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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
More than half of adult women are mothers. It's not a lifestyle. It's
not a trend. It's just one of those things—you know, continuation of
the species and all that. A biological urge complicated by societal
factors that has been, not incidentally, the subject of great art and
literature over the past few centuries. Into that pantheon comes Motherhood: The Movie, promoted by a trailer full of worn tropes and painful moments. Want to silence Uma Thurman, the ruthless killer bride of Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2? Stick a binkie in her mouth. Motherhood, the Great Infantilizer. How did we come to this? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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Hanna, I think you’re exactly right that Where The Wild Things Are is alternately too boring and too scary for kids.
And as counterintuitive as it might sound to say about a beautifully
shot movie featuring overly emotional, jeering, violent, hybrid beasts
who bicker, build forts, and knock holes in trees, I think it just
might be a failure of imagination as well.
If Wild Things existed in a cultural universe that was not
saturated with twee, quirk, and thirtysomething ennui—if, in other
words, it existed in a universe where the McSweeney’s
aesthetic was fringe—this movie might be fresh. Even as it is, the
decision to make the wild things neurotic, angsty, misbehaving, and
nitpicky initially plays like a surprising choice. When we
first come upon the monsters, arguing in the forest, it’s jarring that
they sound like unhappy versions of the teenagers from Dazed & Confused. Whatever you imagined the wild things to be like when reading the original, this wasn’t it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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The real root of the vampire trend, according to Stephen Marche at Esquire, is that straight women want to have sex with gay guys. It’s an interesting thesis, but I’m not buying it ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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If you’re a woman, then the cause to legalize marijuana wants you. Most activists working with the Marijuana Policy Project are men, Laura Greenback writes in High Times.
But they want to change that. So Greenback is doing some soul searching
about why women aren’t gunning for ganja. She offers the theory that
women “feel the pressure to be seen as strong workers and perfect
mothers, so we shy away from getting behind something our coworkers and
PTA members might see as ‘out there’ ” ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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After The Wrestler, Nacho Libre, Rocky, When We Were Kings,
and scores of other films about hand to hand combat, you would be
forgiven for thinking there’s nothing that could go down in a ring you
haven’t seen before. You would be wrong ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Bruno approaches. It’s three and a half weeks until the arrival of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat follow-up, about a gay, Austrian fashion reporter who talks like this “Ich sleep in a seaweed body wrap under a Zac Posen Navy-Cut Nightshirt. In mein dreams, ich sleep naked in a giant reed basket drifting slowly down ze Nile, cradled in ze arms of Daniel Radcliffe.” But Cohen’s already posing naked on the cover of GQ, worrying Austrians, troubling troubgay rights groups, and sticking his bum in Eminem’s face. The emerging question: Will Bruno be good for the gays?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Pixar’s making a movie about a girl! The animation company announced its schedule through 2012
and not one, but two of their films will feature females. Harping on
Pixar for not having made a movie with a female heroine sooner,
especially when I’m still high on Up! (just as Meghan is), feels a little like ragging on Jackson Pollack for not painting straight lines. Still, it’s exciting news.
The first film, Newt, out in 2011, imagines... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dana, on your recommendation, I saw the scream-filled, sharply funny Drag Me to Hell this weekend, and I didn't think the protagonist was punished for being a striving woman. I thought she was punished for trying to raise up from her humble farm girl origins... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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As Nina pointed out last week, and the Times pointed out over the weekend, Disney's The Princess and The Frog, its first animated feature to star a black heroine, Tiana, is already controversial, and it doesn't come out until December. Watching the trailer for it on the big screen over the weekend (it's playing before Pixar's totally awesome Up!) got me thinking about another potential source of contention: Tiana's voice... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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When it opens this weekend, I hope a lot of XXers will go see Drag Me to Hell,
the new Sam Raimi horror movie, so we can discuss it here. In addition
to being (I thought) a satisfying two hours' worth of alternating
laughs and screams, it's a very rich text about female power. So rich,
in fact, that I'm not sure yet exactly how to read it... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan wasn't the only person who missed Sarah Connor. Terminator Salvation lost the weekend's box office war to another sequel, Night at The Museum.
There's surely some "in this economy" fauxrgument to be made explaining
this outcome (ITE people want family friendly fare, not dark tales
about the world's end), but I think Terminator's problem is more basic, a structural flaw, a storytelling 101 screw-up.
