An Alternate Ending

Not that I didn’t enjoy the movie Much Ado About Nothing, but I had a few alternate lines of dialog running through my head.

Hero: Wait a minute, you want me to marry this loser after all? The one who stood up in front of the whole town and told everyone I was a slut? Just because he saw some woman in my bedroom window from so far away that it could have been you in a wig for all he knew? Why would I want to do that, Dad?

Don’t go running off, we’re not done talking yet. You wanted me dead, Dad. I heard you. You didn’t even wait to hear my side of it, you told me to go ahead and die. And now you want to have this big wedding feast and pretend like everything is all right? Who are you, anyway ? No wonder mom ran off. Yeah, yeah, I’ve known about it for years, how did you think you could keep something like that a secret in a house with a bunch of servants? 

Speaking of servants, I have one. About my age, about my size, busy in my room a lot. So how come it never occurred to one of you geniuses that it could have been her at the window? Because, yeah, if I was going to do the nasty with someone the night before my wedding, it would be right in front of my bedroom window with the light on. I’m smart that way. Anyway, she's apparently allowed to have sex without anyone getting mad at her. So why is that again, anyway? Because she's the one of us who can't afford to take care of a baby.

How could you even believe this, dad? The padre here knew better than to believe it of me. My cousin knew better than to believe it of me. Her on again/off again, now he has a beard, now he doesn’t loser can’t even propose without help from half a dozen people boyfriend knew better than to believe of of me. Yeah, you, who did you guys think you were fooling, any middle school kid could tell how you felt about her. Throw her a wedding, dad, why don’t you? Oh, you were? A twofer? Matching veils. Dad, Martha Stewart you are not.

Okay, okay, I’ll marry the jerk. But don’t think he’s ever going to hear the end of this.

You either.

You Can Make Book On It

Sunday we went to see Silver Linings Playbook, which is having a short run in theaters again due to its having been nominated for so many Academy Awards. While I enjoyed the movie, I wouldn’t have nominated it for best picture. I’m sure the members of the industry who did nominate it know what they are doing better than I, but I would have passed it over in favor of Moonrise Kingdom or even Flight (and then voted Lincoln for best picture, although I loved Argo.) I’m not sure I would have picked Jennifer Lawrence for best actress, although I would have picked Jacki Weaver over Anne Hathaway for best supporting actress. But then, as I have said, I don’t see a lot of movies, so I don’t know the small details to look for in deciding who did what best. Such choices probably are better left in the hands of the professionals.

The aspect of the movie that intrigued my husband, however, was the character of the father, played by Robert DeNiro, or more precisely, his occupation as a bookmaker.

My Uncle Savario was a bookie, as John learned from the man himself on their first meeting. Uncle Sam, as everyone but his parents called him, was the oldest sibling in my dad’s family, and the only one to operate outside the law. He was also the one with all the money. My dad told me that back in the early 1950’s, my uncle did get convicted of bookmaking and paroled with the understanding he had to hold down a legitimate job for a year. Uncle Sam moved to Michigan and managed a paint store for that year. He did well at it, but as he later told Dad, he found legitimate work boring.

New York State legalized off track betting in 1970, partly in hopes that it would decrease illegal gambling. What it did was diminish revenues at racetracks, but my uncle’s business went rolling on.

I am rambling on like this to lead to a point: bookies do not have favorite teams. It would drive Dad nuts to watch a football game with his older brother, because Sam would cheer for one team up to a point, and then start cheering for the other team. Dad would ask why and Sam would say, “If the first team wins by too much, I’m going to lose money.”

When I was in my early twenties, a publisher began republishing articles from the old Liberty magazine. One of those articles was advice from a professional gambler on how you can make money gambling. He pointed out that the odds you were offered on sporting events varied by small amounts in different pool halls and bars around town. What you needed to do was go around checking the odds, and then place bets for and against the same horse, or team, in such a way that if the team lost, you would break even and if it won, you would win. (Or vice versa. The point is, you had to cover your bets.)

Mr. Professional Gambler also pointed out that his system is a full-time job. (I don’t think he mentioned this, but it also requires you to be very good at math. I think of him as the Nate Silver of his day.) There isn’t any way to get rich quick gambling. The way to get rich is to profit off other people’s gambling. The house always wins.

So when Robert DeNiro’s character bet all his restaurant financing on the Eagles beating the Giants, John found it perplexing, and so did I when he pointed it out to me later. I wrenched myself away from thinking about how long it had been since I made braciole and wondering why Jacki Weaver’s character Delores didn’t mention putting parsley in hers to contemplate the answer to John’s question, “Would your uncle have bet all his restaurant money like that?”

“Oh, hell, no.” He made his money getting other people to make bets like that.

So leave aside the unwisdom of the main character getting involved in a love relationship while still technically married and still learning to cope with his mental illness. The more important issue is, how can you trust a movie that gets details wrong like how to make braciole?

Oh, and that whole bookmaker thing, too.

That's the Way You Do It

So you’re hosting the Oscars, and you want to get away with singing an opening number called We Saw Your Boobs addressed to a number of women in the audience. Well, one way to do that is to embed it in a sequence in which Captain James Kirk comes back from the future to tell you how badly your hosting performance was received, in part because of that song. It’s a rhetorical technique called apophasis, from the Greek for “I’m not saying”. (Okay, actually, from the Greek for “to say no”, if you want to be so everlastingly picky.)

