Tag: Erin Fenner

Movie Makers from the Margins: Lorene Scafaria

Written by Erin Fenner.
In a 2012 interview with Vulture, Lorene Scafaria said she is not afraid of “quirky.” And why should she be? Indie-wood’s model to movie making seems to be dependent upon quirk. Whimsical women characters bring in the big money in the industry.

Michael Cera and Kat Dennings in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Scafaria wrote the screenplay for Nick and Norah’sInfinite Playlist, and I can forgive most of the quirk there. The dueling premises – rescuing a drunk friend and finding your favorite band at a mystery venue – worked to propel the narrative forward at a good pace. The growing optimism of the characters matched the lighthearted arc of the film. Most of the characters were palatable. It hardly passed the Bechdel test, unless you consider Norah’s (Kat Dennings) interactions with her drunk friend a conversation, but it did pass the GLAAD test by nonchalantly making an “all-gay” band Nick’s (Michael Cera) connection to underground music and his way to impress fellow music-lover, Norah.
What I am getting at here is: I am willing to forgive the over-abundance of quirk in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. But, I can’t be so lenient when it comes to the film Scafaria directed and wrote, Seeking a Friend for the End of theWorld.
Steve Carell and Keira Knightley in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

The concept is poignant and hilarious, viewing the end of the world through an intimate lens. It forgoes the heroics of a Michael Bay movie and instead inspects the day-to-day challenges of fast-approaching mortality asking: How do we grieve as a community and how do we live with each other when we know that we won’t live any longer?

And, for the first part of the film, that exploration is funny and tender. Dodge (Steve Carell) is a middle-aged insurance man who was left by his wife as the announcement that the end was nigh came over the radio waves. (As in: his wife [played by Carell’s actual wife, Nancy Carell] full-on bolts out the car door after the announcement finishes.)

Dodge’s life doesn’t appear to change too much. He’s bored with the job he continues to go to and interacts with his friends who still remain shallow. You think this might just turn into another existential metaphor for trudging through life – but don’t worry. Dodge meets his manic pixie dream girl, Penny (Keira Knightley), so we don’t need to worry about in-depth examinations because we have our fast-food route to a resolution: love.

Penny is wacky and sentimental. As she’s leaving her boyfriend and apartment she remembers to bring along a stack of records. She’s a hypersomniac; sleeping even while Dodge vacuums around her. She has the sort of bad luck that means, oh shoot, they’re always getting into tricky situations. Penny talks fast and cries expressively. Without her, Dodge would not be able to grasp at the meaning we all want him to find.

She’s the classic MPDG, not because of the quirk, but because she is primarily a male character’s tool for his personal self-discovery.

Their relationship could have been ok. They start out as co-adventurers seeking out their own resolution but, after they have sex one time in the heat of an orgy-escaping moment – we, the Pavloved audience (this is the scene where you ought to cry) – know that the characters are doomed to romance of the cheesiest kind.

Their need to find love in each other to resolve a film about the world ending reduces a crisis of humanity in the way that most American films reduce a crisis of humanity: focusing on the individual struggle of one person trying to connect with one other one person in the carnal way.

They don’t die alone, which is all they wanted after all. Crisis averted.

Scafaria’s lens is interesting at first. It does make sense that a woman director would look at a topic that has been explored from every exploding angle and find something else. But, she explores it in an ultimately sentimental oh-too-predictable way that leaves us with a content male character gazing at his MPDG as the end envelopes them.

Movie Makers from the Margins: Celine Sciamma

Written by Erin Fenner

French filmmaker, Celine Sciamma, brings you uncomfortably close to the lives of adolescents.

She does this intentionally, but not in a voyeuristic way that so often comes along with any Hollywood film. Instead, her proximity to her characters creates a level of intense intimacy. Even when her characters are dealing with issues like sexuality, her work doesn’t feel sexy, but nerve-wracking, like being a teenager does.

In her first feature-length film, Water Lilies¸ we follow the experiences of three girls who are on a synchronized swimming team together. We see their stories through their eyes only – rarely even glimpsing a character who is older than 18.


The girls are all trying to understand how sex and desire fit into their lives. Marie (Pauline Acquart), who we follow most closely, longs for Floriane (Adele Haenel). Anne (Louise Blachere) longs for Francois (Warren Jacquin). Floriane seems fixated more on the functioning of her own desire and how it can connect her to many people, rather than any one individual.



Louise Blachere, Pauline Acquart and Adele Haenel in Water Lilies
We see them clumsily sort out their first interactions with their own desire and the desire of others. While Floriane flirts with Marie, she is not monogamous in her affection. And this functions as a regular torture for Marie, who spends much of her time helping Floriane meet with boys. Francois walks in on Anne while she is completely naked, and this moment catalyzes Anne’s burgeoning infatuation with Francois.


