This week, in anticpation of the upcoming WAM Prom on Friday, I'll be blogging some thoughts on music and culture by the way of our mash-up theme of hip-hop and disco.

One of the myths about disco, one that I think that contributes to a lot of misunderstandings about it, is that it was a brief trend that collapsed as quickly as it rose up in the 70s. In reality, disco was just another step in a long 20th century evolution of dance music, and it ended for the same reason a lot of musical trends do: it morphed into other forms. If anything, disco had a larger impact than most music trends do, as elements of it came out in techno and all other electronic dance music, post-punk, New Wave, and most importantly, hip-hop (which is why we're doing a dual theme for this year's WAM Prom.) But one reason I think there's a sense that disco was its own thing in a way that other trends aren't is that the kind of dancing people think of when they think of disco is this elaborate, ballroom-style dancing that has no relationship to the bouncing and writhing that is most dancing people do in America, whether at a rock show, hip-hop club, or rave. You know what I mean. People think "disco" and they think of John Travolta playing Tony Manero.

Or Travolta's solo style dancing in the same movie:

Nothing against Travolta's unbelievable dancing skills, but this wasn't actually how people (at least prior to this movie) danced to disco, which was, from what I understand, much like they've danced to everything since, which is mostly formless bouncing and writhing. Now, all sorts of music trends have movies that exploited them to make semi-musicals with elaborate dancing, but Saturday Night Fever became synonymous in the public imagination with disco in a way that hasn't happened before or since to a musical form. Why? 

There's a lot of reasons: the dancing is really that good, the music is that much better, a zeitgeists was hit. But I think one reason is that Saturday Night Fever purported to be based on a true story, giving the audience the feeling that they really were taking a peek into the Brooklyn disco scene by watching this fictional film, in much the same way that 8 Mile got a little extra boost because it's so well-known that Eminem did in fact scrape his way up through rap battles like the one portrayed in the movie. But while I think Eminem's life is pretty well-documented, the "true story" of Saturday Night Fever is actually, well, a hoax. 

The whole thing started with a New York Magazine story by Nik Cohn in 1976 called "Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", a story about the elaborate disco lifestyle of the Italian-American regulars at a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn disco. The story was a hit; it seems it must have gone into development as a movie in record time. The only problem wiht it is that Cohn made the whole thing up. 

He finally admitted the hoax 20 years later, in 1997.

For an article in the December 8 issue celebrating the 20th anniversary of the movie, Cohn tells of a disco deception born of frustration. The British writer describes how he went to Brooklyn's now legendary 2001 Odyssey searching in vain for a flamboyantly dressed fellow he had spotted in the club's entrance a week earlier. "I didn't learn much...I made a lousy interviewer: I knew nothing about this world, and it showed. Quite literally, I didn't speak the language.

"So I faked it. I conjured up the story of the figure in the doorway, and named him Vincent...I wrote it all up. And presented it as fact," Cohn confesses. "There was no excuse for it...I knew the rules of magazine reporting, and I knew that I was breaking them. Bluntly put, I cheated."

The culture and specifically the emphasis on dancing skills was a mish-mash of Cohn's own imagination and what he observed in the Northern soul clubs in Great Britain in the 60s. It's one of those stories that has drifted under the waves, because most people don't really think it's that important (though why not in our James Frey-bashing era, I don't know). But while it's far from the most important story of journalistic misinformation, I still think it's not something that should be waved off. After all, Cohn's imaginings supplanted the more reality-based portrayals of disco, most of which I think are far more interesting than the image that Cohn painted. To make it all worse, if people had a better idea of how disco actually was in the 70s, I think it would be easier to see it as part of the larger quilt of American pop music, which is always mutating as different genres swap and steal and morph into something new, yet still familiar. 

Lots of online discussion about this movie, notably from Melissa Harris-Perry and Nelson George.  I'm with Jill on this; above all other things, the idea of this movie makes my eyes close with boredom. Another story that puts a white person at the center of a story about racial injustice in order to assuage the white guilt of mainstream American audiences?  Oh boy!  After that, I plan to think about how even though I'm too good to do something icky like get an abortion, I'll generously allow that others should have that right, and after being so exquisitely self-sacrificing, I'll reward myself by listening to some country music renamed "bluegrass" to make it more palatable. 

If for no other reason, I'm angry at "The Help" for raising the usage rates of the words "well-meaning" and "problematic" online, causing me to seriously consider logging off the internet until the euphemism rates get back to normal levels.  

Movies like this, no matter how vigorously anti-racist on their surface, exist to give people an excuse to believe racism is something that happened in the past but is no longer a real problem.  At most points in time, this urge is fucked up, but since we're in a current cycle of---to use euphemistic language of my own---strained racial relations, it's especially fucked up.  I suppose I'll be mewled at for drawing this conclusion without seeing the movie, and in my defense, I'm going to say one thing.  Sitting in a crowd of white people clucking their tongues at how bad the South was in the 60s while ignoring shit like this is bad for my mental health.  I have a doctor's note.  So I'm going to take a pass on this one and not even feel remotely bad about it. 

I have quite a bit of work to do that will take me off-blog today, but I did want to share with you a passage I read from David Denby's New Yorker review of "Crazy, Stupid, Love" that I found quite scintillating as I jogged in place at the local gym.  Describing a scene where Ryan Gosling's character takes Emma Stone's character to his bachelor pad for the first time, Denby writes:

[A]nd arriving at his wrap-around-glass bachelor pad, demands that he remove his shirt, which he does, revealing a chest and abs so perfectly sculpted that she's revolted.  She says, "Seriously? It's like you're Photosopped!"  Men in the audience may be relieved to hear that at least some women find the perfection of a gym body too close to narcissism to be a turn-on, and Stone gives the line, and many others, a quick, precise, tart delivery.

Women in the audience, on the the other hand, took their relief in the realization that should they be bold enough to achieve physical perfection, no one will hold it against them.  I, for one, would like to thank the two male directors and the male screenwriter of "Crazy, Stupid, Love" for this revelation.  I had been up late at nights recently worried that perhaps I should lighten up on the gym and diet routine, but now I can go after it worry-free.  

In all seriousness, there should be a special Oscar for rom-com actresses who manage to sell odious dialogue like that.  At least the screenwriters should send them flowers with cards thanking said actresses for rescuing their careers from their own hackery.

Alyssa Rosenberg has an interesting post up about how some people refuse to accept that "Harry Potter" has political themes.  There are probably two camps of people who believe this, though it's obviously false (which I'll get into): a) people who just think politics is a nasty sporting event and has no real world implication and b) people who strongly disagree with JK Rowling's point of view and so pretend that she actually agrees with them so they can continue enjoying the books.  Alyssa deals with both groups in her post.  I'll point out that I blogged just the other day about a variation on the second group, situations where people like certain characters in fiction so much they impose their own worldview on them, even when there's textual evidence against them.  I was also dealing with this to a degree in my (what I thought was light-hearted, but man, the angry responses I got) piece on how Harry Potter is more of a jock character than a geek character.  Unfortunately, I got responses from people that liked my post that also missed the point.  They wrote me to say that because Harry wasn't a geek, they disapproved and wouldn't read it.  In general, I find a tendency to treat fiction this way, like it's supposed to be a comforting fantasy of a world full of people that are more like you kicking ass, upsetting.  I prefer fiction to be challenging, and that challenge to include characters that are enticing as characters even if they wouldn't be my best friend in real life.  

Okay, that out of the way, I do want to talk about the political themes in "Harry Potter", though I want to be very clear that because X is a theme in the story in no way means all the good characters agree or even understand with the ideas that the story brings forward.  It's fiction, not a treatise.  Waht makes the political themes poignant is that the characters struggle with political ideals in the same way ordinary people do, without full historical knowledge or really thinking things through or applying political philosophy to current events. The characters may not even grasp that political ideas are political, with the exception of the hyper-aware Hermione.  They just react to them with a bundle of desires, compulsions, fears, and moral bravery, and the politics of their world are very personalized and attached to real, complex people.  It's quite a bit like real life, where the big picture is hard to see. 

