For Feisty Feminists

Somehow, the equation Liam Neeson + Kicking Ass = Awesome never entered my mind, but when I saw the preview for Taken, I wondered why no one had thought of it before now. Taken begins with Neeson, a retired secret government operative, trying to become closer to his estranged daughter, Kimmy, before she goes on a trip to Paris he doesn’t approve of, and gets kidnapped the first day there and sold into sexual slavery. The movie has its flaws, but it occupies a comfortable middle ground between crap like Bride Wars and He’s Just Not Into You and overly earnest Oscarbait featuring naked Kate Winslet, Mickey Rourke’s flesh torn with barbed wire, or botched home abortions.

Bryan (Neeson) was absent on secret missions for most of Kimmy’s childhood, and now he is overprotective - subsequently, his 17-year-old daughter acts like she is approximately 8. She gets a pony for her birthday; when she sees him at a restaurant, she yells ‘Daddy!’ and runs towards him; and he takes the liberty of pre-ordering her a peanut butter banana milkshake. Note to fathers: if you refer to your 17-year-old daughter as ‘My Kimmy,’ she is going to be the kind of snivelling, infantile, completely sheltered and incompetent person presented here. But she’ll grow up fast when she’s forced to do heroin and become a prostitute!

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It is hard to explain the absolutely traumatizing, horrifying experience of reading The Road. I read it in one day - it seemed appropriate, seeing as how it had no chapters, no breaks, had no quotation marks for dialogue, and was just completely unrelenting, unforgiving, and devoid of any hope. It has stayed with me for over a month now; I will be walking along and then stop in my tracks, remembering some horrifying image from the book. The Road takes place somewhere on the East coast of the U.S., after an apocalypse; the reason for the devastation is never clearly stated, although the fear and chaos leading up to it is remembered in flashback. The landscape described by McCarthy sounds like a nuclear winter - the air is cold, ash constantly blows through the air, there is no wildlife or plantlife. A man and his young son travel south, trying to find the coast, where they think life will be better. Anyone they see is automatically suspect, and therefore avoided. They stay out of the cities as much as possible, going through houses and stores to find canned goods and supplies to survive. None of the characters have names; they are only referred to as ‘the man,’ ‘the boy,’ or whatever title is the least trouble to identify them. There are hardly any scenes involving anyone other than the man and the boy.

The book is good. It is written well. I will give it that. But I really doubt if the message, the impact of the book is worth the reading of it. I mean, do I need to read about roving bands of cannibals with young boys they use as sexual slaves, or about an underground cellar of people being harvested for their limbs to feed said cannibals, or about a baby roasting on a spit in order to understand that people have bad sides?

Do I need to know about these specific horrors, in a world where wildlife - plant, animal, sea, everything - has died, to know that the environment is important, and that nuclear winter would be a bad thing?

Do I need to read about the main character stripping another man of his clothes and only possessions at gunpoint to know that those who label themselves as ‘good’ are making relative judgments, and are sometimes not deserving of the labels they give to themselves?

I’m lapsing into the rhetorical question book review; but I really question whether the message and the quality of the book is worth how disturbing it is - and not in a horror movie, I’m scared of things that go bump in the night disturbing, but a deep, bone-chilling fear of humanity, along with a fear of what the future holds for us.

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Eat, Pray, Love is the story of a New York woman in her thirties who becomes dissatisfied with her life, to the point where she is silently bawling in her bathroom, spreading a pool of tears across the floor, hoping that her husband - the husband with which she knows things will not work out - will not hear her. From there, she tells the story of her eventual divorce, which leads to her journey across the world. In Italy, she simply enjoys sensual pleasures through eating; in India, she learns to pray and be silent at an Ashram; and in Indonesia, she learns to love, through a medicine man she met on a journalism assignment, and a generous, patient Brazilian lover.

This book is, like Nickel and Dimed, good but not great. It shows the weaknesses of someone who has written only for magazines and newspapers before trying to write a novel. Additionally, the point(s) is(are) fairly weak and obvious; who doesn’t know that Italy is especially sensual, and the Italian food divine - or that living at an Ashram will give you an inner peace, or that giving a multi-thousand dollar gift to a foreigner that is more money than they usually see in their lives will make them want to try and get more out of you? Again, it’s an Ehrenreich situation of asking many rhetorical questions that will never be answered by the folks writing the books.

Eat, Pray, Love is a decent book, but, like Nickel and Dimed, not great. It’s really just navel-gazing, and, reading it right now, with the economy and jobs (and me looking for a job), to hear someone talk about their time soul-searching, on a book publisher’s dime, in Italy, India, and Indonesia, with no objective in mind, makes me a little angry. But, still a decent book.

And, there would be more to write if I had not read this book quite awhile ago, but it does not stay in one’s memory so much. It is not memorable, notable, or that worthy of praise.

After years of hearing people praise Nickel and Dimed - both in conversations about books, and in conversations about homelessness/housing access and poverty - I finally sat down and read it on a Sunday afternoon. It’s an easy read, not great writing, but competent. The book chronicles Ehrenreich’s adventures slumming it in blue collar jobs. For about a year, she applied for jobs that required no training or education, and attempted to make ends meet. She set out with some ground rules - she had some cash to start out with for deposits on rental units (which most poor folks do not have), but would not dip into her savings unless it meant sleeping on the streets or going hungry, and she did not mention any of her training in journalism or her education. She started out in Florida, and waitressed in a small town restaurant; next was Portland, Maine, where she worked for a cleaning service; and in Minneapolis, she took a job at Wal-Mart, and her constant struggle to find affordable housing finally broke the experiment.