In her second film, Tomboy, we meet Laure (Zoe Heran) who expresses hirself as a boy. While the film doesn’t explore whether Laure identifies as a boy, it does sift through the complications that come with assigned gender. It also touches on how we make assumptions about a person’s identity and how antagonistic adults, in particular, can be toward androgyny.  


The American approach to stories about youth usually looks as though they’ve been filmed through a gauzy lens. American audiences are bombarded by nostalgia for fat-cheeked childhood. And, lessons of discovery and coming-of-age are typically shown through the perspective of the privileged. Sciamma does fall into the trap of focusing solely on white stories, and while it’s a relief to see stories that aren’t just focused on cis-males, it would be better to explore issues of race as well.

She does try to address these identities as authentically as possible. Sciamma comments on this and says casting is important to her.
“I chose them to be very age appropriate to the story, because I wanted that innocence and fear and inexperience and passion to come through. I didn’t think a 20-year-old playing 15 would give that same performance,” Sciamma said in a 2008 interview with Go Magazine.

And because her actors are the age of the characters, the pathos is stronger and the emotional arc is more realistic. We can connect to the sexual experiences of the girls without sexualizing them.

In the same interview, Sciamma talked about being outed as gay by the American press.

“I am a lesbian director, but I’m also a woman director, and a French director. If you add them all, it’s okay, but separating one out is not honest. In France there is less of a question of whether you are a lesbian or not. It’s other places that it is such a big deal,” she said.

She talked about the issue of being a woman and a director in another interview with Canape in 2008.
“The secrets of the girls I think is the secrets of women in general. That’s why I made the movie, because I think cinema has really been celebrating women but it’s always men doing the talking and it’s always in the man’s point of view. I think the secrets of women is that they have no secrets. They can be cruel. They can be ugly. They can be beautiful. They can be awkward. Cinema is always enhancing the mysteries of women. What I wanted to tell is what is behind the mysteries.”

And in not trying to enhance anything about the experiences of girls and women, Sciamma provides a refreshing narrative about coming of age.

Movie Makers from the Margins: Sarah Polley

Written by Erin Fenner
I stumbled onto Sarah Polley during a typical Sunday TV slam – in which my roommate(s) and I watch  a set of television shows and/or movies while gently tearing them apart for end o’ weekend laughs.

With only Netflix to stream on this particular weekend we ended up on a movie we assumed would be a typical snort-inducing indie flick: the type that has good intentions and an endearingly low-budget, but still follows a set formula with too-familiar archetypes, dialogue and the sort of acting that can only be done with a whispery voice.

Michelle Williams and Luke Kirby in Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz

Our Sunday tease-fest was abruptly cut short because we had picked Take This Waltz. Within the first minutes of watching the film we realized we had accidentally found something fresh and interesting. The camerawork alone was captivating. The writing was surreal while remaining painfully grounded. The story about a young married woman, Margot (Michelle Williams), exploring her own dissatisfaction with her marriage while trying not to explore her attraction to another man was intense, exceedingly sexy and hilarious.

It didn’t take long before we – typical Millennials with our addiction to information and technology – started feverishly Googling the film: then discovering the filmmaker was a “she.” That may have been the first time I accidentally found a female director. Every other time has been purposeful and even then it has been rare to catch movies that were directed or written by women.

An article in the New York Times celebrated that out of the top 250 grossing films in 2012 there were more female filmmakers than the year before. That increase was from five percent to nine percent. And while any increase in diversity is valuable, I can’t help but feel a bit cynical about whipping out party favors when women are making less than 10 percent of the top grossing films.

In a society that espouses equality as an ideal; the absence of women filmmakers should incite righteous indignation, right?

Mostly it just goes unnoticed.

After my brain was lovingly melted by Take This Waltz I did what I usually do when falling for a tall dark and surrealist or postmodern director. I sought out the whole collection. I needed to see all the Polley films ever made! Achieving that was just too surmountable. The young director has only made three films, and only two are available on DVD. I can’t even be a Polley geek. I can’t go to Polley trivia nights. Watching two DVDs in a row can’t even be a Polley marathon.

The second Polley I watched was her first feature-length film, Away from Her, about a couple and how they deal with their relationship when one of them develops Alzheimer’s and eventually needs to move to a long-term care facility.

Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie in Away from Her
In Hollywood people over 60 are usually depicted as feeble and they are portrayed most often through the perspective of their children or grandchildren. Even The Notebook which features an aging couple – one suffering from Alzheimer’s – takes place mostly in the past: mostly when the couple was first falling in love and their cheeks were still fat with youth. The happy ending is that they die together.


Away from Her, instead focuses on the relationship of the aging couple as it exists in the present. The couple has regrets. They have fond memories – but their primary concerns are about how to handle their current situation and what they are losing now. Also. It shows that people over 60 have sex in a sexy but normalizing way.