That works to an extent, but you don’t want to have to embed every tasteless joke, like the one about John Wilkes Booth, in that one opening sequence, and William Shatner is demanding some outrageous coin to stick around for the whole show for the has-been actor he is.

So what do you do? You have a surprise presenter give out the final award, the one for Best Picture. Somebody well-known to the public, but not associated with the movie industry. Somebody attractive and articulate, but at the same time controversial. Someone who is all dressed up anyway, in a Naeem Khan creation, because she and her husband are hosting a black-tie dinner for 100 or so people at the White House.

Who do we know who fits that description? Yes, it’s first lady Michelle Obama.

And the trick works. The outrage over Mrs. Obama’s appearance is instantaneous and, to me at least, hilarious. Never mind that she is not the only first lady to make an appearance at the Oscar ceremony. Laura Bush appeared at the 74th Academy Award show in a short film showing 100 people discussing movies. Of course, Mrs. Bush’s appearance could easily be overlooked in the controversy over whether it was too soon after the attacks on the WTC to hold a big Oscar extravaganza at all, not to mention she was one of 100 people shown in 3 minutes of film. Michelle Obama got a whole three minutes or so all to herself, live.

It’s amazing how many of her critics managed to overlook the fact that Mrs. Obama was not physically present at the ceremony, just shown on a screen from the White House. 

Some typical comments from Facebook:

I'm more concerned about the taxpayer money used to get her there and back. I'm tired if them spending my money to party.

That one drew a reaction:

On the other hand,[name], it's nice to know that transporter technology is working so well. Just think of all the military applications it will have.

which apparently went over more than a few subsequent commenter’s heads, because then we got:

The First Lady should not be at the oscars! She should be out trying to help make a difference in the world!

and

STAY THE HELL IN WASHINGTOn

The funny thing is, the article these people were responding to made it clear that the FLOTUS was in Washington, hosting the governors' dinner.

That fact also did not stop at least one person from believing that Mrs. Obama got dressed up and summoned up a military guard purely for her three minutes of fame on TV:

We were all waiting to see who was going to win for Best Picture and then all of a sudden, cut to Michele Obama from Jack Nicholson? She's wearing a gown at the White House for the Oscars with military guard? What is the purpose of this?? Why didn't she just go to L.A. and present then? None of this makes sense, because it's totally contrived and self serving.

So why didn’t she just go to LA, so that people could criticize her for not staying home? By now I’m seeing boobs, but not the kind Seth MacFarlane sang about. (See, I bet you forgot about that already.)

I also loved this comment:

She's definitely no Hillary, that's for sure...

Yes, because when Hillary was first lady, everybody loved her and no one ever criticized her.

The after several people made the predictable accusation that Mrs. Obama is a communist, there were these comments:

She had NO business there!!!

I thought Michele Obama had no right being on The Oscars,

She had no.business there

Because if there is one thing the free enterprise system means, it’s that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can’t invite just anyone they want to be a presenter. We the people will decide who they can ask, through our special Who Can Be a Presenter Commissar. 

Side Effects

If it weren’t for my husband, I would hardly ever see a movie. Today I was planning to clear off and clean the kitchen counters, when my husband asked, “Do you want to go see a movie?” Let’s see, housework or movie. Such a tough choice.

The movie he had in mind was Side Effects, billed as a psychological thriller. It is probably just as well  that I did not know that Channing Tatum was in it, given that I was not terribly impressed by the last movie I saw him in.

Side Effects is a much better product. It turns out Tatum can act after all, when he has a decent script to work with. 

Tatum plays Martin Taylor, a man who is about to get out of prison where he has served four years for insider trading. We first meet his wife Emily (Rooney Mara) when she goes to visit him in prison and they discuss impending release. Emily seems happy that he is getting out, but once he comes home, it becomes apparent that she is struggling. One day she rams her car into the wall of a parking garage. 

She survives the wreck, but because the police suspect a suicide attempt, she is seen by a psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Banks, played by Jude Law. He wants to admit her to the hospital for a few days, but she convinces him her husband needs her at home and that she will see Dr. Banks as an outpatient. In the course of the conversation, she reveals that she has been treated for depression in the past, after her husband’s crime and conviction led to legal, financial, social and medical consequences for Emily. Once home, Martin tries to convince her that he will get them back to where they were, but his new business plans involve a move to Houston rather than back to Connecticut as she had hoped.

Dr. Banks tries Emily on conventional drug treatments for depression, but she finds the side effects too disagreeable. When Emily comes too close to the edge of a subway platform, she runs to Dr. Banks in a panic, interrupting his conversation with his wife, who herself is facing a difficult job interview and needs his support. 

In consultation with her former therapist (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones), Banks prescribes a new drug. Emily is pleased by the results, but Martin notices that she is sleep walking and becomes concerned. Emily resists the suggestion that she change medications again, so Dr. Banks prescribes some other medications to help control the sleep walking.

Shortly thereafter, Emily commits a crime and claims she has no memory of it. With support from Dr. Banks, she is declared not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a forensic hospital until she is deemed fit for release.

While this seems like the best possible outcome for Emily, for Dr. Banks, things take a downward turn. His handling of Emily’s case is investigated. When reporters begin following him to work, his partners ask him to take his practice elsewhere. He is fired from his role as a consultant in a study for an anti-anxiety drug. Allegations about a past patient surface, making his wife wonder if there were aspects of his treatment of Emily that were less than professional. His reaction to these events lead his family and friends to wonder about his own mental stability.

