Tag: Amber Leab

Movie Preview: The Runaways

The Runaways were a 1970s girl rock group, best known for their hit “Cherry Bomb,” but perhaps later best known for rocketing Joan Jett (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Lita Ford) to stardom. The movie is based on Cherie Currie’s memoir, Neon Angel.
This is a movie I want to see in the theatre. I’m often content to wait for DVD, but a female-centered film, written and directed by uber-cool Floria Sigismondi–who formerly directed music videos–has to be good. Even if it’s good in that candy necklace sort of way.

Discussing the sexual politics of the film, Karina Longworth, of The Village Voice, says

When the band turns on Cherie for submitting to a solo soft-core photo shoot, it’s because Joan understands that unless they set the terms of their own sexual empowerment, and its commoditization, then what’s really happening is exploitation. “You could say ‘No,’ ” she tells Cherie. It’s a shock to the blonde; it’s also the thesis of the film.

Any film about teenage girls, rock music, and the requisite sex and drugs that goes along with it will not be without its faults. A director’s feature-length debut will not be without its faults. The border between sexual empowerment and exploitation is a line we’re still trying to negotiate in 2010. I’m pumped to see some gutsy women from the 1970s rock as they come of age.
Opening in limited release tomorrow, and wide release April 9th, The Runaways stars Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett and Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie.

Director Spotlight: Kathryn Bigelow

Kathryn-Bigelow-001
Welcome to our second installment of Director Spotlight, where we explore the biographies and filmographies of an often overlooked group: women film directors. (We’ve also spotlighted Allison Anders.)
Kathryn Bigelow is all over the web right now for being the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Achievement in Directing (not to mention the Oscar for Best Picture, the BAFTA for Best Director and Best Picture, and the DGA for Directing, among dozens of other awards for The Hurt Locker). Her win is a source of pride and great relief everywhere, though it’s not without its controversy (chiefly because the Academy rewarded a woman interested in portrayals of masculinity).

The 2000 book Feminist Hollywood: from Born in Flames to Point Break, by Christina Lane, contains a section on Bigelow that nicely rebuts critical reaction to her and her films.

Bigelow, who has taken up the traditionally “male” genre of the action film, has been criticized for lacking any new insight into gender politics. Feminist critic Ally Acker contends that Bigelow “adopt[s] the patriarchal values of fun-through-bloodshed and a relishing of violence” creating “nothing more than male clones.” Similarly, more mainstream male critics have echoed David Denby’s remark: “I can’t see that much has been gained now that a woman is free to make the same rotten movie as a man.” These simplistic generalizations do not allow for the nuances in Bigelow’s work, nor do they stop out of essentialist notions about what is possible in the “male category” of action films. I propose that Bigelow’s films rely on a complex relationship between genre and gender, often blending genres or reversing generic expectations, and that they are best understood in the context of her independent origins.

 Bigelow had been making films thirty years before being critically lauded for The Hurt Locker; here is a snapshot of her career.

The Loveless (1982)
Bigelow’s feature film debut was also Willem Dafoe’s debut. An homage to The Wild One, The Loveless parodied Reagan-style nostalgia for the 1950s. In a scathing review, Janet Maslin of The New York Times says:

This movie, a slavish homage to ”The Wild One,” is full of peach and aqua luncheonette scenes, which give it some minuscule visual edge over the original. But otherwise, it’s no improvement. Its evocation of tough- guy glamour is ridiculously stilted. (”This endless blacktop is my sweet eternity,” says the not-very-Brandoesque hero.) And it regards the past with absolutely no perspective or wit.

A more positive perspective come from Time Out London:

‘Man, I was what you call ragged… I knew I was gonna hell in a breadbasket’ intones the hero in the great opening moments of The Loveless, and as he zips up and bikes out, it’s clear that this is one of the most original American independents in years: a bike movie which celebrates the ’50s through ’80s eyes.

Near Dark (1987)

Fun fact: the above poster was designed to promote the DVD release of Near Dark, and the resemblance to a certain tween sensation is no coincidence–from a marketing perspective. The poster may, however, be the only thing these films have in common.

From Maryanne Johanson, The Flick Filosopher:

As darkly amusing as Near Dark is, though, Bigelow never romanticizes one of the great American perils. This is an intense film, an eerie depiction of the isolated, empty middle of America and the dangers that lurk there… and a surprisingly haunting, if never entirely sympathetic, portrait of the loneliness and torment of the eternally undead.

Blue Steel (1989)

Jamie Lee Curtis stars in Blue Steel, a psychologically intense cop thriller. IMDb describes it simply: “A female rookie in the police force engages in a cat and mouse game with a pistol wielding psychopath who becomes obsessed with her.”

