Tag: Biopic

Oscar Best Picture Nominee: ‘Moneyball’

Brad Pitt stars in Best Picture nominee Moneyball
This is a guest post from Robin Hitchcock.
I didn’t know until the end credits that Aaron Sorkin had a writing credit on Moneyball. This is good, because I semi-irrationally hate Aaron Sorkin, and I wouldn’t want that bias to have influenced my take on the film. I’m frankly astonished I made it through the movie without recognizing Sorkin’s handiwork given his very specific, very stilted style. I’m not sure if that is a credit to the acting, the directing, the influence of also-credited writer Steve Zallian’s earlier draft, an uncharacteristic bout of restraint on the part of Mr. Sorkin, or a combination thereof. Sure, the dialogue is sharp and clever, not so aggressively sharp and clever that you feel like you’re being stabbed in the throat with wit. The snazzy dialogue is more there to entertain the viewer, instead of demonstrate the genius of the writer, which is pretty much the opposite of how I usually feel about Sorkin’s work.
While I didn’t know about Sorkin’s contribution to the script when I watched Moneyball, I did know I’d be reviewing it for Bitch Flicks. So I watched with my feminist glasses freshly cleaned and firmly planted on my nose. Which was tricky, because this is not a movie about women. Professional baseball is about as much of a man’s world as you could ask for, plus there’s the whole “based on a true story” business to validate keeping all the major characters men.
Which is fine! There are stories, stories worth telling, that are just about men. [Likewise, there are stories worth telling that only involve women, but its hard to get Hollywood to bankroll those.] Telling a story about men in a men’s world isn’t inherently sexist. But I think it is fair to subject whatever scraps of portrayal of women we get in these male-dominated films to a slightly higher scrutiny.
Moneyball becomes pretty cringeworthy when you do that. The film has a runtime of 133 minutes, and by my rough count women “characters” are featured in slightly less than 8 of those minutes. That’s 6%. [This whole “math” thing is kind of a double-edged sword, eh, Moneyball?] In those 8 minutes we see three wives/mothers, two daughters, three markedly cheerful and helpful secretaries, and one bitchy sports reporter. Yep, that’s right, the only woman in the movie who isn’t in a family or subservient relationship to the male characters is established as pushy and mean in a scant ten lines of dialogue.
Casey, played by Kerris Dorsey
The only even remotely well-rounded female character is Billy Beane’s twelve-year-old daughter, Casey (Kerris Dorsey), and the character is only as well-rounded as a dented egg. She’s your standard shy-yet-precocious pre-teen on the brink of womanhood, a favorite stock character of lazy male writers. [See also First Daughter Lucy in Sorkin’s The American President]. Casey feels a bit shoe-horned into the movie, to soften Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane and give him some scenes where he’s not flipping tables or arranging complicated player trade deals, all the better to bait that sweet, sweet Oscar honey. The other reason for Casey’s character to exist is to provide an explanation of Beane’s decision to reject a lucrative offer from the Boston Red Sox to become the best-paid GM in the game. I have no idea if Real Life Billy Beane stayed in Oakland to be near his children (although this Sports Illustrated piece from the time suggests as much), but I am sadly reminded of Aaron Sorkin’s “but you guys remember Rooney Mara, right!?” defense against the feminist criticism of women in The Social Network. When you’re only including women in your story because they motivate the men in the story, it’s not enough to win you any points with feminists.
The other women in the film (aside from an entirely wasted Robin Wright as Beane’s ex-wife) are all presented as service-providers to men. On top of the cheerful secretaries, we also see one of the player’s wives bring out coffee for Beane and his associate when they invite themselves into her living room to recruit spurned former catcher Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) to play first base, and quickly scoop up her and Scott’s young daughter when she toddles her way through this important meeting between the menfolk. I was so distracted by the antiquated gender dynamic playing out in that scene I had to watch it a second time to pay attention to the plot advancement.
Antiquated gender dynamics mar Moneyball
A later scene leads me to believe that the strange emphasis on women as helpmates was intentional, hopefully trying to say something about the old-fashioned hyper-masculine world of baseball. When Beane meets with Boston Red Sox owner John Henry (Arliss Howard), his cheerful and helpful secretary cheerfully and helpfully serves coffee, prompting this exchange.
Henry: You know, it’s her birthday, and I need to get her a present, but she’s usually the one that does that for me. So, do you have any ideas?
 
Beane: Uh, scarf.
 
Henry: You mean like wool?
 
Beane: No, I meant, uh, what women wear with, uh… decorative.
 
Henry: Where would I get something like that?
After which Beane cuts him off with something like, “I have no time for such frivolous lady issues! Let’s talk about serious matters of vital importance, like BASEBALL!” I believe this exchange is in the movie to highlight the strangeness of the general absence of women in this universe and subservient roles the few present women are in. At least, I hope that is what is going on, because otherwise I get the sinking suspicion that Sorkin wrote all these helper women in the movie as a deliberate fuck you to those who criticized the portrayal of women in The Social Network. Or worse yet, he thought by making all these helper women so markedly cheerful and polite, and by not having anyone snort coke off their bodies, that he was course-correcting. But that’s all wild speculation, given I don’t know the content of Sorkin’s contributions to the script.
Regardless, its inarguable that Moneyball does no favors for women in cinema. Aside from that, it’s a perfectly fine movie, not something I’d generally consider in the echelon of Best Picture nominees, but well worth watching nonetheless. All the same, I wish there were more movies with virtually all-female casts to counterbalance all the Moneyballs I’ve seen over my lifetime.
Robin Hitchcock has previously reviewed The Descent and Michael Clayton for Bitch Flicks. You can read her movie reviews at her blog HitchDied and other feminist pop culture commentary at her blog The Double R Diner.

Oscar and Indie Spirit Best Actress Nominee: Michelle Williams in My Week With Marilyn

This is a guest review by Danielle Winston. 
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“My Week With Marilyn” is set in 1957 London; the film is told through the eyes of Colin Clark, a twenty-three-year-old Londoner who lands a gopher job as a third assistant to the director, Lawrence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) working on a film that would later become “The Prince and the Show Girl.” There he meets Marilyn Monroe, newly married to Arthur Miller, and has a relationship with her that lasts a week.
In the film, Michelle Williams resists the urge to make Monroe into a familiar cartoon, even though the script is rich in both the icon’s clichés and complexities, with expected poses, lines and mannerisms we’ve come to know as Marilyn-isms.
Williams–who has a naturally earthy presence–digs beneath Monroe’s facade and chips away at the woman underneath. In a subtly drawn performance, she lets us a glimpse into the personal world of not just the movie star–but also the massively powerful woman. This Monroe, with her soft whispery voice, does not lull us into thinking her a victim. Instead she portrays a woman so uncomfortable with her own strength, she’s continually battling opposing forces inside her own psyche and projects the demeanor of a frightened child, wrapped in an overtly sensual woman’s body. We have the sense that she is always silently asking permission for something–but we’re not sure what or why. With her pale blue eyes and sweet girlie smile, Williams’ Monroe is eternally blameless for her actions, no matter how she inconveniences those working with her: forgetting lines, showing up hours late or not at all…it seems as though she could set the film set on fire and we would find a way to excuse her. 
Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe
So raw, sensitive and utterly vulnerable, Monroe has us and the characters in the film, wound around her finger so airtight, it leaves us wondering if it’s all just a clever act, and if there isn’t really a manipulative diva in there someplace, acting her pants off just to get what she wants. But then…she twists us yet again, and we decide, no woman could really be that good. Or could she?
Not quite everyone is so accepting of Marilyn’s careless ways. Olivier is at his wits end trying to direct her and repeatedly tries to wrangle Marilyn into his version of what he expected he was getting when he ordered up this particular blonde bombshell to star in his film. He doesn’t realize how terrified she is of him: in awe of his talent, Monroe’s hoping to learn all she can from such a great master. Unfortunately, when she bumbles lines in rehearsal, on the verge of tears, Olivier interprets it as a personal affront and never truly understands how much respect she has for him.
When Marilyn is running late for the first table read, young Clark, smitten with Marilyn on sight, goes to her dressing room and finds her acting coach Paula Strasberg, standing guard at the door. Strasberg attempts to shoo him away like a mosquito, but Marilyn, seated by her mirror, studying her lines, barefaced, smiles at him kindly and says, “Excuse the horrible face.” It’s as though she revealing a secret: she’s unacceptable in her own skin, and asks to be forgiven the discretion of being human. 
  

