For Feisty Feminists

This past weekend’s viewings took in a blockbuster that was supposedly about the visuals, with a ludicrous storyline and horrific acting and characters, that lasted too long at 2 hrs 27 minutes; and a movie from 19 years ago from a writer-director full of ideas, rich characters, and dialogue-heavy scenes, with some botched visuals. Guess which one I liked better? Hint: duh.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen has a silly plot that is simultaneously mind-numbingly stupid and difficult to follow. Every scene seems silly and ridiculous, the action scenes look like complete shit despite the fact that it cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, and the best acting in the movie comes from Josh Duhamel.  I don’t hate action movies, not at all, but I hate soulless blockbusters that make me ponder the question “which is worse - if the makers of this movie actually thought this was good, or if they knew that it would make money despite its innate shittiness?” This movie is definitely in competition for the worst movie ever made.

Grade: F

Jungle Fever is Spike Lee’s look at an interracial relationship. It is about an affair between married architect Flipper (Wesley Snipes), and his temp assistant from an Italian-American neighborhood, Angie (Annabella Sciorra). The movie also deals with the lives of their families, including Angie’s father and brothers who expect her to wait on them hand and foot; her erstwhile suitor, played by John Turturro; Flipper’s wife and child, as well as his crack addict brother (a pre-Pulp Fiction Samuel L. Jackson) and his parents, a loving Ruby Dee and the crazy ‘reverend doctor’ Ossie Davis.

Lee’s usual strengths are on hand here. The performances are stellar - career bests from Snipes and Sciorra, and he has a strong eye for undiscovered talent, with not only Jackson but Halle Berry on hand.  The characters are well-drawn, and even when the dialogue becomes hyperbolic, it still seems consistent with the characterizations.

Lee’s weird point - for me at least - is the structuring of his ideas about race; namely, that if there is a racial issue at play, it is the only issue. Flipper cheats on his wife, which is not a big deal according to his best friend, until he reveals that it was with a white woman. His wife throws him out, apparently because he had sex with a white woman. When Flipper eventually breaks up with Angie, he tells her that they both just had jungle fever. Lee seems to be promoting this single-minded mentality. I think it’s a bit more complex - if it’s acceptable for men to cheat on their wives in Flipper’s world, could some of his wife’s anger be simply expressing her feelings about cheating in general, through a socially acceptable outlet of anger about race? If Angie lives in a working-class neighborhood and doesn’t know anybody who thinks beyond those limits, could some of her attraction to Flipper be about his upper-class status? Could Flipper be interested in cheating on his wife with a younger woman who is impressed with him, and also interested in what it would be like to be with a white woman? Lee doesn’t deal with these complexities, and that is both a strength and a weakness. He makes his points clearly, but does not leave room for complicated human emotions.

Lee’s weak point is visuals. He experiments with certain aspects of visuals, but they just don’t work. Lee stages numerous conversations where the participants are walking down the street with weird tracking shots, where it looks like the actors are floating rather than walking. It looks like shit, although not as shitty as any single scene in Transformers 2.

Despite all these flaws, Jungle Fever is, like almost all Spike Lee movies, well worth seeing due to the dialogue and characters. Jackson’s character in particular is great, showing how different members of his family deal with a fundamentally dishonest, scamming, drug-addicted brother or son. The character is only one of many that are interesting; there almost doesn’t have to be a plot to make a movie about these characters watchable. I criticize the heavy-handedness of the writing and directing, but Lee’s heavy hand is what makes his movies so interesting, and this is no exception.

Grade: B

Book 11 in Cannonball Read 2

How to Read Literature Like a Professor: a Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines is pretty much what the title promises - an overview of various themes, symbols, and literary devices that come up repeatedly throughout literature, put forth in an eminently readable format. Foster explores the various possible meanings of weather, irony, christ figures, and 20+ other recurring literary motifs, using various books to illuminate his points. It is an entertaining read, and certainly a good one to pick up if you can’t seem to find interesting books - both for the titles he recommends, and to rekindle an interest in the complexities of literature.