The most strong impression I have from the book, that so many people praised because it revealed to them the realities of the working poor, is: what the hell? You had to read a book about some rich white lady’s experience to learn that some people end up staying in motel rooms that cost twice as much as an apartment, because they can’t scrape together the money for a deposit? You had to hear it from her to know that some folks are barely surviving, working through not only aches and pains, but bones they have broken that same day on the job? Really? I am pretty disgusted, not at the book itself, but from the reaction I have heard from middle-class folks that this book is so eye-opening! so shocking! It’s pretty much the same reaction I had to watching Crash, which is dismay that a piece of work with a message so glaringly obvious could be passed off as profound, despite the also glaringly obvious flaws in the construction of the work - in addition to the condescending and patronizing attitude that got it made in the first place.

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I sat wondering if I could write about a supporting actress from 2008 for quite awhile. I will admit that I have not seen too many movies this year. But here is my contribution to StinkyLulu’s Supporting Actress Blogathon

I thought Penelope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Viola Davis in Doubt were both incredibly powerful, transforming the stories such that the characters were never the same once they showed up onscreen; I was stunned at the depth Olga Kurylenko gave to the latest Bond girl, Camille, in Quantum of Solace, even suggesting that a Bond girl could have a life beyond her relationship with James Bond; I was decidedly underwhelmed by Amy Adams in Doubt and Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight, two actresses I look forward to seeing on the screen; and I was touched by Hiam Abbas as Mouna in The Visitor - she managed to show a complete character in her brief screentime, while tantalizing us with an unknown world - the kind of character you wish you could get to know in real life.*

Yet, when I think of the idea of ‘actressing at the edges,’ (Stinkylulu’s idea, not mine) I think of not necessarily the most powerful performance, or my favorite character, but of an actress who lends the few moments of comedy and warmth to a grim, bleak movie that should have never been released.

That actress, the one that makes you laugh in a movie that competes for the crappiest movie I have ever seen, is Judy Greer in 27 Dresses.

This performance is in a real craptastic pile of shit of a movie. Judy Greer is the tasty pickle on the side of the crap sandwich. Yet, Greer charms in every scene, making you wish that the crappy rom-com had been made about her character, or at least that someone had had the foresight to put her in any scene other than those demanded by the plot.

The movie is about a career woman, Jane, who is 27 times the bridesmaid, never the bride, because she is in love with her boss - a neurotic played by Katherine Heigl.

Casey (Greer) is a co-worker, Jane’s best friend (? - the movie isn’t even clear on this relationship) who helps Jane with particular tasks, but also tells Jane that she is full of crap, in love with the boring boss who will never love her, needs to move on with her life, etc. - and these are all rote scenes for a romantic comedy. Somehow, Greer makes these scenes funny and fresh, while suggesting weariness and fatigue. She accepts Jane’s love for the boring boss even while she doesn’t understand it, or approve of it.

In one scene that could have been painfully unfunny, Greer swears her way through a yoga class, mad at the actions of various men in Jane’s life but still perplexed at Jane’s choices. Swearing through a yoga class sounds like the sort of easy target that would make me groan more than laugh in a comedy, but Greer nails it. Later, in one of the movie’s supposedly pivotal scenes, she covers for Jane’s poor judgment, and then tells Jane that, while she (Casey) may have a skewed moral compass, what Jane did was pretty fucked up. This scene is, like the rest of the movie, badly written, but Greer seems appropriately bewildered and sincere in her only dramatic scene.

Greer may be best know as Kitty, George Sr.’s secretary on Arrested Development (’say goodbye to these!’), but I doubt many fans would recognize her in other roles - I found myself struggling to place her distinctive voice throughout most of the movie. I don’t think she should be winning awards for this performance, but I do wish she could be in better movies and better roles - and someone should laud the actresses who provide a few moments of entertainment during an entertainment- and fun-less movie.

*I have not yet seen Taraji P. Henson in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Marisa Tomei in The Wrestler, Rosemarie DeWitt and Debra Winger in Rachel Getting Married, Catinca Untaru in The Fall or any of the talented women in Synecdoche, New York.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a departure from other Atwood books I have read (notably The Edible Woman, which I highly recommend) in that it is not grounded in reality, but  in a dystopian, anti-feminist future in which women are valued only for breeding, are rarely allowed to leave the house, and are not allowed to read. Like Orwell’s 1984, the government controls everything, and rigidly dictates not only individual behavior but who belongs to what class of people and what behavior they may engage in.

The story centers around Offred, a Handmaid - a younger woman used only for her breeding purposes to help an older, married man carry on his legacy. In this future, the birthrate has declined beneath replacement levels, and Handmaids have become incredibly important - but are almost constantly confined to the house and not allowed to read or write. They get a bit more respect then some of the other women - the servants, the poorer women - and some of them lord this little crumb, this ‘respect’ that is used to control them, over other women.

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