Williams’ Monroe is a riddled with contradictions. Without any attempt to hide her insecurities, she’s a woman on a path to self-discovery. Even while being subdued by her handlers with pills and alcohol, she still yearns to be more than a male-centric view of femininity. And yet interesting enough, it’s that very fabricated celluloid image, which she switches off and on like a neon stop sign, skillfully working to her advantage.
After only being married three weeks to Arthur Miller, the couple have a nasty argument: Monroe feels betrayed and believes Miller’s stolen bits of her for his writing. Frustrated with his new wife and her unruly personality, Miller leaves the set, and Marilyn, to her own devices.
We’ve all seen those blasé versions of Monroe where she can’t exist without a man to fill the void and they make us wonder how much was true…here’s where the film takes on a different tone: no longer the plaything to be conquered by an older man, this time Monroe decides to call the sexual shots. After discovering Colin is only twenty-three, she tells him, “I’m 30. I guess that makes me an old lady to you.” In ‘57 being thirty was a milestone in a female’s life. No longer thought of as a blushing girl, Monroe was now a mature woman who had already been married three times.
Monroe was older, yes, although nearly as ancient as Olivier’s wife, Vivien Leigh, who at 43 was considered too over the hill to reprise the role which she originated on stage in, “The Prince and the Showgirl.” When Monroe tells Olivier she thought Leigh was wonderful in the role, he quips that she’s far too old for the film. At that moment, we see sadness wash over Monroe’s carefree expression, and we’re not sure whether it’s compassion for her fellow actress she feels or the impending sting of her own expiration date looming on the horizon.
As we watch Monroe ensnare the naive Clark within her charming web, we know he doesn’t stand a chance against this force of womanliness; all we can do is hope she’ll be kind when she’s finished with him. The seduction begins when Clark innocently walks in on her naked in her dressing room. Instead of covering up, she very slowly wraps her towel back on, making sure he’s had an eyeful first, and then asks, “Are you afraid of me?” And even though he answers “no” we wonder if he should be.
When Clark is ordered not to see her or he’ll be fired, Monroe takes the upper hand once again, showing us she’s not one to be pushed around. In a ballsy move, she hides in the backseat of a car and has Clark picked up and whisked away to a nearby lake where she takes him skinny-dipping. Whimsical and irresistible are her methods, but after Clark is warned to stay away from her or risk getting his heart shattered, it’s clear that while Monroe may’ve looked soft and delicate, this blonde sure wasn’t stupid, and she was much more resilient than she appeared. 
  

In 1957, women didn’t have meetings or marches to unite them; instead they were separated, competitive and envious of the physical attributes of each other, left to suffer in isolation at the hands of men who shaped their images, dictating what was “desirable.” Monroe took that glittering image, ran with it and used it to become a sensation.
Monroe’s sexual onscreen presence, combined with her blonde hair and baby-voice had studios and audiences typecasting her as dumb. In her own quiet way, she had been studying method acting with Lee Strasberg at the actor’s studio for quite some time, hoping to elevate her stature as a serious dramatic actress. Even though she was already a movie star, at the height of her career, she saw the chance to work with Olivier, one of the greats, as her chance.
Monroe and her teacher, Paula, Lee Strasberg’s second wife, had a strong mother-daughter dynamic in the film. Strasberg, an earnest, and intelligent woman, greatly admired Monroe’s raw talent. However when she’d express herself, telling Monroe she was truly a brilliant actress, Monroe would simply listen politely but took her words as no more than generous flattery.
Monroe’s dedication to method acting is a constant annoyance with Olivier. Not at all what he envisioned the kittenish actress would be; he was baffled by her contrary behavior. Stuck in old-school actor mode, he tells her, “Just be sexy. Isn’t that what you do?” Perhaps that’s one of the things she was apologizing for: not always being sexy.
While acting, with great focus, she searches for the truth in every line. To such an extent, if the realness isn’t there, she can’t even utter the words. Often what’s perceived as, “difficult behavior” is actually Monroe’s sincere desire to understand her role and deliver the best performance possible. 
Marilyn Monroe
Ultimately her involvement with Clark is a very safe choice. It borders on passionless, and seems to be more a spiritual connection than a physical one. In the end Clark is able to give the world’s biggest star a rare gift: solace in his innocence. And for a brief point in time the chance to recapture her own adolescence.
When Monroe asks if he’s in love with her, Clark replies, “You’re like some Greek Goddess to me.” In many ways Colin isn’t so different from all the other men Monroe has known; he still sees her as larger than life.
She tells him, “I don’t want to be a goddess. I just want to be loved like an ordinary girl.”
Marilyn may believe she longs for normalcy but what she demonstrates is the opposite; when Clark tries to rescue her by saying she can quit working and he’ll take care of her–without hesitation she refuses–not even sure what he’s saving her from or why. Clark tells her, maybe then she’d be happy. But Marilyn is confused. She already believed she was happy and doesn’t want to stop acting. Right then, Monroe is not a child but a strong woman who knows exactly what she wants.
Ultimately Williams’ portrayal of Monroe is so understated it appears effortless. It’s a performance that could only emerge by finding the character’s inner truth within each word, a thought-provoking performance that Monroe herself, who struggled to understand the realness in her acting, and her own life, would likely appreciate and perhaps even envy. 
  

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Danielle Winston is a Manhattan based screenwriter and playwright. Her articles are regularly published in regional and National Magazines. She’s also a yoga teacher and creator of Writer’s Flow Yoga.



