Whip It!

I started documenting my list of female movie directors more than two years ago, and I'm so pleased to say that I have a huge backlog of people I would like to write about, and since beginning this project Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar for directing the (atrociously named, but very good) The Hurt Locker.

So, things, I suppose are looking up. I guess.

Which brings me to the career of ridiculously likable actor and first time feature director, Drew Barrymore, and her film, Whip It. Written by Los Angeles Roller Derby girl, Shauna Cross (AKA Maggie Mayhem), it's both an underdog sports story and a coming of age piece. Is it super original? No. But it's extremely enjoyable and possesses both an intelligence in its execution and a lack of cynicism that's extremely welcome in these dark movie watching days when people being mean to each other is supposed to be hilarious.

Ellen Page plays a young girl named Bliss who lives in a small town near Austin, TX and participates in pageants at her mother's insistence. After picking up a flier, Page and her BFF go to a Roller Derby tournament and she is completely entranced. One of the nicest things about the movie is watching somebody find something they love. There's an early scene in which Bliss is skating in preparation for tryouts with a look of absolute joy on her face.

And yes, the film contains most of the typical Bad News Bears styled clichés, but it's amiable and low key and often funny. And - Wow! - it really, really looks to me as if the actors do pretty much all their own skating! Barrymore's direction is skilled and doesn't get in the way of her story. During the Roller Derby scenes I always knew who everyone was and where they were in relation to the other skaters (something, for example, Christopher Nolan is completely incapable of), and it looked lovely. There's a sweet PG-13 romance between Bliss and a cute musician boy, but romance isn't the point. It's about Bliss skating, and about her relationship with her best friend and her parents.

I thought Bliss's parents (played by Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern) to be the weakest part of the film. They were painted a little too broadly and either Daniel Stern was completely miscast, or he's just a terrible actor, either way, I found his performance a little hard to watch. I did like that whatever issues Bliss was having with them, they were not painted as villains. After lying about her age and sneaking off to Austin to skate, when her parents found out they'd been lied to, they (understandably) freaked out. I liked that the script has Kristen Wiig's character point out to Bliss that she had lied, and that her parents clearly cared about her, and maybe she should cut them some slack.

Of course it ends with the big game in which the Hurl Scouts face their rivals, the Juliette Lewis (Iron Maven) led Holy Rollers, and none of the plot points are particularly surprising. But Whip It possesses in spades many of the simple pleasures one often wants from movies that seem so often in short supply. The film also had a really nice, understated sense of place. Another subtle touch, one I see very, very rarely was in the costume design. Bliss (later, Babe Ruthless), comes from a family without a great deal of money. And we see her character wear the same items of clothing, in different combinations, multiple times throughout the story. Barrymore paid a great deal of attention to detail, giving the film a really nice visual texture. There was nothing rote about the filmmaking.

Drew Barrymore has been acting in movies since she was four or five, and comes from one of the most legendary show business dynasties in American history. Whip It, while not perfect, didn't feel like a rookie effort. It was modern and self-assured and good hearted, all qualities one associates with her as an actor. It's one of those movies that I'll likely wind up seeing 600 times before I die, simply because I'll sit there and watch it every time it's on TV. It's the kind of movie that makes me unreasonably happy in an uncomplicated and unembarrassed way. Something that is actually pretty rare.

Kings Point: A Documentary

As I touched upon briefly in Thursday's post, American's really hate the idea of getting old and dying. Not that most other nations are precisely jumping up and down about it, but there's a little more integration of their older citizens into daily life. I've been job hunting for a while, and I know my age is an issue. And I'm not even old. Logan's Run, here we come.

Which brings me to a feature documentary currently in the completion and fund raising stages called Kings Point, directed by Sari Gilman. I've seen the five minute preview (and so can you! Embedded below), and it's lovely. The film profiles several residents of a large retirement community in Del Ray, Florida. The brief exerpt I saw was fairly riviting. One woman speaking about it still being a world of couples, although she's essentially living in a city of women. We also hear a little snippet from an elderly commitment-phobe ("Bea's on top of me all the time!"). Like most things that try to get at the root of some aspect of humanity, it's both funny and sad.

Much of the time the great joy of documentaries is listening to people talk. And the people Ms. Gilman has chosen to focus on are very good talkers. It looks lovely, too, with well composed shots and a palette of greens and peaches (not, I beg to clarify, the dreaded orange and teal) that evoke Florida beautifully. I'd like to see more. Which brings me to the fund raising portion of this post. The filmmakers have set up a kickstarter page. Please click here to help them with their completion funds.



In the spirit of full disclosure, I must mention that I grew up with Sari in West Egg. Upon hearing the name of the film I initially assumed that West Egg was the subject matter, as the village in our home town where all the fabulously wealthy people (including Gatsby) live, shares its name with the title of this film. But it's just a coincidence. Sari has had a long career as a feature documentary editor, working on such projects as Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas At the White House among others. This is her first outing as director and I'm looking forward to seeing the completed film.

Jennifer's (and Megan's) Body

I was really prepared to like Jennifer's Body for a multitude of reasons, mixed reviews or not (and that's mixed, meaning mixed, not bad). It's a teen girl horror flick penned by Diablo Cody straight off her Oscar win for Juno, and directed by Karyn Kusama who helmed Girlfight (which I haven't seen, but about which I've heard good things) and Aeon Flux (which was awful). It stars Amanda Seyfried, who I've always liked and Megan Fox, who I thought I'd never seen in anything, but I was wrong, as she had a small part in the Lindsey Lohan vehicle Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen. Which I've seen. Don't judge.