Apocalypse narratives—movies, books, TV about the end of the
world—can be divided into two groups: stopping the apocalypse
narratives and surviving the apocalypse narratives... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Terminator
movie franchise is notable for its creation of one of the earliest
tough female action-hero characters: Sarah Connor, mother of John
Connor. In the later movies, her son becomes the leader of the
resistance to Skynet, the computer system that launched the war against
humans, but in the first two she plays a crucial role. In a sense,
she’s a Mary figure, the mother of the savior, but rather than cast a
vulnerable softie, James Cameron cast Linda Hamilton, tough girl. Who
can forget her biceps, or her famous chin-up scene? So I went to see Terminator: Salvation hoping to find more of the same gender complexity. Instead, this movie, directed by McG is as conventional as can be... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The joyful, saccharine, karaoke-inspring Glee, which premiered last night on Fox, got me wondering: What did we do before Tracy Flick? She first appeared, embodied by Reese Witherspoon, in 1999's Election,
a previously unidentified personality type, the driven, ruthless,
terrifyingly ambitious striver who micromanages her inevitable rise to
power in relentlessly cheerful tones. In the decade since Election, Flick has been transformed from a fresh, new character into an archetype, found frequently in... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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More and more frequently, movie trailers
are better than the movies they're promoting. As they've become
increasingly adept at short-handing a feature-length plot, and
increasingly unconcerned about revealing all the elements of said plot,
they play like accelerated shorts, complete with a story arc and
emotional climax, ruining plot twists and funny-the-first-time-you
hear-them jokes. They're trailers for people who hate surprises.
David Edelstein, in his New York review of the new Terminator film (aka, the film where Christian Bale lost his shit), demurs from revealing... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Caryn James:
With stylish women flaunting recessionista chic and Michelle Obama
embracing her modest roots—“my parents were working class people,” she
repeats in speeches—it may seem like a timely advance that a flurry of
independent films (in theaters and on DVD) are depicting those
forgotten heroines, working-class women. In Wendy and Lucy, a deglamorized Michelle Williams lives out of her car while driving to Alaska in search of a job. There’s Frozen River, with Melissa Leo in her Oscar-nominated role as a trailer-park single mom, and Julia, with Tilda Swinton playing a downwardly spiraling alcoholic.
These movies are unsentimental and wonderfully realistic on the
surface, but take a closer look: why is every one of these heroines... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Like every other former sci-fi geek in NYC, I (sorry) trekked out to see the Star Trek
movie on Friday night. My assessment? J. J. Abrams has turned out a
well-made B movie: The film moves along at a crisp pace, hits all the
key retro-nostalgia moments, and is designed to be... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I did a dumb thing over the weekend: I went to see Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. I have excuses—it was raining, a soft spot for Matthew McConaughey—but they are insufficient. I don't think I've ever seen a movie for women that is so disdainful of women, and I've seen He's Just Not That Into You. Ghosts assumes that we're all so predictable and pliable that every single one of us—from the 16-year-old to the MILF (duh, this movie has a MILF), from the desperate-to-get-laid bridesmaids (are they any other kind?) to the heroine—would want to shag a man with no redeemable qualities except that he looks like Matthew McConaughey. Bongo McC is a handsome guy, but I remain stalwart in my belief that at least some of us could resist a sleazy, cheesy, untrustworthy, commitment-phobic, game-playing cad who says things like "Every night I swim in a lake of sex." Ew.
How does a film such as this, a chick flick that doesn't understand or even like women, come to be? I blame Judd Apatow, the director/writer/producer responsible for the ongoing bonanza in dick flicks, romantic comedies with male protagonists. (Thanks to New York's Vulture for noting that this particular rom-com sub genre needed a name.) These movies aren't a new phenomenon—Annie Hall, Say Anything, There's Something About Mary all qualify— but thanks to the success of Apatow's The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, they're more popular than ever, with at least four similar films coming out this summer.
Now, it's not really Apatow's fault that some of the movies copycatting him suck—his movies don't suck—but Ghosts sucks so hard because it has taken a subtle flaw in Apatow's oeuvre and blown it into a whole movie. Meghan wrote in an incisive critique Knocked Up:
If Apatow tries to suggest that guys need to grow up a bit to meet women's high expectations, he, like his own characters, doesn't seem to get that maybe there's a lot more to women than these expectations.You might say his critique is muddied by its own joyful enactment of male high jinks, and the corresponding absence of anything similar on the part of the women.
Apatow's male characters may have to learn a thing or two, but they still have richer inner lives, more imagination, and more spark than his female characters. His women are less interesting and less fun than his men. And in lesser hands than Apatow's, these lesser-than female characters become totally cardboard, as they do in Ghosts, and we're left with a dick flick masquerading as a chick flick that no woman or man could possibly enjoy.
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"Why Democracy" is an organization that produces documentaries intended to "start a global conversation about democracy." One gets the impression, reading their website, that the filmmakers want to steer the conversation in a particular direction. As a foundation for art, this does not sound promising. But last night I watched and loved Why Democracy's Please Vote for Me, a film that follows three Chinese eight-year-olds in their quest to be elected class monitor. It's an unassuming, fascinating little documentary about the profound stress of being an eight-year-old. Along the way it makes the worst possible case for democratic reform in China or anywhere else.