Best Actress Oscar Nominees: Meryl Streep and Michelle Williams

Of the Best Actress nominations at the Oscars this year, two stand apart from the rest. Not because of the skill of the actresses, but because they depict real-life figures. Through these portrayals much can be learned about the ways women are represented on screen: The Iron Lady starring Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, and My Week with Marilyn with Michelle Williams playing Marilyn Monroe.
Characterisations in fiction can always be dismissed with a flippant “it’s only a story,” remark. However, both of these depictions come with the burden of hours of footage and innumerable documentary evidence to inform our perception of how “believable” and accurate the portrayals are. We can directly compare scenes from these films with original footage, and clearly see how both actresses must have studied relentlessly for their roles. Nevertheless, while the intention may have been to throw light onto the motivations and private psyches of these icons, the films have in fact revealed how far there is to go before female characters on screen are reflective of what women are really like.
Margaret Thatcher became the first (and so far, only) female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.  One of the most controversial politicians of the twentieth century, she was loathed by much of the country when she was eventually ousted from her position by her own party. She is now 86 years old and suffers from Alzheimer’s.
Marilyn Monroe remains the greatest female film icon 50 years since her death at the age of 36. During her career she walked out on her contract with the most powerful studio in Hollywood to form her own production company in a bid to be taken seriously as an actress in an unprecedented move that foreshadowed the downfall of the studio system.
Meryl Streep and Margaret Thatcher
In The Iron Lady we are introduced to Baroness Thatcher as she is today – frail, widowed and in the grip of dementia. For the first 20 minutes of the film, her vulnerable position is made clear as she holds conversations with her long-deceased husband, and her care-worn daughter attempts to help her with simple daily tasks. The ravages of her devastating illness present a character so feeble and subjugated that it is impossible to feel anything but pity for the predicament she is in. From this starting point of total empathy, we are then invited to look back over her life in a series of flashbacks.
The ferocity of the woman’s ambition is tempered with reminders of her weakened state, as the film intersperses present day scenes of awkward dinner parties and domestic banality, between expositional recreations of famous public moments. Most fascinatingly, once the role of Thatcher has been assumed by Meryl Streep, her husband Denis, played with almost farcical humour by Jim Broadbent, is always shown at the age he was when he died; it is her memory of her dead husband that appears. His presence serves both as a reminder that it is the memories of an infirm woman we are seeing, and to emphasise her dependency on him (symbolically when she is being interviewed outside Downing St after having won the Election, Denis is shown in the background, standing on the doorstep of Number 10). 
Most troublingly however, is that so little time is spent showing the woman’s character. The well-known facts are retold economically – grocer’s daughter decides she will enter politics, bucking class and gender stereotypes, etc. Yet even her decision to run for Leader of the Opposition is a decision she is coerced and then fashioned into (by senior male colleagues). The time spent with her in private spaces is entirely set during the present time when she is deeply unwell, and is so heartrendingly sentimental that it lacks any insight into the complex sides of her personality.
At times during her tenure, Margaret Thatcher was despised by many, and revered by others, and it is the reasons for this that hold most interest. Yet even some of the most crucial and controversial points in her career (miners’ strikes, poll tax riots) are glossed over in montage footage. Her regrets and conflicts of conscience are briefly alluded to in confused nightmares during the present day, with no depiction of their effect on her at the time they were occurring. What is truly fascinating about a woman such as Margaret Thatcher, or any controversial political figure, is what the motivations were behind the controversies: how did she handle being so despised; what was her logic behind the audacious policies she initiated; what were those decisions were based on; how did the consequences of her decisions make her feel? The answers to these questions may not endear her to an audience, but they are vital to developing an understanding of her, and to giving a rounded portrait of the woman dubbed “The Iron Lady.” Central characters do not need to be likeable after all, but they should be believable.
Meryl Streep’s astonishing performance recreates with expertise Thatcher’s most famous public moments, her mannerisms, and speech. However, this interpretation does not deepen our understanding of the woman who led the UK into war with the Falklands, and remains the country’s longest serving Prime Minister to date.
By choosing to focus on the elderly Thatcher, The Iron Lady sanitises her by using domesticity. Her strength is simplified into stubbornness and her forthright opinions and brutally impersonal policies are diluted by the bantering affection she shares with her dead husband. The writer Abi Morgan has stated how it is the loss of power that she was most interested to depict, but as a viewer, it seems an opportunity has been missed.  Time and again women are depicted in ill health, tackling menial domestic chores, mourning loved ones, and being powerless. Margaret Thatcher was a truly fearless and defiant female character, uncompromisingly ambitious and divisive. It is an insight into the challenging aspects of her personality that this film had the potential to show. However, it seems there is no film language to portray these facets of a female character.  Strength, intelligence, charisma are denoted in relation to male counterparts, and it is only through the prism of her relationships with men that Thatcher is depicted – most obviously through her connection to her dead husband.
Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe
My Week with Marilyn, based on the bestselling book of the same name, recounts the experiences of “gofer” Colin Clark (the book’s author) during the filming of The Prince and The Showgirl. There is much to suggest that Colin Clark and Marilyn Monroe never even spoke, let alone ended up sharing a bed, and it is widely believed the book is entirely fictional, written along with many others to cash-in on Monroe’s legacy. However, regardless of the veracity of the book, it is interesting to look at the way the filmmakers have chosen to portray Monroe.
There is much anticipation built up in the opening scenes as excitement increases with the prospect of Marilyn Monroe arriving in England. She was the biggest movie star in the world at this time, and The Prince and The Showgirl was the first film to be made by her production company that she set up in defiance of the type-casting she received in Hollywood. As a naïve and star-struck young man, Colin is desperate to be involved with the production, and manages to secure a junior position as a gofer on the film.
The hoopla surrounding her arrival is depicted with startling accuracy when compared with the original footage, and Michelle Williams delivers a trademark “Monroe-ism” with flirtatious delight when asked if it is true that she sleeps in nothing but Chanel No 5: “As I am in England let’s say that I sleep in nothing but Yardley’s Lavender” she declares. It may be that a casual viewer would not notice that the portrayal of Marilyn Monroe is undermined from this very first sequence: however, the question is posed to her by Toby Jones, playing Arthur Jacobs, Monroe’s publicity man. The implication is that, far from coming up with her witticism spontaneously, she has been fed a line. Throughout her career, many who worked with Monroe remarked on her natural intelligence, comedic timing and incisive wit, and yet this cynical scene immediately suggests that is not the case.
As Colin finds himself indispensable to Marilyn Monroe during the course of the film’s shoot (cue to suspend disbelief) the pair take off around some of the UK’s beautiful countryside and historic sites. In the library of Windsor Castle, a wide-eyed Marilyn gasps, “Gee, I wish I could read this many books!” Such astonishingly naïve a line, it literally draws snorts of amusement at the woman’s ignorance, and is followed by, “Isn’t he the guy who painted the lady with the funny smile?” when presented with a Da Vinci etching. Yet Marilyn Monroe’s study of literature throughout her lifetime – she took up night-school classes at the beginning of her career instead of attending Hollywood parties – as well as her passion for renaissance art, are well documented in biographies. So the decision to disregard these facts, and to choose instead to exaggerate the “dumb blonde” image is no accident. No mention is even made of the fact that on this film she was a Producer, and therefore Laurence Olivier’s boss: this and their conflicting approaches to acting were reasons why their relationship on set was so fractured.
Marilyn Monroe
Although devastatingly insecure about her talent and notoriously late on set Marilyn Monroe was no victim – especially at this point in her career. Known to moments of rage, and fiercely passionate about her craft, the depiction of her as a weeping child-woman too frail to articulate her emotions is to undermine the complexity of an actress who has continued to captivate audiences five decades after her passing. That she would find solace in the arms of any young man that found himself captivated by her, is to assume not only her complete disregard for the new husband for whom she converted to Judaism to wed, but serves to perpetuate myths about her sexual promiscuity.
When looking at the characterisations of Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Thatcher in My Week with Marilyn and The Iron Lady it is crucial to remember that the way they have been portrayed is not by accident. Nor are these the only ways in which they could have been depicted, and neither should they be considered exact or entirely true. These characterisations have been constructed and depict women stripped of their complexity, strength, intelligence, wit, and dynamism: the very things that made them so successful and iconic. This inevitably raises questions about why.
Consistently the call comes for more interesting and diverse female characters in film, yet too often that means showing women who have been victimised and exploited. Even when historic figures have demonstrated extraordinary courage, making remarkable achievements in their lives, they are diminished when characterised on film. It is not because stories of amazing women do not exist, but the perspective their tales are told from. Perceptions of women as reactive and submissive stereotypes will remain in place when even the most extraordinary females are reduced to clichés, and it is up to producers, directors and writers to be fearless enough to show women as active participants in their own lives to ensure this is changed.  

Gabriella Apicella is a feminist writer and tutor living in London, England. She has a degree in Film and Media from Birkbeck College, University of London, is on the board of Script Development organisation Euroscript, and in 2010 co-founded the UnderWire Festival that aims to recognise the raw filmmaking talent of women. Her writing features women in the central roles, and she has been commissioned to write short films, experimental theatre and prose for independent directors and artists. 

Question of the Day: Biopic Wishes

Every week the Women’s Media Center hosts a tweetup–called #sheparty–to discuss issues of women and, uh, media. Last Wednesday the topic of biopics came up–specifically, the fact that there are currently two films in production about Linda Lovelace. Who? I had to look her up to remind me of where I’d heard that name before (it’s not the math genius, Ada Lovelace, who immediately came to mind for me). Linda Lovelace was the star of perhaps the most notorious porno of all time: Deep Throat.
Now, in theory I don’t think it’s unacceptable for a biopic to be made about a woman who happened to star in a famous porn film, though I’m immediately concerned about characterization, whose perspective we’ll see, who viewers will be encouraged to sympathize with, and all those other things that make films not just entertainment but social commentary.
What is unacceptable is that Lovelace herself testified that she was coerced into making porn. In 1986, she testified before the Meese Commission that “Virtually every time someone watches that movie, they’re watching me being raped.” While we can’t know the content of the films until at least scripts are released, this fact should give us pause, and make us consider Hollywood’s motivations for greenlighting two projects based on her life.
What is also unacceptable is that two films are being made, when there are so many other women out there–who’ve had major social, cultural, scientific, or political impacts–who haven’t had major motion pictures made about their lives.
During the tweetup, we asked participants who they’d rather see as the topic of a biopic–and the suggestions poured in. Below I list some–though not all–of the responses we received, and want to open the question up to all our readers.
Who would you like to see a Hollywood biopic made for?
Here are some of the suggestions that came to us via Twitter:
Emma Goldman
Alice Walker
Betty Friedan
Bette Davis
Alice Coltrane
Minnie Riperton
Hannah Arendt
Gloria Steinem
Nellie Bly
JK Rowling
Harper Lee
Margaret Atwood
Hillary Clinton
Margaret Mitchell
Mary Shelley
Gertrude Ederle
Louise Erdrich
Marilyn Monroe
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Victoria Woodhull
Margaret Chase Smith
Amelia Earhart (better than Amelia and less focused on her love life)
Vita de Sackville West
Aayan Hirsi Ali
Audre Lorde
Marie Curie
Margaret Sanger
Eleanor Roosevelt
Thanks to all who suggested these women. Add your wishes in the comments!

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: Milk

 
I Need a Hero: Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008)