That said, all I know about Ms. Fox is what I've gleaned from the internets over the past few years. Most of this can be summed up thusly:

1. She's great looking.
   
2. She says lots of boneheaded things to reporters and on talk shows.
   
3. She's in a long term relationship with (now married to) Brian Austin Green who played David Silver on 90210.
4. My friend's teenage daughter and her friends adore her (she's soooo fuckin hottttt).
5. People on the internets seem pretty contemptuous and hateful towards her, and I can't quite seem to figure out why.

Back to the film. Ms. Cody's script has a lot going for it, but it feels a little half baked. The beginning is terrific: the film is book-ended with scenes of Amanda Seyfried in a maximum security women's prison. It's shot beautifully (if with a few too many teal/orange clichés for my taste) and starts off creepily enough and has us wondering what could have turned sweet-faced Seyfried into a killer. We then flashback to Devil's Kettle High School, where pretty cheerleader Megan Fox (Jennfier) is BFF with dorky Amanda Seyfried (Needy. No, really. That's the character's name). Even before any of the violent supernatural goings on that we see later in the film, Jennifer and Needy seem somehow psychically linked, almost too close. Needy's sweet boyfriend thinks (rightly) that Jennifer is using and manipulating Needy. Jennifer is a classic mean girl who seems to require Needy to follow in her wake like some sort of wide eyed terrier. What both the movie and Fox do pretty well is show that Jennifer seems to need Needy as much as Needy needs Jennifer. It's an unhealthy, nearly parasitic, uneven, symbiotic friendship.


Megan Fox is a beautiful girl and is talked about in the gutter press as if she was a major movie star. But she's only appeared in six films so far (with a couple more in the can waiting for release). Six. She shot to fame after appearing in the first Transformers movie and after appearing in various states of sexiness in every men's magazine the world over. She also has an extremely well documented case of verbal diarrhea which makes her a completely entertaining interview. After reading a slew of Megan Fox articles over the past couple of days and taking a look at her TMZ coverage from the past couple of years, a couple of things became immediately apparent. Unlike many young starlets, she seems to have a really good bead on both the nature of her job (being a sexy young starlet) and the pluses and minuses of this particular line of employment. The other is that she has the most shockingly boring private life of any sexy young starlet since the job was invented.


Jennifer and Needy wind up in the local shit kicker bar to see a band, Low Shoulder, that Jennifer heard about on YouTube. Before talking to the cute lead singer (Adam Brody from The OC) Jennifer is all trash talking teen girl expounding to Needy that they have boobs, hence all the power. And then after confidently striding up to Brody she... melts. She's a little nervous and stammery the way girls are when they talk to Older Boys. Needy thinks they're bad news, but Jennifer is smitten. Cute! In a band! From the city! Needy is very, very protective of Jennifer, correctly thinking that her heedlessness could lead her into real trouble. While watching the band, the bar explodes into flames. It is hinted at, but never confirmed, that something telekinetic may be at play. The girls escape through the bathroom window, and run into the lead singer in the parking lot, while surrounded by burn victims and screams. He convinces Jennifer to come with him in the band's van. Needy knows this is a terrible idea and tries to talk Jennifer out of it, but she goes. Now, I have to say I really liked how this was handled even if they took a play straight out of the Buffy handbook. What I mean is, we as audience members are truly frightened for Jennifer. The ways in which this could go badly for her are manifold. When we next see Jennifer, she's a monster. Or so Needy thinks. We don't know what's happened to her, or what she is, but she's covered in blood and she's just... wrong. Up til now the movie has been pretty terrific. This, though, is where things start to fall apart.


Oh, Megan Fox. If there's any young starlet in need of a good gender studies class, it's her. I'm just worried everyone from the professor to the other students would be mean to her, as in some ways she's a perfect object lesson in four inch heels. And when I say she's in need of a good gender studies class, I do so because she is clearly fascinated with the ramifications of gender and sexuality as they pertain to both her working life and the world at large. She talks about it all the time in her interviews in a way I've almost never heard before from someone who is in her particular position. Megan Fox is equal parts intelligent and inarticulate, which causes some problems. The following are some quotes:

It's a double standard. To be outspoken, or different at all, is a problem for women. As soon as you curse or, God forbid, make some sort of sexual reference that's a joke, you're labeled a party girl. They don't do that with men, so I feel it would be a lot easier.

When I go to a party, I always feel like I'm chum. Like my agent is just chumming the waters until I'm circled by all these dudes.

I don't trust male intentions, usually, because they don't approach me for intellectual conversation.

If you know how to take control of being a sex symbol, then it can be powerful. But I have no idea how to handle it yet, how to deal with it.

Hollywood is the most superficial thing you could possibly be a part of and if I weren't attractive I wouldn't be working at all.

I personally always find something really scary about watching little girls learning to manipulate their dads by baby talking. Then they grow up and use the same technique on their boyfriends or husbands. That scares me because it's just so sick on so many levels.

Little girls are very much exposed to sexuality through the media and the entertainment industry and advertisements. So when you realize that you have the same power that you've watched women who've come before you have, it is frightening and you don't know what to do with it. I don't think you ever get comfortable with it.

And there's pages more. She's clearly given this stuff a lot of thought, but doesn't quite know what to do with it. In interviews, she actually most often sounds like a regular person, which I didn't realize was so unusual until I realized that the current crop of actors and actresses sound like crazy people. She talks about being lonely. She talks about smoking weed and watching movies. She makes dumb jokes. Sometime she's annoying. Sometimes she sounds bored. Sometimes she's engaging. There's also, by many, or most of the journalists who interview her a "Look! It talks! Just like an actual person!" attitude that must be maddening (although Fox claims she doesn't read her own press, as it would make her crazy). She also complains about her job the way normal people do. Unfortunately (for her), she tells these things to the press, rather than her friends (of which, she claims, she has none), so she gets into all kinds of trouble.