After seeing the last movie Saturday, I was impressed by how much the political themes of it really resonated even more with me than when I read the books.  I don't think it's a coincidence that it's because this is post-Obama's election, which has brought forward a surge of nationalistic fervor from people who are insistent on both American exceptionalism and have a very specific idea of what makes America exceptional, and it no more involves electing black Democratic Presidents that the Death Eaters in "Harry Potter" are interested in electing Muggle-borns to head the Ministry of Magic.  The focus is on the personal vendetta-holding and power-mongering of Voldemort, but that Voldemort is an asshole doesn't really explain why he's able to get so much support from the wizarding world. To that, we have to look at the internal politics of their world.  The Death Eaters---and the latest movie does a really good job of conveying this austerely---are fundamentally traditionalists who have no desire to bring the wizarding world into the modern era.  This was obvious enough in the past, but now that we have the Tea Party to compare them to, it almost reads as anvilicious, except that the story predates current events.  The good guys are far more modern, but even within that, they're hardly saints but are often completely complicit in the injustices of their world that allow the views of the traditionalists to have so much sway.  At the end of it all, you are left with the hope that the good guys realize it's not enough to be generally tolerant of the Muggle-born but still living in a society built on unjust labor practices and casual racism towards Muggles. 

That's what I really think raises these books above more pedantic literature.  Rowling doesn't let anything be easy in the wizarding world.  In the first couple of books, you are really right there with Harry thinking that wizards are just a superior group of people to Muggles, though there are hints that their self-imposed segregation that they claim exists to protect Muggles instead serves to keep them from learning and modernizing in ways that would make them a kinder, more evolved people.  Over time, you learn more about how disturbing and often medieval their culture is, and how they don't think twice about barbaric acts.  More disturbingly, you discover that even the more liberal people of their society have massive blind spots, especially with regards to the enslavement of elves, the abuse of goblins, and their own inabilities to really take advantage of all the benefits of modernization.  The way that wizards are actually behind Muggles in certain ways---they don't have TV!---is something that's easy to write off at first, but as the books go on, you realize that the wizarding world is actually very dysfunctional and their sense of superiority to Muggles has basically closed them off to major avenues of innovation that would improve their world. 

And just to complicate it further, our hero Harry is just as guilty as anyone else.  His initial responses to Hermione's complaints about the injustices of their world is to find her either annoying or unpatriotic, even when his conscience tells him that she has a point.  He's too immature to realize that you can both love a culture and be critical of it, and in fact it's often because someone loves a culture that they criticize it.  They believe that this culture has the potential to grow and change and become something better.  (Indeed, Hermione grows up to be a bureaucratic activist who fights to make the wizarding world a better place.)  It's a lesson that obviously misses a lot of adults in America, from conservatives who conflate loving America with refusing to see, much less correct, injustice.  But sadly, I've definitely seen leftists who let their criticisms of America cause them to be reflectively anti-American.  It's rare, of course---we're definitely more Hermione-mature on average than conservatives---but I definitely saw, for instance, a couple of people on Twitter say that they were going to root against the U.S. team in the World Cup just because it's the U.S.  They're ridiculously naive, of course, starting with the notion that other countries ther reflexively support against us are such great places.  I'm far more Team Hermione: we should love our country, and because we love it, we should fight for it to be better. 

This aspect of the books really came out well in the latest movie.  The scene where you see the tortured, miserable dragon in Gringotts was deeply moving, and a scene in the movie that pretty much every person I've talked about the movie with has mentioned.  The ugly fact of the matter is both the bad guy and the good guys in the wizarding world looked the other way as the goblins tortured this dragon for the financial benefit of wizards.  It's Hermione's talent at imagining a better world that saves them; she sees the dragon as a creature who longs to be free, and this gives her the inspiration to find a way out of the bank.  It was a neat little encapsulation of some of the larger themes of the book.  In "Harry Potter", it's not enough to be against the bad guys.  The characters cannot excel until they stop being blind to all the ways they also benefit from injustice, and instead make the brave choice to be better than that. 

Which is, incidentally, why I think a lot of feminists see feminist themes where I didn't really see any.  The justice theme underpins the entire series, and the fact that it's not grappled with on gender in much depth is a disappointment.  I have my own theories as to why that is, but that would require another post entirely. 

I will say I have one small criticism of Alyssa's post.  She relies heavily on Rowling's real life activism and views when it comes to extrapolating the themes in "Harry Potter".  I'm uncomfortable doing that.  Often writers use political ideas they don't agree with as themes because they work with the story.  Joss Whedon is an atheist and a liberal, but "Buffy" and "Firefly" have religious and libertarian ideologies as themes, because within the work, those ideas are more evocative.  I still like both works a lot, and again, I maintain that ideological tests of art are just a bad idea. 

With all the excitement over the last Harry Potter movie coming out, I thought it would be a fun time to float a thought I've had about the book that often seems to surprise people when I mention it.  Even recently I was talking with some folks who were plowing through the books and enjoying them, and when one of them characterized Harry as "nerdy", I had to take issue. 

"Harry isn't a nerd," I said, "Harry is a jock."  I mean, Harry has an existential crisis that gives him some depth, but social outcast and/or geek he's not.  The opposite, in fact. 

I realized then that the "band of misfits" theme has so much power over the American imagination (maybe not the British, which could explain Rowling's choices) that people just sort of shove Harry and his friends into that mold, and then rely on a handful of rationalizations for it---Harry wears glasses, Hermione is a bookworm, Ron is a redhead---in order for that theory to make sense.  We're used to the X-Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Scooby Gang, so much so that we don't see that Harry's trajectory is the inverse of Buffy's.  Buffy is a former cheerleader whose magic powers actually make her a geek and an outcast.  Harry is a nobody-special who finds out that he's special, and becomes not just the star athlete and hero of his school, but an actual celebrity.  Sure, there's ups and downs, but his trajectory is away from being the outcast and towards being the homecoming king.  Which may not be as emotionally satisfying as "my greatness makes me an outcast", but is probably more realistic.  In his world, being a badass is appreciated and he's realistically rewarded in his society for it.  

I'd argue that not only is Harry a jock character, but his friends also do not fit the traditional "band of misfits" mode.  Let's look at the evidence:

*Harry is the star of his Quidditch team, and basically is the equivalent in English football to a star striker, and in American football to the quarterback. 

*Harry's girlfriend is not only a star athlete as well, but is clearly the most popular and beautiful girl in school, with all the boys fawning over her.  It's a feminist touch that Rowling didn't make her the wizarding version of a cheerleader, but that's what makes the books so perfect for the modern era.  Rowling gets that girls can be popular in their high schools without being merely support for the boys.

*Which brings me to Hermione.  Hermione is the best piece of evidence for the "band of misfits" theory, but she still doesn't rise to the level of a true geek character.  Oh sure, she gets taunted for being Muggle-born and is the smart girl who annoys the other kids.  But while I'd say she's a tad nerdy at the beginning of the books, she evolves into one of the popular kids at Hogwarts.  She becomes very beautiful, is good friends with the most famous young man in their world, and she dates a famous Quidditch player.  Seriously, at one point she's basically a high school kid dating the equivalent of a young Cristiano Ronaldo.  I think it's cool that Rowling is acknowledging that the culture is making room for girls that are both accomplished and still popular.  And that's what Hermione is; no true outcast character would actually date one of the most famous athletes in the world. 

*Harry and Ron, on the other hand, are more stereotypical privileged young men who only put forward a C effort in school because they know they can coast into adulthood on their families' reputation.