The way in which Polley explores aging and disease is refreshing because while it is so different than most of the media we consume it actually more accurately represents life.

To get these sorts of new narratives we need directors from all backgrounds: not just the white male variety.

Women filmmakers are still getting into the business. They’re less established and get less attention. Which is why we need to have a director spotlight here on Bitch Flicks – and why this will turn into a column. We’ll be speaking with up-and-coming filmmakers and reviewing the works of directors who face marginalization for their identity.

Because Polley was the first female director I discovered without trying I decided it was time to make more of an effort to seek out directors from all backgrounds. If you have suggestions for writers, directors, producers or filmmakers you want to see written about: leave them in the comments so we can have a conversation.

It’s Our 5-Year Blogiversary!

BF co-founders Steph and Amber at the 2010 Athena Film Festival

We can’t believe it, but today marks five years since we started Bitch Flicks.
In March 2008, we started a blog with the wink-and-a-nudge name, Bitch Flicks. In that first year, we wrote a whopping seventeen posts, eight of which were actual film reviews.
In 2012 we published 557 posts–and “we” consisted of a dozen people, not to mention numerous guest writers.
We want to thank our Editor and Staff Writer Megan Kearns.
We want to thank our staff writers: Erin Fenner, Robin Hitchcock, Leigh Kolb, Carrie Nelson, Rachel Redfern, Amanda Rodriguez, Lady T, Max Thornton, and Myrna Waldron.
We want to thank everyone who has ever contributed to Bitch Flicks, whether by writing a post, designing a logo, donating, commenting, or sharing a piece you read with someone else.
Everyone mentioned here has been a part of what has made this project continue. 
Finally, we want to thank every one of you reading this–and we hope you’ll stay with us in years to come. 
–Steph and Amber

‘Hansel and Gretel Witch Hunters’ Trailer



The trailer doesn’t provide the full context for why Gretel (Gemma Arterton), in the upcoming movie Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, headbutts a grumpy fella (Peter Stormare) after he says, “I’m not going to have you telling me what to do.” I really hope the exchange between grumpy guy and Gretel escalates as rapidly as the trailer implies. As in: did she really just headbutt a person for asking not to be bossed around?

Meet Gretel: our strong female character.

Gretel is the sort of gal that will easily turn an absurd macho flick into the sort of film all genders could enjoy, right? She’s beautiful, but oh-so-deadly. Her bad-assed tone of voice and ability to slowly walk away from explosions means she will be more appealing to women than a Bond girl would.

Don’t worry though, gender-norm-sensitive-mainstream, she’s plenty palatable too. Even though she appears alongside her brother throughout most of the trailer – swaggering, punching and weapon-wielding – she still screams at the end of the trailer beckoning for Hansel to save her.

In what has become typical in fantasy/sci-fi action flicks; we are presented with the façade of a strong female character only to be reminded of their passivity and dependence upon their male counterpart.

Because this particular film isn’t out until next week, this characterization of Gretel may be off. She may be consistently strong. She may rescue Hansel. But, we know that we are being sold the movie with those aggravating and too-predictable gender expectations. Studios want to bring people into this movie with a women desperate to be saved, and they lazily present her strength to smooth over the sexist edges. 

‘The Hobbit’: A Totally Expected Bro-Fest

Written by Erin Fenner
Is there enough dude on this poster for you?
Bad Taste, 1987, was Peter Jackson’s first dip into epic nerd movies and his first film. While he may be best known for his specially affected J.R.R. Tolkien interpretations, I personally will always love Jackson for his exploding sheep and (literally) brain-snatchy/gory aliens in Bad Taste.  The film is about a group of investigators who discover that a town is being overrun by aliens who are harvesting humans for their fast food franchise. It was extremely low budget – less than $30,000 – and Jackson recruited his friends to play starring roles. Jackson, himself, actually plays two lead characters in the movie. The aesthetic is that of a film school project – rough and cleverly stupid. It’s gruesome; on of the heroes repeatedly squishes his brain back into his skull and keeps it in with a hat and belt.
Its cheeky absurdity fits snugly into a cult/b-movie-lover’s tastes.
But.
But, it has no female characters. The only women in the film are extras – two extras in huge alien suits.
So, in 2012, one quarter-life-crisis after Jackson’s first feature-length film, we saw a pretty similar problem.
The Hobbit is well acted with predictably great special effects, humorous dialogue and a compelling arc.
But.
But, there is only one female character with a speaking part and maybe a couple female hobbit extras who you see behind a frolicking Frodo (Elijah Wood) or Bilbo (Martin Freeman/Ian Holm).
Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) is the only woman with a speaking part in The Hobbit. And really, her role is little more than a cameo. While men are talking, Galadriel elegantly paces around the room – her gauzy dress seemingly slowing her down by the unnecessarily long train. Gandalf (Ian McKellen) steals a word with her to talk about his plan with Bilbo and the dwarves. She supports him and smiles slowly. While I like the unexpected sexual tension between Galadriel and Gandalf – it’s less than gratifying to see a woman plugged into a movie with no purpose other than to be a magical validator.
This lack of lady in the film has not gone unnoticedor uncontested. But, Alyssa Rosenburg with the XX Factorsaid in her piece, “We Don’t Need Women in the Hobbit” that women shouldn’t be included for the sake of equity. Rosenberg writes: 