The second act of Jennifer's Body is a mess. We see too much of what Jennifer has become too quickly, sort of destroying suspense. The idea of this pretty cheerleader being a monster and literally devouring boys is very potent and full of potential. But the thematic, horror and plot elements never really come together. The boys Jennifer kills seem arbitrary. The direction seems a little lazy during some of it - oh, and can we please retire the sexy slo-mo babe walk down the hallway at school? It's the biggest cliché ever at this point. We get it. She's hot. That's why you hired the actress you did. Duh. So I feel like I did a lot of waiting around for the climax. Also, there seemed to be something a little off about the tone of the film and the performances. Pitch black horror comedies are really, really difficult to make. Diablo Cody's dialogue is fairly mannered. This wasn't a problem in Juno as director Ivan Reitman had such strong control of the material. He had everyone play it pretty straight with as much emotional truth as possible. Any sort of wackiness or artificiality in the performances would just push it over the edge. I think that's a bit of what happens here. Fox isn't great, but it looks to me as if she's been poorly directed. Pros like J.K. Simmons and Amy Sedaris aren't terrific either. I thought the best performance in the film was from the kid who played Needy's boyfriend. I have a feeling Kusama wasn't paying enough attention to her actors.

I guess what I find so interesting is the extraordinary amount of animosity felt towards this young woman. She was recently fired from the Transformers franchise for mouthing off in the press. In an interview, she compared her director, Michael Bay to both Napoleon and Hitler. This was, to say the least, unwise. She had also been quoted saying some things that might be construed as unflattering to the Transformers franchise (they also might be construed as true) such as finding the plot of the second film to be garbled and confusing, that the stunt work was unsafe, that her own performance wasn't very good, that she doesn't understand how anyone could watch the IMAX version without having an aneurysm. So her option was not renewed. She's clearly a little enchanted with her own outspokenness, but I found (something she also seems aware of) that when watching her in televised interviews it's pretty clear that most of what she's saying is meant to be self-deprecating and are said with far more good humor than is perceived when read. But the most risible thing that I saw being brought up again and again vis a vis Fox, was the question of whether she was promiscuous, or a slut. From what I can gather, this is constantly brought up because of Fox's appearance and because she often appears in mens magazines in her underwear (Fox doesn't do nudity). There is literally zero scandal attached to her personal life. I couldn't find a single photograph of her out in a nightclub or a party, barring things that are clearly work related events. Interestingly, people like Reese Witherspoon and Hilary Swank have much more active dating lives than Fox, but the perception of them as "good girls" somewhat protects them from the truly ugly smears Fox has been subject to. Really, Perez Hilton needs to go away forever.

In the last act, Jennifer's Body picks up again. The climax is satisfying and the coda ties it together nicely. And the end credit sequence is kind of brilliant. But, over all, the film didn't work for me. I don't quite get what I'm supposed to take away from the film. Instead of being gang raped, as we feared, the indie rock band sacrifice Jennifer in exchange for fame and fortune. The catch is that they are supposed to sacrifice a virgin, and small town bombshell Jennifer is anything but, so instead of remaining dead, she becomes a demon. She's portrayed as a mass of foul mouthed insecurities that has a hard time saying no to boys. Her becoming a ravenous demon is so potentially interesting. As I wrote in my Ginger Snaps post, our culture is deeply uncomfortable with sexually aggressive woman (to quote Ms. Fox: "men are scared of a strong, confident vagina"), and if Jennifer's hunger sprung out of need, rather than a vague free floating animosity, it could have been really great.

Here's what I want for Megan Fox: I think she should take a few acting classes and find somebody she can learn from that she can trust. She needs some chops. She said in one of the interviews I read, that people's expectations of her are so low, she's bound to impress. She has also disparaged her own ability again and again, saying that she hasn't done anything, how could she be any good yet? I don't know that I find the woman herself all that terribly fascinating, but seeing how the world reacts to her is. And I like the fact that she cheerfully reports the stupidities that are heaped upon her in Hollywood to all and sundry. I also like that she seems in no danger of meeting any kind of Marilyn Monroe/Lindsey Lohan/Brittney Murphy like fate. Her personal life seems almost comically boring. I think she's a big enough deal that TMZ and the other stalkers feel the need to keep watch, but they are pretty much reduced to reports like "Megan Fox Has Weird Thumbs" (I'm not making this up, there's pages of it). "Megan Fox going the the dentist." "Megan Fox takes her dog to vet! Pictures inside!" "Megan Fox Grocery Shops!" Then, of course, was the excitement of her honeymoon. She went to the beach. She looked happy. Hollywood is a weird, weird place and being a starlet is a weird job. Fox seems to take all of it with pretty good humor. She's been somewhat painted as a baby-Angelina, and there are worse things for her to be, certainly.

TCM: Moguls & Movie Stars

We seem to be in the midst of something like an old timey movie golden age here at the beginning of the teens in the 21st century. Silent movie festivals are happening all over the place, and seemingly every movie ever filmed (that hasn't been lost or incinerated) is on DVD or on the internet. It never stops being thrilling to me.

That said, if you aren't watching Turner Classic Movies's new documentary series, Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood, you are truly missing out. It's thrilling history, and the rarities being shown after the airing of each episode are added fabulousness. They do a terrific job of putting what was happening in a particular time in film history into a more general historical context.

Exciting to the author of this blog, is a look at the careers of two women I profiled a while back, Lois Weber and Alice Guy-Blaché. Below is Danse Gitane, a 1905 film by Guy-Blaché.

Miranda July and Why I Hate Her. The Negative Post Full of Hatred You've All Beeen Waiting For

There have been one or two minor criticisms of my blog saying that I only write about things I like. If you feel this way - this is the blog post you've been waiting for!