Roger Ebert, in his review from 1990, says:

“Blue Steel” was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, whose previous credit was the well-regarded “Near Dark.” Does that make it a fundamentally different picture than if it had been directed by a man? Perhaps, in a way. The female “victim” is never helpless here, although she is set up in all the usual ways ordained by male-oriented thrillers. She can fight back with her intelligence, her police training and her physical strength. And there is an anger in the way the movie presents the male authorities in the film, who are blinded to the facts by their preconceptions about women in general and female cops in particular.

The bottom line, however, is that “Blue Steel” is an efficient thriller, a movie that pays off with one shock and surprise after another, including a couple of really serpentine twists and a couple of superior examples of the killer-jumping-unexpectedly-from-the-dark scene.

Point Break (1991)

Perhaps her best-known film before The Hurt Locker, Point Break is a film about an FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) who goes undercover to find a group of surfing bank robbers. It’s campy, goofy at times, but full of suspense and wonderfully-shot action sequences. As with most of her films, critics were harsh.

It’s hard to decide whether Point Break is a really bad good movie or a really good bad movie. On one hand, it boasts thrilling, original action sequences, a tightly woven caper plot, and a cast jam-packed with Hollywood middleweights acting — and surfing — their asses off. On the other hand, it also suffers from terrifying leaps of story logic, a vacuous emotional core, and some of the silliest dialogue ever spoken onscreen. It’s a Hollywood formula movie at its best and worst.

Strange Days (1995)

Written by James Cameron and starring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, and Juliette Lewis, Strange Days tackles the sci-fi topic of virtual reality.

The IMDb plot summary:

Set in the year 1999 during the last days of the old millennium, the movie tells the story of Lenny Nero, an ex-cop who now deals with data-discs containing recorded memories and emotions. One day he receives a disc which contains the memories of a murderer killing a prostitute. Lenny investigates and is pulled deeper and deeper in a whirl of blackmail, murder and rape. Will he survive and solve the case?

Once again, Mr. Ebert:

“Strange Days” does three things that will make it a cult film.

It creates a convincing future landscape; it populates it with a hero who comes out of the noir tradition and is flawed and complex rather than simply heroic, and it provides a vocabulary. Look for “tapehead,” “jacking in” and the movie’s spin on “playback” to appear in the vernacular.

At the same time, depending more on mood and character than logic, the movie backs into an ending that is completely implausible.

The Weight of Water (2000)

Adapted from Anita Shreve’s novel, The Weight of Water stars Sean Penn, Elizabeth Hurley, Sarah Polley, and Catherine McCormick. Perhaps best known for its two-year release delay (complete in 2000, but not released until 2002), the film received uneven reviews.

Here is the Rotten Tomatoes synopsis:

Two stories unravel simultaneously in this dark and suspenseful film. The first story, set in the present day, concerns a photographer, Jean (Catherine McCormack). She is working on an article for a magazine about a pair of bloody murders that happened 200 years before on the Isle of Shoals, just off the coast of New Hampshire. To get the pictures she needs she must visit the location of the murders, and so her husband, Thomas (Sean Penn), arranges a yachting trip with his brother, Rich (Josh Lucas), and Rich’s girlfriend, Adaline (Elizabeth Hurley). The foursome pal around, enjoying the sea and the sun, while Adaline shamelessly seduces Thomas. Meanwhile, Jean is reliving the Isle of Shoals murders in her head, which is where the second story comes in. Maren (Sarah Polley) is a Norwegian woman who has recently immigrated to America with her husband. When her sister (Katrin Cartlidge) and sister-in-law (Vinessa Shaw) are brutally bludgeoned to death with an axe, she is the sole survivor, and thus the only one who knows the truth about what happened. THE WEIGHT OF WATER draws a parallel between these two tense episodes, as the surf swirls menacingly, foretelling imminent disaster.

Stephanie Zacharek’s review from Salon:

Bigelow’s movie might not come together as cleanly as it should. But as it moves along, there’s always something to watch for, either in the performances or in the way the scenes are so thoughtfully joined. Bigelow is an uneven director — although I find pictures like “Point Break” hugely enjoyable, I couldn’t bring myself to face “K-19: The Widowmaker.” But in “The Weight of Water,” she’s clearly trying to tell a much different type of story, in a way that at least stretches her capabilities. (Considering the way Hollywood pigeonholes directors, that may have been her chief problem in getting this picture released.) We all complain when filmmakers “sell out” and give us recycled Hollywood formula. But maybe it’s also time to stop listening when we hear those handy, zombielike, all-purpose words, “I hear it’s not very good.”
***
Kathryn Bigelow has directed feature-length films, short films, and television episodes which aren’t included here. She isn’t afraid to take risks in filmmaking, and this trait alone insures we’ll see more work from her in the future.

A last word from Christina Lane:

By rewinding and fast-forwarding through Bigelow’s films–and thereby refusing to adhere to the counter-cinema/Hollywood divide–we can begin to locate her complication of genre conventions and her re-casting of the politics of gender and sexuality. While there is no need to label Bigelow’s films “feminist” per se, they certainly move within a “feminist orbit” and engage political issues. Her films encourage spectators to ask questions about gender, genre, and power.