“My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you,” yells a nearly unrecognizable Sean Penn in a pivotal scene in Gus Van Sant’s biopic Milk (2008). Wearing a tight red and white shirt and form-fitting slacks highlighting a noticeable bulge, Penn unnervingly inhabits the body of a man who was never handsome, never pretty, but who exuded an eye-twinkling sexiness which led numbers of attractive young men into his bed. It’s a transformation that is not merely surface, not merely costume and hairstyle and what appears to be a slight prosthesis on the nose: like Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours, this is a full-bodied immersion in a character. Penn, always something of a chameleon in recent years, loses all traces of his own physicality, and portrays Harvey Milk with a buoyancy, a loose-limbed lightness that I’ve never seen in him before. The process seems to have liberated him as an actor—he’s behaving with an unbridled exuberance. His co-star, James Franco, reported that after their first kissing scene, Penn called up ex-wife Madonna and said, “I’ve just kissed my first man,” to which Madonna replied, “Honey, I’m so proud of you.” So are we.
In a recent piece on the Criterion Collection edition of the Oscar-winning 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (directed by Rob Epstein, later to direct The Celluloid Closet and Paragraph 175), photographer Daniel Nicoletta calls the documentary “Harvey Milk 101.” It would be fair to call Van Sant’s Milk “Harvey Milk 102”—the two films, viewed in order, represent a progression in the course sequence, but they’re primers, neither qualifying you for an advanced degree in the subject. For that, one must turn to the late Randy Shilts’s book The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1983), which, to my mind, remains the definitive work on the man’s life and legacy. The Epstein documentary is primarily concerned with Milk’s political career; the Van Sant biopic fills in many of the biographical holes in the documentary and concentrates more on Milk’s personal life and relationships. My suggestion is that viewers watch both films—Times first, Milk second—and, if they yearn for more, to then turn to the Shilts book.
Milk begins with archival footage of police raids on gay bars in the 1950s and 60s, and is followed by Milk in 1977 reading his will into a tape recorder: he was convinced that he would soon be assassinated, a prediction that would shortly come true. Flash back to 1970, and Milk’s meeting with Scott Smith (Franco) in a New York subway, and the beginning of an on-again, off-again romance that would last the rest of Milk’s life. Dissatisfied with his grinding corporate-America job in New York, Milk moves with Smith to San Francisco in search of liberation and meaning. He opens a camera shop, becomes an exceedingly groovy bohemian, and ultimately becomes involved with gay rights and local politics, culminating in his election as a city supervisor—the first openly gay elected official in the United States. He is helped along the way by Smith and a band of friends and lovers who operate out of his camera store: Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), Jack Lira (Diego Luna), Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill), and Dick Pabich (Joseph Cross). Once elected, he finds a staunch ally in Mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber) and a nemesis in Supervisor Dan White (Josh Brolin). White, after a series of public humiliations, assassinates Milk and Moscone in City Hall (Dianne Feinstein’s famous announcement of the event appears in the film), and later pleads insanity by using the notorious “Twinkie defense.”
More than a mere summary of events, Milk seeks to illuminate some of the depths of Milk’s character, which are left mostly untouched by The Times of Harvey Milk. And Penn’s performance is a marvel. But I’m left at the end of the film still not entirely knowing what made this man tick. I’m slightly in awe of him, I’m humbled by his passion, I’m drawn to his politics, I’m certainly attracted to him and can easily see myself getting talked into bed by him without much effort, but I still feel separate from him, as though his core has not been exposed. Perhaps this is more than a biopic can do, but my sense is that this is the film’s goal, and on that count it doesn’t quite deliver. The fault is neither Penn’s nor Van Sant’s nor the script’s—my guess is that capturing someone as mercurial as Harvey Milk on film is an impossibility.
Lest this sound as though I didn’t enjoy the film, let me hasten to add that Milk brilliantly recreates a period when gay sex was fun and free and easy and the specter of AIDS was a few years in the future. The cast looks resplendent in its period costumes; it’s alarming that clothes I once wore as a child now constitute “period attire.” And, apart from Penn, the cast is uniformly superb, as we might expect from Van Sant, who, after all, delivered amazing performances from the non-acting teens in 2003’s Elephant. James Franco demonstrates the fearlessness that led him shortly thereafter to take on the role of poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl, and proves why he’s one of his generation’s most interesting actors; his Scott Smith is sweet, sexy, charming, and loyal. Josh Brolin has the incredibly tough job of making Dan White a human being rather than the boogeyman of the piece. He looks uncannily like the real man, and he manages to imbue White with enough pathos that I was unable to hate him, or not entirely. Victor Garber is reliable as always as Moscone, and Diego Luna and Joseph Cross (the little boy from Northern Lights, with Diane Keaton) excel as bits of eye candy on the fringes of Milk’s world. Emile Hirsch has the gravitas to play the great Cleve Jones, whose activism continues to inspire today, and Alison Pill holds her own as the sole woman in this sea of gay men.
What struck me most about Milk at the time of its release was its celebration of the writer. The trailer proudly announced “Written by Dustin Lance Black” in huge blue letters, and the very fetching Mr. Black won a well-deserved Oscar for his efforts. His Academy Award speech, in which he pleaded for the acceptance of young gay men like himself, is already legendary, and in interviews with magazines like The Advocate, he chronicled his difficulties in getting the script written and his exhaustive research. Perhaps the best thing about his script is that it doesn’t venerate its subject: it would have been all too easy to turn Harvey Milk into a saintly angel in America, but he is instead presented by turns as charming and irritating, pleasant and cantankerous, open-minded and bull-headed. And despite the opening which announces his death, the film doesn’t belabor this inevitable trajectory: the focus of both the film and the characters is on the moment, or on a rosy future. Again, the film’s only flaw, to my mind, is that Milk still seems at arm’s length from me, and I craved a more intimate relationship with him. But perhaps this is the point.
I’m bothered by one last thing, completely apart from the film itself. In his bravura acceptance speech for Best Actor at the Oscars, Sean Penn drolly called the audience “You Commie, homo-loving sons of guns.” Perhaps, but we’re still dealing here with a film with a gay hero who dies. Is it significant that two other actors to have won Best Actor Oscars for playing gay men—William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and Tom Hanks in Philadelphia (1993)—were killed off by gunfire and AIDS? As producer Jan Oxenberg remarks in Rob Epstein’s The Celluloid Closet, it remains to be seen whether or not Hollywood will embrace—and indeed, deem worthy of an Oscar—a gay character who lives.
Drew Patrick Shannon received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Cincinnati, and currently teaches 19th and 20th century British literature at the College of Mount St. Joseph. He is at work on a novel and on a non-fiction book examining the diary of Virginia Woolf. He contributed a review of the 1986 film, Working Girls, to Bitch Flicks, which appeared in a previous version on his blog, atleswoolf. 

Guest Writer Wednesday: The Blind Side: The Most Insulting Movie Ever Made

This cross-post first appeared at Rage Against the Man-chine on June 11, 2010.
Davetavius and I consider ourselves the world’s foremost authorities on watching movies for reasons other than those intended by their producers. As such, we go way beyond just watching “cheesy” (whatever that means) movies, 80s movies, or kung fu movies (which I refuse to watch but which every dork on Earth has been pretending to like in some attempt at letting everyone know how “weird” they are since Quentin Tarantino’s ridiculous ass popularized kung fu movie fandom as the #1 route to instant eccentricity cred in True Romance) to focus our attention on recently-released romantic comedies, those obnoxious movies in which two assholes just sit around and talk to each other for 98 minutes, and “serious” movies for which people have been given gold-plated statuettes. One can learn an awful lot about the faults and failings of our social system and corporate entertainment’s attempts to sell us its version of culture by watching movies created by and for the anti-intelligentsia, and if one were to try hard enough, I’m sure one could find the string that, if tugged, would unravel the modern world system buried somewhere in a melodramatic Best Picture Oscar contender intended to make people who refer to beers as “cold ones” feel like they’re considering The Big Issues. There was no way we were going to miss The Blind Side.
Spoiler alert: this is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and I’m going to spoil your desire to see it yourself by writing this post. Also, I may, if I can manage to give a fuck, divulge important plot elements. But it’s based on a true story that everyone has already heard anyway, so who cares.

Let me say up front that I’m aware that I’m supposed to feel sorry for Sandra Bullock this week. She’s purported to be “America’s sweetheart” and all, she has always seemed like a fairly decent person (for an actor), and I think her husband deserves to get his wang run over by one of his customized asshole conveyance vehicles, but I’m finding it difficult to feel too bad. I mean, who marries a guy who named himself after a figure from the Old West, has more tattoos than IQ points, and is known for his penchant for rockabilly strippers? Normally I’d absolve Bullock of all responsibility for what has occurred and spend nine paragraphs illustrating the many reasons Jesse James doesn’t deserve to live, but I’ve just received proof in the form of a movie called The Blind Side that Sandra Bullock is in cahoots with Satan, Ronald Reagan’s cryogenically preserved head, the country music industry, and E! in their plot to take over the world by turning us all into (or helping some of us to remain) smug, racist imbeciles.

The movie chronicles the major events in the life of a black NFL player named Michael Oher from the time he meets the rich white family who adopts him to the time that white family sees him drafted into the NFL, a series of events that apparently proves that racism is either over or OK (I’m not sure which), with a ton of southern football bullshit along the way. Bullock plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, the wife of a dude named Sean Tuohy, played by — no shit — Tim McGraw, who is a fairly minor character in the movie despite the fact that he is said to own, like, 90 Taco Bell franchises. The story is that Oher, played by Quinton Aaron, is admitted into a fancy-pants private Christian school despite his lack of legitimate academic records due to the insistence of the school’s football coach and the altruism of the school’s teachers (as if, dude), where he comes into contact with the Tuohy family, who begin to notice that he is sleeping in the school gym and subsisting on popcorn. Ms. Tuohy then invites him to live in the zillion-dollar Memphis Tuophy family compound, encourages him to become the best defensive linebacker he can be by means of cornball familial love metaphors, and teaches him about the nuclear family and the SEC before beaming proudly as he’s drafted by the Baltimore Ravens.

I’m sure that the Tuohy family are lovely people and that they deserve some kind of medal for their good deeds, but if I were a judge, I wouldn’t toss them out of my courtroom should they arrive there bringing a libel suit against whoever wrote, produced, and directed The Blind Side, because it’s handily the dumbest, most racist, most intellectually and politically insulting movie I’ve ever seen, and it makes the Tuohy family — especially their young son S.J. — look like unfathomable assholes. Well, really, it makes all of the white people in the South look like unfathomable assholes. Like these people need any more bad publicity.