The film starts with a change of school rules; instead of selecting the class monitor, as teachers have always done at this elementary school in Wuhan, the teachers will select three nominees and let the class elect its favorite. The process will involve a talent show, speeches, and debates. The nominees—two boys and a girl—are revealed. All hell breaks loose. Nice kids turn into scheming rivals, bullying their classmates into shouting down the other nominees. The children go home to parents who write their speeches, force them to stay up late rehearsing debate tactics, insult the other kids, and, in one case, bribe their classmates. Most painful to watch is how the process forces the overt expression of once-subtle social norms. The boys are vicious; the girl retreats into passivity and bursts into tears during her speech. The boys' parents tell them to attack the faults of their competitors and catch their fellow students in lies; the girl's mother reminds her of her own shortcomings, suggesting she work on her "communication skills."
I won't be giving anything away when I point out that this particular experiment in democracy ends in tears and tantrums. The shocking conclusion: Eight-year-olds are unfit for self-governance. No ideological points have been scored, nothing useful argued. But given the tendency of activism to quash inquisitiveness (see Tyler Cowen's take on The End of Poverty here), it's nice to see some filmmakers ask a question with some degree of sincerity, in the spirit of discovery and with genuine curiosity about what they might uncover.
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Last week Dahlia linked to a piece by Salon's Rebecca Traister about TV Land's new dating show The Cougar, in which a bunch of young dudes try and woo a 40-year-old woman. Traister hates the show and the whole cougar phenomenon in general because, "Of all the things that men do that women might reasonably wish to do as well isn't this....mimicking the midlife crisis-penis-car-crippling-insecurity version of mature masculinity...one thing we could have just walked away from without regret?" Some behavior isn't empowering, for anyone, and should be left well enough alone.
A story in this weekend's New York Times got me thinking a similar, if inverted, thought. It was a piece about how Hollywood's leading men are getting fat. Seriously. Apparently, the expanding waistlines of Russell Crowe, John Travolta, Denzel Washington, Hugh Grant and Leonardo DiCaprio constitute a trend worthy of examination in the paper of record. The piece's writer, Michael Cieply, describes a scene between Crowe and Jeff Daniels in the just-released State of Play as "Two men. One notebook. Four chins." Ba dum dum ching. To reverse paraphrase Traister, of all the things women do that men might reasonably wish to do as well, obsessing over one's weight—or being publicly shamed about that weight by the media—shouldn't make the list.
New York's Vulture points out that some might say, "[T]his kind of criticism levels the playing field a bit and puts men in the same position that women have faced for years." I would say it just gives everyone body-image issues.
Cieply writes in his piece that "Hollywood's women may [may!!] have weight issues of their own. But it is somehow less noticeable, possibly [possibly!!] because actresses who expand do not often get roles to showcase that growth." In other words, larger women hardly ever appear in movies because they never, ever get cast. Is it noble of the Times to draw attention to this double standard? So that, what? Larger men don't get cast either? Perhaps, in the interest of equality, actors, just by virtue of turning 45, should start losing roles—exactly like their female counterparts! Then we’ll never have anyone who looks even remotely like a normal, middle-aged person in any movies ever again, but, at least, that would be fair. Or, you know, equally unfair.
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17 Again, a film about a 38-year-old named Mike with a sucky life who gets to go back to being 17, when he looked like Tiger Beat pin-up Zac Efron, opens today. ("What is Zac Efron?" Manohla Dargis wonders in in today's Times. He does have a space-alien quality—those vacant, kewpie doll eyes—but he's just the newest model in an old line of cars that go fast, for a short period of time. Think David Cassidy, Kirk Cameron, The Backstreet Boys). Why does Mike's life suck? Well, he just lost a promotion and quit his job, he's getting a divorce and his kids hate him—but the more fundamental reason that his life stinks is that Mike chose to become a teen father.
See, when Mike was 17, and a star basketball player with a bright future, his pretty girlfriend informed him she was with child. He decided to do the "right thing" (as EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum says, "Levi Johnston, consider yourself schooled.") and happily married his sweetheart. But 20 years later, Mike's decision has had unpleasant consequences. Mike never went to college, so he's been overlooked time and time again for a promotion. He's also spent the last two decades bitterly resenting his wife and kids for the sacrifices he made to be with them. Sacrifices that have kept him from the life he thinks he should have, and could have, had. So Mike wishes he could be 17 again, before he gave up his future for his family.
Unsurprisingly, the film goes out of its way to neutralize this message—that teen parenthood might require enormous, painful sacrifices that don't always pay off—by having Mike "realize," thanks to his repeat performance as a 17-year-old, that his wife and kids are the most important thing in his life and he really ought to appreciate them more.
The movie is schizophrenic about teenagers, sex and responsibility in other ways as well. When Mike returns to high school and condoms are being distributed in his health class he makes an impassioned plea for abstinence. This is played for laughs—Mike's daughter is in his class, and of course he doesn't want her having sex-—but since we know Mike was having sex in high school, and obviously without condoms, it's unfathomably short sighted. Wouldn't this man, of all men, know the importance of protection? Probably, but then he'd have to advocate condom usage—and God forbid a film intended for real teenagers do anything like that.