Preview: Toe to Toe

In his NYT review of Toe to Toe, A.O. Scott says

If “Toe to Toe” were a young-adult novel, it would be embraced and argued about in classrooms and eagerly read by thoughtful teenage girls. The film’s observations about race, class and friendship are clear and accessible without being overly didactic, and its sometimes harsh candor about female sexuality would not be unfamiliar to devotees of contemporary adolescent literature. But because it is a movie — the first nondocumentary feature film by the writer and director Emily Abt — “Toe to Toe” is likely to languish in art-house limbo, far from the eyes of its ideal audience.

He’s probably right, and it’s a shame. As much as we adult women want movies that speak to our intelligence and experience, I’d guess the need is at least double for adolescent girls.
Melissa at Women and Hollywood summarizes the movie:
Tosha (Sonequa Martin) is a poor African American girl in a private prep school who is pushed by her grandmother (Leslie Uggams) to believe in herself and her ability to get into Princeton.  She also encourages her to play lacrosse because no African American girls do.  It is on that field that she meets Jesse (Louisa Krause) a troubled, sexually provocative white girl who has been kicked out of many schools.  Jesse and Tosha are drawn to each other and become friends even while the outside world is conspiring against them.  But like most teenage girls they also compete.  Their friendship is messy, and at times disappointing and destructive.  But they try, which is more than can be said for Jesse’s busy single working mom (Ally Walker) who is so oblivious to her daughter’s needs and desperation that you want to throttle her.
 Be sure to check out the interview with Emily Abt on the same Women and Hollywood post.
Watch the trailer. (The official movie site seems to have vanished; if anyone has the link, please leave it in the comments section.)
Toe to Toe is currently playing in NYC and LA.
Written and Directed by: Emily Abt

Movie Review: The Hurt Locker

In the entire film, one woman appears–and she’s a wife and mother. She doesn’t have any conversations with other women about things other than men. The film is a Bechdel fail.

Bombs explode. Men work together. They play together. They bond. Action! Explosions! Male soldiers! Men! Triumph! Failure! What seems, on the surface, a movie that I wouldn’t seek out is the one I’m pulling for to win Best Picture.

Okay, I’ve only seen one of the other nominees, but I’m pretty sure about this: Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is the film of the year. She is the director of the year.

Anyone reading this post is probably familiar with the movie, at the very least for the narrative of its director’s sex and, unfortunately, her relationship with another nominee in the same category. I want a woman to win the award for directing; in the history of the Academy Awards, only three women before Bigelow have ever been nominated (Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for The Piano, and Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation). While I don’t want to lose focus on the how good the movie actually is by focusing exclusively on Bigelow’s sex, a few things need to be said.

War is a subject typically dominated by male voices. The Hurt Locker was written by a man. Its protagonists are men. But to make the mistake that war is a male subject is to make a classic sexist assumption. War is a universal subject. One need not be a man to create art about war, or to study texts of war (movies, books, paintings, etc.). In her Salon review, Stephanie Zacharek may put Bigelow’s accomplishment best:

She’s sympathetic toward her characters without coddling them or infantilizing them. Bigelow is an outsider looking in and she knows it, but that status also allows her some freedom. The guys in “The Hurt Locker” are human beings first and men second. The point, maybe, is that you don’t have to have a dick to understand what they’re going through.

We are all implicated in war. If women seem less likely to focus on war, our silence is implicated.

Do I want to see a female director lauded for a woman-centered film? Without question. But Kathryn Bigelow shouldn’t be blamed for making the kinds of movies she’s made for two decades. I didn’t see a woman-centered movie this year that was as powerful and well-made as this movie. And that is a problem.
In The Hurt Locker we have a close and careful character study of three men and their approaches to dealing with combat and their jobs on an elite IED diffusing team at the height of the war in Iraq. Sanborn (played by Anthony Mackie) is a rules man, relying on procedure to maintain his cool. William James (in an Oscar-nominated performance by Jeremy Renner) is the risk-taker, the cowboy figure we want to be the all-powerful hero, but who we quickly come to see is more than a little bit undone. Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) seems to be the youngest and least experienced member of the team; he’s terrified, skeptical, and, ultimately, the most likely to survive post-combat. At times the filmmaking is claustrophobic; we see the world as they see it–as they’ve been trained to see it. Every Iraqi is a potential enemy; even a child.