After seeing a series of movies that had what I considered an excess of story telling gimmicks, I found Side Effects a refreshing change. While it was hard to see where the movie was going at first, in the end there wasn’t anything that I felt could have been left out. 

I read on IMDB that Lindsay Lohan had been considered for the role of Emily. Despite all of the turmoil of her recent life, I still see Lohan as the twins of Parent Trap, and can’t imagine her giving the performance that Rooney Mara does. Catherine Zeta-Jones is her competent self in the role of Dr. Victoria Siebert. Even Ann Dowd in a small but significant role as Martin’s mother is memorable.

I count Side Effects as one of my husband’s better choices. Much better than cleaning the kitchen.

Stand Up

Sunday, John took me to see Stand Up Guys. It was a movie I had little interest in seeing, but I had selected our last movie, Zero Dark Thirty, so I could hardly complain that I am offended by mindless violence.

(Spoilers) The first two-thirds of the movie lived down to my expectations. Al Pacino plays a former hit man (Val) who has been released from prison on parole, with Christopher Walken (Doc) playing his buddy who has stuck by him the whole time and who picks Val up from prison when he gets out. Val has served 28 years for a job gone wrong in which a mob boss’s only son gets killed. At that point a “little does he know that I know that he knows that I know” scenario ensues as Val finally confronts Doc about Doc’s latest assignment: killing Val.

They set off on one last night of celebrating Val’s freedom before the deadline of 10 the next morning, by which time Val has to be dead or there will be repercussions for Doc. Their adventures take them to a house of prostitution and then the emergency room of a local hospital, where they meet the daughter of their old partner, Hirsch. On finding out that Hirsch is in a nursing home, they decide to rescue him. Hirsch once again becomes their driver in a stolen sports car. A police chase leads to them finding a kidnapped woman in the trunk. Val and Doc decide to seek vengeance for her, and return to find Hirsch dead.

No, I am not making this up. Script writer Noah Haidle did. And if you’re a little startled, imagine the look on the priest’s face when Val confesses to all this the next morning.

Just about the time I was ready to close my eyes and settle in for a nap, I started to like these guys. Yes, they were that staple of bad movies, hardened criminals with hearts of gold, but they had their standards and their loyalties. Within the norms of their world, they did indeed try to be stand up guys, but as the priest told Val, “You’re not going to be able to Hail Mary your way out of this one.”

The movie ending came as a surprise to me, yet it ended the only way it could. Let’s just say it involved a line from another movie I’ve never seen, “I’m all outta bubble gum,” and my favorite lines from Stand Up Guys:

Doc: Tomorrow turned into today.

Val: It always does.

Argo

It’s a story so old it was told back when chariots of iron were the latest military technology. A stranger, usually a traveler, is in town. He is invited to stay by a person who takes the duties of hospitality very seriously. The townspeople suspect the stranger is a spy, an enemy. They demand his host turn him over to the mob.

There is no doubt the host has put himself in danger. In the old stories, the women of the family are used as bargaining chips. In Judges 19, a concubine is sent out to be raped and then murdered by the crowd. In Genesis 19, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the daughters of the house are offered to the crowd, but the offer is turned down. These episodes are often given as examples of how poorly women were treated in the old stories, and I won’t argue that they weren’t, but I think they were also meant to represent the utter sacredness of hospitality, the duty to protect the stranger, no matter what. 

In the movie Argo, the situation is a little different. The kindly host is also a stranger in the land. No one offers a woman to the angry mob, although the host’s housekeeper is in danger if she is found to have known about the strangers’ presence and not told on them. The main focus of Argo is not on the host, his duties and his peril, although that is a strong element, but on the efforts of the strangers’ homeland to get them out of danger. Yet while watching the movie, I couldn’t help thinking that it was a Biblical story set in a Biblical land, because the twin impulses, to  bond with others for our own protection and to defend against them for our own protection, go back that long and even longer.

Argo is set in Iran in 1979-1980, starting with the storming of the US Embassy on November 4. Six employees of the US Consulate are able to escape and eventually make their way to the Canadian Embassy, where they are sheltered in the Canadian ambassador’s home. Given the situation in Iran at the time, the ambassador is putting himself and his wife at risk. Everyone in the house is in danger, and the CIA is called on to come up with a plan to get the six Americans home. The State Department, the CIA and the Canadians agree that giving the six escapees fake identities as Canadians and flying them out on a commercial jet is the best way to extract them, although the idea of giving them bicycles and maps is floated briefly. After rejecting what at first seemed like more plausible plans that had serious flaws, CIA agent Tony Mendez comes up with the idea of staging a fake movie and giving the escapees identities as members of a Canadian film crew.

The movie cuts from scenes of the hostages being taken and their treatment in Iran, to scenes of the CIA and State Department meeting and planning, to scenes in Hollywood with a deft touch. The horror of the situation in Iran is countered with humorous moments in Hollywood often enough to give the audience a break but not lose the overall suspenseful tone of the movie.

The cinematography was tweaked to give the movie a period feel. Not just the costumes and hairstyles, but the whole look of the film was just right for the time. That’s an amazing attention to detail, and it works.