Quentin Aaron puts in a pretty awesome performance, if what the director asked him to do was look as pitiful as possible at every moment in order not to scare anyone by being black. Whether that was the goal or not, he certainly did elicit pity from me when Sandra Bullock showed him his new bed and he knitted his brows and, looking at the bed in awe, said, “I’ve never had one of these before.” I mean, the poor bastard had been duped into participating in the creation of a movie that attempts to make bigoted southerners feel good about themselves by telling them that they needn’t worry about poverty or racism because any black person who deserves help will be adopted by a rich family that will provide them with the means to a lucrative NFL contract. Every interaction Aaron and Bullock (or Aaron and anyone else, for that matter) have in the movie is characterized by Aaron’s wretched obsequiousness and the feeling that you’re being bludgeoned over the head with the message that you needn’t fear this black guy. It’s the least dignified role for a black actor since Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s portrayal of James Robert Kennedy in Radio (a movie Davetavius claims ought to have the subtitle “It’s OK to be black in the South as long as you’re retarded.”). The producers, writers, and director of this movie have managed to tell a story about class, race, and the failures of capitalism and “democratic” politics to ameliorate the conditions poor people of color have to deal with by any means other than sports while scrupulously avoiding analyzing any of those issues and while making it possible for the audience to walk out of the theater with their selfish, privileged, entitled worldviews intact, unscathed, and soundly reconfirmed.

Then there’s all of the southern bullshit, foremost of which is the football element. The producers of the movie purposely made time for cameos by about fifteen SEC football coaches in order to ensure that everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line would drop their $9 in the pot, and the positive representation of football culture in the film is second in phoniness only to the TV version of Friday Night Lights. Actually, fuck that. It’s worse. Let’s be serious. If this kid had showed no aptitude for football, is there any way in hell he’d have been admitted to a private school without the preparation he’d need to succeed there or any money? In the film, the teachers at the school generously give of their private time to tutor Oher and help prepare him to attend classes with the other students. I’ll bet you $12 that shit did not occur in real life. In fact, I know it didn’t. The Tuohy family may or may not have cared whether the kid could play football, but the school certainly did. It is, after all, a southern school, and high school football is a bigger deal in the South than weed is at Bonnaroo.

But what would have happened to Oher outside of school had he sucked at football and hence been useless to white southerners? What’s the remedy for poverty if you’re a black woman? A dude with no pigskin skills? Where are the nacho magnates to adopt those black people? I mean, that’s the solution for everything, right? For all black people to be adopted by rich, paternalistic white people? I know this may come as a shock to some white people out there, but the NFL cannot accommodate every black dude in America, and hence is an imperfect solution to social inequality. I know we have the NBA too, but I still see a problem. But the Blind Side fan already has an answer for me. You see, there is a scene in the movie which illustrates that only some black people deserve to be adopted by wealthy white women. Bullock, when out looking for Oher, finds herself confronted with a black guy who not only isn’t very good at appearing pitiful in order to make her comfortable, but who has an attitude and threatens to shoot Oher if he sees him. What ensues is quite possibly the most loathsome scene in movie history in which Sandra Bullock gets in the guy’s face, rattles off the specs of the gun she carries in her purse, and announces that she’s a member of the NRA and will shoot his ass if he comes anywhere near her family, “bitch.” Best Actress Oscar.

Well, there it is. Now you see why this movie made 19 kajillion dollars and won an Oscar: it tells a heartwarming tale of white benevolence, assures the red state dweller that his theory that “there’s black people, and then there’s niggers” is right on, and affords him the chance to vicariously remind a black guy who’s boss thr0ugh the person of America’s sweetheart. Just fucking revolting.

There are several other cringe-inducing elements in the film. The precocious, cutesy antics of the family’s little son, S.J., for example. He’s constantly making dumb-ass smart-ass comments, cloyingly hip-hopping out with Oher to the tune of  Young M.C.’s “Bust a Move” (a song that has been overplayed and passe for ten years but has now joined “Ice Ice Baby” at the top of the list of songs from junior high that I never want to hear again), and generally trying to be a much more asshole-ish version of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. At what point will screenwriters realize that everyone wants to punch pint-sized snarky movie characters in the throat? And when will I feel safe watching a movie in the knowledge that I won’t have to endure a scene in which a white dork or cartoon character “raises the roof” and affects a buffalo stance while mouthing a sanitized rap song that even John Ashcroft knows the words to?

And then there’s the scene in which Tim McGraw, upon meeting his adopted son’s tutor (played by Kathy Bates) and finding out she’s a Democrat, says, “Who would’ve thought I’d have a black son before I met a Democrat?” Who would have thought I’d ever hear a “joke” that was less funny and more retch-inducing than Bill Engvall’s material?

What was the intended message of this film? It won an Oscar, so I know it had to have a message, but what could it have been? I’ve got it (a suggestion from Davetavius)! The message is this: don’t buy more than one Taco Bell franchise or you’ll have to adopt a black guy. I’ll accept that that’s the intended message of the film, because if  the actual message that came across in the movie was intentional, I may have to hide in the house for the rest of my life.

I just don’t even know what to say about this movie. Watching it may well have been one of the most demoralizing, discouraging experiences of my life, and it removed at least 35% of the hope I’d previously had that this country had any hope of ever being anything but a cultural and social embarrassment. Do yourself a favor. Skip it and watch Welcome to the Dollhouse again.

Nine Deuce blogs at Rage Against the Man-chine. From her bio: I basically go off, dude. People all over the internet call me rad. They call me fem, too, but I’m not all that fem. I mean, I’m female and I have long hair and shit, but that’s just because I’m into Black Sabbath. I don’t have any mini-skirts, high heels, thongs, or lipstick or anything, and I often worry people with my decidedly un-fem behavior. I’m basically a “man” trapped in a woman’s body. What I mean is that, like a person with a penis, I act like a human being and expect other people to treat me like one even though I have a vagina.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: 127 Hours

 
I didn’t go into 127 Hours expecting to see any women in the film.  After all, it’s about a man who goes out for a day of canyoneering fun, doesn’t tell anyone where he’s going, bikes through some amazing scenery while occasionally performing random, impressive athletic moves for no reason, decides to do some hiking, and ultimately falls off (and into) a cliff-type structure that becomes a trap. Basically, he smashes his right arm between a giant rock and the wall of a canyon. And gets stuck. I mean stuck.
We know what’s in store for us–at least an hour of watching this guy attempt to get the hell out of there (and, as it turns out in the end, by any means necessary). I immediately caught myself thinking, “Where can the filmmakers possibly go with this? You mean I’m going to have to sit here and watch this d-bag James Franco chip away at a boulder with a dull knife for an hour? While he makes jokes about his shitty Made-in-China adventure-equipment and urges us to Buy American?” Well, yes. And no. While the film certainly has its problems, especially in its presentation of women (and there are only, like, two, so it’s disheartening that they manage to still fuck that up), dare I say I walked away kind of loving it? With a renewed respect for James Franco?
Ha. Well. First, let’s talk about Danny Boyle. I had the same problems with Slumdog Millionaire that every film-goer with a set of critical thinking skills had. So walking into 127 Hours, I was already all “meh.” But damn did he manage to make some bike riding exciting.  Seriously. After ten minutes of watching Franco pedal across the horizon accompanied by A. R. Rahman’s soundtrack of tribal drums with violin and brass combo beats, I wanted to leave the theater and go buy a mountain bike.  That feeling lasted all the way up until the first two women were introduced three seconds later.  
They’re lost.  And they need Franco to help them navigate the terrain.  He does.  Franco hangs with them for a while and they do some canyon-climbing and they record themselves swimming and they splash around and they flirt a little bit and it’s actually pretty fun to watch.  This scene, which doesn’t seem like it has much of a point at first, becomes essential, especially considering it’s one of only a handful of real-time scenes that exists outside of his entrapment.  We get to know him here, and the truth is, it’s difficult not to fall in love with him.  He plays Ralston as a full-of-life, thrill-seeking sweetheart who’s hellbent on having as much fun as possible before the day ends. So when he and the women part ways, and his new friends invite him to a party later, it’s impossible not to experience a little unease.  We like him now.  And we know there’s no fucking way he’s making it to that party.

The rest of the movie takes place in the canyon–a claustrophobic nightmare that only works because Franco is apparently an amazing actor–and inside Franco’s mind, through flashbacks of his super hot  (gasp) blond ex-girlfriend and the phone calls from his mom and sister that he clearly stupidly ignored prior to his departure.  He also hallucinates some crazy shit, like a giant Scooby-Doo blowup doll that’s soundtracked to that ghoulish laughter reminiscent of the last few seconds of Thriller.  Yeah!  And though it sounds absolutely insane, it’s why the film works.  Boyle takes a narrative about a guy struggling to get out of a hole and turns it into an action film, a radio show, a documentary, a commercial, a disaster movie, a cartoon, and a comedy.  About a guy struggling to get out of a hole.

Not that there aren’t a few impossible-to-deal-with moments. The final scene, which is poignant enough on its own, insists on beating the audience over the head with its call to EXPERIENCE EMOTION, courtesy of this ridiculous Dido & A.R. Rahman song. And I still can’t quite figure out how the closeup shots of ice-encased Gatorade and Mountain Dew add anything more than advertising revenue, as much as I’d like to argue that, “If I were trapped in a cave, about to die, drinking my own urine, toying with the idea of amputating a limb, I’d totally hallucinate all these brand-name beverages from Pepsico.”