The Hurt Locker is a powerful anti-war film, which can almost get lost in the breathless action sequences. Its message is subtle but unmistakable: war utterly breaks you. The final scene of the film, which has been criticized for its ambiguity (we see James voluntarily back in action after a brief return home and a too-familiar scene representing shallow American excess), is actually a haunting, almost terrifying reminder of our implication in war. If you see James as a hero at the end of the movie, you haven’t understood a frame of the film you just watched. Yet the film teases us with a traditional genre representation of the hero. We want him to be a hero, only finding joy in the adrenaline rush of war, but he isn’t. He’s an empty shell of a person, nothing more than an animated suit heading toward…nothing. He’s walking off into the abyss. War has ripped out his humanity. This is what we do to our soldiers: we ask them to do the impossible in combat, and it destroys them.

Ripley’s Pick: Season One of Pulling


Pulling is a British comedy series written by Sharon Horgan (who co-stars) and Dennis Kelly. It aired on BBC3 for two seasons (of six episodes), starting in 2006, and an hour-long farewell special aired this May.

After breaking off her engagement, Donna (Horgan) moves in with two of her best friends, Louise (Rebekah Staton) and Karen (Tanya Franks). What follows is a hilarious, raunchy, irreverent take on life as a thirty-something woman.

Things I Love About Pulling

  1. Women behave badly, too. While something like 99% of television and movies allow men to behave badly and enjoy themselves, when women behave similarly they’re slut-shamed and made to feel guilty for thinking about anyone but everyone else. A woman has a one-night stand in most movies, and she’s punished with a pregnancy (and, yes, in comedies pregnancy typically is a punishment, meant to teach a woman she needs to change her selfish, uppity ways and start living for someone else). See Knocked Up, Juno, and just about every other American comedy.

  2. Successful dark comedy. While American dark comedy typically consists of some pretty awful misogyny, or at least humor at the expense of others, Pulling manages to be funny and edgy without displaying hatred for any group of marginalized people. Even a tirade against a man who gave a less-than-stellar performance in the bedroom has a tone of lightness and regard for the man, who looks adorably helpless standing by the kitchen table as Karen goes off. The viewer isn’t supposed to hate that man; the viewer feels sympathy for him.

  3. No interest in babies, marriage, children, or shopping. Donna decides she doesn’t want to marry Karl, despite caring for–even loving–him. Although Karen is a teacher, the one moment when she gets all sappy about children–with their tiny fingernails–being the future is played for laughs. And the only moment in the first season that approaches interest in clothes involves Karen verbally assaulting her dry cleaner for not being able to deliver same-day repair service for a torn dress, despite the fact that she had a completely bullshit suck-up conversation with him.

  4. The show is smarter than its characters. So many so-called smart shows have characters who are successful professionals–doctors, lawyers, businesspeople–and who do sophisticated things. Not this one. These women go to the pub–a lot. They have working-class jobs (waitress, teacher, personal assistant). They don’t feel guilty about being working-class women. They work. Lousy jobs. They lose lousy jobs. They don’t enjoy gallery openings.

  5. Despite the drinking, sleeping around, and general screwing up, the show still has a moral center. When the characters do something reprehensible, they know it. When Louise’s mother comes to visit, it’s clear that her behavior (which I won’t give away here) crosses a line that her daughter’s (and the roommates) don’t cross.

From a subjective viewpoint, these three women are my age and their lives are disasters. Their lives are, in fact, closer to most people I know than anything else represented in film and television. If I’m to believe media, the things I really concern myself with are marrying, having babies, buying a house, driving a newer car than I do, using the best hair/skin/cellulite-diminishing products, and obsessing over my investments. If I’m to believe my regular life, no one knows what the fuck they’re doing.

Pulling is a show starring women, but it’s not all about female empowerment and becoming a better person and sisterhood and all that. I’m all for female empowerment, but sometimes I just want to laugh. Pulling delivers, and it’s a shame the show lasted only two seasons. Those two seasons are, however, available on Netflix. If you haven’t seen Pulling, I suggest you immediately add it to your queue.

Ripley’s Pick: ‘Smiley Face’

Anna Faris in Smiley Face
Anna Faris in Smiley Face

 

Written by Amber Leab.

Contrary to popular belief, you need not be stoned to enjoy a stoner comedy. You just need to be a dude.

Or so I thought, when I came upon Smiley Face, starring Anna Faris as a stoner who happens to be female, starring in a movie that offers mindless entertainment but still manages to be smart.

Faris eating pot cupcakes
Jane eating pot cupcakes

 

The plot is typical stoner-flick, road-movie material: character has a destination/goal and encounters obstacles on the way there, which are funny and at times poignant. Jane F. (Faris), a twenty-something wannabe actress/pothead, has a busy day ahead of her: she needs to pay the electric bill to avoid the power being shut off, and go to an audition–all while not eating her roommate’s plateful of cupcakes in the fridge marked “These cupcakes are RESERVED for SCI-FI EXTRAVAGANZA-CON!!! Do NOT eat! That means YOU Jane.” In a fit of mid-morning munchies, she eats said cupcakes, and you can probably guess why Steve wrote such an enthusiastic note about them.