*By the way, Harry's parents are wealthy, handsome people.  If anything, Harry's father is more of a cocky son of a bitch who coasts on charm and privilege.  Harry's mom is the homecoming queen who is nice to the geeks, a type that isn't as familiar in pop culture as the "mean girl" type, but is still a type.  Harry is portrayed as a chip off the block. 

*The most genuinely nerdy character is Severus Snape, which becomes even more clear in the flashbacks where Snape hates James Potter for his easy charm with the ladies, especially Lily, who Snape loves.  Snape is shown as being tortured by the popular kids when he's young.  As an adult, he and Harry don't like each other, and it's a continuation of the nerd-jock animus that both of them feel. 

*Let's face it; if "The Social Network" took place at Hogwarts, Mark Zuckerberg would be in Slytherin and the Winklevoss twins would be in Gryffindor.  Case closed. 

It's worth pondering if Harry Potter is so much more popular than many other series that have similar settings and themes because the books avoid the "band of misfits" structure.  "Band of misfits" is a trope that has great appeal to the traditionally geeky fantasy audiences, but Harry is accessible to people who have no relationship to that trope or what it feels like to be a misfit. 

Spoilers.

So, a review of "X-Men: First Class".  Well, it wasn't nearly as good I'd been led to believe from some of the raves I read online.  I think people are so desperate for a superhero movie that actually goes beneath the surface and struggles with some larger themes that they graded this one on a curve.  But this movie had a number of major flaws that were really distracting:

1) While the lead actors were really good, the supporting cast had some distracting clunkers in it, especially January Jones.  I fail to understand casting bad actors in a movie, seriously.  There are thousands of people who want a break who are better than some of these actors. Cast one of them.  What's stopping you?  Laziness, I assume.

2) The script was really uneven.  There were a number of great parts in it, but there were an equal number of head-thumpingly stupid moments.  Some really atrocious lines, and the whole scene where the X-Men are naming themselves needed to be cut, burned, and never spoken of again.  

3) This is minor in the grand scheme of things, but was to me really indicative of how lazy this entire enterprise was.  The costuming in this movie was unforgivable, especially since they were clearly trying to borrow some of the glory of "Mad Men" and the cultural fascination with the early 60s.  As I joked on Twitter, the miniskirt was invented in 1965, but the costume department for this movie seemed to think all women in 1962 were wearing them.  It's not that I object to miniskirts.  That's just one of the most obvious problems.  Mostly the suits men were wearing and other outfits looked generic and modern, and not like the 60s at all.  This is supposed to be a stylized film.  I fail to understand why not just hire the costume designer from "Mad Men" and pay her whatever she wants.  Ditto on the hair, though the make-up was fine. 

I think in a lot of ways it was more disappointing because there was a good movie buried inside this one.  We joked afterwards that "Magneto: Nazi Hunter" would have been an awesome movie, for instance.  I don't really mind the Cuban missile crisis as a backdrop, and the action sequence where they captured the submarine was sublime.  There were lots of instances, in fact, where I just longed for the movie to live up to its potential---the bar scene in Argentina, the joke about the White Queen projecting sexual fantasies so that men believed they were real, things like that.  Above all, I really dug the underlying idea of the movie.  At the end, there is no resolution between Xavier and Magneto, and if anything, the thumb was on the scale for Magneto and his crew of badasses, while Xavier was left with the dorky white dude brigade.  Which is how it should be; audiences should be forced to take Magneto's arguments more seriously than they were asked in the previous X-Men movies, where Magneto was a purer villain and his mutant army seemed like a bunch of whiners because they were skeptical that assimilation was an effective strategy. 

In fact, I suspect there's a draft of the movie that's  much better out there, but that the studio system chewed it up and put demands on the script such as "more time with the younger mutants".  There's a lot of good in the script, especially in terms of characterizing Xavier as an overprivileged twit who can't really understand what it's like to really be oppressed, and in terms of how Magneto's status as a Holocaust survivor and an orphan makes him feel excluded from normal people to begin with.  I can definitely see why people liked it more than I did; they concentrated on the good and ignored the bad.  But I really think that audiences should demand more.  These characters clearly mean a lot to people, and the amount of money spent on these movies should buy, at bare minimum, a clunker-free script, good costumes and set design, and good acting.  I know that it's possible---"Iron Man", the first one, was put together brilliantly, even though it was fluffy on its themes compared to "X-Men".  What we need is a superhero movie that weds the deeper themes of this movie with the level of storytelling skill that was in play in "Iron Man". 

Someone's Twitter stream had a link to this mess up.  You see, some nutjobs have decided to make a film called "Gates of Hell" where abortion drives black people crazy and then they kill all of us, because they are dark angels of our souls, or something:

Black power. Abortion. Terrorism. "Prophetic fiction". Three years in the making, "Gates of Hell" is a documentary from the year 2016 that chronicles the crimes of a band of domestic terrorists known as the Zulu 9. Finnish filmmaker Ani Juva travels to the United States to better understand the mysterious black power assassins, the bizarre eugenics conspiracy theory that drove them to commit extreme acts of violence and how America's political landscape was transformed forever. Blending real history and real public figures with a fictitious (yet plausible) future, it is safe to say that you have never seen a film like "Gates of Hell".

Watching the trailer/sales pitch for the film (they're only $99,680 away from the $100,000 they need to do something something with this), the crux of this is clear: evil big government liberals use abortion as a secret method to commit mass genocide against blacks.  Blacks who are also the most reliable group of voters for evil big government liberals.   And are also a part of another conspiracy to have public money funneled to them so that they have more kids.  

It's like a completely useless cycle where you earn money to buy matches to burn money, but it involves black people, so the soundtrack is by Young Money.

One might argue, if one were painfully naive in a manner that bordered on certfiable brain damage, that this is simply an effort for "pro-lifers" to get their message out using the corollary of violent black people uprising against a system of oppression.  Of course, one might not have Googled the creatively named director, Molotov Mitchell (also known by the nickname on his birth certificate, "Jason").  You see, ol' Mol (or is it "Tov"?  I never know when people have ridiculously stupid nicknames) makes a lot of videos.  Some of them involve black people.

Some of them involve advocating for the murder of black people.  Bet you didn't see that one coming, eh?

Molotov...okay, buddy, I'm gonna call you Jason, because it's a lot hipper than "Molotov", which is basically a tool for winos who are done with their wino rags and ran out of money to burn.  Jason here advocated for the Ugandan anti-gay bill that would have allowed the government to kill gay Ugandans.  For being gay, not for having abortions, which is a totally different thing.

Now, you might wonder what makes a policy of murdering actual human beings better than a policy of allowing voluntary abortion, but that, ladies and gentlemen, is a gotcha question.  We don't think about the relative moral efficacy of comparative actions involving the same group of people.  Duh.  We care about the right people dying, and preferably white people not having to get their hands dirty doing it!

Incidentally, a sitting elected official is in this film, Representative Bobby Franklin of Georgia.  Now, do keep in mind that we just saw a married Congressman get shamed on national television for using the internet to have dirty chats and send pictures of his junk; surely a state Representative who's taking to the internet to make race-laden murder fantasies deserves some scrutiny, too?

Ah, well, probably not.  Let's tune in for the low-budget sequel to this, Gates of Crack-Addicted Black People Making Your GM Car.

Spoilers! Lots and lots of spoilers.

What I expected when I went into "Bridesmaids": An over-the-top comedy that sends up the hellish wedding-industrial complex for 90% of the film, and then tacks on a happy ending to reassure audiences that they should engage with it anyway, thereby ruining all the fun of the past hour and a half.

What "Bridesmaids" actually was: An over-the-top comedy with dramatic bits that merely uses the wedding as a backdrop to explore the complexities of female friendships with deadly accuracy that makes a mockery of "Sex and the City", especially the movie.

