“Bugsy Malone” and lost kids’ movies

I’m not the type to cry about how children’s movies aren’t as good as they used to be — far from it, as we seem to be living in a golden age for terrific kids’ movies.  But there’s something exceptional about Alan Parker’s Bugsy Malone (1976) that’s worth discussing.  Last night our home-for-the-holidays family watched it again and I struck by its appeal to both adults and children – a rarity in the 70s, an era of corny Disney features like The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) that, I’m guessing, don’t hold up all these years later.  The difference, I think, is that the child actors in Bugsy Malone are pretending to be adults in a Prohibition-era world of gangsters, molls, torch singers and showgirls, and wannabe prizefighters.  Because they inhabit their pretend-adult roles so seriously, the movie evokes a sweet melancholy for disappointments, lost chances, and broken dreams, moods discordant with other children’s films.  In fact, I think it’s the film’s juxtaposition of its sometimes dark themes, its terrific child actors, and its joyous final song that rejects cynicism in favor of youthful hope that makes it so watchable.  (Friends, it’s available in full on YouTube.)

When I saw this at a relatively young age, I wanted to visit the set and play there.  They drive kid-sized replicas of early autos that operate by bicycle pedal, it’s full of eminently singable song-and-dance numbers, and best of all, the plot pivots on a gang war over guns that shoot whipped cream.  The acting isn’t always seamless, but the best characters are played by the transcendently good Jodie Foster and, of all people, a pre-Happy Days Scott Baio as Bugsy.  Bugsy’s a scrapper – a good guy who’s a bit down on his luck but manages to get along.  He flirts with all the girls, but he really takes a shine to the solemn-faced Blowsey Brown (Florrie Dugger), a would-be singer who carries a baseball bat in her suitcase.  She shows up at Fat Sam’s speakeasy to get a job; Bugsy gets pulled into working for Fat Sam during the gang war; and their budding romance gets complicated by the worldly, wise-cracking Tallulah (Foster), a torch singer who vamps it up with the guests at the club.

What I find so remarkable about this is the prevailing sense of cynicism in the early parts of the film.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a group of 12- and 13-year-olds voicing such quasi-noir skepticism about the world.  When the club’s janitor hears again that he’ll have to wait till tomorrow to try out for a tap-dancing job, he resolutely picks up his tap shoes and sings a slow dirge:

Tomorrow
Tomorrow never comes
What kind of a fool
Do they take me for?
Tomorrow
A resting place for bums
A trap set in the slums
But I know the score

I won’t take no for an answer
I was born to be a dancer now, Yeah!

Tomorrow
Tomorrow, as they say
Another working day and another chore
Tomorrow
An awful price to pay
I gave up yesterday
But they still want more

Likewise, when Bugsy thinks he’s found a new boxer of extraordinary talent, he takes the poor guy to Cagey Joe’s gym to have him trained.  Joe looks him up and down and begins a warning-off song, eventually joined by all the other boxers in the room:

So you wanna be a boxer
In the golden ring
Can you punch like a south-bound freight train
Tell me just one thing

Can you move in a whirl like a humming bird’s wing
If you need to
Can you bob, can you weave
Can you fake, and deceive when you need to?

Well, you might as well quit
If you haven’t got it.

I should mention that this is really a catchy song, with lots of quick cuts to boxers in training.  But “you might as well quit / if you haven’t got it”?  When have I ever heard that before in a kids’ movie?

Now, no adult today will find the movie’s central plot about the growing arms race to be terribly remarkable — after all, the “splurge guns” at the center of the story shoot whipped cream — but as the film was made in 1976 it’s worth pondering whether it had the Cold War and the US/Soviet arms race on its mind.  Splurge guns prove to be infinitely more “deadly” than earlier weapons (that is, throwing whipped-cream pies into people’s faces), and without them Fat Sam is losing his territory quickly.  The film ends with an utter white-out battle in the speakasy, hitting everyone mercilessly in a way that at any other point would have signified death — in fact, it might have led to an even bleaker conclusion to a film that already has a lot of bleakness on its mind.  But when a pie hits the piano player and he hits a couple of notes, the battle halts; he begins singing in a rueful way, “We coulda been anything that we wanted to be,” a song that grows into a promise to change, to make friends, to live, to love:

It’s been lost, hasn’t it — the sense that the world is precarious, and that we have to become better than we are to save it.  It’s a mood I grew up with as a kid in the 70s, with children’s shows that advocated a social conscience.  All the more reason to watch Bugsy Malone.  Remember that Scott Baio was once a froggy-voiced kid with a sweet Brooklyn accent, a kid who could really act; remember that children’s films had something to say about politics; remember that 1970s message about children being the future.  It’s a pleasure to remember.

Clara Bow, topheavy with IT (1927)

“She’s a ripping sort, really,” someone says about Clara Bow’s character in It.  “She’s really topheavy with ‘IT’.”  Bow was the It Girl in the late 20s not just because she was popular.  “It” denoted a personal charisma that seemed to ooze from the pores of a few special individuals and not at all from others.  Perhaps sex appeal had something to do with it, yet Bow’s high-test caffeinated activity conveyed more best-girl good nature than the languid, sexy sultriness of other stars, from Louise Brooks to Gloria Swanson.  I’ve seen only two of Bow’s films (It and Wings, both made in 1927) and in both she conveys the same sparkly, occasionally goofy willingness to bounce around the screen.  Critics have simplified this to mean sex appeal, but I see a girl I’d have liked to go out dancing with.

First and foremost, Clara Bow was adorable.  She had a pile of indomitable curly hair cut in some kind of proximate of a 1920s bob, with enormous dark eyes and round, youthful cheeks better suited to hamming it up onscreen than to come-hither looks.  If we want to talk about “it” as meaning sex appeal, we must specify that her appeal came from the flirtatious fun that Bow insists on having in these films rather than something more serious; she’s the girl you take to the rides at amusement park and who has a hard time keeping her skirt from riding up to show her garters, as in the clip below.  What she showed onscreen was a willingness to show a little skin — but only in that offhand, accidental way that was both funny and a little titillating.  Bow was that good-time girl who was probably chaste but who showed an intoxicating familiarity with the men around her.  In It she sets out to win the heart of the department-store owner, and she does.

Turns out, It was a Hollywood vehicle specifically designed to shine Bow’s star.  The filmmakers took a fluffy 1926 article from Cosmopolitan by Elinor Glyn, paid Glyn piles of money, and transformed it into a narrative about a shopgirl who turns the heads of wealthy men and eventually that department store man.  They even gave Glyn major writing credits for the film (though it had virtually nothing to do with her article) and had her walk into the restaurant at the Ritz to discuss her idea, as if it were as significant and complex as the theory of relativity:

[“IT” signifies] self-confidence and indifference as to whether you are pleasing or not — and something in you that gives the impression that you are not all cold.  That’s “IT”!  If you have “IT”, you will win the girl you love.

That pronouncement sets the tone for the rest of the film, which remains as unserious as Bow could keep it.  But one can’t help being convinced via her manic energy and that preposterously loopy head of hair that she really did have “it,” and that you want to watch her keep performing it onscreen.  The dreariest part of the film is when we are reminded, again and again, of Glyn’s simple idea.  Not that it weighs Bow down in the least.  As David Thomson puts it in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, she appears as “a lipstick butterfly veering between old adages and fresh opportunities.”  I’m going to keep watching.

“The Beaches of Agnès” (2008)

I can only hope that when I’m 80 I’ll have the good humor and creativity to make an autobiographical documentary as delightful, visually rich, and oddly modest as Agnès Varda’s The Beaches of Agnès (Les Plages d’Agnès), which won the César Award for best documentary that year.  She fills it with her own photographs and clips from her films, re-creations of tiny moments from her past, and whimsical stagings of props — for example, she uses a cardboard cutout of a car to show how the garage at the end of her alley in Paris was so tiny that it required her to make a 13-point turn (if everything went right) to manoeuver her car inside.  Only slowly do you realize that the sum total of these flickering memories and scenes of her gently directing her young staff is more than just deeply moving; it’s a cinematic achievement of its own that seems akin to the most magical and innovative of documentaries, like Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. 