All of the acting was excellent. If you stick around long enough for the credits, you get to see pictures of the actors in character next to passport pictures of the real people they are portraying. It’s astonishing how close the resemblance is.

And there is a resolution at the end of one worrisome point about one of the Iranian characters. I don’t know if it was true to life, but it was an important detail to me.

The only small flaw I can find, and it’s an ongoing complaint of mine, is the number of, let’s not call them “cliches”, but Hollywood conventions that make their way into the script. While Argo is based on a true story, it doesn’t strictly tell the true story. Wired has recently reprinted their 2007 article, which I would recommend reading. I don’t fault Argo for being a fictionalized account of true events. I suspect most viewers, familiar with Hollywood storytelling conventions, can figure out which parts are likely real and which are add-ons. I just think of the old advice given to me in my girlhood years about jewelry: look at what you have on and subtract one piece. I think filmmakers would be do well to adapt that advice to their storytelling conventions: look at how many you have added to the script and subtract one. Some days I have a suspicion that they already do just that and still go overboard. I think the ending of the movie would actually have been stronger if there had been one or two fewer instances of split-second timing.

But then, as long as this story has been told, it has been told with the storytelling conventions of the day. The tokens sent to allies to summon them to avenge a great wrong, as in Judges 19 and as in the story of Troy. The helpless visitors turn out to be gods, as in the story of Baucis and Philomen or angels as in Genesis 19. In our day, there has to be a car chase. Maybe it wouldn’t be a story without it.

It’s a story that will always be told, because like all social species, we need our own kind, and we fear our own kind, but in addition, as humans, we feel the sacred duty of hospitality. It’s a story that will always be told, and Argo tells it particularly well.

In the Loop

What with all our traveling, my minor illnesses, and the depressing succession of broken appliances, the most recent being the garbage disposal, we hadn’t been to see a movie for a while. Yesterday my husband suggested we go see Looper. A futuristic movie about a hit man starring Bruce Willis did not sound like a movie I wanted to see, but I didn’t have any better suggestions, and anyway, hubby was paying.

It turned out to be quite a thought provoking movie, a very violent one, but thought provoking. The movie dealt in paradox, the paradox of time travel of course, but also the far more perplexing paradox of doing evil to prevent evil. Specifically the evil is that of killing one person to change the course of history, but there’s also the  paradox of doing evil in presenting mindless violence in a movie in order to get the viewer to think about what violence accomplishes. 

The film’s main character, Joe, is a “looper”. Loopers are hit men who exploit time travel: they are sent victims from the future, when time travel has been invented, to kill and dispose of in their present. The victims are sent to them trussed up like Thanksgiving turkeys, wearing hoods, and with the looper’s payment in silver bars strapped to their persons. The killings take place in a rural field near the world’s most depressing urban area, known merely as the city. When Joe isn’t killing folks out in the cane field, he lives in the city.

“Loopers” get their name from a peculiarity in their contracts: at some point in the future when he will have outlived his usefulness to his boss, the Looper will be sent back to the past to be killed by himself. Payment for this hit is in gold. Killing one’s future self is called “closing the loop”, hence the term “looper”. 

Okay, digression here. Another plot point is that when time travel was invented, it was immediately made illegal, so that the only people who have access to it are criminals. Think about that. Apparently every country in the world has made time travel illegal, and no military or law enforcement agency has access to it, just the bad guys. Does that make any sense to you, Gentle Reader? Because I just don’t see that happening. What I see happening is whole armies going back to refight and refight and refight the wars of the past hoping for a different outcome, until finally the whole planet goes up in smoke, but of course that would be an entirely different movie. (One in which white supremacists in this country go back to the mid-1800’s to refight the War Between the States while a faction in great Britain goes back to the late 1700’s to refight the Revolutionary War. Then something goes wrong and they wind up in the same place at some point in 1830.)

If there is any explanation for why the looper has to be the one to kill himself, I missed it. It seems like it would be easier and cheaper to assign the hit to another looper. I wondered at first if perhaps the script was based on a book that gave a 14 page description of why it had to be done this way that just didn’t make it into the final script, but no, the script does not appear to have been based on other source. As far as I can tell, the only reason for this particular clause in the contract is that otherwise, there wouldn’t be a plot.

Because what happens is that when Old Joe (played by Bruce Willis) is finally picked to die, he manages to fight off his captors, get into the time machine to meet his younger self, and escape him, too. Is there a TV trope that goes “the bad guys never know karate”? Because if there isn’t, there should be. Old Joe is determine to find and kill someone who is going to become a villain called The Rainmaker at some time in the future. Young Joe tries to find and kill Old Joe, because unless he does, Young Joe’s boss is going to have him killed. (Which is why I wonder how it came to be the case that the young loopers have to be the ones to kill of their older selves. If someone else had been the one to botch the kill on Old Joe, there would have been just one manhunt, the one for Old Joe, and it might have been successful. Of course, then there wouldn’t have been a movie.)

Young Joe may not be able to prevent all of Old Joe’s violence, but he can see, in a moment of clarity at the film’s climax, what is going to create the endless loop that leads to the exact end Old Joe is trying to avoid. He closes the loop the one way he knows how. 

I think this is a good movie, but it is, as I said, very violent. If you avoid violent movies on principle or for reasons of taste, I am hesitant to tell you that you should make an exception for this one. It bothers me that I have come to the point that I can see a movie in which people are being killed every few minutes (and the worst violence takes place off screen) and still think of it as a good movie. 