Foster spends 10 or so pages exploring each topic, enough to give the reader a general idea without confusing the reader who is not familiar with the literary works he uses as examples. He also doesn’t hide his tastes, and makes it clear that the novels he picks are the ones he loves.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor gets a bit frustrating if read all at once, as towards the end each chapter seems to be ‘X could represent Y…or it could be something else entirely! Sometimes it something else. Figure it out yourself.’ However, Foster gives you a fair amount of tools to do that analysis and figure it out yourself.

Book 10 in Cannonball Read 2

A Passage to India is a book that is not that great, despite my expectations. I loved Forster’s Howard’s End, and while the writing style remains the same,  A Passage to India failed to interest me; Forster uses the book to tell a parable about race and colonialism, but the story is clunky and a good portion of the characters are one dimensional.

A Passage to India ftakes place in India, and follows the story of Adela Quested & Mrs. Moore, British visitors to India, who become acquianted with Dr. Aziz, a local man.  The Brits all represent different attitudes towards India and Indians: most of the characters take the view that it is not proper to socialize with Indians beyond what is courteous and professional, and that it will lead to no good for either side. Adela and Mrs. Moore both represent a more liberal viewpoint, but in different ways: Adela challenges the other British visitors a bit, and cannot see why she shouldn’t be close friends with an Indian, whereas Mrs. Moore quietly goes about her business and treats the Indians as human beings. To think about it in modern terms, Adela would be a yuppie who makes a very big deal about how she’s not racist and ‘doesn’t see color’; Mrs. Moore would be someone who just quietly goes along treating people as individuals without ever making a big deal about her one black friend. For their part, the Indians also discuss whether or not it is possible to be friends with an English person.

Aziz takes the ladies to visit the nearby Marabar caves, loses track of Adela, and then something happens - either Adela has a hallucination, or a young man hired as a guide assaults her - and she ends up accusing the doctor of assaulting her in a cave. The British all assume he is guilty, and the Indians are outraged at his treatment.

The book, although perhaps progressive when it was written, is limited in its view of Indians and India. The Indian characters are largely defined in terms of their interactions with, and attitudes towards, the British imperialists.  There are only a handful of scenes where Indian characters take amongst themselves, and the book would not meet an Indian version of the Bechdel Test.  Most of the characters don’t go beyond the rudimentary “British = racist & Indian = noble and good” framework that Forster uses to lecture his readers. India itself is depicted as a mystical, magical place, mythologized into ‘the orient’ rather than a real place.

I could be making it sound a lot worse than it is; the truth is that, while easy to pick apart  the racial, cultural, and gender stereotypes portrayed, the book is eminently readable and fairly interesting, at least once the reader passes the slower beginning. Some of the characters, particularly Mrs. Moore, are well-written and have wonderfully fleshed out moments and interactions. The book is only disappointing as compared to the almost canonical reputation it holds.

Ah, my secret shame: awards-gazing. I follow the Oscar blogs fanatically, and I look forward to the announcement of the nominees and the awards themselves perhaps a bit too much. Inevitably, I am disappointed. This year is a bit less disappointing than usual - those 10 Best Picture nominees yielded an interesting group, and I’m solidly behind two of the locks for acting awards (Mo’Nique and Christoph Waltz). There were a few duds in the nominees, and there could be in the awards themselves - but I’ll talk about that only if it happens.

Best Picture: Avatar; The Blind Side; District 9; An Education; The Hurt Locker; Inglourious Basterds; Precious; A Serious Man; Up; Up in the Air

I have seen all 10, and I like 8 or 9, love 3 to 6 of them (the three I definitely love are A Serious Man, Inglourious Basterds, and The Hurt Locker. I might love Up, Precious, and District 9, but would probably have to see them again to be sure).