Boy how did "Bridesmaids" not want to be a chick flick about shopping and boys.  Of course, these things are part of women's lives and women's friendships, so they are almost completely unavoidable, but the filmmakers subverted the paradigm in two very obvious and I thought amazing ways, by having the single shopping scene disrupted by the now-notorious (but as funny as advertised) food poisoning scene, and by giving the groom in the wedding exactly zero lines.  (He's permitted to mouth something wordlessly, as if to hang a lampshade on it, and that's it.)  Even the bride in "The Hangover" had a bigger role.

Not that the movie just flips the script of the dudebro comedy, where women are one-dimensional accessories.  The main male character has a personality that matters, and they actually do some stuff with him where they set you up to think he's a typical Nice Guy®, but then you find that isn't actually what he's like at all.  But let's be clear: this movie is about women, and it's a big fuck you to the Hollywood establishment that pushes women out of decent roles, and the number of women with speaking parts is easily double the number of men with speaking parts.  They have nice little touches, too, where certain characters that would be played by men in 99% of comedies (say, random person sitting next to you on a plane saying weird shit) are female, and one character---the perturbed flight attendant---that is played by a woman in 99% of movies is actually a man in this one.  Little choices like that make this movie feel fresh and different in ways that I didn't expect.

But that doesn't mean it's flawless.  In fact, I'm really sad to report that the movie had a major flaw that prevented it from really being great, which is that it was too pensive and slow-moving.  I wanted so badly for it to be an ensemble cast, since every single actress in it kills, but it was mostly about Wiig's character Annie, and how her friend's over-the-top wedding is provoking every anxiety she has about being a failure at life.  This means that there are lots of scenes of Annie being sad, Annie staring into space, Annie driving around and boring the shit out of us.  And this is all scene time that doesn't go to women making me laugh until I want to pee. 

Which is a major shame, since every scene that wasn't Sad Annie was pretty much awesome.  Every time Annie's anxieties boil over into anger or bizarre behavior, Wiig had the audience in stitches.  More than that, the rest of the bridesmaids (and even the bride) all had great turns, and you could feel the audience perk up the second that we cut away from Annie forlornly baking a cake or whatever to the promise of the other actresses coming onscreen.  It actually made the lack of screen time devoted to broad comedy painful, because those parts were so good.  I think the filmmakers cut back on some of the broad comedy and had some of the sad shit in there in order to make Annie more sympathetic, but it didn't work at all.  If they'd left it at a couple of scenes where she's goofing off with Lillian, the bride, you would have bought that she's usually not like this.  They didn't have to hammer it home with all the droopy-eyed stuff.

Melissa McCarthy was especially awesome, embodying the role that would surely be played by Zach Galifianakis if this was a typical, male-dominated comedy, except that she's a weirdo but not a loser.  If the audience perked up when the ensemble actresses came on screen, they practically cheered at the sight of her face, she was so funny.  It wasn't just that she was so good, either---the screenwriters worked in like a fat joke about her, a bizarre one that she sells well, but overall they did avoid avoid stereotyping her as the fat lady.  Comedic roles for fat actresses fall into two categories: the sap and the oversexed woman who doesn't realize she's fat.  They do play around a little with the second one, but her character is far more butch than this stereotype ever is.  We also quickly learn that her supreme self-confidence isn't delusional (and it's always portrayed in the stereotype of the confident fat woman), but well-earned, since she's ridiculously smart and built immense wealth with her own hard work. In other words, she's proud of herself because she should be. There is never a moment in the film where you could even reasonably describe her as "sassy".  Plus, and I thought this was a nice touch, she got to be butch without subjecting the audience to any kind of moaning about having to wear a dress to the wedding.  No, she got to be too smart for stupid shit like that.

I hope she starts getting better roles, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

I honestly expected more negative, sexist shit after reading Michelle Dean's review, but I walked away feeling like I saw a different movie than she did. I think she was annoyed at the way this movie was taken as some big feminist event, and that made her ungenerous, but I have to push back. No one is saying that having comedies where women not only dominate but come across as human beings will change the world.  But as I've noted before, being entertained and feeling pleasure are extremely important things, and the fact that women don't get to have nice things does matter. I also want to see stuff where feminism is just assumed to be true, and doesn't have to be asserted, and this movie had some of that going on.  At no point does a character suggest that having to work for a living is some great moral dilemma for women, and female sexuality is just a given, not treated like it's bad nor presented in a protest-too-much way.  This paragraph of Michelle's in particular didn't ring true to me:

That said, even when applying the new gold standard of the Lady Film, the Bechdel test—it's now been endorsed by the New Yorker, after all—the results are mixed. I'm not sure if we can really count conversations about weddings in this movie as not being "about men"—although it's true that the province of the wedding is presented to us as women's territory. But movies like Bridesmaids presume that much of the angst that women who are not the bride feel on these occasions has to do with not being married (or at least in a stable relationship) themselves.

The Bechdel test doesn't require that female characters never speak about men, and if they didn't, I think that would be really weird.  (Unless they're lesbians and the movie is a romantic comedy.)  Women talk to each other about men.  They just talk about other stuff, too.  The Bechdel test just asks very simply that there be even a single scene where two named characters talk about something other than men.  The joke is that's a minimum requirement.  Needless to say, that minimum is met in the first few scenes of the film (Annie and Lillian talk about Annie's failed business, without even mentioning that she started it with a boyfriend, which doesn't come up until later), and it continues throughout.  Because I read Michelle's post before seeing it, I ended up mentally cataloguing topics of discussion besides men, and to make it even broader, besides wedding planning.  Characters talk about business, work, money, children, high school, what makes someone a loser instead of a winner, dogs, being brave about eating at offbeat restaurants instead of middle-of-the-road fare, self-delusion, art (well, bad art), tattoos, female friendship, travel fantasies, the shitty music you liked in junior high school, the difference between old friends and new friends, and nervousness around flying.  They also talk about sex and men, but what made it nice is that it was integrated.  You know, like real life.

Also, I don't really agree that the angst the character feels is because it's not her wedding.  Michelle admits later that maybe part of it is that she's afraid of losing her friend to marriage, but again, I don't agree.  Annie is far more worried about another woman stealing her best friend away, and her anxieties that are provoked by the wedding have more to do with the fact that she feels her friends are all growing up and moving on with their lives while she lives with her mom and doesn't have a job.  Again, they go out of their way to leave men out of it, and by the way, all three of the married bridesmaids have failing relationships. I was actually surprised how disinterested this film was in propagandizing marriage. 

So, I would say see it.  It's hilarious.  But I will also say that it should have been edited very differently, with 75% of the Sad Annie shit cut and replaced with what I bet is some hilarious ensemble comedy acting that is probably laying on a cutting room floor. Beating us over the head with Annie's dilemma was unnecessary.  I wanted to yell, "We get it!  She's sad!"  Especially since some of the comedic bits did more to demonstrate her fucked-up-ness than any pensive scene ever could. 

Also, Hollywood?  More of this, please. Kthnxbai.

On Sunday, my mom and I went to go see Jumping the Broom, which is nominally a comedy and which is, more importantly, a movie starring a predominantly black cast that's not directed by Tyler Perry.  The discussion we had beforehand revolved around rewarding Hollywood for actually making the thing, regardless of quality; seeing a mediocre romantic comedy became a chance to send a message that there are audiences willing to see movies starring largely minority casts.  It outdid the similarly programmed Something Borrowed, so in some ways, it may have worked.

Unfortunately, it also required us to sit through a treacherously terrible movie.  The movie was produced by megachurch pastor T.D. Jakes, which means that it's not a bad comedy.  It's a bad sermon with some poorly timed jokes thrown in.  The core plot of the movie focuses on the relationship between Sabrina (Paula Patton) and Jason (Laz Alonso).  Sabrina begins the movie by asking God not to let her "give away her cookies" anymore after waking up in the apartment of an otherwise committed man following a one-night stand - and  yes, by "cookies", she does mean her vagina.  She takes a vow of abstinence until marriage, and then almost immediately meets Jason by hitting him with her car.  Because he's her soulmate, he tends not to mind the fact that she just rammed an Audi into his ass, and six months later, they're engaged.  