Why do I love this movie? Jane graduated summa cum laude with a degree in economics, yet she’s half-heartedly trying to be an actress, though her only experience seems to be a regional root beer commercial. In other words, she’s not lazy or stupid, just a slacker. We have so many twenty- and thirty-something male slackers in film, and we’re all supposed to just adore them. (Boys being boys! Slobs in need of feminine domestication!) Female slackers are a rarity. Women in movies are supposed to be highly functioning and successful. They fall in love with slackers (who then save them from their uptight, bitchy selves). Jane isn’t interested in love, or romance, or success. She’s interested in saving her thousand-dollar mattress from the dealer who threatens to take it if she doesn’t pay her debt.

Jane getting high
Jane getting high

 

There are major differences between this and other stoner movies I’ve seen. First, and most obvious, is that we’ve never had a female protagonist. Sure, there have been stoned girlfriends and minor lady players, but never have I seen the main character of a stoner comedy be a woman. Second, and just as important, Jane does not have buddies who get stoned with her. She’s all alone (after a brief debate with her dealer about the state of marijuana as a black market item in a “laissez-faire paradigm, or whatever”), stoned and entirely alienated from the world around her. Her interactions are all with people who are sober and generally hostile toward her, from a casting agent to a manager in a pork processing plant, to the guy (Krasinski) she uses for a ride to Venice, who happens to be madly in love with her. Her utter alienation allows viewers to solely identify with her, regardless of the viewer’s gender. That’s pretty cool.

Jane freaking out
Jane freaking out

 

Alienation might just be the theme of the whole movie. Jane might have lost her friends by failing to repay the money she borrowed from them, but she’s also a woman walking around in a male genre. It’s no coincidence that the book accompanying her on the journey through L.A. declared alienation a necessary requirement for the functioning of capitalism (I’ll leave it up to you to analyze that final, wonderful scene with the manuscript). Jane is alone and lost in a world that seems to be suspicious of her every (paranoid, high) move, but with a few strange helper characters, she might get where she’s going.

Or not.

Movie Review: Persepolis


Persepolis. (2007) Written and directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud.

I rented Persepolis before the recent Iranian election, and have been thinking ever since about the film.

Persepolis is adapted from the autobiographical graphic novels written by Marjane Satrapi (which I haven’t read), and represents the first graphic-novel-as-film. Other graphic novels have been made into films, but none (to my knowledge) have remained as true to form as this. Visually, the film is lovely, stark, and at times deeply disturbing.

In Persepolis, we meet Marjane, a young girl living in Iran at the time of the Islamic revolution of 1979. The society changed drastically under Islamic law, as evidenced by Marjane’s teacher’s evolving lessons. After the revolution, in 1982, she tells the young girls, who are now required by law to cover their heads, “The veil stands for freedom. A decent woman shelters herself from men’s eyes. A woman who shows herself will burn in hell.” In typical fashion, the students escape her ideological droning through imported pop culture: the music of ABBA, The Bee Gees, Michael Jackson, and Iron Maiden.

While the film is a personal story, it does offer a concise history of modern Iran, including the U.S. involvement in the rise of Islamic law and in the Iran-Iraq war. This time in Iranian history is especially important right now, with the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the ensuing protests. One scene in particular depicts a group of people protesting when a young man is shot, bleeds to death, and is hoisted over his fellow protesters’ shoulders–eerily reminiscent of what happened with Neda Agha Soltan, whose public murder has rallied the Iranian protesters and people all over the world.

The history of Iran, while it determines the course of Marjane’s life, really is a backdrop—especially in the second half of the movie. In other words, the film is more about the experience of one woman than a documentary-style account of Iranian history. Once Marjane escapes the society she grew up in, her problems become much more ordinary for a Western audience, more commonplace. She vacillates between different crowds of people. She falls in love and has her heart broken. She feels angst and confusion over who she is and what she wants. She goes home to Iran for a time and, like so many others, ultimately finds she cannot return home.

As evident in the film, Satrapi grew up in a wealthy, educated, progressive Iranian family. They sent her to Vienna as a teenager so she didn’t have to spend her adolescence in such a repressive society, and because they feared what might happen to such an outspoken young woman there. While acknowledging her privilege, not many women in circumstances other than these would be able to accomplish what she has. Satrapi isn’t afraid to show missteps she makes in growing up, either. Young Marjane learns that her femininity, even when repressed by law, offers great power—and shows how she misuses that power. Missing her mother’s lesson at the grocery store about female solidarity, she blames other women for her troubles (“Ma’am, my mother is dead. My stepmother’s so cruel. If I’m late, she’ll kill me. She’ll burn me with an iron. She’ll make my dad put me in an orphanage.”), and falsely accuses a man of looking at her in public to avoid the law coming down on her.

