Can you tell I’m behind on my reviews? Does the Nutcracker count as a narrative work of art? Does it surprise you that besides my obsession with ballet this is the first ballet I’ve seen by a “real” company? Is it weird that I thought it was too short?
Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, “Why the Indie Music World Hates Lana del Rey”
(Maybe the most important crystallized idea about us to take with you.)
I just finished this and reviewed it over at Persephone.
[Very delayed reviews of Young Adult and Tiny Furniture, which I originally wanted to make a longer essay but didn’t have time to, mashed together because they both made me feel icky:]
I’d like to say I hated Young Adult, but it’s not that simple. It didn’t make me feel very good about myself, or about anyone in it, or really about humanity at large. And largely this is because I thought I despised the main character, Mavis Gray, played ably by Theron. It took me a long time (and one long impassioned conversation about the film) to come to embrace Mavis and try to understand her perspective.
The Gen Xers I read who saw this film found it scintillating; as a geriatric millennial, I found it less so. Perhaps I’m too young to give up hope on a redemption arc. Or perhaps that is what a redemption arc looks like, and I’m too young and naive to really embrace it.
I saw Up in the Air and liked it okay, but I didn’t really think much of Jason Reitman as a director until I saw Young Adult. The most interesting thing about the film, to me, was the attention the camera paid to Mavis maintaining and enhancing her beauty. Close-ups of cuticles and body wax and tangled hair extensions. It’s interesting that seeing the grotesque behind-the-scenes business of getting a woman looking gorgeous is still so rare on-screen. Those moments made me look more closely at the film. I guess you could switch out some nouns and from that sentence and come up with a relatively apt summary of the film: It’s interesting that seeing the grotesque behind-the-scenes business of getting an addict to grow up is still so awful on-screen.
Delightful and delicious. I love Jessica Walter in all things and can be relied on to get over-emotionally involved in the lives of animated sitcom characters. Hope I get to be Lana Kane when I grow up.
[This essay was cross-posted at Persephone Magazine.]
Technically speaking, I’m more of a rewatcher than a watcher. I’ve seen a lot of movies and television shows in my life, but ultimately what gives them meaning is the second/third/tenth/nth viewing. I used to do this with books. There are books from my childhood I can still quote wholesale from, an ability I have utterly lost with my grown-up, theoretically more sophisticated reading.
I believe this is because rereading is just so much harder than rewatching these days — I can rewatch something while doing the dishes or cleaning my room. But this is also because watching (and hence, rewatching) has a social quality. I can rewatch Adaptation with a group of friends without much difficulty. Rereading Pride and Prejudice with a group of friends, with even one, has proven much more challenging.
At its best rewatching can be deeply social. I have a whole language of quotes with my sister, for example: we can have a conversation that consists almost entirely of quotes (or oblique references) from movies we watched hundreds of times on our couch growing up. I’m okay with reading and rereading being a solitary act, I think. Rewatching solo, meanwhile, feels like “wasting time.” And yet it’s something I do quite a bit.
Over the last month I rewatched three different movies that have meant a great deal to me at some time or another, with very different social contexts, with very different reactions. It solidified for me the importance of revisiting works of art that matter in your life as you grow up, to see what flavors they lose or take on. I remember from Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking that her husband John stood in their pool one summer and read and reread The French Lieutenant’s Woman, to see how it was put together. I do sometimes bring that technical gaze to the rewatch, but sometimes it’s much less than that. Sometimes I just want to try on something familiar and see how it feels.
(via bon-bon)
this post was brought to you by “the girl with the dragon tattoo”
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(Source: mehreenkasana, via arbitrarily)
Who thinks people talk like this?
The Father: Very dark. Too dark. Dark with an agenda. Overall fascinating idea of what the battle of the sexes is like, but either beyond me or too far out of my context for me to agree.
Miss Julia: I don’t know what she did to deserve her fate, except merely exist, but I think I enjoyed this one the most. Maybe it seemed the most relevant to my life.
Easter: Weirdly upbeat after the first two. Not sure what I was supposed to get from it except a Jesus metaphor I dont’t think I understood. Strindberg does tragedy better (though must they all end in suicide?) because this was facile compared to the other two.
I watched this movie through a haze of tears. It is ostensibly about Margaret Thatcher, but really it is about aging, coming to terms with the creeping irrelevance that age brings.
There is still (but hopefully will not be forever) a novelty in seeing a great woman contemplating her power. (I was reminded of the book I just finished, Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life.) Margaret Thatcher at the height of her power was both inspiring and a cautionary tale.
The powers of the rest of the story, of a lonely old woman coping with her husband’s death, dealing with the guilt of being more than just a wife and mother — well, they may not affect you as they did me. But I was deeply affected. I think as much as Thatcher would repudiate the idea of being a feminist, she is still a figure for feminism. A few of the friends I saw it with felt that Thatcher’s politics were not excoriated enough. Her policies were regressive and problematic, her style dogmatic and combative.