Despite the inability of either lead to deliver a line in a way that isn't either annoying or focused on the absolute intensity of their injury-based love, we proceed to their wedding and meet their families.  It's a standard premise: her family is a bunch of snooty elites, and his family is a bunch of working-class commoners.  Culture clashes ensue, and things generally turn out okay, I suppose.

The hard part here isn't the banal plot.  It's how the movie treats these competing models of blackness, and ends up coming to a determination that both are flawed.  Sabrina's family and friends are a broad stereotype of bougie blackness, impossibly attractive, needlessly materialistic, and consumed with melodrama.  Her parents are in a loveless marriage, and her friends are snobbish jerks; they've rejected the slave tradition referenced in the movie's title (and at one point, her mother even declares that the family used to own slaves, because it was in no way necessary to the plot).  

Jason's family, on the other hand, is a walking pastiche of hoodness, from the uncle who's been married four times to the mother that doesn't know what various foods are; it's the mother's incessant meddling (after praying on it, of course) that ends up nearly destroying the wedding.  The movie is supposed to serve as an endorsement of abstinent commitment and faith in a Christian God, but what it becomes is a broad critique of How Black People Live.  

Sabrina and Jason are both upwardly mobile young people who have well-paying jobs doing things in large buildings, but they rush into a marriage based on her self-esteem issues and career path (she's moving to China in two months, so they have to get married).  Jason is a confused, bland man whose main contribution to the plot is proving that people who come from little means can gain success.  The rest of the cast is a group of jealous, horny, possessive assholes of various stripes who all cling fiercely to the things that give them a specific cultural identity.  The only person who seems happy and healthy is, of course, T.D. Jakes in his cameo as the wedding pastor.  

It's hard enough to find positive, normal portrayals of black families, even if the families have flaws.  It becomes that much harder when we fall into the Perry/Jakes trap of portraying all black people as irrevocably flawed until some sage reminds them of the true path, whether it be Jesus or a cross-dressing narcissist who's richer than God.  There are two undercurrents here: the first is a wait for another black leader, another Martin or Malcolm; the second is a fundamental discomfort with the lives of black folk.  There's an image of socioeconomic normalization in the white community, where everyone can aspire to an uncontroversial middle-classness, but that doesn't exist with nearly the same certainty in the black community.  

What comes out of that uncertainty are movies like Jumping the Broom, where a discomfort with the ability to remain authentically black at any level results in a critique of blackness at every level.  The disturbing undercurrent of this is that it turns Perry into Jakes into something more than entertainers; depending on your viewpoint, they either become prophets of the banal or predators feasting on the uncertainty of black adaptation.  Neither are particularly beneficial to black people, but following them makes you feel like you're doing something, even if it's just outdoing a terrible John Kraczynski romcom.

Via Lawyers, Guns and Money, I see that Roger Ebert has tackled the question of why "The Shawshank Redemption" has the highest ratings of any movie on IMDB.  Ebert makes somes interesting points about the appeal of "Shawshank", but in this enthusiasm for talking about what makes the movie so good, he misses talking about what it has that would make it rise above the ranks of other movies that have similar qualities. I would argue there's two reasons that "Shawshank" rises above all others:

1) It's got no female characters.

2) Mediocrity rules.

I actually feel bad dinging the movie for these, because in a way, it's unfair.  "Shawshank" isn't a mediocre movie---the acting, the script, the directing are all pretty damn good.  But it still rises to the top for the same reason that mediocrity rules.  It plays it safe.  And not having female characters in it is one of the most important ways it plays it safe.

The idea behind "mediocrity rules" is that true greatness always runs the risk of offense, or at least turning people off.  For one thing, greatness is innovative, which means that you lose huge portions of the audience that wants a warm bath of not being challenged at all.  Think of the film that deserved the Oscar that year, but lost out (along with "Shawshank") to "Forrest Gump"---"Pulp Fiction".  Nowadays I don't think "Pulp Fiction" perturbs too many people, but at the time the film was so shockingly different that it didn't have a chance in hell.  In fact, Tarantino is still doing one movie after another that offends the typical sensibilities of the mainstream American audience (including, which I'll get to in a minute, the shut-up-ladies phenomenon), and still not getting loaded down with Oscars, in a fashion that will be seen in the future as a scandalous oversight.  "Pulp Fiction" was rock and roll, and "Forrest Gump" was Michael Bolton.  "Shawshank" was a Frank Sinatra album---solid, classic even, but not great.

"Shawshank" doesn't have anything in it that's going to chase people out the door.  It appeals to the smart and the stupid alike, the liberal and the conservative.  Everyone can get behind the story of a man redeeming himself after the system grinds him down unfairly.  It's set in the past and outside of the world, minimizing the chance of referring to anything that triggers people's distaste.  There's nothing polarizing about it.  If it was a blog comment, it would get a lot of upvotes, but no one would bother to downvote it.  Functionally, this is what happened to it on IMDB.

It also benefits from everyone having seen it.  And the reason is that it, like "Back to the Future", is on cable non-stop.  I'd bet it's playing on a channel somewhere right now.  But the reason that it is has everything to do with these principles.  It seems like the safe movie you can play on cable non-stop.  Everyone likes it and no one hates it.

I would argue that its lack of any real female characters contributes to the feeling that it's safe.  As much as it pains me to say so, I think that female characters are polarizing.  Hollywood's preference is to have female characters with no internal lives, no physical flaws, and no concerns outside of man-pleasing, because they believe (with some reason) that large chunks of the audience find anything else from female characters threatening.  But you also have a large part of the audience---and a growing one---that's frustrated with the lack of understanding that women are people in Hollywood films, and won't like movies that portray women as cardboard characters or dumb bunnies.  "Shawshank" sidesteps the problem entirely by simply not having female characters, outside of a wife character who I don't even recall having any lines before she's killed. 

Women are polarizing figures in our society in general, because of the eternal rule of the patriarchy that a woman is never doing anything right.  Everyone is eager to tear at women and judge women and examine women closely for perceived slights against what they personally believe a woman should be like. There's also the feminist urge to examine women closely to see if they're rising above the gender trap. Simply by being Other, women capture attention and controversy.  There's a reason that Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin both are more polarizing figures than their male counterparts.  Putting a woman onscreen causes the audience to start dividing against itself.  But "Shawshank" is a bunch of dudes.  This contributes to the non-challenging aspect of it.  Even the rape somehow gets removed from the toxic gender norms that create rape (and therefore allow men to become victims) by the magic lady erasure of the movie.

I make it sound like I don't like "Shawshank", but I actually do.  It's solid.  It's a better quality than most movies that use these strategies to be non-controversial, which is why I think it rises above those movies in the rankings.  But it also falls short of being as good as movies that choose one section of their audience over another.  Tarantino, as I mentioned previously, has moved into giving the finger to people who are alienated by having to remember that women are people when they're watching movies.  His best characters have been women since "Pulp Fiction" gave him license to do whatever he wants.  (And arguably, the most fun character in "Pulp Fiction" is Mrs. Wallace.)  This, I suspect, contributes to the polarizing nature of his work.

Maybe I should call it the "Shawshank principle" instead of, as I usually do, "mediocrity rules", in order to encompass actual works of quality that still avoid giving any kind of offense and therefore rise to the top by default. 

The Shawshank principle, by the way, is why I'm convinced that Tim Pawlenty is going to win the Republican nomination.  People continue to make the mistake of looking at popularity contests as a matter of who has the most positive qualities that draw people to you.  Instead, you should look to see if someone has a polarizing quality that's going to cause them to get some downvotes, in the internet parlance.  This goes doubly so for Republicans, because the whole point of being conservative is being reactionary, rejecting out of hand things that challenge or perturb you.  Liberals can often get swept up into enthusiasm for a candidate instead of simply picking one by process of elimination, which is in part how Obama won. 