I hate Miranda July. So much praise has been flung her way, I'm sure she can handle my disdain. She's been doing art, video and music projects around Portland since the early 90s, working with among others, the awesome Kill Rock Stars. So far, so good. She's also had a bunch of bloggy, on line art stuff. In 2005 she wrote, directed and starred in Me and You and Everyone We Know. Then, in 2007, she released the short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You. See, all good stuff. Right.

Sigh.

It's not jealousy. I swear. Yes, in some ways Miranda July is living my dream life and yes, maybe I'm a little jealous. But, that's not it I promise. I hate all of her work. I hate it. I hate her twee little revelations. Her forced creepiness which wants so badly to be depth. I hate her stupid doe eyed face. Okay, that was mean. But - I HATE HER STUPID DOE EYED FACE! I hate her affectless underbaked short stories that seem to me like dated parodies of Raymond Carver and Mary Gaitskill. And not in a good way! I hate her annoyingly smug and self enchanted web projects. Okay. The movie wasn't terrible. I think I liked it when I saw it. But I remember none of it. I just read the plot summary on Wikipedia and it didn't even ring a bell. And I know I saw it. There it is in my Netflix archive. I know I sat on my couch and watched it. But it's all gone.

What is it about her that's like fingernails on a blackboard to me? I mean I loathe her. It feels personal. I mean why? She doesn't seem all that different than most of the people I know. Why?

I think it's simple. I don't like her work. I find it boring and empty. And it's being heaped with praise. I feel like shouting, "The emperor has no clothes, people! Helllo!". But I know it's futile. Her work is bathed in the kind of emptiness that enables people to pour their own meanings and personalities into it, there's no there there (to quote a far better artist). But does that make it good? Universal? Or just empty?

I don't know. I just can't stand her.

Mary Harron and American Psycho

Mary Harron has directed three feature films in the past fifteen years or so: two were overtly feminist biopics of culturally relevant outsiders, the third was an adaptation of a novel about a (possibly) serial killing, rich, misogynistic (and fictional) investment banker. The adaptation of the novel was the only really successful film of the three, I think.

More on the feminist biopics later, but first I want to talk about American Psycho, the one about the investment banker who either likes to, or pretends he likes to, cut other people up into little pieces. Truth be told, I haven't read Bret Easton Ellis's novel. I did read Less Than Zero around the time it came out, and I can say with pretty great authority that he writes with emotional accuracy about a particularly creepy rich kid milieu. I think I actually may have written a paper in high school that posited that the Beverly Hills Ellis skewered in his first novel was essentially the same as the world we lived in at home in West Egg. Not everyone was pleased. Back to the movie. I think it's kind of great. I've seen it twice, but the first time I watched it I was a little distracted as a crazy drunk tried to break into my apartment in the middle of my viewing of the film and I had to call 911 and deal with the cops, etc. (and, no, I am not making this up). The responding beat cops thought it was hilarious that I was watching American Psycho during all this. I saw it a second time a couple of months ago, and it just nails a certain type so well. The kind of rich business man whose performance of his own gender is so aggressive it almost always strikes me as a kind of deeply closeted homosexuality. It's all about competition with all the other M&A guys, women don't even figure into the picture except as another acquisition.

Her movie is so good, and so very disturbing. I read a couple of interviews with Harron before writing this, and she is very, very smart. She started off as a journalist. She was a founder of the legendary 'zine Punk, and was the first journalist in the US to interview the Sex Pistols. She was The Observer's theatre critic for a while (and she dated Tony Blair!). I found her two biopics, I Shot Andy Warhol and The Notorious Bettie Page fun to watch, but mostly because of my fascination with the subject matter of each. Bettie Page was by far the stronger of the two, and Gretchen Mol is really lovely in it. I think what I like about Harron is that I believe she is actually trying to work things out about gender and class and about how people fit or don't fit into the various slots they wind up in. Her feminism isn't static, and she has a wicked and black sense of humor. She is currently working on an adaptation of The Moth Diaries, a girl's boarding school gothic horror novel. I'm practically salivating in anticipation.

Revolution Girl Style Now

That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood
She's got the hottest dyke in town
That girl she holds her head up so high
I think I wanna be her best friend, yeah

Rebel girl, Rebel girl
Rebel girl you are the queen of my world
Rebel girl, Rebel girl
I think I wanna take you home
I wanna try on your clothes oh

-"Rebel Girl" Bikini Kill

I have no idea if the above lyrics were written for Joan Jett but they sure as hell could have been. She did, however, produce and play on the track.

I finally saw The Runaways flick the other day after waxing rhapsodic in hysterical anticipation about it all over the internets. I didn't see it right away pretty much because of equal parts fear of a let down and the enjoyment of the anticipation. This month has been about all kinds of delayed pleasures, with my veiled and tiresomely vague mentions of making out on park benches, and maybe after all the disappointments in the past, both romantic and cinematic, for a while pleasurable anticipation seemed the way to go. But anticipation is over and done with and gone on all fronts, and The Runaways was awesome and so is the over the top intensity of a brand new romantic entanglement.

As anyone who is a part of any kind of group that has been marginalized by the larger culture knows - whether you're a girl or queer or black or whatever - there is art that is outside the culture looking in, which isn't necessarily terrible, but doesn't so much speak to the people inside the group as to the people outside of it, and then there is art that is positioned inside, shooting outwards. The Runaways film made by first time feature director Floria Sigismondi (she's directed tons of music videos and done lots of installations and video art) definitely lives inside of girl culture and is filmed from that perspective. There have been some (understandable) complaints that the film should have been more overtly queer, but, like, baby steps. Susie Bright's amazing blog post on the film and about the LA '70s underground punk dyke groupie slut subculture is a total must read. What's kind of interesting and sad to me is that the reaction of some men to the film ("Hot teen girls!") has been pretty much exactly the reaction to the original Runaways back in the '70s ("Hot teen girls!").

