Monday, April 13, 2009 - Posts
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Dana, Jess, I too saw Observe and Report over the weekend and...thud. Much of the conversation about the maybe rape scene has orbited around whether it was funny or not. I didn't think it was funny (or offensive. Faris's injunction for Rogen to keep going neutralized the scene for me)—but then I didn't think the movie was funny. At all. And not because I was sitting through it constantly offended or icked out—that's actually what I was expecting and, in a perverse way, kind of hoping to feel: A movie that makes you want to walk out is always more interesting than a movie that makes you think "Eh. I wonder if they give free refills." Instead, I just thought the jokes didn't land—if "jokes" is even the right word to describe the stunts and dialogue contained in this film.
Observe and Report struck me as the kind of movie you have to come to wanting to laugh, at least a little, to find funny. Digging Seth Rogen or ultra-violent slapstick or the kind of counter-intuitive comment that might become hilarious if you were to repeat it to your friends 15 times outside the theater (Zoolander has a lot of these) could give you the necessary want. Otherwise, nothing helps a joke go over quite like a room full of laughing people—an audience in hysterics could make a comatose girl asking a psycho to keep having sex with her funny. (Oh, Anna Faris, please try a little harder to find a movie that deserves you.) It could probably make a lisping guy shooting heroin seem funny. I imagine it could make violently beating up teenage skateboarders funny. The audience I saw this film with found none of these scenes funny (they're all actually in the movie), and you know what? I think they're really not funny, even if, in the right moment, you could laugh at them. The only thing I thought was amusing about this film was the chase scene leading up to the final, violent ending—and I don't know how much credit director Jody Hill gets to take for the inherent humor of a flaccid penis. I'm pretty sure God wrote that joke.
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As Easter continued on the White House lawn this morning—and back to the dude-what-about-female-athletes beat—I was heartened to read this from Lynn Sweet’s pool report on the basketball station of the White House Easter Egg Roll:
At one of the baskets, the president is shaking hands with the girls from Woodson, when he spots number 50. “Didn’t I just see a story about you in the newspaper?” Obama says to Johnson.
“Johnson” is Jenice Johnson, a 6-foot-6 18-year-old female hoops phenom, profiled in the Washington Post this March. And later:
Obama tells a youngster he wants to “see you shoot a little game.” Tells another “he’s got good form.” Encourages a kid who misses to “keep on going till you make it.”
One small boy got special attention from the president. Obama lifted up the youngster, extending his arms to lift him high enough so that the boy dunked the ball in the basket.
Obama, concerned that no girls were lining up to shoot, asked, “where are the ladies?” That brought some young girls up. He told one, “you gonna be a star some day.”
Cute! For all the attention the New York Times Magazine lavished on little Allonzo Trier (also check out Jason Zengerle’s great TNR profile of Lance Stephenson and the NYC child hoops industry), it’s nice to see the president shower some encouragement on ladies that can handle the rock.
*Post title cribbed from Ryan Lizza's great campaign postmortem, in which the president talks hoops, and flashes a little of that famous ego.
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A guest post from Slate contributor Vanessa Gezari, who writes frequently about Afghanistan and Pakistan:
Given the precariousness of women’s rights in Pakistan and Afghanistan, it’s curious that the so-called Afghan “rape law” has drawn such fury in the U.S. and Europe. Not that the law isn't worthy of condemnation—it is. But being bound by written law to have sex with your husband on a regular basis is no better or worse than the de facto law under which the great majority of Afghan women already live. The more interesting question is why this is being treated like a new outrage when it really is an enduring one. Is it possible that Obama, Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel believe that things have changed so significantly for Afghan women since the Taliban was removed from official power in 2001 that the “rape law” is anything but a codification of normative behavior? How we overestimate our ability to change people’s minds and re-orient their hearts! Law or no law, Sunni or Shia, an Afghan man—like a man in many other parts of the world—can have sex with his wife anytime he wants, whether she wants it or not. And as one commentator noted in response to a CNN story, citing Ohio statute that legalizes spousal rape under some conditions, this shouldn’t surprise us. Anyone who has broached the subject with American cops knows they hold widely divergent views of the validity of marital rape claims.