Almost every candidate in the Republican field has something about them that a portion of Republican voters really dislike.  Romney will get killed on the Mormon thing---the evangelicals just aren't ready yet.  Haley Barbour is out because the racism thing is too toxic.  (This is a really good sign of progress in our country, by the way.)  Sarah Palin is not only out, but I think women in general are a failed experiment for Republicans, and the glass ceiling is thicker than ever for them.  Huckabee turns off the large portion of Republican voters who aren't evangelical Christians.  (Believe me, the contempt that more secular conservatives have for their Bible-thumping comrades is something you don't want to ignore.)  Trump is just kidding, but even if he wasn't, he's never going to get the Christian vote ever.  Pawlenty has nothing overtly offensive about him. The Christian right doesn't suspect he's a secret liberal or that he's not a real Christian, and the more secular right doesn't think he's a wild-eyed Bible thumper.  He wins by default. 

Heading home today, so not much time for blogging.  But I wanted to link this Feminist Frequency to discuss how I disagree with it, which is rare when it comes to Feminist Frequency.  In this, Anita denies that Mattie from “True Grit” is a feminist character for two major reasons: 1) Mattie never changes, so she’s less a character with development than a “type” and 2) Mattie is just a traditional hyper-masculine Western character in a woman’s body, and feminism is about critiquing masculinity as a form (in part), not reinforcing the idolatry of masculinity.  I think that Anita may have a point when it comes to other characters in less thoughtful pieces than “True Grit”.  Action films that center around traditional cold-hearted hyper-masculine characters that are nonetheless held up as ideals aren’t particularly feminist, even if the character is female but is traditionally masculine in this way.  And I think you could make an argument that this means that in the “tough girls” genre, it’s Buffy that’s more feminist in this sense, since she does incorporate “feminine” qualities into her work—-cooperation, empathy—-and in doing so, makes clear why those qualities are values. 

I just don’t think any of this really applies to “True Grit”.  I think Anita’s analysis fails on one major point, which is that she assumes that “True Grit” is a typical Western that valorizes the hyper-masculine, violent, cold-hearted world that it portrays, and that is a profound misreading both of this film and the Coen brothers’ larger body of work.  In watching a Coen brothers movie, it’s usually important to really pay attention to the ending.  Often the ending of their movies are comments on everything you just watched—-think of how “Raising Arizona” and “No Country for Old Men” both end with characters describing dreams that point to the reading of all the events that happened before. 

I think you could argue that “True Grit” is a typical, mindless Western without the ending that shows Mattie without her arm and seeking the people she’d had this adventure with in order to make sense of her life and failing.  I’d probably argue with that, but a case could be made.  But with the ending, I think it’s pretty clear that the point of the movie is to condemn the brutality of this world and to argue that it destroys the people in it, including Mattie.  Throughout the film, we admire, rightly, her spunk and her determination. But the questions comes up—-Anita brings it up!—-of whether or not that spunk and determination should be applied to this single-minded task of getting revenge.  Anita asks this, and it’s clear that she thinks the Coen brothers didn’t intend for that question to be asked.  I’m skeptical.  Obviously, we can’t know what’s in their heads, but the way that the movie is made, I think we’re not only supposed to ask if Mattie was right to be so stubborn in this particular way, but we’re meant to conclude that she actually destroyed herself in the process.

After all, look at adult Mattie.  First of all, she’s missing an arm, just as Rooster is missing an eye.  Coen brothers movies are heavy with symbolism, and I’d argue that the missing arm and eye symbolizes the part of their very humanity that has been erased in all this brutality.  Having missing body parts isn’t exactly a new way to symbolize internal brokenness, but goes into mythology.  But it’s more than just that.  Adult Mattie is portrayed as ghostly.  She has no family, no connection to the world.  She has become Rooster.  She realizes as she ages that he’s the only person in the world that means anything to her, because they share this….and he’s dead and gone.  She has nothing. 

So Anita says that the movie doesn’t question the value of revenge or capital punishment, and I say that in fact it not only questions it, but comes down—-as Coen brothers movies usually do—-on the side of arguing that violence destroys not just the person who is acted upon, but the person who does the acting.  And the argument that Mattie doesn’t change is also false.  Mattie starts off the movie as a spunky, intelligent young woman with a bright future.  She ends the movie as a broken shell of a person who will disappear from the face of the earth having done nothing of value with her life.  And the reason for this is because she chose to enter a world of violence and revenge instead of doing something more valuable—-which other characters repeatedly ask her to do—-with her multitude of talents. 

Contrast her, then, with Marge from “Fargo”, who is a more direct feminist character of the sort that Anita is asking for.  Marge is not a broken person, because Marge is interested in justice and peace, not revenge.  Marge isn’t a violent person.  Marge deals with the world of criminals and violence, but she is not of it.  Mattie carries her missing arm as a symbol of what’s wrong with her, but Marge carries her hugely pregnant belly as a symbol of what’s right with her.  Mattie only brings death, but Marge is bringing life. 

Is Mattie a feminist character?  I don’t know if you can really apply ideology in that sense to feminist characters, nor should you.  But Anita spells out what she considers important in a feminist story—-interrogation of the notion that traditionally masculine characteristics (emotionally inexpressive, aggressive, dominating) are superior to traditionally feminine characteristics (emotionally expressive, cooperation, affectionate)—-and I think that “True Grit” is absolutely that story.  The violent, hyper-masculine Western is portrayed as leaving those who engage with it as broken, sad people who have no connection to others and who die unloved.  Doesn’t get more critical of traditional masculinity than that.  On the gender front, what makes this all very dark and tragic is Mattie has no real options, as a woman.  Traditional femininity doesn’t serve anyone well in this harsh environment, either.  But I’d say that’s just it—-the Coen brothers routinely object to the very existence of soul-less, violent environments. Even so, it’s clear that nurturing is considered a higher moral good in this world.  Rooster’s saving grace as a human is that he saves Mattie’s life.  He abandons the world of the Western for a moment to nurture a child.  And that’s basically the only good thing he ever does in his life, and it’s traditionally a feminine thing to do.

I needed to see something brainless this weekend, and what better than Battle: LA, this year’s official celebration of 1996’s Independence Day?  Yes, it’s been fifteen years since Jeff Goldblum and a newly updated copy of Mac OS 7 saved the planet.

You’ve seen this movie before: aliens invade for some reason; brave Americans rise up and blow the motherfuckers to alien hell.  The movie manages to address some of the nagging problems of this genre, to its credit.  For instance, the multiracial squad of intrepid people, although led by a handsome white dude, contains multiple Negroes and Latinos, and at least one Asian.  And not a one of them is a former gang banger, which is awesome.  The aliens also have armor or uniforms of some sort, which solves the continuing issue of alien nudists massing up to show off their junk to a world most unwilling to view it.

The great part about the movie is that it manages to avoid the offensive stereotyping of most of its characters.  The bad part is that it does it by giving them all such shitty, bland dialogue that you almost wish the token female soldier (Michelle Rodriguez, playing the same character she always does, but in uniform) would start talking about how she just wants to have babies.  The film’s bold choice to provide virtually no differentiation between its characters also seems less wise once they start dying.  You realize that once you strap a helmet on these people and start dousing them in grime, there’s absolutely no way to figure out who’s doing what and when; when someone gets shot, it’s just one less gun firing.  One of the characters is a virgin.  I have no idea if he survived or not.  There was another one who was afraid of the battlefield or something.  I think he died, but he might also have lived.  The Asian guy definitely died somewhere in there, but I lost track.  Michelle Rodriguez lives, but that’s mainly because Hollywood remains convinced she’s a bankable star. 

I struggled to find a way that Battle: LA related to modern political debates.  (This is where the spoilers begin, below the jump.)