Persepolis is, in every definition of the term, a feminist film. There are strong, interesting female characters who sometimes make mistakes. The women, like in real life, are engaged in politics and struggle with expectations set for them and that they set for themselves. They have relationships with various people, but their lives are not defined by one romantic relationship, even though sometimes it can feel that way.

As much as I like this movie, I can’t help but write this review through the lens of an interview Satrapi gave in 2004, in which she claimed to not be a feminist and displayed ignorance of the basic concept of feminism. I simply don’t believe gender inequality can be dissolved through basic humanism—especially in oppressive patriarchal societies like Iran. I wonder if feminism represents too radical a position to non-Westerners, and if her statements were more strategy than sincerity. Making feminism an enemy or perpetuating the post-feminist rhetoric isn’t going to help anyone. That said, this is a very good movie and I highly recommend it.

The official trailer:

A couple of good articles about women’s role in the recent Iranian protests:

The Nation: Icons of the New Iran by Barbara Crossette

Feminist Peace Network: Memo to ABC: Lipstick Revolution FAIL

Post your own links–and thoughts about Persepolis–in the comments.

Movie Review: Duplicity

Duplicity (2009). Written and directed by Tony Gilroy. Starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. Excellent supporting roles by Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti.

Duplicity has dropped out of the top box-office earners since its March 20th release; though it has earned a total of over $40 million domestically, that’s not enough to cover its budget of $60 million.

I saw Duplicity in the theaters last month in part because of the positive reviews paired with skeptical press and questions about whether Julia Roberts could still open a movie. (Questions that angered me enough to express my opinion with my wallet, an action I believe is important.) A recent story clip on MSN compelled me to revisit the movie. The headline “Moneymakers” beside a picture of Julia Roberts, with the byline “Hollywood’s most bankable actresses” links to an article that discusses which actresses can currently be counted on to bring in the bucks. “Moneymaker”, of course, is a term most commonly associated with pornography, prostitution, and the objectification of the female ass, in particular.

The actress-as-commodity isn’t anything unusual in the sexist institution of mainstream filmmaking, but describing a popular actress as a “moneymaker” creates a serious problem. While box office numbers (and particularly opening weekend numbers) determine a film’s success and influence executives in terms of which movies are greenlighted, I have to wonder if it’s the actress’ ass alone bringing people into theaters.

Anyhow, on to the movie.

Duplicity expects level of sophistication and intelligence from its audience, which includes the ability to follow a story that jerks viewers from location to location, and from time to time. It’s a romantic comedy, but it makes you think. Maybe this is a problem for box-office bucks, but a little mental effort makes a movie much more enjoyable–for adults, at least.

Thinking about Ripley’s Rule as a litmus test, this movie actually barely passes–if at all. This fact ordinarily is a big problem for me, but in Duplicity it feels like an afterthought. It’s a romantic comedy, but not the kind we’ve become accustomed to. As a number of reviewers have previously mentioned, this film hearkens back to the screwball comedies of the 1940s, when wit was king, and the women generally matched the men in smarts (that’s not to say that the gender politics were a mess in those movies). What makes the movie good–and so different from other romantic comedies–is that the man and woman are on an even keel. Domination of one or the other sex isn’t the issue. These characters have bigger fish to fry–namely, their bosses in the world of corporate espionage. It’s as if Michael Clayton were remade into a romantic comedy.

If you aren’t convinced that the movie is worth seeing, the opening credits present the strangest and most hilarious fight scene in recent memory.

Here’s the trailer:

The Flick-Off: WALL-E


The Flick-Off is a new series in which we give a quick–but smart–rip to movies that tick us off.

I know, right: a rebuke of a Disney/Pixar cartoon? About robots? Yes–and it deserves it.

While the beginning of WALL-E is a lovely silent film (and would’ve been a fantastic short film), when you brush away the artifice and the adorable little robots, all you have is standard Disney fare: a male protagonist and a female helper, told from his perspective. Why the robots are gendered at all isn’t clear; the movie could’ve been about their friendship–and far more progressive than the heteronormative romance that ensues.

EVE is sleek and lovely, and is physically able to do things WALL-E cannot, but she’s part of an army of task-oriented robots. The mere push of a button shuts her down, and she lacks the self-protectionist drive that WALL-E exhibits when his power reserve drains. He is, of course, beholden to no one since the humans left Earth; he is autonomous and self-sufficient. EVE, on the other hand, is fully robotic: she’s a badass, complete with gun, and she’s more intelligent and cunning than WALL-E, but she’s been programmed to be that way. She’s an advanced form of technology, but she needs WALL-E to liberate her.