So many of the problems with many movies about teen girls stem from the fact that they are made by men who don't understand teen girls at all. There has been gallons of ink spilled on how teen boys view teen girls and about objectification and sex and bros before hos and on and on. Now, in many narratives, teen girls are seen as being much more relationshippy and full of Deep Feelings about the boys in their lives and have all these Important and Meaningful Thoughts about Boys and on and on. Look. I will fully admit I know absolutely nothing about teen boys. I started dating boys when I was a teen, and I think maybe I have a tiny handle on grown up men people after all these decades. But I know girls. Teen girls are Awful. They are solipsistic little monsters who gaze at themselves and each other endlessly and dramatically. And they are just as angered and mystified and often as bored and annoyed by boys as boys are by girls. The most important relationships in most girls' lives are with other girls. Boys are fun and all, but to many, many, many girls, it's other girls who Matter. I don't know why this is such a confusing concept. After all, when you're 15 (and sadly sometimes long after) Boys Are Stupid. Boys: whatever horrible things you think the girls in your class are thinking and saying about you, the reality is likely far, far worse. If they even bother to think about you at all.

You can pretty much judge the quality of a teen girl movie by seeing how important relationships with girls are compared to relationships with boys. Foxes (co-starring Cherie Currie). Clueless. Mean Girls. Ginger Snaps (the greatest Canadian teen girl werewolf movie ever made). All these films Get It. The Runaways is entirely about girls. Boys simply don't figure into it. They were all a bunch of baby dyke rock stars with no romantic attachments except possibly to each other. Does it get any cooler than that? This is one of those movies that reminded me completely viscerally how much fun it was to be really young and hot and bratty and immortal. I had so much fun back in the early '90s when I ran wild in the East Village in my vinyl boots (I had four pairs. FOUR.) and my burgundy suede hot pants and my vast collection of mini-skirts and my silver tights and and my black leather coat that I wore until it fell apart. But of course I was never a rock star as I was handicapped by the lack of even the smallest, rudimentary drop of musical ability. But I totally could have played one on TV. Oh, the arrogance.

Dakota Fanning is good as Cherie Currie. I do question the sad pouty face at the end, though. She has a crappy retail job post-Runaways, post-rehab and I guess we're supposed to feel sorry for her, but she got to be a ROCK STAR for a minute and a half. From what we saw of her home life, without the rock star interlude she likely would have been working a similarly shitty job in the Valley. So. Hair aside, she doesn't look much like Currie, but she does a nice job. I thought Kristen Stewart was awesome as Joan Jett. The slouch, the attitude, the reserve, that pretty face - she just nailed it. It was great to see her just killing it without being hampered by some fucking sparkly vampire.

I grew up worshipping at the shrine of Patti Smith, but as I've gotten older I've become slightly ambivalent about her. The thing with Patti is that she's pretty much always the only girl in the room. She's all about exceptionalism in some ways, which bugs me. I mean, has she ever even had a female friend? Joan Jett may be the opposite. She's done endless work on the behalf of other artists, working with The Germs, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, The Gits and others throughout her career. She's still playing, still recording, still touring, and through some kind of deal with the devil she has managed to hardly age a day. And below are the real Runaways being big in Japan.

Who Said Romance Was Dead?

Over this past Valentine's Day weekend it may have been me saying it. But personal drama aside, I'm really not cynical enough to completely disbelieve in it altogether. Like all good Americans I've gotten pretty much all my ideas about romance from the movies, and I often wonder if all my real life relationships haven't been totally sabotaged in advance by all that movie watching.

Last week, Nora Ephron published a list of her favorite romantic comedies in the Daily Beast. It's a very good list, but there are a few truly glaring omissions and one inclusion that truly baffles me. I mean, there's no arguing with likes and dislikes but calling Casablanca a romantic comedy at all strikes me as bizarre. One important thing she fleetingly mentions as being very important are plots. That romantic comedies seem to work best when they're about something besides the romance. This was also discussed this week here, on Alyssa Rosenberg's excellent blog. I completely agree with her that the exclusion of The Lady Eve and Trouble in Paradise are completely indefensible. I think what everybody is really talking about here is stakes. Which in the current crop of romantic comedies, simply don't exist. If the girl and the guy don't wind up together, what exactly will happen? Um, nothing. I mean, who cares? And the movie isn't about anything else so it becomes a totally pointless exercise and incidentally totally unromantic because it's just completely annoying and solipsistic and you wonder who would put up with these stupid self-centered people for more than five minutes. That's one of the reasons Jane Austen's stories still work so well. The stakes are sky high. If the Bennett girls or Anne Elliot don't marry they are doomed to terrible lives of penury.

There are some other films that I think are really worth talking about in the context of romance. Ephron's list has very few films from what we'll call the modern era: Hannah and Her Sisters, Splash and Sense and Sensibility (which hardly counts). None from the past ten years. I'll probably be pilloried for this, but I honestly believe something from the Apatow oeuvre belongs on the list. Crass they may be, but they are actually funny. They are surprisingly romantic and the women in his films fare much better than they do in most current Hollywood product.

But the biggest modern omission of all is Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight. This was one of the best movies of the '90s and completely and criminally underrated and ignored. Granted, much of the movie focuses on crime and prison and heists. But the romance provides the structure and it's achingly romantic in a way movies have mostly forgotten to be. I think it's George Clooney's best performance by about a mile and Soderbergh somehow managed to wrench a decent turn out of Jennifer Lopez. There's a scene early in the film where Lopez, a Federal Marshall, is being held hostage by Clooney, who has just escaped from prison. The two of them are locked together in the trunk of a car and they begin to talk. They mostly talk about movies, and it's one of the great falling in love scenes in film. He's certain that he's found his perfect woman, but the obstacles are legion. He's a bank robber who doesn't know how to do anything else. And she's Federal Marshall who wouldn't ever even think about neglecting her duty. After that great early scene, they only meet face to face three more times. Once, he waves to her from an elevator as she stands with the SWAT team sent to capture him. Then they meet in a bar, half pretend they are other people, and have sex (he refers to it as a time out, from their real lives, from crime, from inevitable disaster). The third time, she shoots him. But it's essentially a comedy, if a dark, violent and bittersweet one.