And yes, god, seriously, The Women.  I know this is a movie about Ralston’s journey.  I respect that and enjoyed watching the innovative ways Boyle used split screens, reverse zooms, fantastical elements, warped focus, and speed variations to tell Ralston’s story in a way I can’t imagine another director successfully telling it.  That doesn’t mean I could ignore my own cringing every time a woman entered the frame.  The ex-girlfriend clearly serves as a vehicle to show Ralston’s loner-ness; see, he pushed her away all cliche-like. We know this because she says Very Important Things to him. “You’re going to be so lonely,” she yells, after he silently (but with his eyes!) asks her to leave a sporting event they’re attending.  (I want to say hockey?)

His hallucinations suck, too.  His sister shows up in a wedding dress.  His sister showing up in a wedding dress clearly serves as a vehicle to make us feel bad that he’ll be missing Very Important Life Events if he dies, like his sister’s wedding.  More pointlessly, the hallucinated sister, who might have one speaking line if I’m being generous, is played by Lizzy Caplan, an actress who’s had large roles in True Blood, Party Down, Hot Tub Time Machine, Cloverfield, and Mean Girls.  Instead of engaging with the film, I found myself taken completely out of it, as I wondered why they would cast an actress who’s clearly got more skills than standing in a wedding dress, looking sullen and disappointed, to stand in a wedding dress looking sullen and disappointed.

So, the first two women (the lost ones) show Ralston’s carefree coolness.  The ex-girlfriend illustrates Ralston’s darkness and his need for independence–as do the voicemails he ignores from his mother and sister, which are played in flashback.  His sister reminds the audience that Ralston has Things to Live For.  Hell, Ralston even tries to console his mother in advance (when he records his deathbed goodbye with his video cam) by saying things like, “Don’t feel bad about buying me such cheap, crappy mountain climbing equipment Mom … I mean, how were you supposed to know this would happen!”  Hehe.  What? Apparently it’s easier to use every possible cliche ever of how men and women interact (as a way to reveal information about the hero’s personality and psyche) than it is to, I don’t know, show him interacting with some guys? Have him flashback-interact with Dad? Nope, we get Lost Women in Need, Wedding Dresses, and Mommy Blaming.  And I haven’t even gotten to the masturbation scene yet.

[This is your Spoiler Alert.]

I struggled with the masturbation scene.  Because it’s a failed masturbation scene.  I mean, it’s a scene where masturbation is attempted unsuccessfully. I didn’t like that he took out his video camera and freeze-framed and zoomed in on a woman’s breasts from earlier–as far as I’m concerned, there’s no other way to look at that than as classic Objectification (and dismemberment) of Women.  (Also, the audience laughed, and I was taken out of the film yet again.) But at the same time … whoa. Ralston knows he’s about to die.  He’s out of water.  He’s got no hope of being rescued. Ultimately, masturbation for him is an act of desperation, the desire to feel something that his body has already let go of.  Yes–it’s powerful stuff. Watching Ralston’s body betray him shows his imminent physical death.

But it felt too much like The Ultimate Betrayal.  As much as I sympathized with Ralston–and Franco is brilliant in this scene–I don’t want to let the film off the hook entirely.  I mean, what’s with men and their dicks?  If I’m trapped down there, I’m thinking, “A little less masturbation, a little more amputation.” Honestly. The scene played too much like a metaphor for his final loss of power (read: masculinity), as impotence usually does on-screen.  In that moment, I no longer identified with the film’s initial overarching theme of hope and possible redemption; I just thought, “Oh man, he can’t get  it up it. SNAP.”  I guess I’m just wondering if the film really needed to go there …

So, aside from the women “characters” being cliched, pointless, slightly offensive insertions used  only to further our understanding of Ralston, 127 Hours is a fabulous film.  I’m not even being sarcastic. I’ve never been much of a Franco fan–I mean, apparently he’s teaching a class about himself now?–but this performance is a game-changer for James and me.  Boyle certainly showed his directing chops, too; this movie goes places a viewer would never expect–in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.  I cried. I eye-rolled. I looked away (often). And I laughed.  Especially at the end of the film, when the woman behind me said, “Wait.  You  mean that shit was a true story?!”

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: The King’s Speech

The King’s Speech: An Intimate, Winning Look into a Powerful Male Relationship
This is a guest review by Roopa Singh.
Prince Albert is “Bertie” to his inner circle (Colin Firth), and has a debilitating stutter, but the British Empire needs him to step up into his father’s Kingly shoes (George V, played by Michael Gambon), and be a powerful orator. Bertie’s ability to lead is intricately linked to his ability to speak, particularly as the World War approaches, and the changing tides of technology make worldwide radio broadcasts ubiquitous for all rulers. With quirky but powerful help from speech therapist Lionel Logue (an inspiring Geoffrey Rush), and the charismatic support of his wife (Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth), Bertie overcomes his speech impediment and goes on to, as a final title card states, become a symbol of resistance against the tide of Nazism. Or so the movie would have us believe. What’s also true is that The King’s Speech is a lovely, ingratiating film about the lavish family behind a violent colonialist empire erupting in a tide of human protest during the very period of the film.

I live in New York City, and when I went to see the film in Union Square, it had already been nominated for a whopping 12 Academy Awards. It was a packed movie house, and even in the midst of the most diverse locale in America, the audience was almost exclusively older, white couples. To be clear, I liked the film, and I’m not suggesting it needed to broaden its treatment of the King as, say, the British Raj. But if this audience was any indication, most people walked away from The King’s Speech without understanding to whom exactly we’ve been so adeptly ingratiated.

The film is book-ended by two pivotal public speaking engagements for Prince Albert, who later ascends to the throne as King George VI. The film opens in 1925 at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Stadium, and closes in 1939 with a global radio broadcast declaration of war with Germany. To contextualize this time period, in 1925, M.K. Ghandi had recently been released from a two-year prison sentence awarded by order of the British Raj for his galvanizing leadership in the anti-colonialist Indian Independence movement. 1930 saw M.K. Ghandi leading the galvanizing Salt March through an economically crippled India, a strategic moment in sovereignty struggle. As I watched, laughed, and rooted for Bertie to speak with all his might, I couldn’t help but reflect upon the worldwide impact of his every word. It is always worthwhile to qualify any fawning, particularly in a rather segregated western popular culture market. That being said, The King’s Speech is a loveable film framed around acute performance anxiety, something we can all relate to.

It took a solid team led by Director Tom Hooper to create this uniquely intimate period film. Period films can come off stuffy, but here the outdoor shots glint with bracing, misty energy and the indoor shots are defined by palpable, direct-gaze intimacy. Recall the intriguing approach of Elizabeth’s chauffered car creeping along cobblestone streets towards Logue’s home, horse drawn carriages and other period mise-en-scene coming in and out of fog. There was the dewy sunlight of the sculpted garden scene where Bertie, nursing wounds from a scathing run-in with popular brother David (Guy Pearce as King Edward VIII), walked away from Logue in a fit of defensive anger, his sharply outlined shadow trailing him like an afterthought of remorse. Internal shots are palpably and unusually intimate. Take for example, the film’s numerous peeks into Bertie’s mouth, gargling, inadvertently spitting in effort, or full of marbles. There is the stark, dignified honesty of the curling turquoise decay that marks the wall in Logue’s speech therapy room.

Notably, the film tends towards flat, pictorial frames, direct eye gazes, and close-up, slightly de-centered frames. Manohla Dargis, in her New York Times review, bemoaned Hooper’s “unwise” use of the fish-eye lens as a too literal metaphor for Bertie’s life in a fishbowl. But I found the close-ups ultimately supportive of the film’s overall tone. A direct gaze shot of Logue at the head of his family dinner table suitably emphasizes how this very place, from where he is now looking at us, is perhaps the only place where this talented yet under-employed therapist retains a sense of power.

It cannot be said that this film has any meaningful roles for women, who are simply not the focus in this story. No matter how much is written about Helena Bonham Carter’s canny and compassionate Elizabeth, the film boils down to cinematic basics when it comes to women. There are two doting wives (Jennifer Ehle as Myrtle Logue), one frowned upon mistress (Eve Best as Mrs. Wallis Simpson), and three rather doll-like daughters. Aside from a small battle of wills between Bertie and Elizabeth (in which we taste a tiny bit of her wry cunning as the Red Queen in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland), there is not a hint of nuance for any female role. No, you don’t watch this film to see women shine. Instead, what makes The King’s Speech unique is its tender treatment of a relationship between two men, Logue with his power to heal, and Bertie with his power to rule.