WALL-E, it seems, has developed human qualities on his own. He is also capable of keeping up with a robot approximately 700 years newer (read: younger) than he is–an impressive age gap in any relationship. EVE worries over WALL-E and caters to his physical limitations (he is, after all, an old man–with childlike curiosity), acting as nursemaid in addition to all-around badass. Who says we can’t be everything, ladies? While EVE doesn’t have any of the conventional trappings of femininity, she’s a lovely modern contraption with clean lines, while WALL-E is clunky, schlubby, and falling apart (not to mention he’s a clean rip-off of Short Circuit‘s Johnny 5)–reinforcing the (male) appreciation of a certain kind of female aesthetic, while reminding girls that they should look good and not worry too much about the appearance of their male love-interest.

Pixar, by the way, hasn’t created a female protagonist yet.

More contrary opinions about WALL-E–including the troubling way it portrays obesity–on:

If you know of some other good discussions on the film, leave your links in the comments.

Short Review: Los Ojos de Alicia

Los Ojos de Alicia (2005). Written and directed by Hugo Sanz. In Spanish (no English subtitles).

I saw the short film Los Ojos de Alicia as part of the Cincinnati World Cinema 8th annual “Oscar Shorts,” which screens this year’s nominated short films, along with ‘bonus’ films (of which this is one; I’m not privy to the selection process of the bonus films).

Of the eight films (in Part B of the program), I’m sad to say that not one passes the Bechdel test. Los Ojos de Alicia (which you can–and should–watch in its entirety above, although it is in Spanish without subtitles) comes closest, as it stars a woman and a video recording of a woman talking to her–although it turns out to be the same woman, talking to herself. (Note: if anyone can provide an English transcript of the film, please let me know.)

We open on a woman, tied up and blindfolded, just waking from a memory-erasing procedure. A recording turns on and a woman leads the blindfolded woman to a glass of apple juice to quench her thirst, then tells her the juice is poison. She tells the still-hooded woman exactly what memory she’s had erased: the woman returned home to find her husband seriously wounded and bleeding to death. She stopped to care for him before checking on her daughter, who she found also seriously wounded and who soon died. Not only did the woman choose her husband over her child, but she then learned that her husband stabbed the child, before trying to kill himself. The woman doesn’t know how to live with the implications of the tragedy, which led her to this room. The woman in the recording tells her there’s an antidote to the poison juice, if she can just cut herself free and swallow a pill. Just before the woman swallows the pill, we learn that it’s the pill–not the juice–that contains deadly poison. The woman in the video challenges her will to live in the face of the tragedy she experienced.

I think the film was included because it is provocative and good for engaging conversation, though the format of the festival (one film right after the next) did not encourage discussion. However, it bothers me on multiple levels. We have a male writer and director pontificating on a woman’s guilt, remorse, and what can only be described as self-hatred. This is a torture film, even if it is self-torture.

It’s interesting to consider how we deal with tragedy, though the thesis here seems to be that the only way past it (or through it) is to create an even more horrific tragedy. I can see how a woman would want to punish herself for failing to save her child, even when it’s not in any way her fault. What I like about the film is that it literalizes the way we torture ourselves when we feel we’re to blame for something terrible. The act of making literal torture in a raw and painful way makes us think about the banal torture people inflict on themselves. We all know someone who has been through unspeakable tragedy, and many times what the person does to herself (or himself) amounts to destruction on a tragic level.

What I don’t like about the film is its manipulation. It feels very much like cheating to create a universe in which we have alternate reality (memory erasure) and still are supposed to feel sympathy for a woman who would choose to do this to herself. We don’t know if the memory-erasure was a success; even with the juice detail (the woman claimed to enjoy the apple juice, even though we’re told she hated apples as a child) we just don’t know what kind of memory she has of what happened. She saves herself, but not without first forcing the “new” her to have a (false?) memory of what she lived through. Ultimately, the film is manipulative and sadistic; a thought-experiment on suicide, but not a very productive one.

Here is the CWC program of Oscar Shorts, Part B:

  • Auf der Strecke (On the Line)
  • This Way Up
  • Los Ojos de Alicia
  • Presto
  • Spielzeugland (Toyland) – Live Action Short Oscar winner
  • Lavatory – Lovestory
  • Sintonia

Ripley’s Pick: Happy-Go-Lucky


Happy-Go-Lucky. Starring Sally Hawkins, Alexis Zegerman, Kate O’Flynn, Sarah Niles, and Eddie Marsan. Written and directed by Mike Leigh.

Poppy Cross (Hawkins, who won a Golden Globe for her performance) is a 30-year-old primary school teacher in London. She shares her flat with her roommate of ten years and lives a life filled with happiness. What feels at first like an innocent, fluff-filled movie is actually an examination of the difficulty of living life with a goal of happiness.

Time after time, Poppy’s optimistic outlook on life is tested. A rude worker in a bookshop doesn’t respond to her small talk, someone steals her bicycle, she injures her back, and her new driving instructor (Marsan) has what you could call a serious dark streak. Instead of reacting cynically, Poppy struggles to stay positive and, what’s more, create moments of happiness in the lives of others.