But to get back to Nora Ephron. I think this is as good a time as any to take a look at her directing career and to add her to my sporadically added to list of women who direct movies. She comes from a family of screenwriters (her parents wrote Desk Set), and was once played in a film by Meryl Streep. Her first screenplay was for Silkwood (also starring Streep). I saw it in the theater when it came out and have been using the phrase "scrub oneself like Karen Silkwood" pretty much ever since. I haven't seen the movie in almost 30 years, so I hesitate to say much about it. One thing I do remember was it was the first time I ever saw oral sex being performed on a woman in a movie (very eye opening). She also wrote the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally. The first film she directed, This Is My Life, is mostly forgotten, which I think is unfortunate as I liked it. In it, Julie Kavner (most famous for being the voice of Marge Simpson), the single mother of two young girls (Gaby Hoffman and Samantha Mathis), begins a new life as a stand up comedian. I love movies about women and their careers and their relationships with other women. They so rare, I can basically count them on my fingers. Bedchel's Law is rarely adhered to in Hollywood (or anywhere else to be perfectly honest). This is the point in her career where things get a little dicey. She proceeded to direct the two most successful romantic comedies of the 1990s - neither wound up on her list, by the way, and rightly so. They both starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The films are not aging well to say the least and the second one (You've Got Mail) is particularly risible for both its moral sogginess and its desecration of The Shop Around the Corner. She made a few other forgettable, poorly received comedies. But then last year she made Julie and Julia. She went back to writing about what I believe she's best at - women and their careers and their relationships with other women. It's adapted from two memoirs (Julia Powell's titular one and Julia Child's) so she doesn't get all the credit. But there are so many places where this movie could have gone wrong and it didn't. Both women have men in their lives and to my great joy, they are each relegated to the roles most commonly played by women: the spouse who either spends the whole film going, "I believe in you, honey, go do that thing you do!" or conversely, saying, "This thing you do is tearing our family apart!". But it's a wonderful film, about hard work and food and finding joy through one's passion and through marriage. My feelings about Ephron are so mixed, as what I'm now referring to as her mid-period was just completely horrifying to me. But in many ways both her first and her most recent films point to a mainstream, feminist cinema that seems to reflect the sensibilities of ordinary, modern, working women.

Alice Guy Directed Over 300 Films

I've been pretty much neglecting The List I began about a year ago - perhaps I was disheartened by the Twilight debacle

To recap: I started a series of posts focusing on various female film directors. I wondered why so shockingly few women through the past 100+ years have had successful careers (particularly in the US), and why it was still so ludicrously difficult for women to get movies financed and made.

Today, Fuzzy Bastard forwarded a really interesting article about Alice Guy, yet another female pioneer of cinema I had never heard of. Back in 1895 when the Lumière brothers more or less invented the movies and screened their short films, Alice Guy, a secretary at the Gaumont still camera company was in the audience. Gaumont "allowed" her to film some shorts on her day off for no pay, and Guy proceeded to invent narrative cinema. A surprising number of her films survive, which makes it even more unfortunate that she has been almost entirely forgotten. Wonderfully, Kino has just released a DVD which contains more than 50 of her films. Here, she filmed music hall performer "Little Tich" in 1900. Jaques Tati cited this short as an influence.



"Le Tonneau Ivre" is a charming little comedy short from 1906:



Guy eventually made her way to New York and set up a film studio in Fort Lee. She subsequently directed some films for the Hollywood studios, returning to France in 1922. She was unable to find work and never made another film. She died in New Jersey in 1968.

(image: Kino)

Twilight Watch, Part 2: The Arrival

It's been more than a month since the last installment of Twilight Watch.  I still haven't seen the damn film.  It's starting to fade from the multiplexes and it's beginning to look as if I will have to wait for On Demand.  Sigh.

I think the best thing I can do is to just continue The List I've been working on for the past few months as that was the whole point, right?  Okay.  Here goes.

Catherine Hardwicke: As far as I know, she is the only production designer turned major director in the history of American movies (as always, if I am wrong, please let me know in the comments). So far she seems to have avoided the cinematographer-turned-director disease of pretty, pretty films with story problems. I was super excited to see her first film, Thirteen. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I am completely obsessed with anything that has to do with teen girls. To say I enjoyed Thirteen in no way implies that it was any good. It's a melodramatic film, full of after school special clichés. Even though I was aware of all that when watching it, I still found it hard to shake. For all its silliness it feels right in how it's pitched emotionally. Sadly, the reality of teenage life is often more like bad television then good art. A few years ago I began listening to a lot of Britney Spears for a project I was working on, and I was amazed at how dramatic all her songs were, how emotionally raw and over the top. And then I got part of why she became such a huge star- her songs aren't any good, really, but they feel like being in high school.  While writing this I took a look at the reviews for Thirteen, and honestly they kind of weirded me out.  All of these middle aged men giving positive, serious reviews to this film about thirteen year olds having sex and wearing really hot clothes and lying to their parents, just made it seem really prurient.  Andrew Sarris wrote one of the few negative reviews, pointing out how creepy it was watching this film in the theater with a bunch of grownups.  Thirteen is the only film of Hardwicke's I've seen.  I really want to see The Nativity Story.  I have no idea how Hardwicke treats the subject matter, and I think I have a fantasy about single, teen, pregnant Mary of Nazareth deciding that telling a really elaborate lie about the messiah is a better plan than being stoned to death (I remember a TV miniseries about Jesus from the '70s that had a scene of Mary worrying about being stoned to death, it really stuck with me).  I have a feeling I will be disappointed, but that will be more my problem than the movie's.  The Lords of Dogtown is somewhere on my Netflix list.  LA skaters have never really interested me that much, but I've heard it's pretty good.  And now Twilight.  Sigh.  The worldwide take is nearly $280 million. It cost $37 million to make.  It's a monster hit.  I have to see it.