“All-male spaces and social circles existed in the kind of medieval settings Tolkien was commenting on, they exist today, and stories that are set in those environments aren’t uninteresting to me because I’m a woman — in fact, just the reverse. My hope isn’t that they go away, but that intellectually curious men should be able to find stories about femininity, and female spaces, whether they’re fantastical or not, just as fascinating, even if there aren’t male characters in the mix.”

Unfortunately Rosenburg’s argument is just as indolent as Jackson’s move to include only one woman for less than a ten minute scene to balance the dudeness of The Hobbit, an almost three-hour-long movie.
If Jackson was really sticking to the details of Tolkien’s novel for accuracy’s sake then Bilbo would have been fatter and the dwarves all hairy and large-nosed. While Fili (Dean O’Gorman) and Kili (Aidan Turner) were adorable; their delicate five-o-clock shadows did not resemble anything dwarf-like. So, since Jackson Hollywooded this story up anyway, you think he could have included some women’s voices and stories instead of lazily inserting a suspiciously always-glowing Galadriel.
All male spaces exist, but that doesn’t mean that the surrounding non-male space shouldn’t be included – or that the story shouldn’t be updated to stay relevant. And the idea that women ought to expose themselves to more male-only spaces is giggleable. Since infancy girls are exposed to story books, movies and television shows that have few if any female characters. And hey, what about action movies, Westerns, superhero flicks and on and on. While women sneak a peek into these films here and there; they are usually a romantic interest or the object that can sexily swagger.
Women are a small percentage of the roles in Hollywood movies. In 2011 women made up only 33% of all movie characters of the top 100 domestic grossing films, and only 11% of protagonists were women. In the same year women only made up 18%of writers, directors, producers, executive producers, editors and cinematographers of the 250 domestic top grossing films.
We do need to include more women in stories that originally didn’t include women because if we’re not proactive about representing women it won’t happen.
So – even though Jackson’s tantalizing nerdy films are pleasing – more needs to be demanded from them. More women.

 

ABC Family’s Consumerist Christian Ethic

Creepy Christmas critters compel you to watch non-stop holiday-themed specials

ABC Family airs its corporate hamfast, 25 Days of Christmas, every December. To ease the fretful nerves of holiday-addicts, they even have a pre-countdown countdown, Countdown to 25 Days of Christmas (my redundancy nowhere near matches theirs.) If you need a fix that can’t be soothed by old classics – if you need something new, artificial with Christian platitudes intact – ABC Family has your back.

Disney understands its market. It knows how to manipulate traditional values into palatable family fun with high profit returns. And, as ABC Family is owned by Disney, they follow the family-fun exploitation model ardently.

Most of the specials they air have just been derivative rom-coms, but they have also are comfortable exposing embarrassing sequels to Rankin-Bass movies to the public. No, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer did not need to be revisited in lazy 3-D animation. It already had two sequels, anyway. We don’t need Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys. We don’t need to check back in with Rudolph unless he and Hermey are entering a domestic partnership and challenging Santa’s Judeo-Christian approach to distributing goods to minors of the world.

On top of a continuous mind-melting block packed with classics reruns, jingle bells, stop-motion ice monsters and family weeping around indoor trees – ABC family also produces its own new specials yearly with C-actors (or used-to-be-almost-an-A-actor).

For whatever reason, they try mainly to appeal to an older age bracket with contrived romantic narratives. So we get the same poke-your-eyes-out story about a woman whose main concept of success is wrapped up in pursuing romantic love with a dude. And it’s called a Christmas special because mistletoe and other thematic flourishes are thrown in.

In the 12 Dates of Christmas we follow Kate Stanton (Amy Smart) as she relives the same day over and over. A holiday movie about a person inexplicably repeating their day over and ultimately learning a profound lesson about life – surely not a rip-off of anything. So, why Kate’s counterpart in Groundhog’s Day goes through stages of acceptance that mirrors philosophical growth and an acceptance of the complexities of life and what we owe the world – Kate in The 12 Dates of Christmas just really really wants to not be alone. While annoyed that she is stuck on Christmas Eve over and over again Kate doesn’t spend a lot of time considering her situation. She does sigh a lot – and even more than sigh, she looks longingly at a strong-jawed fellow while blinking glassy eyes.  