Effective teaching is a major theme of the film. Scott (her driving instructor) talks about the necessity of repetition in teaching, we see multiple scenes of Poppy and Zoe interacting with their young students, and we see a fantastic scene with a flamenco instructor who channels her heartbreak into passionate instruction. If ever there was a profession that requires optimism, Poppy—with her bold, confident, and fearless personality—makes a great spokesperson.

Perhaps the greatest struggle Poppy faces is the force of the status quo. Her outlook on life, which she shares with her friends and one sister, is summed up nicely by friend and coworker Tash (Niles), who relates what she tells her prodding aunts:

“No, I haven’t got a boyfriend. No, I won’t be getting married soon, and, no, I won’t be investing in a property with a mortgage in the near future, thank you very much.”

Amen, sister. The movie actually spends little time on social forces driving women, particularly, to settle down (except for one visit to the ‘burbs), though this always lurks in the background. The bigger struggles are the everyday events that drag us down, which makes this a nice little slice-of-life movie, with a minimal plot, and a major focus on character. Female friendship is at its heart, without the stock shopping and food footage that most films use to represent how women bond. As we know, bonding over consumption of material objects (whether they be chocolate, sexual conquests, or clothing) forms the most shallow of relationships. Happy-Go-Lucky is a film that realizes this fact.

Once you adjust to Poppy’s infectious (or, I found, slightly grating) personality, you’ll see a female-centered movie that just leaves you feeling good. Oh, and you’ll forever have Enraha. You’ll understand if you’ve seen it; that one sticks with you.

Rachel Getting Married: A Response

Last October, Stephanie reviewed Rachel Getting Married after seeing it in the theater. After rereading her post, I’d like to offer my response.


First, the poster is a poor representation of the film. While you could argue that Kym (Hathaway) is the main character, the movie is really about her and her sister, Rachel (DeWitt). The background of the movie is much more in the foreground, unlike the poster. All the characters in the film are complicated, conflicted, and ultimately complicit in the family tragedy. What Stephanie said about the anger and guilt rings true, as well as the unsentimental nature of the story. Each character behaves in cruel, selfish ways; Kym’s narcissistic, inappropriate speeches counter Rachel’s bratty outbursts of jealousy. Yet there are some weak points in an otherwise very, very good movie.

The mother, Abby (Winger), always stays on the periphery of the story, with both sisters desiring her comfort and love. Her inability to give her daughters what they want is realistic, but in a film where the two main characters change over the course of a weekend, and grow to accept each other in subtle ways, an unchanging, hard mother stands out and takes on the role of the ‘responsible party’ in the family’s tragedy. Her coldness and distance, compared to the father’s overbearing nurturing of his daughters (he’s constantly stroking faces and fixing food), makes her an easy target for blame. The reversal of stereotypical gender-based reactions to tragedy is particularly interesting, but I wonder if the flip is too complete, too easy. In other words, does the mother simply become the father? What kind of love are the sisters looking for from their mother? Do they need something from their father? If so, what?

Aside from what I see as the incomplete characterization of the mother, something that really bothered me is something I simultaneously love: the lack of back story. While it makes us more present in the film, it endlessly thwarts attempts at a reading. The documentary-style filming, too, frustrates viewers by hiding as much as it reveals. The family trauma is made abundantly clear, maybe too much so. In the first scene, we learn from a fellow rehab patient that Kym killed someone with a car. Once she gets home and stands for a moment in an empty child’s room, we can guess what has happened. We get several additional scenes that explain every detail of the accident. Yet, that’s not the source of her addiction. Kym was some sort of teen model, gracing the cover of Seventeen magazine while blasted on horse tranquilizers, and her family had the kind of money (whether it was hers or not) to send her to the premium rehab facilities.

Also, it’s impossible to ignore the multicultural cast of friends and family. We don’t know how a Connecticut WASP family came to be part of such a rockin’ crew, or how the bride and groom’s families all became so comfortable with each other on their very first meeting. While I admire the post-racial aspirations of the film, and thoroughly enjoyed the music, the actors seem more like Jonathan Demme’s crew than two families joining for the first time. The mixing of cultures (Caribbean and Hindu, specifically, with those intimate with “Connecticut’s complicated tax structure”) plays naturally in the movie, and never feels like a co-optation, but compared with the stark realism of the primary relationships, leaves viewers asking questions, testing our willing suspension of disbelief. I’d love to read the screenplay (written by Jenny Lumet), and see how my issues with the film manifest in the (original) script, and how much is Demme’s indulgence.

While this may seem like a negative review, the preceding are really my only complaints. I watched the movie twice, and liked it even better the second time around. I haven’t seen such a realistic family drama, with women who break common decency while ultimately remaining sympathetic characters. Further, I’m fascinated by stories that deal with the aftermath of the worst kinds of traumas, and that explore how we come to deal with the unfathomable, the unforgivable, and the unforgettable.