Then suddenly, things get even more interesting.  Catherine Hardwicke has been fired from Twilight's sequel, New Moon.  According to Summit Entertainment, this was a mutual decision based on scheduling.  Anonymous reports inside Summit say Hardwicke was "difficult" and "irrational".  Oh, for Christ's sake.  Irrational?  She just helmed a low-cost blockbuster.  Suck it up Summit.  She is being replaced by Chris Weitz whose most recent project was The Golden Compass, which cost $180 million and was a US box office disappointment, but did well internationally.  I'm not the hugest fan of the His Dark Materials books.  I liked the Golden Compass, and more or less enjoyed The Subtle Knife, but I thought The Amber Spyglass was a mess.  I found Weitz's film to be pretty unwatchable.  American Pie box-office aside, he is hardly a risk-free choice.  This makes no sense.  I hate to be a shrill feminist scold (actually that's a lie:  I fucking love being a shrill feminist scold), but please name one male director who has been removed from a film series when the first installment was a massive, money creating machine. Right, never.

I really have to see this film.  Damn.  And read the book.  I do have some news.  I ordered the book from Amazon.  It has arrived, in fact it's sitting here in my lap, still in its brown cardboard shipping box.  I'm going to open it right now.  Hold on.  Okay.  Here it is, all 498pp of it.  Damn.  I guess I should read it, right?

Stay tuned for Twilight Watch Part 3: The Reading

Twilight Watch, Part 1

I just can't do it.  I almost bought tickets online to force myself to go, but I know I would rather waste the twelve dollars than watch. Sigh. I cannot, I repeat, I cannot. I feel that I must. I've been writing about female directors, with a special emphasis on American women. Genre films are of particular interest to me.  The goal has been achieved. A film directed by a woman has a monster opening weekend- 70 million dollars. Domestic! Gift horses. Mouth. Sigh. I am incapable of either seeing this film or of keeping myself from counting teeth.

The film is Twilght. I have not seen the film and I haven't read the book. I have no right to comment.  There is a 2:15 matinee.  It's now 1:52.  Can I make it?  I still really, really don't want to go.  I'm really pleased for Catherine Hardwicke.  

That's a total lie.  The entire thing makes me angry.  Updates on my attempts will follow.

There is clearly no pleasing me.

Boo!

The past few decades have not been good for people who specialize in the short form of anything, but maybe, just maybe the pendulum is swinging in the other direction again.

Hollywood is specializing in three hour long B Movies, novels are volumes long, and I think all of it is collapsing under the unbearable weight of expense and bloat. I love short stories, and if my opinion is worth anything, I really believe that the best young American writers seem to be short story specialists. Kelly Link is untouchable with her razor sharp voice and her boundless imagination, and Karen Russell is not far behind, having written my favorite story of recent years: St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves. Link's fantastic zine, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet is never ever dull, and is, story for story, way stronger than The New Yorker. The yearly anthology edited by Ellen Datlow (who I met this year at a reading and almost died of shyness and excitement) and Link is always really, really worth reading. All we need now is for Alice Munro to win her long deserved Nobel.

Okay. I need to fess up. Alice Monroe aside, most of the above write what is called fantasy, or speculative fiction, or horror. If left completely to my own devices, this is where my taste runs. Happily, my taste seems to have gone mainstream, so there is lots and lots of it. Also, most of the authors listed above are women. I don't know if means anything, as the world of speculative fiction short story writing has always been more egalitarian than some (probably because there was always so little money at stake). All this brings me back to The List I started blogging about last summer. To recap: there have been remarkably few female film directors who have had careers of any significance.

Last night I attended a screening of an anthology of short horror films directed by women, Bride of Sinister Six, curated by Bryan Enk. I love anthologies. I play my ipod on shuffle. I crave variety. Halloween is the best. The more splatter the better. I had a really great time. To make a full disclosure, I know many of the people involved. I'm not here to be a critic. I'm just really glad Bryan remedied a really unfortunate situation (the two previous Sinister Six anthologies included only male directors).

I loved Sally McKleinfeld's film (The Box) which dealt with sisters and a horrific, flipper-like tongue. I also really liked Gyda Arber's creepy roommate story (Watching), with a lovely performance by Jessi Gotta (who played Winnie in the second incarnation of Antarctica). I enjoyed all six films, but I really wanted to talk about "The Poison Kiss", Hope Cartelli's offering (still, above). It is sublime, it is beautiful, it is complete. A black & white, silent, German expressionist pastiche, with a terrific lead performance by Iracel Rivero (who looks like she was cast via time machine). Hope has been collaborating with her husband, Jeff Lewonczyk, on the silent, staged, Bizarre Science Fantasy series for the past few years, and the experience shows. The story telling is clear, fluid and concise. This is Hope's first film but you would never guess that from seeing this short. More please?

Surrealists Are So Pretty But Then So Many Artists Are Forgotten

A couple of weekends ago I watched a Netflix triple feature: The Triumph of Love, Romper Stomper, and Once. It was lots of fun as none of these films had anything to do with each other and I'm the kind of person who only listens to her ipod on shuffle.