Rarely have I seen such exploration, such daring vulnerability in the portrayal of male relations on the contemporary western cinematic screen. Perhaps being the King of an Empire allows for this intimacy, because regardless of how vulnerable Bertie reveals himself to be, he still rules. The King and his unlicensed speech doctor navigate class differences adeptly, heartbreakingly, on their way to foraging the trust needed for Bertie’s impediment to heal. While Logue is humble, he never concedes honor, and it is this adroit balance that allows us to willingly follow where he may take us, especially when the road is audacious (casually calling him Bertie! making the King cuss and roll about on the floor!). For Bertie’s part, it is painfully evident that he rarely, if ever, had a truly intimate relationship with another man. His father nit-picked and neglected him, his older brother demeans him with ferocious skill, and a stuttering would-be King is born. The awards Colin Firth is racking up for his portrayal of Bertie surely have to do with his ability to embody the process by which a rock of defenses sincerely and helplessly cracks open.

By all pre-Oscar indicators, The King’s Speech is securely in line for recognition at the 83rd Academy Awards ceremony. The question is, what will the film garner stateside, given stiff competition from critically fawned-over flicks like The Social Network and Black Swan? 

The King’s Speech swept in five major categories at the UK Oscars, otherwise known as the BAFTA Awards (British Academy of Film and Television Arts). This was a resounding showing despite an arguable snub by the British Film Institutes monthly magazine, Sight and Sound, in their popular top ten poll.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the film hasn’t fared as well stateside, but it’s still getting some shine. Lead actor Colin Firth won a Golden Globe and a SAG Award (Screen Actors Guild), and the film earned another SAG for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. If I had to predict, I’d say The King’s Speech will at best win in one major category (that won’t offset the domestic darlings from their perch), such as Best Supporting Actor, and in one or two less high profile awards such as Best Original Score. If you haven’t already seen it, go see it while it’s still in the theater, especially if you know what it’s like to quake a little before a public performance of speech or song. The film’s intimate look at the somatics of sound and breath will get you in the gut, and before you know you’ll be laughing and rooting hard for the King. But do me one favor, just don’t forget who you’re rooting for.

Roopa is finishing her Masters in Cinema Studies at Tisch/NYU, and got her law degree from UC Berkeley in 2003. She loves writing and teaching about the political context of contemporary popular culture, and often blogs at her site, http://politicalpoet.wordpress.com. And truly, she can’t believe how much The King’s Speech had her empathizing with the damn Raj.  :)
  

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: The Social Network

The Social Network (2010)
This is a guest review from Carrie Polansky.

There are two ways to read women in the universe of The Social Network:

1.    As unnecessary set dressing, existing solely for the aesthetic and sexual pleasure of men; or
2.    As vital to the invention of social networking and, by extension, to the progression of the film’s plot.

The first reading is actually the one I prefer. The truth is, the female characters in The Social Network are so poorly written that it is easy to ignore them entirely. They are relegated to the roles of girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, one-night stands, groupies and lawyers out to destroy Mark Zuckerberg’s empire. None of them are directly involved in the creation of Facebook or any other social networking site – they are the scenery that accompanies the male protagonists (and antagonists) as they go about reinventing human communication. In fact, if you removed the women from the story entirely, nothing would really change.

My fiancé, who also writes movie reviews, likes to refer to this as “superfluous woman syndrome.” He points out the fact that such treatment of women has become a standard film cliché, and I tend to agree. I think that’s why it didn’t take away from my enjoyment of The Social Network. Yes, it’s maddening that so many films lack positive, three-dimensional roles for women, but perhaps there just wasn’t room for women in The Social Network. It’s based on a true story, after all – could it just be that no women played important roles in the real-life creation of Facebook? If that is indeed the case, I can’t fault Aaron Sorkin or David Fincher for leaving three-dimensional women out of the film.

And this brings us to the second potential reading of women in The Social Network. I typically hope that women fill vital roles in movies, but in the case of The Social Network, that reading is incredibly troubling. The film is bookended by Mark Zuckerberg’s relationship with his girlfriend, Erica. The first scene depicts Mark and Erica on a date, during which Mark is particularly rude and dismissive to Erica, and she, deciding she’s had enough of this treatment, dumps him. This leads Mark to write a highly inappropriate blog post about his ex-girlfriend, which leads him to create a website comparing the attractiveness of Harvard co-eds…which ultimately leads him to create Facebook. Which, by extension, means that Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook because his girlfriend broke his heart.

Again, this would be fine, if it was really how Facebook came into being. Except it wasn’t. Mark Zuckerberg has had the same girlfriend since 2003. And this brings us back to the first reading of The Social Network. The fact that no women do anything significant aside from giving Mark Zuckerberg motivational angst doesn’t mean that no women played significant roles in the creation of Facebook, because we already know that the truth has been altered in the transition to celluloid. All it means is that the filmmakers could not think of anything interesting for any woman to do, other than provide the male leads with enough angst to fuel the film’s action. And that’s the most horrifying reading of all.

Carrie Polansky is one of the Editors and Founders of Gender Across Borders. She graduated from Emerson College in 2008 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Visual and Media Arts (and a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies). Her review of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire appeared in last year’s Bitch Flicks’ Best Picture Nominee Review Series. She vows to produce films with much, much better roles for women than the roles in The Social Network.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: The Fighter

The Fighter (2010)
This is a guest review from Jessica Freeman-Slade.

The adage of “Behind every good man is a great woman” is worn out, particularly in the realm of boxing movies. You can reduce the entirety of Rocky to the battered Stallone’s anguished cry of “Adrian!” as he wraps up a brutal fight. We’re meant to believe that what kept him alive was passion, love, a desire to see life through to the closing bell. It’s a hackneyed way of suggesting that though Rocky pounds with his fists, he really leads with his heart. This is the kind of boxing movie that writes itself, and one that doesn’t really need to be seen more than once. Luckily for everyone, David O. Russell’s The Fighter is not that kind of movie. Instead of being a movie about masculine physicality and power, we get a subversive movie about the women that wage real battles outside the ring, the kind of battles aren’t cleanly won.

The same idea is suggested in David O. Russell’s The Fighter, which tells the true story of boxer Mickey Ward’s comeback from next-to-nothing welterweight to one of the most admired fighters in the ring. Micky, as portrayed by that yummy hunk of Irish soda bread Mark Wahlberg, is a softie who finds himself losing fight after fight under the coaching of his half brother Dicky Eklund, a former boxer and current crack-addict (played by a wiry, skittish Christian Bale) and his domineering dye-job of a mother, Alice (the always wonderful Melissa Leo). Behind Dicky and Alice looms Micky’s seven sisters (the most foul-mouthed Greek chorus you could ever come upon), and beyond them the town of Lowell, a neighborhood that treats Dicky like the prizefighter he believes he once was. What defines Micky as a fighter is not so much his hesitation to throw a punch as his willingness to suffer them. In a fight shown early in the film, Micky is beaten so hard his cheek is punched clear through—a beating he takes because his brother and mother placed him against a much larger opponent, and one he takes because unless he fights, no one gets paid. Micky is punished as a boxer and as a son because he is obligated to his family—to his mother, a manager without any managerial tendencies; his brother, bossy in the ring but willing to jump through windows to escape being caught on the crack pipe. (Both sons seem more terrified of disappointing their mother than they do of getting arrested or beaten down.)

And they’re right to fear her: with her steely nerve, Alice is as brazen a coach, Mama Rose in the boxing ring, Joey LaMotta in a push-up bra. When Micky goes absent from her immediate purvey, she shows up on his porch with the sisters in tow, posing questions that put him right back in the place of the apologetic son. “What’re you doing, Mickster?” she asks, her eyes all hard with disdain and disappointment. “Who’s gonna look after you?” Alice knows that mother love—and filial obligation—is one of the most powerful weapons she has. “I have done everything, everything I could for you,” she mutters. Her life is bound up in her children, and her coaching mantra is entirely one of maternity. When she catches Dicky sneaking out of a crackhouse, she shakes her head, on the verge of tears, and he has to sing to her like a little boy to pull her back to sanity.

It’s not easy being the son of such a demanding mother, and while Dicky gets to joke his way back into favor, all Micky can do is fight—fight and lose, but fight nonetheless. So it makes sense, given his messed-up family history, that Micky first starts to move out of the nest after falling for Charlene, a local bartender and the first person to call “bullshit” on his family-as-manager situation. (As portrayed by an utterly unglamorous Amy Adams, Charlene is one of the few college-educated characters in the film—due to an athletic scholarship for high-jump.) Charlene’s power in this movie is not as a love interest, but as someone who doesn’t treat Micky like a son or like a brother. She tells him he has to seize control of his career, toss Alice and Dicky off his team, and get serious with a real coach. We think she’s imagining him as a full-grown, self-sufficient man, but she also can’t help but place herself as an equal contender for the managerial job. She gives him a reason to go looking for new management, but she also seats herself decisively by the side of the ring. This is not a woman content to show up after the fight is finished—she is very much an active participant. “You got your confidence and your focus from O’Keefe, and from Sal, and from your father, and from me,” she declares, and there’s not an ounce of hesitation in what she says. It’s thrilling to watch the formerly meek mouse known as Amy Adams get to play someone so fierce.