Desperately Seeking Santatried on the workaholic-woman-chooses-man-over-job trope. Jennifer Walker (Laura Vandervoort) is ambitious, but always with a sad faraway look in her eye. She’s not sure what she’s missing, but we know. To be complete, she needs a tender, but still macho, dude to romance her and restore her Christmas faith. Her job almost destroys the family business of her love interest. Don’t worry folks. She gives a speech about goodness to her money-hungry boss, shuns a promotion and rushes to the arms of hunky sensitive sexy-Santa. Of course, she’s decrying capitalist morality while being in a movie that was packaged efficiently and cheaply to make some quick bucks for ABC Family.

ABC Family is just a part of the consumerist holiday problem. They’re just playing into an existing formula that has already been embedded into our culture. But, they do it really well. And really bad.  

‘Anna Karenina,’ and the Tragedy of Being a Woman in the Wrong Era

Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina 

Written by Erin Fenner.

In Joe Wright’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, we are relentlessly stuck in a nineteenth-century playhouse.

Instead of moving through space – sets move around the characters. Everyone is a tool of their society. They’re subject to frivolous, yet harmful social etiquette. And while props whiz past the characters, they are near static – sometimes their only movement is to literally fall backwards into another scene. Whatever personal will characters have is not rational, but instinctual and overwhelming.  The characters base their life on propriety but their motivation shifts to a need to seek pleasure, and then a need to simply not suffer.

Anna Karenina is about how love is battered by rigid societal structures – how norms create an appearance of civility, but ultimately destroy individuals.

Anna Karenina (Keira Knightley) is a young married mother. Her husband, Alexi Karenin, (Jude Law) is a well-respected statesman and painfully kind. We meet Anna as she begins her journey to Moscow to see her brother, Oblonsky (Matthew Macfayden). There, her goal is to convince her brother’s wife, Dolly (Kelly Macdonald), to stay in her marriage. Oblonsky has been casually adulterous, and Dolly can’t bear to stay with him.

Oblonsky committed adultery and is only threatened with losing his wife. Dolly, on the other hand, now devastated by a man she devoted her life to, cannot do anything without losing everything. So, she forgives Oblonsky. And he returns to philandering because, as a man, he is exempt from the stringent rules that do apply to women. For men, societal rules are a game. For women, it’s serious. So, while the tragedy in Oblonksy’s family should be his own – his flaw being infidelity – the tragedy is his wife’s. Her flaw is that she is unfortunate enough to be a woman in a culture that denies women autonomy.

Anna convinces Dolly to stay with Oblonsky with a brutally layered argument. She sandwiches love around impending destitution. You love him right? If you leave him you will have nothing. But, don’t worry, because you love him.

This is how we meet Anna – as manipulative as the shifting set around her. She is persuading her sister-in-law with good intentions – but based on a system’s rules that ultimately marginalize.

It is almost immediately after meeting with Dolly that Anna pushes against propriety by dancing all night with the handsome young Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who is certainly not her husband. Wright, who also directed Pride and Prejudice¸ uses a device in Anna Kareninen that is reminiscent of a scene from Pride and Prejudice.  Anna and Vronsky enter the dance floor and the rest of the dancers are frozen intermittently throughout a song – then the extra dancers disappear leaving us only with Anna and Vronsky. And Anna’s social rationality begins to slip.

Knightley and Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Anna Karenina
It is after this that Vronsky begins taking extreme measures to seduce Anna. When she returns home from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Vronksy follows her and sets up in her town. He attends the parties she does and regularly indicates his interest in her even though she just as regularly declines him. Stalking has regularly been portrayed as a fundamental (and even romantic) aspect of courtship. Vronsky doesn’t win likability by his entitled, desperate and coercive approach to wooing an unwilling married woman. Of course Vronsky is able to stalk because it won’t damage his reputation, won’t strip him of livelihood or alienate him from his community. Anna has everything to lose. So, when they do consummate their affair, Anna calls Vronsky a “murderer” of her “happiness.”

[Spoilers ahead]

When Anna confesses her affair to her husband, Alexi’s main aim is to defer a scandal. Acting rational in this culture means following irrational rules.

But, when Anna gives birth to Vronsky’s daughter, it’s harder to keep the story mum. Anna almost dies in the process, and on her presumed deathbed she acts as a devoted wife and begs for forgiveness. She embraces demure, until she recovers. It makes sense that Anna could only bear living up (or down, rather) to feminine ideals when she was dying. Being a puppet to a patriarchal society while alive is excruciating for her.  

When her affair becomes publicly known, Anna is ostracized by her community. Vronsky begs an old friend of hers to “call on her.” The friend refuses saying, “I’d call on her if she broke the law. But, she broke the rules.”

Because Anna was audacious enough to act on her own desire, she is to be punished. Oblonsky and Vronsky can sleep with whomever they want and receive little more than a reprimand and tongue-clicking. For her marital indiscretion, Anna loses her children, her friends and she is unable to even secure a divorce. Due to her intense isolation and social shunning, Anna breaks down and eventually throws herself onto the train tracks as a train comes barreling toward her.