As I said, it is thought provoking.

Hope Springs

Now that the Olympics are over, John is again looking for movies for us to see weekly. This week’s movie was Hope Springs, with Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones as the older married couple who have fallen into a rut. They sleep in separate bedrooms since he hurt his back, but worse (to me, anyway) is that they don’t seem to connect on any level. Arnold is obsessed with his job and golf, not necessarily in that order, and Kay has a job at a clothing store but seems mostly to identify with her roles as wife and mother, and is taken for granted in the first and at a loss in the second now that the kids are grown. 

When an attempt to initiate sex with her husband fails, Kay decides to take action and signs them both up for intensive couples counseling in Greater Hope Springs, Maine. Arnold is highly resistant, refusing to go at first, showing up at the airport only when Kay leaves without him, and sabotaging several of the exercises the therapist assigns for them. When he finally realizes what he has to lose and plans a romantic evening for Kay, what began well ends badly. They return home with Kay feeling frustrated and Arnold asking “It hasn’t been all bad, has it?”

I know I am supposed to identify with Kay, but I felt bad for Arnold. Both characters are stereotypes who only emerge as real people because they are being played by excellent actors. But Arnold in particular seems like the stereotype of the emotionally distant husband who thinks coming home at night and bringing home a paycheck are all that he needs to do to be a good husband. The movie pokes fun at him and Kay finally voices her disappointment at him for using gift giving occasions to buy things for the house (a hot water heater, a cable subscription), but I see these “presents” as Arnold’s way of being her protector. 

I’m reminded of a older couple I knew when I was much younger, living in a small town in New Jersey. They owned a small grocery store in the heart of town. One day, the husband told us proudly, “She never had to eat margarine. Even during the war (World War II), she always had butter.” I thought that was the most romantic thing I had ever heard anyone say.

Of course, I don’t know how his wife felt about it. She might have preferred less butter and more flowers, or diamonds, for all I know. But I suspect she knew he really wasn’t just talking about butter.

Arnold, however, is not even at that point. Kay is important to him, but he has his own disappointments, and seems to think that if he never complained, she shouldn’t either. His biggest fear seems to be that if they admit their disappointments with each other, their marriage will fall apart. It’s easier for him to understand that his house needs maintenance than that his marriage does.

The movie does have a happy ending, as unlikely as it sometime seemed that it would ever get there and despite the painful moments along the way. Don’t go expecting the merry, slapstick comedy the previews seem to promise. But go, is what I’d advise. Bring tissues.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

The opening scenes of Beasts of the Southern Wild introduce us to Hushpuppy, the cutest 6 year old that ever lived, and the harsh environment of rural poverty in which she is being raised. I say “raised” rather than the proper southern “reared” because Hushpuppy’s daddy, Wink, while he loves her profoundly, has no idea how to be a father. It’s not clear that he would have any idea how to be a father even if he weren’t an alcoholic, and, as it transpires, seriously ill.

John wanted to see Beasts of the Southern Wild because it was filmed nearby in Terrebonne Parish. “Terrebonne” means “beautiful earth” and the marshy landscape is starkly beautiful, and unforgiving. Hushpuppy, her dad and their neighbors live outside the levee that protects the parish from floods, on an island called “The Bathtub”. The name is a conceit of the movie, but a real island, Isle de Jean Charles, inspired it. Isle de Jean Charles is disappearing into the rising waters of Terrebone Bay.

Hushpuppy is going to school of sorts, and is being taught about global warming and its effects in her teacher’s inimitable style. (At least I hope it is inimitable. Lord knows it would have got me fired.) She also learns about cave people and the extinct aurochs, which Hushpuppy imagines coming to life as the global ice caps melt. The aurochs comes to figure more and more in her imagination and in the movie, the “beasts of the southern wild” that represent the real-life troubles that threaten to overwhelm her just as floodwaters threaten to take away her home.

At home, her living situation is, to put it mildly, unusual. She has her own house, actually a broken down trailer, next door to her daddy’s, but separate from him. Wink disappears for a few days without leaving any provision for her care, and Hushpuppy fends for herself while reflecting stolidly that “Children with no mommy and no daddy have to live in the woods and steal underwear” and “If Daddy doesn’t come back soon I’m going to have to eat my pets.” When he returns, a storm is moving in. Wink and a few neighbors ride out the storm rather than fleeing, and while at first they are able to join forces to find food and shelter, the reality of the effects of salt water on the local flora and fauna forces them to take desperate measures, which in turn bring them to the attention of the world inside the levee.

That world does not represent rescue for Hushpuppy, however, and neither does the woman she sets off to find who may or may not be her mother. Finally she returns to her world to face the reality of her father’s impending death. In a powerful scene, she literally looks her fears in the eye and says, “You’re my friend, sort of”. 

But then, the aurochs that haunts her imaginings is the least scary thing about this movie. 

Quvenzhané Wallis is the cutest child actor ever, but she is playing a six year old. I am tired of movies that feature precocious children, children who manage to have skills and philosophies at 6 that most of us did not have at 25. All over the world there are real six year olds who feel fear and confusion at parental neglect and abandonment, who feel deprived by poverty and who need comfort for their fears. These children are not as articulate and philosophical as movie tykes, but they are lovable and engaging, and they deserve to have their stories told. Maybe the people who make movies should try that some time.