Romper Stomper is really disturbing and really well done, but judging by a quick google search it has been embraced by every stripe of wannabe violent asshole, which is a pity. It's a show boaty, high energy Clockwork Orange-influenced tragedy about Australian Nazi skinheads. It was Russell Crowe's second major film role and he is really, really good in it. His performance as this really menacing, tightly wound skinhead is so completely different from the likable character he was in Proof (directed by Jocelyn Morehouse, PJ Hogan's wife), a movie I really adore. Once, as basically every other person on the internet has already said, is a complete joy. Triumph of Love was sort of a mess, a filmed version of a Marivaux play, starring a sort of incompetent Mira Sorvino. It had a lot of ideas, such as seeing flashes here and there of a modern day audience sitting on folding chairs watching the action. It was directed by Tasmanian Clare Peploe, who got her start as the writer of Anonioni's hippie epic, Zabriskie Point. Which brings me back to The List I started a couple of posts ago.

Lois Weber is someone I had never heard of until I began researching female directors for this blog project. According to IMDb, she directed 132 films (although according to Film Reference the number could be well over 300) and was the first woman to direct a feature. There is a clip from her film Hypocrites on YouTube and it really makes me want to watch the whole thing. It's beautifully shot, and I'm not entirely sure what is going on but it features a priest and a naked ghost girl and it's super ethereal and lovely (Note: the music used, however, is super annoying. I suggest you mute it). Lois Weber was a rabidly successful silent actor, director & producer. She was the highest paid director at Warner Bros. and from what I can gather (up to 90% of all silents are lost, few of her films survive), she explored moral hypocrisy and society's ills from a kind of early 20th century religious/progressive/feminist perspective. Her films looked at abortion, birth control, capital punishment and drug addiction and made lots and lots of money. Like many successes of the silent era, the combination of a messy personal life and the coming of sound killed her career. She found some work as a script doctor and then died penniless in 1939. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (6518 Hollywood Blvd.), and is all but completely forgotten.

Maya Deren. Why are all the lady surrealists all so, so lovely? Maya Deren was an experimental film-maker who although she rejected being classified as a surrealist, made a number of films which share many qualities with the films of Cocteau, Buñuel and Duchamp (who she at one time collaborated with). Her most famous film Meshes of the Afternoon, is like a dream. I do not mean what is usually meant when people describe things as being "dream-like". It is just like a dream, in its constant repetition of events with slight variations, confusion of identity, its use of the subconscious and of ritual. It was playing on a loop at the Tate Modern when I was there, and I just sat and watched it two or three times in a row. I love At Land, which somehow manages to build an unimaginable tension through its imagery and silence. In 1947 she received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation to travel to Haiti and study Voodoo. She died young in 1961 from a brain hemorrhage brought on by malnutrition and amphetamine addiction. Or possibly from a voodoo curse. One never knows.

Directing Movies Without The Benefit of a Penis

Why are there so few female movie directors and why do their careers seem to have so little momentum?

Last night a friend and I stood in the 7th Avenue subway station in front of the token booth discussing this. I hate the conclusions we came up with which were about the really disgusting Hollywood boy's club, about how most movies are geared towards little boys, about how one box office disappointment (I mean disappointment, not disaster) will kill a female director's career flat*, about the Sofia Coppola exception (more to follow on this below), and on and on. It's all very dispiriting.

Far fewer women go into directing film than men. It's a much more complicated prospect. Whose career to emulate? Who would I like to be? There are so few women, and almost no American woman to look to to see how it was done before. I mean who wants to be a pioneer? It totally sucks having to justify your very existence within an industry that clearly doesn't want you there. Maybe I'm wrong, and please post comments if you think so. Through this and subsequent posts I will create a list of female directors, with some discussion of their careers. One more sweeping generalization before I begin listing: no female director has ever, or could ever in the current climate weather the various non-performing movies, egotastic lunacies, creepy scandals and drug fueled shenanigans of some of our most respected male film directors. For example. Women simply cannot afford to fuck up.

The List, Part 1: Oscar Nominees

Sofia Coppola: The only American woman EVER to be nominated for an Academy Award for directing a film, and is only the third woman to be nominated. Look. I love her movies. From her short "Lick the Star" through the problematic but still worthwhile Marie Antoinette, she is making truly interesting films. But, she is also the great exception as she has the weight of the film establishment behind her in a way that cannot be matched by any other woman working in US filmmaking today or possibly ever. The executive producer credit on each of her three features is her father, Francis Ford Coppola. I want to be really clear. The happy circumstance of her birth did not make her movies good. I particularly want to give a shout out to her adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, a nearly unfilmable tone poem of a book, which is absolutely pitch perfect. The fact of who her father is, and the power he wields within the industry got her movies made, which of course is step one to becoming a legend.

Jane Campion: Full disclosure- I HATED The Piano for which she was the second woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Direction. Moving on. She's had a really great career that seems to have faltered recently. Angel at My Table is fantastic (based on Janet Frame's three autobiographies, which knocked my brain out of the back of my head when I read them), Sweetie is a great suburban gothic, lot's of people liked The Piano although it did not work for me, Holy Smoke I have not yet seen, and In The Cut was a disaster. To me, this is a really solid career. She has a film about Keats in the pipeline, which is kind of worrisome.

Lina Wertmuller: I'm in really dicey territory here, as I (embarrassingly enough) have never seen one of her films. She got her start as Fellini's assistant director on 8 1/2. She directed the original version of Swept Away (i.e. not the Madonna one). Was a communist and a feminist. She directed her latest film in 2004 when she was 78 years old. She sounds super awesome, actually, and I'm sure she benefitted from never having to work in Hollywood where lefty feminists have traditionally not fared very well (the Streisand exception will be in a later post).

To be continued!

* After Waterworld, that douchebag Costner was allowed to make The Postman, possibly the worst movie ever made.