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Adventures in blog-reading and the interesting juxtapositions it makes: Reading that Jane Russell has died at 91, and reading this post by Paul Campos about the political use of nostalgia.  (Also, Man Boobz recently chose to illustrate a post on women being funny with Anita Loos, the quite-funny writer of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which one of Russell’s most famous movies was based on.)  Paul was talking about how nostalgia serves conservative ends, and how nostalgia for the 50s is channeled through reactionary nostalgia for sexual and racial hierarchies and conformism, instead of economic structures that spread the wealth around and made America the wealthiest nation on the planet by doing so.  Amongst other things.  Read the whole post; it’s kind of tangential to the point here, but has a lot of interesting insights about nostalgia-management and money.

What I want to point out is that nostalgia is a slippery thing.  Yes, it’s usually used in service of reactionary politics, but sometimes nostalgia can be subversive.  In the 50s, for instance, there was actually a lot of nostalgia for the 20s.  I’m sure most of it was reactionary, as was 80s nostalgia for the 50s—-it was remembered as a time of innocence and wealth, before the Depression and the war.  But it was also remembered as a time when the usual rules and restrictions loosened up dramatically.  I get the impression, from 50s products that incorporate 20s nostalgia, that part of the appeal was the escape from the stifling conformity and sexual repression of the 50s.  (Ironically, I wouldn’t say the 50s were more sexual repressed than the 20s in practice—-people had a lot more premarital sex, for instance—-but I think it’s the difference between feeling like things are moving forward instead of backwards.  In the same way, people can have nostalgia for the 60s and sexual liberation even though we’re far more liberated now than they were then.)  Interestingly, two of Marilyn Monroe’s best films were 20s throwbacks that use the cover of nostalgia to poke fun at sexual repression and conformity.

If you doubt that “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” has its subversions, I give you Jane Russell’s solo number from the movie, where she dances around a gym full of muscular, mostly-naked men working out in front of murals inspired by ancient Greece, while she sings about how there’s a bunch of sexy men around her but she can’t get laid.

This video has provoked some discussion over how many battles with censors were probably pitched over those dark bands at the bottom of the shorts. 

Unlike “Some Like It Hot”, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” isn’t actually set in the 20s, but it’s still a 20s nostalgia picture.  It’s based on a novel by Anita Loos that was written, frankly, as a proto-feminist satire poking fun at men for desiring dumb, hot women to bolster their egos.  The movie retains this quality—-the main characters are throwbacks to the image of flappers no matter how big their boobs are.  I would argue that beyond the homoerotic jokes, there’s an arguably feminist subversion at the heart of it.  Monroe’s character, Lorilei, has been denied respect and education because she’s a woman that’s not from a good family, but she exacts her revenge by using her sexuality to make herself filthy rich anyway.  Of course, true feminism is overturning the system.  The character isn’t a feminist.  But the book has a feminist quality in that it exists to satirize the patriarchy, and especially to make fun of how privileged men become dull and weak because they’re so shielded from challenge.

If you doubt me, consider that I had yet another reason to think about this movie, and how it retains this satirical edge from the book, when I was asked to contribute to an anthology of writing on Madonna.  I wrote about “Vogue”—-you’ll have to read the book when it comes out!—-but I did think a lot about Madonna paying tribute to Monroe in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” with the video for “Material Girl”, which replicates the number “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”.  So, I watched both videos next to each other, and was unpleasantly reminded that in “Material Girl”, there’s an entire subplot where Madonna dates some guy who just gives her flowers and falls in Twue Wuv, instead of running around with men who shower her with diamonds.  Which is all very romantic, but utterly non-subversive, because there’s no challenge there to the restrictions put on women to perform their sexuality but to never cash in on it for themselves. 

I like Lorilei better.  She’s not smart, but she does outsmart the men around her, and the implication is that’s not hard to do.  At the end of the movie, when the father of the rich man she’s marrying accuses her of being a gold-digger, unlike Madonna in “Material Girl”, she doesn’t deny the charge or try to prove that she’s just a humble girl who makes no demands on men in exchange for all the effort she puts into being sexy and giggly and ego-boosting.  Instead, she says, “Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn’t marry a girl just because she’s pretty, but my goodness, doesn’t it help?”  Double standard called out, and the father can’t do anything to stop the marriage, thus the happy ending.

Of course, in real life both then and now, sex kittens don’t actually have a right to call men out on their behavior without bringing a halt to the gravy train.  If “Real Housewives” have taught us anything, it’s this—-the women who excel at the game of being trophy wives and mistresses are those who believe in the system, not those who approach it with a subversive mindset appropriate to a satirical character like Lorilei.  Sex kittens with a subversive bent move more towards direct cash transactions, so they can go home and turn the act off at the end of the day.  Or that’s my guess anyway, but what do I know?  “Real Housewives” is just as fictional as “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”, but it isn’t nearly as clever.

You can certainly argue that “Gentlemen” isn’t really that subversive.  It’s not.  There’s a wedding at the end, we’re boringly led to believe Lorilei does love her doofy husband, etc.  But the end of the movie isn’t the point of that movie; it’s all the jokes and setpieces before it.  And that stuff is all why I think it was a hit.

Spoilers, I’m sure.

I’m not surprised that “Little Fockers” outdid “True Grit” in box office receipts, but unlike many bemoaning this, I’m fairly certain that isn’t a final indictment on our national inability to have any taste whatsoever.  After all, we did, as a nation, embrace “Fargo”, which is the movie most like “True Grit” in both character and plot.  I believe the main reason that “Little Fockers” did better is that people go to the movies for one reason above all others around the Christmas holiday, which is that if they have to spend one more moment in the house with their families, trying to entertain each other, they will lose their minds.  So they want to go to the movie, but they have to bring the whole family, and if that includes little kids and overly sensitive family members, you’re going to go for pablum you know will suck over a movie that has “probably has sex/discomforting violence” written all over it.  And that’s “True Grit”, which, true to Coen brothers history, is heavy on the violence but doesn’t actually have much in the way of sex in it. Which is good, due to the fact that the main character is a 14-year-old girl. 

By the way, have I mentioned that this is quite the feminist film?  It even passes the Bechdel test, though it takes place in a world where women are extremely marginalized, and part of the movie rests on exploring the marginalization of women in this world.  (It passes it in discussions between main character Mattie and a woman who runs a boarding house—-their conversations are strictly about another woman and some dead bodies.)  The main character is Mattie Ross, who is a cross between Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz” and Marge from “Fargo”—-intelligent, calm, thorough, but with a real curiosity and desire for adventure.

This movie also interrogates masculinity in a way that’s increasingly trendy in Hollywood, with shows like “Mad Men” and movies like “The Social Network”, but it does all that and puts an interesting female character at the center of it.  They prove it can be done!

Indeed, I’d say the movie is, above all other things, an exploration of how the breakdown of civilization works for women whose talents and ambitions are far greater than patriarchy ever allows for women to express.  On the surface, Mattie’s world is one of severe repression of women, a world where women are basically sex objects and workhorses, but not seen as real human beings.  Matt Damon’s character, the Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf, works to show exactly how little room women could be given.  He can’t put her in the “sex object” category because of her youth and her unwillingness to entertain him, and so he puts her into the “unruly woman who needs to be put in her place” category, but that ends up not working out very well for him, either.  Because once they go into the Indian territory, outside of the reach of traditional Western civilization, the usual rules are suspended.  And that includes the rule where any man outranks and has the right to control any woman.  That’s why this movie is part “Fargo”—-because it’s built around a woman seeking a murder to bring him to justice—-and part “Wizard of Oz”.  The usual restraints on a young teenage girl don’t count anymore in this world beyond the reach of the social order she’s used to.  Mattie is riot grrrl 130 years ahead of her time.