Brave

Brave was my husband’s choice of movie to see. “You do know that’s a Disney cartoon?” I asked. Yes, he knew, but wanted to see it anyway. I don’t mind watching Disney cartoons, either, although I was more prone to do so back when I worked with children and it was useful to know what they were watching.

The earliest showing we could get to was at 12:05. It turned out to be the 3D version, which is more expensive than the regular 2D version, but that wasn’t showing until 2:20. “What do you want to do?” asked hubby. I had actually never seen a 3D movie in a theater, other than the Muppet movie at Disney World’s Hollywood Studios, so I was okay with the 3D version. Besides, he was paying. (I paid for lunch.)

We had a few moments of buyer’s remorse during the previews. Everything looked slightly blurry with the glasses on and even blurrier with them off. Fortunately, the projectionist got the focus right in time for the short animation, La Luna, which preceded the main movie. La Luna was charming, and did an amazingly good job of characterization even though none of the three characters spoke a word. 

Brave was also delightful. Tomboy Merida with her wild hair left me almost hearing my mother’s voice, “Get that hair out of your face!” I hadn’t read much about it at all before seeing it so the main plot point came as a surprise. From that point on, the movie was pretty predictable and the message trite, but I say this from the point of view of a 65 year old who has seen the original release of Disney movies like Alice in Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp as well as early re-releases of Cinderella, Snow White, and Bambi. Walt and I go back a long way. For the film’s target audience, the message that you can’t change your fate by changing another person is fresh and new and worth repeating.

Besides, the characters are delightful, the animation is spectacular, and the lack of a handsome prince is a refreshing change. 

One note about the 3D. As my husband noted, for a lot of the movie it didn’t make a difference. It was like looking at a 2D movie with occasional 3D interpolations.  You might prefer to save the extra money for popcorn.

In God We Teach

I found this video on Chris Rodda’s Blog, This Week in Christian Nationalism, and found it interesting and thought provoking. It runs just over an hour. The filmaker describes it as follows:

A film by Vic Losick, “In God We Teach” tells the story of a high school student who secretly recorded his history teacher in class, and accused him of proselytizing for Jesus. The teacher, in danger of losing his job strenuously denied it. The specifics of the controversy lead directly to the church & state arguments that are in the news this election year. With Stephen Colbert, Alan Dershowitz, Neil deGrasse Tyson and others.

It can be found, with more information, on the website www.InGodWeTeach.com.

Moonrise Kingdom

Monday John wanted to go see Moonrise Kingdom. I wasn’t particularly interested in seeing a movie, but figured I could always nap through it if I didn’t like it.

I didn’t get a wink of sleep.

I don’t know how exactly to describe this movie. I suspect it belongs to a genre of movies that I don’t recognize because I haven’t seen the others. I found it whimsical and charming, but with an underlying realism. The cinematography had a stereotyped look, sort of like a Norman Rockwell painting, very much in contrast with, say, the grim visual realism of Snow White and the Huntsman. The first look at the screen let you know that you were about to see a “once upon a time” tale, although the time was 1965. True, those were real trees and boats and cottages and kids running around in “Khaki Scout” uniforms, but they looked too precise and a little unreal, like the kind of illustrations you would find in the books that Suzy, one of the two main characters, steals from her school library.

The characters are stereotyped and improbable as well, especially Tilda Swinton as Social Services (the only name we are ever given for her character) who wears a uniform reminiscent of visiting nurses of the Cherry Ames era and projects a combination of efficiency and rules-first thinking that still manages to hint at some concern for her missing charge.

Her charge, Sam, is a 12 year old Khaki Scout, orphaned and living in a group foster home, who has run away during a camping trip to be with his girlfriend, Suzy. Sam is picked on by his foster siblings and troop mates. Suzy has a reputation for going berserk when things don’t go her way. They meet when Sam blunders into the girl’s dressing room at a performance of Noye’s Fludde, and write to each other for a year before planning to run away together. Their running away is marked by the whimsical unreality of the movie as a whole. Suzy packs her suitcase with her favorite (unreturned) library books and canned food for her cat, and runs off wearing a skirt and Sunday School shoes. They run away on a small island where there is nowhere to go where they can’t be found, as they are rather quickly, only to run away again when Sam’s troop mates decide that they have been unreasonably unkind to him and that they should help him instead. While this is going on, a record storm is brewing.

So at first blush, the movie seems like a cartoon, a comedy for preteens to keep them busy on a summer day.

Yet there is the underlying reality. With all its whimsey, the movie tells the big truth about twelve year olds. They keep secrets. They run away, even if only into the recesses of their minds, where their parents cannot follow. They think about love and sex much earlier than their parents would prefer to acknowledge. They pick on each other for no really good reason and make alliances for no really good reason and have a code of conduct that has nothing to do with the adults around them.

As teenagers we fight to defend our boundaries from our parents and to keep secrets, and then as parents we fight to know what our children are thinking and feeling so we can keep them safe. We become the ones who are whimsical and unreal, thinking we can get inside our children’s heads and protect them from making every bad decision we ever made. Suzy travels with a pair of binoculars so that she can see everything in detail. She likes to think that it is her “secret power”. As a parent I would have given a lot to have that secret power.