We, like the characters, are mostly confined within the theater for the duration of the film. Occasionally the camera pans over a real setting – in the country or at a train station – but then we are subjected back to props and shifting sets. It devastatingly returns to the façade – while the agony of the drama is so more poignant. But we are reduced to pretense – and that’s where society wanted to keep Anna. The only way she could escape it was through death.

Not So Thankful for These Holiday Movies

The Vicious Kind crew heading home for an extremely uncomfortable Thanksgiving
The Vicious Kind, directed by Lee Toland Kriegar, opens in a diner. For a few uncomfortable moments we watch our protagonist, Caleb (Adam Scott) nearly weep to himself. This is the first of many almost-sobbing scenes. Throughout the film we get sort-of-explained chin wiggling, lips shaking and red eyeing. The first line Caleb utters – almost into the camera – is, “You know they’re all whores, right?” And so the tone is set for this dysfunctional family/Thanksgiving film.
Thanksgiving should be a great holiday for the center of good ol’ American realist drama. But, it can draw directors that want to explore the more obnoxious family dynamics over a colonialist turkey carcass. The holiday functions as a device that can bring together characters who would otherwise not associate with each other and force them to interact against the not-so-distracting backdrop of one of the least commercialized holidays of the season.
The Vicious Kind, in particular, focuses on Caleb, who I think we are supposed to sympathize with. It appears that way since we follow his story, and perspective. There are moments where it appears he softens. And it is his story that is most resolved at the end of the film. So, I think we are supposed to have some degree of compassion for him. The problem is that he is misogynistic, abusive, jealous, misanthropic and many more words that are only associated with detestable characters. He has a paternalistic agenda to “protect” his younger brother, Peter (Alex Frost), from women. Caleb does not approve of Peter’s new girlfriend, Emma (Brittany Snow), making many snide and overt comments to suggest that she is fickle and promiscuous. Caleb makes these claims without much evidence beyond Peter telling him that Emma had cheated on her previous boyfriend. (We all know that the relational and sexual decisions women make as 19-year-olds define their character overall.)
Emma is a flat character who awkwardly shrugs off inappropriate comments from her boyfriend’s father (J.K. Simmons) and pushes back against Caleb’s aggressive advances. She is generally polite to everyone, but obviously uncomfortable. Caleb calls her a “whore” in the grocery store. He tries to kiss her. He makes awful comments in every in-between moment. But then, after she and Peter makes an unsuccessful go at sex, Emma rushes out of the house to meet with Caleb who has been lurking outside the house. Then they get to banging in Caleb’s old bedroom. There isn’t much explanation for this. There is no reason we should believe Emma would be attracted to Caleb since he has only been out rightly horrible to her – save for a few creepy moments where he confesses attraction. When she insinuates she had been a virgin, Caleb rushes out of the room chiding her with, “Peter’s in love with you!”
How’s that for reinforcing the virgin-whore dichotomy?
The tone of The Vicious Kind brings to mind heavy-handed movies that appear to parody themselves in their portrayal of poor men being devastated by the wiles of women. See: The Room. Caleb all but says, “You’re tearing me apart!” When in fact, he is the dominating tool that needs a more demanding character arc. Emma leaves the situation distraught. Caleb gets to reconnect with his father. Caleb can continue to be a misogynist in this setting – he is rewarded at the end by a suggested reparation with his father. Emma, on the other hand, is loaded down with guilt and self-loathing.
Pieces of April is another film with unlikable characters trying to celebrate a family holiday. While it features a female lead, April (Katie Holmes), it doesn’t represent gender much better than The Vicious Kind.
In Pieces of April, April (Katie Holmes), plays with turkeys
April is trying to host Thanksgiving for her family. Her mother, Joy (Patricia Clarkson), is dying of cancer and she is working on making at least one good family memory. But, her oven is broken. And, she has a contemptuous relationship with her mother. She seeks help from her neighbors – using their ovens. We also follow her family as they drive her direction. Mostly, the traveling scenes are just interactions between Joy and family members. She’s acidic and cruel. Watching April cook and interact is also painful – she’s oblivious and self-absorbed.
Don’t worry though. There are some really rational and considerate male characters. April’s boyfriend, Bobby (Derek Luke) is thoughtful and intelligent. He pushes (sometimes literally) April through the process of making dinner. Joy’s husband, Jim (Oliver Platt), is the literal and emotional driver of the family.
See April and Joy cannot reconcile their disdain of each other without the paternal help of the men in their life. They are both immature and obnoxious in their own ways. Joy regularly storms off – implicitly demanding to be chased. At one time she leaves the car and sticks out her thumb with the intention of heading back home. April pouts on the stairs, blows balloons, huffs and is incompetent in the kitchen. We watch her try to mash uncooked potatoes in a too-long scene.
Thankfully, in Pieces of April we don’t see the intense and near-violent anti-woman sentiment that is in The Vicious Kind, but we are still stuck with infantile female characters and the subtle assertion that they are incapable without a man to lead them through their own problems.
While it will be good to get past the Thanksgiving flicks this season, that unfortunately means that corporate and faith-fetishizing Christmas films are next.