But the movie was not really about Thatcher’s policies, which were quite recent, and for most people are relatively common knowledge (though certainly not mine; I relied on my friend Sam to fill in the details). The movie was about Thatcher the woman — as she is now, for she is alive still, though you would hardly know it.
Meryl Streep somehow seemed deeply aware of Thatcher’s iconoclastic accomplishments as well as her flaws, of the contradictions that make this woman so interesting and yet so irritating simultaneously. Streep really is incandscent. She left me teary and heartbroken even after a totally corny light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel sequence. I did not watch the Golden Globes on Sunday because I was watching this instead; if I had been, somehow, in charge of giving out awards for acting, I would have given best actress to Ms. Streep, who as it turns out, did not need my help anyway.
Above all she was striking. Scene after scene, she was the only woman in a crowd of men, completely undeterred, primly dressed in blue suits day after day. It was assaultive, the constant reminder of how very alone she was, as a woman, stepping into the houses of Parliament, and then on to 10 Downing Street. For that alone, I was overcome with emotion. The rest was all Meryl.
This is the type of movie that makes me upset that I have decided to review everything I watch. I don’t feel qualified to say anything intelligent about this movie. Here are some observations I made but they do not coalesce into anything grander.
- This movie is actually, at times, blue.
- I didn’t really like either of the characters, though I thought both were masterfully pretty and then un-pretty.
- I found this to be a movie much more about class than romance.
- I liked the song at the end even though it was by Grizzly Bear.
- Though I knew that something was wrong, I could not really understand the tragedy. That is pretty tragic itself. It wasn’t that I was unsympathetic to the characters, but it didn’t resonate with me.
- I don’t think I get the whole Michelle Williams thing, though I did think this profile of her in GQ was really upsetting.
- I do get the whole Ryan Gosling thing, even when he’s balding and drunk, which is bad news for me.
- I wish I’d seen this with Melanie.
HYPERVENTILATING
I never published this draft! Publishing now. Better late than never. But because US fans are watching Season 2, observations on the Christmas Special are behind the cut. I will also be rewatching this and recapping it for TFT in February.
Melanie sent me this link, in which Steven Soderbergh, director of my heart, confirms that we are all always watching The Matrix.
This book is not as good as everyone says it is. But it is not as bad as everyone says it is, either.
It was extremely absorbing, which has to mean it was well-written, but its plotting was a bit juvenile — relying too heavily on the soap-operatic revealed secrets to really be engaging. But what was most compelling about it — I suspect why the book made it to Oprah’s book club — are the seemingly authentic voices of its three narrators. Scratch that. The seemingly authentic voices of two of its narrators, Aibileen and Minny, two “colored” maids in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi. It’s hard to believe they were written by a white woman, except of course that the third narrator is an almost-superfluous white woman, Skeeter, who is a dead-ringer Mary Jane for the author if there ever was one.
Skeeter is the object of much discussion — mostly revulsion — by highbrow critics, who accuse her of hijacking agency in the civil rights movement from black people and giving it to white people (she puts together a set of interviews with maids in Jackson, changes all the names, and publishes it. They call it, of course, Help). She is also accused of being a character situated to assuage white guilt over deep, systemic racism that existed for hundreds of years and still exists to this day.
As to the former, I pose a serious question: Can no white person feel sympathetic towards the civil rights movement without being accused of hijacking it? Seriously — maybe the answer is yes. White people better just stay out. I’m not sure that’s practical or productive, but maybe it is right. The most upsetting transaction of agency is when Skeeter literally proposes to publish Aibileen’s words under her name — indeed there is much to be said about storytelling as power, and transforming oral narratives to written narratives. But the characters evince much more self-doubt and criticism of one another than may have been obvious in the movie.
As to the latter — I don’t think anyone — neither Kathryn Stockett, the white author of this book, nor Oprah, the black advocate of it — would argue that the book is not about white guilt. If anything that is the central focus. How do you live with yourself when you live in a world where the rules have always been tipped in your favor? Skeeter’s ability to feel guilt and change is what redeems white people. Maybe they don’t deserve redemption in MIssissippi in the 1960s, but there it is. In the afterword Stockett writes that she was compelled to write this story after her own experience with the black maid who raised her, Dellamare. who she never properly thanked. That’s guilt, but it’s also self-loathing and love.
I think the reason I feel like I want to defend this book is that it’s easy to criticize a book that is merely about being kind. Expressing sympathy for something you know little about is treacherous in this day and age. I don’t think it should be. Criticize the plot, please, which plods and then races alternately, or the superfluous characters, which distract from the main plot. But this is not a conservative book. Two of the narrators are black women and most of the men don’t have a major speaking role. If this is what we need to mediate white feelings about the civil rights movement, then so be it. This book does not pretend it has solved racism, and if anything, the black women end up in worse situations than they did when they started. I’m not saying it’s a great book. I’m saying when the option is between saying nothing and saying something, say something.