So once upon a time there was a real, true story of growing up and away from the people who are desperate to protect us. And all around, a storm is brewing.

In A Dark Wood

A few decades ago, I read Joy Davidson’s book, The Agony of It All, The Drive for Drama and Excitement in Women’s Lives, which was published in paperback as The Soap Opera Syndrome. In the book, Davidson discusses what she calls “sheltered risks”. Davidson maintains that it is harder to break the “girl rules”, rules that maintain a woman’s femininity, than to break the “good girl rules”. So using drugs, drinking, dating married men are what she would call sheltered risks: they do not challenge a woman’s femininity the way, say, starting her own business might. They also, of course,  do not give her the fulfillment that challenging the girl rules will.

I was reminded of Davidson’s book when we went to see Snow White and the Huntsman. In its way, the movie, like the fairy tale it is based on, is all about challenging the good girl rules without ever challenging the girl rules.

The movie opens with a scene of Snow White’s mother pricking her finger on a thorn and dripping three drops of blood on the snow, and thinking how nice it would be to have a child with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and the strength of the rose. Soon Snow White is born, and grows to be a good-hearted child who nurses sick birds and climbs trees with her friend William. Her mother, in the meantime, becomes ill and dies, leaving the king inconsolable. An attack on his kingdom by a phantom army leads him to discover a prisoner, who says her name is Ravenna. The king marries Ravenna, who murders him and lets her real army into the castle. William and his father escape, but Snow White does not.

Ravenna is all about breaking the good girl rules. She uses her ageless beauty, maintained with black magic and something close to human sacrifice, to manipulate men and achieve power. She uses her beauty as a weapon against men because her experience has taught her that they will use it as a weapon against her.

As we all know from the tale, Ravenna has a magic mirror, in this case, a polished round of brass, not silvered glass, which she consults to find out who is fairest of them all. In the movie, the mirror emits a stream of molten metal that forms a figure which converses with Ravenna. In one scene, we see Ravenna talking to the figure and then see the scene from the point of view of her brother, who sees Ravenna talking to nothing. This is only fitting: after all, the mirror represents the male gaze. The whole story of Snow White is about the male gaze, as represented by the mirror. When the queen asks “Who’s the fairest of them all?”, she is not asking who the scullery maids and farmwives of the kingdom perceive as the fairest of them all; she wants to know who men, especially men of power, see as the fairest of them all, and it had better be her.

So of course her brother does not see the shadowy figure of the male gaze; it is never directed at him and so is transparent to him. That’s how I interpret it, anyway. I think the film’s author meant us to see the scene as either meaning that Ravenna is dealing with dark powers invisible to mortals or else that she is descending into madness. There is a lot in this movie that I see in a way that I am not sure was intended.

Snow White manages to escape from the queen’s prison to a dark forest infested with evil things. Ravenna’s brother finds a huntsman who has been able to escape the forest before, and Ravenna promises him the one thing he wants in exchange for bringing her Snow White. Once he finds her, however, he chooses to help her escape to Duke Hammond’s castle, which he has been able to hold against the queen as a refuge. The duke’s son, William, Snow White’s childhood friend, has been leading guerilla actions against the queens’ forces. On the way they meet up with some women characters not in the original story as well as the dwarves.

The movie passes the Bechdel Test, sort of. There are at least two conversations between women in the movie that are not about men, because they are about the queen, Ravenna. But nobody is breaking the girl rules.

Even the part of the movie that deals with Snow White being poisoned by the apple and then revived by true love’s kiss underscores the idea that women’s power is beauty, and is fleeting, but men’s is not.  When William and Snow White meet again, he falls in love with her. Ravenna disguises herself as Will and gives Snow White the poisoned apple. William and the huntsman find her dead, and William kisses her. Nothing happens. Later, as Snow White lies on her bier in the duke's castle, the huntsman comes in, bends over her and tells her what she has meant to him, and kisses her. As he does so, a tear falls on her. That's what revives her.

It is a touching moment, befitting the movie and what the audience was no doubt hoping for. At the same time, what does it say that William, who is Snow White's age, does not have the power to revive her, but the older, grimmer (and still hot as a firecracker, but there again, it proves my point) huntsman does? Men gain power and wisdom as they age. Women lose power as their beauty fades.

The movie’s passing the Bechdel Test is true perhaps of the letter, not so much the spirit. The other women in the movie talk about the queen, but as the queen represents the idea that a woman’s power is her youth and beauty, they may as well be talking about men.

At the end there is another one of those scenes that leave me unsure what the filmmakers meant. Snow White has conquered the queen, leading a male army under the banner of the king, her father. She catches a glimpse of herself in the queen’s mirror and walks off with an enigmatic expression on her face. Has she broken the girl rules or not? 

I’d say, go see the movie. Leave the children home. This isn’t Disney, but then, the old fairy tales never were.

ETA: Since the movie has come and gone, I retranslated the spoilers from rot13.

Jump

My husband is always dragging me to movies. “Dragging” is probably overstating the case, but I’m not much of a movie goer left to my own devices. Furthermore, my tastes in movies when I do go, are solidly middle brow (does anyone say that any more?), whereas his are all over the map. If it weren’t for my husband, I never would have seen Map of the Human Heart or Amelie. On the other hand, I also wouldn’t have seen Bridesmaids or 21 Jump Street, the film.

