’s Why” (currently seeking suggestions for a snappier title). So, is My Best Friend’s Wedding really a “Right-wing Nightmare Interpretation of Women”? Must every portrait of women be positive? Isn’t there room to satirize the negative? Watch that sugary opening with its singing bride and chorus of bridesmaids again. See the bridesmaids literally making the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” pose? If P. J. “Muriel’s Wedding” Hogan’s tongue gets any farther into his cheek, he’s going to bite it off. Julia Roberts’ demented and devious Julianne Potter is not a role model. My Best Friend’s Wedding is, rather, a brilliantly acid, deadly accurate takedown of narcissistic and destructive tendencies in the romcom genre. Such as…

Positional Superiority

Positional superiority refers to a superiority that is assumed, not because of superior ethics or behavior, but because of a character’s position in the film. In practice, it means that we will endlessly justify the behavior of protagonists, because we are conditioned to identify a film’s protagonists with ourselves. In a traditionally male genre like an action movie, this narcissism of positional superiority asks us to sympathize and justify our hero in all his casual slaughter of enemy goons. As Austin Powers reminded us, nobody thinks of the families of the henchmen. In a traditionally female genre like romcom, positional superiority means that any attraction felt by the heroine will be “true love,” justifying her in going to any lengths to defeat her deluded and conveniently obnoxious love rivals, to win her trophy man.

In My Best Friend’s Wedding, all the positional superiority is on the side of Julianne Potter. We are set up to believe that Julianne Potter will be successful in winning her best friend’s love for several reasons. Firstly, she is our heroine. Secondly, she is played by America’s sweetheart, Julia Roberts, whose star power tilts us in her favor. Thirdly, she is in a romcom, a genre that conventionally sets up weddings to be interrupted by “true love.” In everything but ethics, Julianne is the clear favorite. Any normal romcom should reward her “wacky” exploits. But My Best Friend’s Wedding is different. The film takes gleeful delight in testing exactly how many “underhand, despicable, not even terribly imaginative” schemes Julianne can undertake before losing our sympathy. Can she force her gay best friend into a humiliating charade of fake engagement? Can she forge a letter that risks her true love’s job? Can she steal a bread van? How far does wackiness have to go before it becomes conniving delusion? Finally, the film forces Julianne to admit that she is not only “the bad guy” rather than the heroine, but the lowest of the low, “the pus that infects the mucus that cruds up the fungus that feeds on the pond scum.” Her redemption lies in regaining her self-respect through the moral courage of total honesty, not rewarding her narcissism by the convenient prize of a trophy man. It’s a sharp reminder that “bad guy” status should depend on a character’s action and not their position in the story. Our narcissism makes it hard for us to accept such an even-handed justice for the character we identify with ourselves. As Julianne puts it, “Getting what you deserve isn’t fair!”

The Pretty-Ugly Girl

Consider, if you will, romcom The Truth About Cats And Dogs. By shutting one’s eyes and listening to Audrey Wells’ sharp script, it is possible to see that this is a smart updating of Cyrano de Bergerac for women. But the role of the physically unattractive girl with a face for radio is played by a bloomingly youthful Janeane Garofalo in a rather unflattering cardigan. A staple of the romcom genre is the “pretty-ugly girl,” usually a conventionally attractive brunette in faintly unflattering clothing, who is set up as the underdog in a rivalry with a conventionally attractive blonde that we are allowed to perceive as “pretty.” Pitting our heroine Julianne, a brunette with quirkily masculine tailoring, against rival Kimmy, a blonde who wears pink, is a classic use of the “pretty-ugly girl” as supposed underdog. Aside from contributing to society’s rampant body dysmorphia, the pretty-ugly girl fuels female rivalry. It gives women permission to hate or disdain love rivals for their conventional beauty while, at the same time, assuring us that conventional beauty is required of our heroine, even if she is a brunette. Encouraging women to strive to be conventionally beautiful while hating rivals for their own beauty is a recipe for permanent catfight.