It’s when the instincts of the protective mother and the defensive girlfriend go up against each other that all hell breaks loose. Alice decides to storm over to Mickey’s house with her daughters in tow, ringing the bell and banging on the door just as Micky and Charlene are doing the nasty. The bell rings and rings, and Charlene, furious at being interrupted, throws on a t-shirt and storms downstairs. Alice pleads with Micky to leave and come back home, but Charlene accuses Alice of allowing her son to get hurt, instead of stepping in and protecting him. In the midst of a boxing movie, what we get is a treatise on how women are the only ones that really know how to fight. Alice calls Charlene a skank, an “MTV Girl” (because clearly all MTV girls are hefting pitches of lager and fending off crude bar patrons), and Charlene lands a solid punch on one of the Eklund sisters. Her fists crunch into the girl’s face, red hair flying wild and legs kicking, and we know that none of these women can be fucked with.

Dicky is manic, and Micky is panicked, but it’s the women who are the real pillars of strength. Thus Micky and Dicky are forced to mediate through their female counterparts—Alice, who can’t stand to let her son give up, or Charlene, who forces Dicky into conceding some deeply held delusions. The dual strength of these women are what define the movie, what separates The Fighter from its fellow inspirational tales of athletic triumph, and what catapults it into a movie about athletic effort, and the force of will. And in the movie’s final joyous fight, we still get a triumphant romantic kiss…and it feels anything but hackneyed.

Jessica Freeman-Slade is a writer who reviews and blogs on book culture at [tk] reviews, and has written reviews for The Millions and The Rumpus. She edits cookbooks and is the assistant managing editor for Alfred A. Knopf. She lives in Morningside Heights.

The Social Network Roundup

Most of the commentary out there on The Social Network focuses on its awesomeness and front-runner status for this year’s Best Picture Academy Award. Plus, the film won its opening weekend’s box office, even though it’s numbers were lower than anticipated. While it very well may be a brilliantly-made film, one thing we can’t ignore is the film’s women. Other people are talking about the film’s misogyny, too, which raises this question:

Is The Social Network reinforcing the misogyny of its subject(s), or is it specifically offering their attitudes about women as critique?
While I hope it’s the latter, much of my reading never makes clear that the film rises above the attitudes of its ivy-league elites. An elitist attitude also seems to creep into articles that criticize  those who note the film’s misogyny, dismissing complaints about yet another film that focuses on upper-class white men as unintelligent.

Here are some of our findings. If you’ve written about the women of The Social Network, or have read something good that we missed, please leave your links in the comments section.

Rebecca Davis O’Brien’s “The Social Network’s Female Props” @ The Daily Beast:

Complaining about misogyny in modern blockbuster cinema is about as productive as lamenting Facebook’s grip on our society. But what is the state of things if a film that keeps women on the outer circles of male innovation enjoys such critical acclaim; indeed, is heralded as the “defining” story of our age? What are we to do with a great film that makes women look so awful?

Tracy Clark-Flory’s “Female programmers on “The Social Network” @ Salon Broadsheet

But, oh, are there groupies: They aggressively undo belt buckles in bathroom stalls, take bong hits while the boys do their important coding work and rip open their blouses so that coke can be snorted off their flat little tummies. They are useless on the technical and business front, as is made clear in a scene where two groupies look on as Zuckerberg has a sudden revelation and begins barking orders to his all-male team. The doe-eyed coeds ask if there is anything they can do to help out — and the question itself is a punch line. Even a nubile Facebook intern who presumably does have some technical abilities is introduced only to party with Facebook’s smooth-talking president, Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), at a Stanford frat party. The women are trophies for these male history-makers.

Laurie Penny’s “Facebook, capitalism and geek entitlement” @ New Statesman

The only roles for women in this drama are dancing naked on tables at exclusive fraternity clubs, inspiring men to genius by spurning their carnal advances and giving appreciative blowjobs in bathroom stalls. This is no reflection on the personal moral compass of Sorkin, who is no misogynist, but who understands that in rarefied American circles of power and privilege, women are still stage-hands, and objectification is hard currency.

The territory of this modern parable is precisely objectification: not just of women, but of all consumers. In what the film’s promoters describe as a “definitively American ” story of entrepreneurship, Zuckerberg becomes rich because, as a social outsider, he can see the value in reappropriating the social as something that can be monetised. This is what Facebook is about, and ultimately what capitalist realism is about: life as reducible to one giant hot-or-not contest, with adverts.

Irin Carmon’s The Social Network, Where Women Never Have Ideas @ Jezebel

Hollywood’s solution to Facebook’s unsexy creation story was familiar: Add women as sluts, stalkers, or ballbusters. With very few exceptions, girls don’t even know how to properly play video games or get high off a bong, and they’re gold-diggers or humiliating bitches, and they certainly never come up with anything of value on their own. The result is a fictional Harvard as crudely misogynistic as Hollywood — which, thankfully, it actually wasn’t — and a world in which the best a woman can hope for is to have her rejection create as meaningful a legacy.

Melissa Silverstein’s “The Social Network” @ Women and Hollywood

The film depicts a world where women are crazy groupies, there for amusement, to give you blow jobs in bathrooms at parties, and to snort coke off of, but not to be taken seriously.  The tech world has long been known as a world that favors guys, just this week twitter was all “atwitter” about a women in tech panel that occurred at the TechCrunch Disrupt event in SF.

I guess that is one reason why it is a perfect movie for Hollywood today.   I know there are women doing some seriously important and great jobs in tech, just like I know that there are women doing some seriously important and great jobs in the films business. But we all know that the tech guys are more visible and the movie guys are more visible. 

Steven Colbert’s interview with Aaron Sorkin @ The Colbert Report


The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Aaron Sorkin
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

Jennifer Armstrong’s “‘The Social Network’ has a woman problem” @ Entertainment Weekly’s Pop Watch

The Social Network has turned out to be the rare pop cultural phenomenon that is everything we hoped it would be. Smart, riveting, and very much of our time, it provides endless fodder for intellectual dissection and further exploration. The fact that it has become so all-engrossing, however, makes one glaring fact about it all the more disturbing: Its downright appalling depiction of women.

Roxanne Samer’s “Review: The Social Network” @ Gender Across Borders

Previously, I have argued that in some cases representations of sexism and racism can serve as political critiques of the mistreatment they depict. One could claim that Zuckerberg and his peers’ objectifying of women and fetishization of Asian women in particular is presented in the film as in poor taste. The film is by no means casting Zuckerberg, never mind Parker, as an innocent angel. But in the end one must ask: are these trysts etc. depicted as deplorable or as typical and tolerable 20-something boy behavior?  My intuition says it’s the latter. 

JOS’ “Social Network sexism” @ Feministing

The film follows an interesting pattern I’ve noticed in other work by contemporary male filmmakers (Inception as an example) – it offers compelling insight into sexism while also displaying a sexist perspective in its storytelling.

Cynthia Fuchs’ “‘The Social Network’: Fincher and Sorkin’s Story of Obsession” @ Pop Matters

Based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book, The Accidental Billionaires, and scripted by Aaron Sorkin, the film is already renowned for its breakneck dialogue (especially when Mark speaks, condescendingly and oh-so-cruelly). However fictionalized that dialogue might be (the book imagines conversations as it recounts events mainly from Eduardo’s perspective, and includes luridish party and sex scenes), it represents here an attitude that makes its own political and cultural point, that men and boys in privileged positions tend to see the world in ways that benefits them, that reinforces their privilege.

Jenni Miller’s “‘The Social Network’ and Sexism: Does the Film Treat Women Unfairly?” @ Cinematical

We’re given a trio of wholly unreliable narrators who do see women as props and prizes and ugly feminists out to get them. They’re emblematic of all the things that the fictional Mark Zuckerberg wants and feels are out of his reach, like the Harvard social clubs. Even Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) questions whether or not Zuckerberg’s screwing him over all boils down to the fact that Saverin got into one of Harvard’s fancy clubs where WASPs cheer on half-naked women making out with each other.

David Ehrlich’s “5 Reasons Why ‘The Social Network’ Does Not Define This Generation” also @ Cinematical

5. It’s a film about men in a generation that’s also about women (I hope).

Alison Willmore’s “The (Homo)Social Network” @ IFC

The suggestion that Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher had an obligation to insert a token “strong lady” character in order to make their film more demographically friendly or underline how their own intentions are separate from their characters is condescending to audiences. The film world still leans incredibly toward male perspectives, male characters and male audiences, and the way to fix that is by supporting and encouraging women making and working in movies, not by implying the need for an artificial quota of “go girl”ness.

Dana Stevens’ “Is the Facebook movie sexist?” @ Slate

The Social Network presents an odd paradox in its vision of the war between the sexes (which, like all the conflict in this movie, is a real war, brutal and unattenuated). It’s smarter about the way women circulate as objects of male competition, predation, and fantasy than it is about the motivations of individual female characters. The film’s “women problem” doesn’t lie in the fact that many of the women in it (with the exception of Erica Albright and the lawyer played by Rashida Jones) are shallow, self-serving jerks—so are most of the men. But any film capable of putting on-screen as complex and fascinating a jerk as Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg should be smart enough to do the same for the ladies.

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.