I wasn’t expecting to like 21 Jump Street when my husband suggested seeing it, but I asked myself, how bad could it be? Why is it I fail to learn that the answer to that question is generally, “Awful. Horrible. Worse than you think”?

Unlike the television drama series on which it is based, 21 Jump Street purports to be a comedy. The movie starts with us meeting two high school classmates, one a jock named Greg Jenko and the other a geek with braces named Morton Schmidt. We see them first on the day in which Schmidt gets rejected while trying to ask his beautiful neighbor to the prom and  Jenko gets told by his guidance counselor that he can’t go to the prom, despite being elected prom king, due to his poor grades. The next time they meet, they are both at the police academy, where Jenko is having trouble with coursework and Schmidt with athletics. They team up to help each other, graduate and are put on park patrol, where their dreams of making a big bust are spoiled by Jenko forgetting the words to the Miranda warning.

For some reason, this error qualifies them to be assigned to an undercover squad working out of an old church on Jump Street. I’ve always been under the impression that undercover work requires a lot of skill and experience, but this is movie world. Not only are they assigned to an undercover job trying to find the distributor of drugs at a local high school, but they are told to live at Schmidt’s parents house (under assumed names) while doing so. If you think that might make it hard to maintain their cover, you're right.

At this point I began to feel like I was taking some of the drugs, what with reality and I having parted ways somewhere around the opening credits. I’ll make a long story short. This is a bad movie. Avoid it. Save your money. Or use it to buy lottery tickets.

The only reason I’m writing about the movie at all is that there was one moment that made me sad for the movie it maybe could have been. When they arrive at the high school, Jenko forgets which brother he is supposed to be and gives the principal the wrong name. As a result, he is assigned to an advanced placement chemistry class while Schmidt is assigned to a drama class just as the role of Peter Pan in the class play is being recast. A series of improbable events leads to Schmidt being accepted by the popular crowd (one of whom is the drug dealer) while Jenko is befriended by the geeks who show him the fun side of science (and help him bug the dealer’s phone). At one point, Jenko looks at Schmidt in surprise that their roles have been reversed, as if he realizes that his being the popular kid in high school was as much a matter of luck as it was of who he is. Channing Tatum, who up to this point in the movie had given no indication of acting talent, managed to convey that in one moment with the expression on his face.

Or maybe I was hallucinating. But it’s a shame, because the audience this movie was intended for (I’m guessing middle school boys) probably could use the message that who you are in high school isn't who you are for the rest of your life. I don’t think the movie would have been improved by trying to hit them over the head with it, but possibly if there had been a half dozen or so fewer car chases, explosions, pratfalls, improbable coincidences and cliches, that one moment would have been a lot more effective.

But there weren’t. So if you are over the age of 13, avoid this movie. Go see something else.

Darn! I Don't Live in Canada

Usually, I don't envy people living in Canada at this time of the year, when it's 75º here in Baton Rouge and 39º in Toronto. But tomorrow this move is opening in Canada, and while it will be playing soon (if not already) in a handful of cities in the US, none of them are near me.

I guess I’ll just have to wait for the DVD.

Dolphin Tale, a Review

I had a plan today to take the curtains off the French doors and scrub them before the man from Acadian Flooring comes around tomorrow to measure them for new blinds. That was the plan, then my husband asked if I wanted to see a movie. Housework, movie . . . housework, movie. Oh, how to decide?

The movie he wanted to see was Dolphin Tale, a movie based on the true story of Winter the Dolphin, who was rescued in Florida and given a prosthetic tail after her own had to be amputated. I first encountered the story of Winter in an edition of News-2-You, a newspaper for young readers who need picture support published weekly by Unique Learning Systems. Back when I was working, I got all my news from News-2-You. I first learned about Pope Benedict’s 2008 visit to the US in News-2-You. Winter’s tale (you saw what I did there) is a fascinating one in its own right. It would have made a terrific movie all by itself.

I say “would have” because while Winter’s story is the basis of the movie, it’s not the only plot point. I’m fairly sure that whoever conceived of this movie jotted down a dozen or so movie cliches on little bits of paper, put them into a hat, and then had the writers pull out four or five to add to the true story. So in addition to Winter, we have Sawyer, the struggling young pre-adolescent (in his first two scenes I wasn’t entirely sure he could talk) who blossoms through his friendship with the dolphin; his cousin Kyle, the athlete turned bitter wounded veteran turned athlete again; Dr. Clay, the director of a non-profit facility which is about to be closed down and sold to a developer for a new hotel; and the crusty businessman with heart of gold. Really, who needed all that? It’s as if Kate Middleton had worried that her wedding dress wasn’t flashy enough and decided to dress it up with a feather boa, a dozen silk calla lilies and a large lapel button that read “Hot damn! I’m getting married!” And then wore it with roller skates.

Keep in mind, I love sappy movies about triumphing over adversity. I was at the movie theater the second it opened to buy tickets to Miracle. I made my husband take me to Huntington , West Virginia after we saw We Are Marshall*. So if a movie is too sappy for me, you can start boiling up maple syrup.

So should you go see this movie? I don’t know. It does have some good moments. Me, I kinda wished I’d stayed home and washed the doors.

*It was on our way home from Ohio and we were on our way to visit his sister in Tennessee, so while it wasn’t the most direct route, it was barely out of the way, and now I can add West Virginia to my list of states I’ve been to. Eleven more to go.