A close relative of the pretty-ugly girl is the nonconformist-conformist girl. We tend to approve of Julianne Potter, because she is independent, quirkily cynical, career-oriented and doesn’t let herself be defined by a man. We tend to despise Kimmy, because she is prepared to sacrifice her education and her ambitions to settle down. So, we cheer for our Julianne to be rewarded… by settling down with Kimmy’s man. When you think about it, that would be more ironic than both rain on your wedding day and a free ride when you’ve already paid. The resentful ego of the pretty-ugly girl is revealed when Julianne calls herself the jello to Kimmy’s creme brulee. Though apparently self-deprecating, Julianne is actually citing her underdog status as the reason why she will win out in the end, because Michael feels “comfortable” with her. As Kimmy desperately hopes that she can become jello to win his love, Julianne snaps, “You’re never gonna be jello!” It is no coincidence that women of other body types, races and ages appear as spectators at the climactic bathroom showdown, as Julianne is finally forced to see her actions as they appear to others, outside her comforting bubble of pretty-ugly aggrieved entitlement.

“Hubble”

Sex And The City famously used the single word “Hubble” to explain Mr. Big’s marriage to a woman who was not Carrie. Referencing romcom tradition through the classic The Way We Were, the gang conclude that Big simply couldn’t handle the quirkiness and intelligence of Carrie, and was forced to settle on a safer, more boringly predictable bride. Her faith in “Hubble” may play a role in Carrie’s embarking on an affair with Big, one that the show paid lip service to criticizing but finally vindicated through Carrie’s own eventual happy ending with Big. If the pretty-ugly girl justifies aggrieved entitlement, body dysmorphia and resentment of more conventionally attractive rivals, then “Hubble” discredits and diminishes the man’s own right to choose. Julianne Potter is close to Carrie Bradshaw in many ways – she is newspaper columnist with a mass of curly hair and a cynical take on romance, who nevertheless winds up wanting the fairy tale. Over the course of the film, she will do anything to win Michael’s love – anything apart from telling him the truth and allowing him to make an informed choice. Her deluded assumption that she is justified in making his choice for him reaches a climax as she steals a bread van to chase him, leaving best friend George to remind her that no-one is actually chasing her. In a romcom genre where interrupted weddings have been traditional since the screwball climax of 1934’s Oscar-winning It Happened One Night, leading our heroes to regularly agree to marry incompatible and obnoxious partners for the flimsiest of manufactured reasons, My Best Friend’s Wedding reminds us that marriage is a commitment rarely undertaken without sincere love, however painful it may be to acknowledge and accept that fact. When all is said and done, “Hubble” is only a cowardly excuse to avoid accepting a man’s right to choose elsewhere, or the possibility that he may have good and valid reasons for doing so.

The GBF

Stanford of Sex And The City has a thankless role. Never invited to brunch with the girls, his role seems confined to the repeated assurances that Carrie is “fabulous.” Their relationship is so one-sided that one suspects that the gay male authors of the show are satirizing the narcissism of their female friends. If so, it was a satire that was lost on a large segment of the target audience. The GBF, the Gay Best Friend as fashion accessory and ego prop, was born. Superficially, Rupert Everett’s George appears to be a classic GBF. His role is a supporting one, offering emotional support and finally playing Julianne’s date and consolation prize at the wedding dinner. However, George is a very different animal from the usual GBF. Notice how all of Julianne’s calls are inconvenient interruptions to George’s full, satisfying life that emphatically does not revolve around his friend. We are given glimpses of his dinner parties with his long-term partner and his enjoyment of book readings. When he is dragged into a pretended engagement with Julianne, as part of her hair-brained scheme to provoke Michael’s jealousy, he protests loudly, mocks the engagement as “against God’s plan” and humiliates Julianne as his revenge. George’s comparing of their pairing to “Rock Hudson and Doris Day” evokes Hollywood’s long history of gay men forced into the closet for the convenience of female admirers. Though his life beyond Julianne is only briefly sketched, it paints her as the needy hanger-on in the relationship, making his final appearance at the wedding into an act of mercy and true friendship.

From the GBF to the pretty-ugly conformist-nonconformist girl, from positional superiority to “Hubble,” My Best Friend’s Wedding is superbly knowing as it expertly raises every clichéd plot twist and trope in the romcom playbook, before stripping them bare in favor of honesty, moral courage and the belief that life really does go on without a man. Surely that’s a message we can get behind?

Brigit McCone is shameless in her love of a good romcom (including Fight Club), writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and singing terrible karaoke.