‘Cloud Atlas’ Loses Audience

But how can a film with so many actors playing so many different roles go wrong?
Cloud Atlas, directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, portrays the pursuit of equality in a palatable way for the mainstream – soaked with platitudes. But, due to facially disproportioned prosthetics and a failed attempt at a postmodern structure it misses even the mainest of mainstreams. Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and a slew of other actors don different noses, teeth and skin colors to represent parallel souls traveling through generations of personal and cultural strife. Each protagonist challenges an authority or oppressive obstacle.

Cloud Atlas tries to transgress norms, but it fails because it spends too much time celebrating gimmicks. Even though it pushes an over-sentimental philosophy – I still want to like it because it tries to present a variety of underrepresented ideas and identities. But, I just can’t like the movie because the structure and devices weaken it.

We get several solid female characters, a tender and sympathetic portrayal of gay lovers and plenty of conversations (directly and indirectly) about the importance of empowering marginalized groups.

Berry plays (among other characters) a journalist in 1973, Luisa Rey, investigating a nuclear plant. She’s smart, complex and is following a story rather than romantic interest. She’s not a kickboxing Buffy-esque strong woman, but a typical adept character with strengths, flaws and personality.

We see a similar level of complexity in the relationship between two men in 1936 who are young and in love, but separated while one, Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw), unsuccessfully pursues his ambitions as a composer. They don’t have an ideal romance, and we only see them actually together once, but their affair may be the most intense of the film. They do not dwell on societally-imposed secrecy about their sexuality, but it is painfully clear what limits them. Also, while their story does end tragically, it is not because of sexuality, but because of Frobisher’s failed ambitions. It could be argued that the characters are experiencing indirect punishment for their sexuality – but their story isn’t the only tragic one, and their affection for each other is the happiest part of Forbisher’s narrative.

Also, we follow the story of a young American attorney who agrees to help a black man escape slavery and subsequently becomes an abolitionist. We also follow a commodified woman escape from slavery and fight against fascism in a dystopian world. These are cookie-cutter liberal narratives – not progressive. But, put together they create a tone that celebrates marginalized people rising up and making their voices heard.

Because the ideas behind the film are embracing multiculturalism I am also reluctant to say that actors playing different races is problematic. It doesn’t feel offensive against a back-drop of social justice themes – as much as naïve. Most of the main characters already share an easily identifiable birthmark – so there is no need for the characters to be played by the same actors. The birthmark itself could be heavy-handed, but the characters being played by the same actors puts it over the top. If the make-up had been skillfully done, it might be more compelling, but when Hanks plays a 19thcentury doctor, he has a clumsy set of fake teeth slapped under false freckles and complimented by a trying-too-hard nasally English accent (the accent is not the make-up artists’ fault, but it sure does negatively enhance the overall effect). All of the make-up looks hastily thrown together. And, reading an interview with the make-up artist backs up that idea. 

Jeremy Woodhead, a make-up designer for the film, detailed his process in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

“Susan Sarandon was away filming somewhere else, so we hadn’t got a life cast, and I had to turn her into a little old man from the Indian subcontinent. So I used James D’Arcy’s eyebrow blocker piece to change the shape of her forehead. On top of that, I put Jim Sturgess’ forehead. And I had two or three noses made of varying sizes, just hoping that one would fit. Luckily, one did. And then put a wig and a goatee beard and a mustache and then just a lot of paintwork on her. This was the first time she’d ever been a man, and she just sat there giggling.” 

Cloud Atlas looks like it is begging to be dubbed “groundbreaking” and reviewed with clichés intimating its unique and fresh take on culture. But, it’s just an over-layered overlapping story making comfortable stabs at conformity and glossy-eyed statements about the connectedness of all humans.

This is the trouble with unremarkable films; no matter how good the intention of their message – it will go unheard if communicated poorly.

Sexism Leading Up to the Elections

The big day is coming up. Pundits, politicians and trolls have a lot to say about it.
The race is so close, that the candidates and their parties have gone beyond the mudslinging phase into a spastic political dance. We’ve moved beyond a two-step and are now doing a politicking polka.
Democrats obnoxiously pander to women, but the GOP manages to surpass them all with outright ignorance and embarrassing insensitivity. Here are some of the more recent things that conservative leaders have been saying about women the weeks leading up to the election.