In case the feminist themes of this movie weren’t obvious from the get-go, there’s actually a parody of the spanking scene in “McLintock”.  The original “True Grit” was a John Wayne movie, of course, but this movie is more interested in interrogating and parodying the John Wayne-type image of masculinity than it is reinstating the myth. The idea of spanking women to control them was a reoccurring theme in the 50s and 60s, and it was pretty much played for comedy and titillation every time.  In this movie, it’s horrifying and completely unfair—-it’s clear that LaBoeuf is spanking Mattie because he can’t best her intellectually or sexually, and so he’s been reduced to trying to beat her physically.  He’s a fool and a coward, in other words.  Rooster, played by Jeff Bridges, respects Mattie and echoes our anger and annoyance at anyone who can’t see this young woman as the respect-deserving person she is.

Overall, the film is unbelievably well-made.  Well, believable because this is the Coen brothers and this is basically their favorite theme, which is a misfit or a band of misfits on a journey of discovery.  It’s the plot of “Fargo”, “O Brother Where Art Thou”, “Raising Arizona”, “The Big Lebowski”, and “No Country For Old Men”, and probably a bunch others I’m not thinking of right now.  They tell the same story over and over, and it’s always interesting and fresh.  Sometimes it’s broad comedy and sometimes it’s very serious, and I think it works better as comedy.  But since they’ve told this one story over and over, the pacing of it is absolutely perfect.  I can’t even say why I always am willing to go along on the ride, since I know that there will be two major revelations by the end of it: 1) The world is a dark, violent place where brutality is absurdly common and sense can never be made of it and 2) Yet, there are good people who live nobly despite understanding the brutality of life, and therein lies hope.  The coda to “Raising Arizona”, I’ve said many a time, basically makes explicit this overriding theme of the Coen brothers’ work. 

Maybe it’s because this theme matters more than any other.  It’s one of the greatest themes of life and literature. But it’s almost never told well.  It’s either too dark and depressing and hopeless, or it’s too sappy and unconvincing. They always strike a balance, probably by making the quietly noble characters very quiet and humble indeed, with the most extreme example being The Dude, who is a broke motherfucker with literally no ambition greater than bowling well.  They celebrate the zen of quiet living, the nobility of the common man, in a way that almost no one else does.  But they also tweak who the hero is in every film, which is how they keep it interesting.  In this film, the hero character is a steely 14-year-old girl, and that adds an intriguing new wrinkle.  Plus, it’s hilarious and endlessly entertaining, so go see it.  Even if you have to leave the overly sensitive and the little kids behind to do so.

Confession time: I’ve spent most of the past couple of decades hating “Dirty Dancing”.  Let’s face it—-it’s a go-nowhere movie with a cheesy and incongruous 80s ending tacked on.  The news songs that were written for the soundtrack sound really awful next to the classic early rock and roll featured in the film.  And are we really supposed to believe that Patrick Swayze’s character, who pulls off moves he clearly learned in ballet, is just some schmuck who picked up ballroom dancing on the job and now works in the lowest rung of professional dancers? My main objection to the movie, however, was that it was the most favorite film of roughly every girl my age in my tween years, which meant I watched it roughly one million times.  Every slumber party, every time you hung out at someone’s house after school, every weekend that you had a dollar and wanted to go see a movie at the dollar theater.  Above all other things, I was sick of it.

Subsequently, I haven’t actually watched it in probably 20 years, though I can still basically play it on a reel in my head, at least the major plot points.  But I did rewatch large chunks of it recently, while helping Marc with a film reel for the prom tonight.  My conclusion is that it’s still a shit movie, but only in parts.  In other parts, it’s actually a pretty good movie.  And it does a couple of things that you almost never see in mainstream Hollywood movies, and those things it does very well.  I think this explains its enduring popularity, which just so happened to be chronicled recently in the WSJ.

According to PageData, a company that tracks metrics and trends on Facebook, the film has more than 6.3 million fans on the site, ranking it sixth among movies. That’s just below mega leaders like “Twilight” and “Harry Potter,” but above “Avatar,” which clocks in at 3.9 million fans.

Lionsgate Home Entertainment Executive Vice President Anne Parducci said the film gets about 150,000 new Facebook fans each week.

“It’s really just people saying they love the movie, they love Patrick [Swayze], they love, love, love everything,” said Ms. Parducci. “There is an innocence to the movie that is so endearing. My 16-year-old daughter says to me, ‘I wish I could live back then.’”

Rewatching it, I have to say that actually its popularity probably has little to do with its “innocence” and more to do with its lack of it.  What immediately comes across is that this is an extremely sexy movie.  But it’s sexy in a way that you almost never see in movies—-from a sex-positive, feminist-minded, heterosexual point of view.  (Honest portrayals of lesbian sexuality are even more rare.)  Attention is lavished on Patrick Swayze’s body, of course, but it’s more than that.  Most sex in most movies, at least dramas, is shown as deadly serious, but the sex in this movie is mostly playful and filled with laughter.  The overly serious portrayal of sex in movies tends to feel sex negative to me, because it discounts how much of sex is just about joy, pleasure, and fun.  There’s also a strong focus on the female longing for actual sex.  There’s a lot of business in the movie about distance, not touching, and all that.  Most portrayals of straight female sexuality root it in the longing for male approval and romance, but this movie portrayals sexual desire as its own thing that women possess—-the animal need to touch and to have.  Jennifer Grey’s name in the movie is “Baby”, but it takes on ironic tone, since she takes to fucking like a duck to water.  Rewatching it with an open mind, I was surprised at how some of these scenes went past right all my defenses and straight to the part of my brain that thinks, this.  Most romantic movies are about a woman submitting to a man in some fashion, but this movie shows erotic love as empowering, and suggests that what’s really hot is treating sex like a two-person adventure instead of a capitulation.

No wonder women cling to this movie so fiercely.

On top of it all, the movie stands against a gazillion social messages that shame women for their sexuality, and it does it with confidence.  Until the cheeseball ending, there’s no sense really that the main couple are going to last past the end credits, and that’s okay.  Having a fling and an adventure without it meaning that you’re a dirty slut who will be heartbroken for life is normalized.  Most astoundingly, this movie still stands as one of the few—-only?—-Hollywood films to portray abortion in a realistic, humane fashion.  Even though the abortion is botched, there’s never a whiff of feeling that Penny is getting punished for being sexually active or having an abortion.  On the contrary, the incident is just another example of how unfair Penny’s life is, and how decent a person she is despite it all.  How the characters react to her abortion is a barometer of how good they are as people—-kind and supportive people are good people, whereas her cad boyfriend who didn’t even have the decency to pay for it is the bad guy.  And, if that wasn’t enough in terms of this movie bravely and effectively showing things that are forbidden in most of Hollywood, the movie portrays very well a platonic friendship between Johnny and Penny.  This is two years before “When Harry Met Sally”, a movie that dramatically toed the Hollywood line in suggesting there is no such thing as non-sexual love between straight men and straight women. 

It’s still a crap movie.  All of this stuff is really great, and then it just falls apart, because I don’t think the writer knew what she wanted her third act to be.  The conflict doesn’t really feel real (though there is still one great scene where Baby’s sister is kind to her despite their frequent conflicts—-did I mention that this movie actually portrays women as supportive of each other in substantive and complex ways, instead of just “you go, girl!” ways?) towards the end, and then everything is wrapped up in a neat bow.  The last scene feels like it’s from a different movie altogether, in fact, with the crappy music and the strange and sudden sentimental reversal of attitude of all the camp-goers and the (Jesus Christ) coordinated dance scene.  I’m cringing to think about it.  But it’s interesting to wonder if you could have just sliced that off and had a different movie, one that is remembered as a pretty solid and surprisingly feminist film, instead of the cheesefest that is actually onscreen.

Thoughts?  Am I being too generous?  Or am I being too harsh?  Do you love this movie?  Hate it?  Or are you like I am now, standing in the middle, depending on what scene you’re watching?