The upside to this batch is that we got an interesting mix, and that these are all movies that at least some people genuinely loved - there’s no coasters, although the quality of some nominees is debatable.

Prediction: The Hurt Locker

Spoiler: Avatar

My favorite: Don’t make me choose between Basterds and A Serious Man. OK, it’s Basterds for now.

More after the jump.

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Here’s the conversation Ben and I had about the Live Action shorts nominated for Oscars, including our predictions for which one will be taking home the prize on Sunday night. Check out Ben’s place for some video clips of the animated nominees, too.

Ben: OK, so I finally made it to the live action shorts as well.  On the whole, I was fairly disappointed.  I saw them last year and, as a group, they were much stronger.  That said, I did enjoy seeing some different interpretations with what can be done with 20 minutes of screen time.

So, they were pretty dark and bleak.  Every single one has some sort of violence or death (at least imagined death, in the case of the true comedy of the bunch.  My favorite was definitely Miracle Fish, about an 8-year-old schoolboy is a bit of an outcast at school. He gets upset, sneaks into the nurse’s office to take a nap, and wakes up to find an empty building.  This was definitely the only one of the films where I couldn’t predict where it was going.  While it probably had the lowest production values of any of the films (it seemed a bit blurry to me), it had the most compelling story.

After that, my favorite was “Instead of Abracadabra,” a sort of Swedish Napoleon Dynamite about a 25-year-old amateur magician who still lives with his parents.  This was shown last, and you could tell the audience ate up the chance for some laughter.

“Kavi” and “The Door” were well-made, but not surprising or all that interesting.  Kavi actually seemed a touch too reminiscient of Slumdog Millionaire.  I think it even had a song by the composer from Slumdog.  The Door, about the Chernobyl disaster and its affect on one family, was beautifully made but, again, a little familiar.

“The New Tenants” started out strong, with some funny repartee between the gay couple who just moved into an apartment.  It gets a little too “wacky” for me, though, and I hated the ending.

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Today, I’m here to help you win that office Oscar pool.  My old friend Ben and I sat down (metaphorically) and had a conversation about this years nominees for the Oscar for best animated short film. We both agree that the new Wallace and Grommit adventure is poised to win, but disagree on the most likely spoiler. Read the transcript below, and check out Ben’s blog, too!

Rebecca: I didn’t notice right away how much this year’s nominees are about death and violence, probably because the tone tended more towards dark humor and. ‘The Lady and the Reaper’ is about an old woman who wants to die, but is filmed as a slapstick battle for her soul between the grim reaper and a heroic doctor. ‘Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty’ is a fairytale turned into a rant about old age. ‘Logorama’ features a murderous Ronald McDonald taking Big Boy as a hostage, as well as an earthquake ripping part of California off of the coast. ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death’ is about a serial killer who murders bakers, and Wallace might be the next target. ‘French Roast’ is the only short that doesn’t deal directly with death - it’s about a guy who forgot his wallet sitting in a cafe.

First things first: I love the look of stop-motion so much more than computer animation, it’s hard for me to be unbiased about ‘A Matter of Loaf and Death.’ There’s so much character and nuance that comes out of stop-motion, whereas the computer animation in ‘French Roast’, ‘The Lady and the Reaper’, and ‘Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty’ starts to all look the same. ‘Logorama’ was an eyesore, but that’s part of the point, as everything is constructed out of corporate logos.

I enjoyed ‘Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty’, ‘French Roast’, and ‘The Lady and the Reaper’ (in descending order). In addition to the similar CG visual styles, they all consist of a simple concept made into a humorous short film of 6-8 minutes. The reason ‘Granny O’Grimm’ was my favorite of those three was the great vocal performance at the center of it, and the visual contrast in styles between the grandmother/child framework and the Sleeping Beauty story itself. ‘French Roast’ and ‘The Lady and the Reaper’ were enjoyable enough, but didn’t really stick with me.

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