As a target of western outrage, the “rape law” is a red herring. The grave concern it has stirred devalues the everyday struggles faced by all Afghan women, as opposed to the 10 to 20 percent who, as Shias, would be governed by the proposed law. The greatest challenges to Afghan women’s freedom and safety lie in the unlegislated space of a war-ravaged society. In the Zabul Province in southern Afghanistan this winter—a short drive north of Kandahar, where I’ve been for the last few weeks—the chief prosecutor told me about a recent case in which a man and his wife had argued. Soon afterward, they found her beaten to death and stuffed inside a well. The thinking was that her husband had done this with the help of their son; both men had fled, and the prosecutor expressed little hope of finding them. His office was understaffed, and he was more preoccupied with the endemic corruption that made his job nearly impossible. He had recently arrested and jailed two prosecutors, he said, but his attempts to lock up another crooked local official had been derailed by high-ranking authorities in Kabul. He described this kind of interference, not drug smuggling, murder or rape, as his greatest law enforcement challenge.
The conversation about where Afghan women stand, where they should stand, and what changes are needed in both law and practice to bring them there must be undertaken by Afghans in the context of their own culture or risk sparking a xenophobic backlash that could ultimately be more damaging to women’s interests. That’s why it’s encouraging that more than 100 Afghan officials and public figures recently signed a petition expressing disapproval of the proposed law. Those signatures carry far more weight, in this instance, than the words of a U.S. president.
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According to the Financial Times (via Jezebel), lipstick is no longer the recession-related financial indicator: It has been supplanted by liquid foundation.
"L’Oréal,
the world’s largest beauty company, has found in the UK market that
foundation has edged out lipstick as the 'must-have' product for women,
with more than one third of 18 to 19-year-olds citing it as their most
essential beauty product against 8 per cent opting for lipstick.
"The
only age group which still appreciates the glamour of painted lips is
the over-60s, with 40 per cent surveyed citing lipstick as the most
treasured item."
What does the shift from lips to skin quality mean?! Is it a nod to the ubiquity of digital cameras among the under-20 set? Has gloss become ascendant in the post-recession world? So many deeply important and unanswered questions.
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Dana, I saw Observe and Report this weekend and I must say, I found the rape scene—in which Seth Rogen's sad-sack security guard has sex with Anna Faris's makeup counter floozy while she's passed out—to be just another stomach-turning plot point in a movie consisting of several similarly revolting scenes. If you are to take the film and its characters seriously, which perhaps is beside the point, Rogen's cop not only sexually assaults Faris but basically stalks her, and the movie ends with him publicly slut-shaming her.
Maybe I'll buy that the movie is failed satire, and certainly director Jody Hill's interview with the Onion's AV Club (via Majikthise) shows that he has a totally muddled vision of the rape scene and its context:
AVC: In the Times piece, they describe the scene you’re talking about as Seth Rogen’s character forcing himself on Anna Faris. Is that how you perceived that scene?
JH: [Pause.] I dunno. I’ve always kind of liked scenes that you talk about how fucked-up they are. I would have been happy without any dialogue in that scene. I wanted to show them just having sex and her passed out, and I thought that would have been funnier. But I think I have a darker sense of humor than most people. So at the end, [Faris’character] is okay with it. [Laughs.] And that was like, “I’ll shoot it both ways.” So I actually shot it both ways. I just kept the camera rolling. There’s like a line that’s “We’re okay laughing, and you’re pushing the envelope.” But you’re not really pushing the envelope until you cross that line where a lot of people don’t go along with you. I tried to do it in a few scenes in this movie, where a lot of people aren’t going to go along with the film or with what we’re trying to do.Hopefully that means we’re actually pushing the envelope. [Laughs.] You know what I mean by that? I think if you’re really pushing the envelope, you have to not include everybody, if that makes sense. Or else it’s not really pushing the envelope.
As blogger Majikthise points out, "[Hill's] reply seems to confirm my theory that Faris' 'motherfucker' line is a cop out—a ploy contrived to keep the scene 'funny' instead of taking it to an even darker place." And that's the crux of the problem with this movie: It tried to hedge its bets between dark comedy and just dark, and managed to accomplish neither. It's as if Will Ferrell tried to make a Todd Solondz movie—Hill went for cheap laughs rather than depth or coherence of vision.
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