  • Newt Gingrich realized the problem that Republicans have been having with outrageous rape comments! It’s not that conservatives are holding too tightly to antiquated and harmful assumptions about sexual assault. It’s that women are not responding well. Regarding ignorant comments; Gingrich said people need to “get over it.” In response, women all over the country sigh a breath of relief, and realize they don’t have to get worked up over assault any more.

  • If you have come late to the political party and weren’t ambivalent about the Republican’s stance on women’s health, Richard Mourdok is here to clarify. He said that pregnancy resulting from rape is something “God intended.” He followed that up with a shrug-it-off comment that “you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.” That seems to indicate that the toothpaste – which here would probably represent the GOP’s real stance on rape and abortion – is no longer within the tube – or the presentation of the GOP’s position on women’s health in a way that is palatable to the general public.
  • Candy Crowley moderatedthe second presidential debate largely because of a petition started by three teenage girls. These girls wanted to see a female moderator since there hadn’t been one at a presidential debate for 20 years. Crowley got mixed reviews for how she managed the debates – some saying her correction of Romney was good journalism, while others said it was an inappropriate intervention. Unfortunately, the reaction to a woman playing such an important role in this fundamental part of the political process was all-too-predictably sexist. 

#Irrelevant&Sexist
The Twitterverse was lighting up with live tweeting coverage of whatever Obama and Romney threw at each other. Tweets trying to catch and ride the next meme latched on to Crowley’s weight.Tweeters managed the internet-version of heckling by all-capsing their disapproval of Crowley’s shape and size. Crowley is the chief political correspondent at CNN. She’s covered war, natural disasters and elections. How she looks is totally inconsequential, and we can make a pretty good guess that the reason her looks were an issue was because of her gender.
There are four days left until the election. Who wants to bet we will have to deal with yet another sound bite or internetstorm of sexism before November 6?

Horror Week 2012: Women’s Terror Vocalized in Horror Films

If only she could scream louder! It might defeat Ro-Man

In the 1953 B-movie, Robot Monster, protagonists Alice (Claudia Barret) and Roy (George Nader) attempt to engage in post-apocalyptic frolicking and fornicating. This is all while being pursued by a gorilla-suited socialism-spewing space man (John Brown). This space man, or as he calls himself, Ro-Man, falls in love with Alice. How could a communist alien from the stars resist a red-blooded American woman? Exactly. Impossible.

Unfortunately for Ro-Man, his love is unrequited. So, he does what any oversized hairy simian does. He launches an impromptu kidnapping. While Alice kicks and screams in his arms, he awkwardly saunters across the desert countryside. But, it is Alice’s screams that are of particular interest. While fighting Ro-Man, Roy grunts and groans but he doesn’t issue the same prolonged tone of terror that Alice does. Alice’s only “action” is to indicate her utter passiveness via screaming. Roy gets to act and rescue.

The woman’s scream has been an essential part of horror. Women play a fundamental role in horror films – possibly more than other genres. Women function as a foil. They are wrought by terror. They scream the way we, in the theater, want to.

The archetypes we see presented in B-movies extend into the classic horror canon. Some of the great horror movies wouldn’t be the same without the woman’s scream.

Psycho featured one of the more famous screaming scenes on the silver screen. What is brutal about this Alfred Hitchcock film is that we follow a faux-protagonist for a long time, Marion (Janet Leigh), only to see her abruptly and brutally murdered. Her role is to be lost to terror and die shrieking.

The thing about Psychoand Robot Monster is that they position their female characters in both terrifying and erotic situations. Alice is swept away by Ro-Man from her dalliances with Roy. Marion is murdered while in the shower. Their screams can be reminiscent of orgasm.

This is pretty typical in any horror movie – especially the ones featuring young people getting indirectly punished for sexual activity (as in: any horror movie since the ‘80s.)

There’s got to be a better place for women in horror films.

And there is. But, it’s complicated.

There are strong women characters in horror movies – ones that rarely scream, and if they do it is with purpose. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) from the Alien films has got to be one of the bad-assest of horror heroes out there. She’s calm, steely and a survivor. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) from Buffy the Vampire Slayeris also an admirable kicker of supernatural asses. Women can be tough in horrific situations.

It’s not the norm, though. 
I mean, in all likelihood, you would scream in her situation. 
In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), the chirpy wife to the murderously insane Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), spends the last half of the movie in hysterics. It seems like a pretty appropriate reaction to your husband losing his mind and trying to kill you. She does ultimately save herself and her son, but it’s in a human and clumsy sort of way.

This should be ok – but against a backdrop of hysterical women, Wendy becomes a part of the passive amalgam.

The problem is that we are still dealing with an either-or sort of situation. Women can be preternaturally courageous and stoic. Or, they can be spastic screeching machines that fall to pieces.

We need more nuance. While horror is not the first place you look for complex characters, we can do better than fitful women standing in for the audience’s own desire to scream.