The film takes a loosely chronological view of her life, from her early life on the coast of Belgium through her family’s houseboat existence during World War II, her work as a photographer in Paris in the late 40s and 50s, her long career in film, her marriage to director Jacques Demy.  But it’s interspersed with moments simply revelatory of her sparkling personality:  her unapologetic loves of cats and the water, her appreciation for great images and great actors, her enjoyment of working with young people, the way art infuses her with energy and life.  As she paints in impressionistic strokes the path she followed, she gradually allows her dyed hair (styled, by long habit, in a bowl cut to exaggerate a face she describes as the shape of a pancake, and dyed a dark maroon) to return to its natural white.  It’s a decision that does more than symbolize her seeming absence of egotism; it enhances that slight sense of melancholy that infuses moments of the film when she reminisces about family and friends long dead.  By doing so, she references — but never dwells on — her own mortality.  I can’t capture in words how much this aspect of the film is done gracefully and lightly; above all The Beaches of Agnès is an utter delight.  

Netflix describes her as “the grandmother of the French New Wave,” but that’s slightly misleading and certainly not a claim the modest Varda would make.  Sure, her early film La Pointe Courte (1954) was a precursor to the New Wave, and she certainly held her own when that boys’ club of Rohmer, Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol et als ruled international cinema (the way she tells it, their success opened opportunities for her and others to follow).  But she had her closest artistic ties to a filmmakers and writers such as Marguerite Duras and Chris Marker, sometimes called the Left Bank group — artists perhaps more experimental and less marketable than the Right Bank directors of The 400 Blows and Breathless.  One need only think of her best-known films, such as Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) and The Gleaners and I (2000), to recognize that she always sought to tell different stories (and, for that matter, to make different political points) than some of her male counterparts.

In the end I’m struck by her slightly self-mocking self-characterization:  of a squat woman in a baggy dress with a pronounced nose and a bowl of hair that nearly conceals her enormous, curious eyes.  Don’t be fooled.  It won’t take long till you wish Varda was your mother, your granny, your boss, your friend, and your future self, all at once.  It’s secretly a film about the love of life and art — and who couldn’t use a dose of that right now?

Julian Assange, rape, and feminism

I don’t know whether Julian Assange is guilty of rape — no one does.  I do know, from Jessica Valenti’s piece in the Washington Post, that all those crazy descriptions of the Swedish charges against him are untrue (there is no “sex by surprise” law in Sweden, nor is Assange accused of suffering a broken condom).  I fully believe that the case should be heard to determine whether he is guilty.  What I don’t understand — and what alarms me to no end — is the eagerness on the part of many to disbelieve all charges of rape levied against Assange in particular and powerful men in general, and to attribute those charges instead to ulterior motives.  In Assange’s case, obviously, commentators have suggested this is a cloaked attempt to dismantle WikiLeaks; in other cases, rape charges have been dismissed as mere vindictiveness by angry women.  During yesterday’s Slate/Double X Gabfest podcast discussion of the charges against Assange, not only did those “journalists” peddle in long-disproven rumors about “sex by suprise” et als, but they never once took it seriously that Assange might not be innocent. 

Again, I repeat:  I make no assumptions about Assange’s innocence or guilt; my concern is less with his case in particular than with the pattern.  When powerful men are accused of rape, those charges are pooh-poohed by members of the public — and this happens a lot.  Just google “athlete accused of rape” and take a look at reader comments on those stories, and you’ll get a chill.  Nor is the pooh-poohing limited to dudes.  Naomi Wolf wrote an unfunny yet purportedly humorous piece for the Huffington Post about the Assange case — a story so objectionable that Bitch Magazine pronounced her their Total Douchebag of the week.  And then, of course, there are the Slate women — Emily Bazelon, Hanna Rosin, and Margaret Talbot — who actually went so far as to write off the women as confused, paranoiac Assange groupies who felt some kind of vague post-consensual-sex resentment and then saw their stories snowball into international drama.  I’m not kidding.  Laughing about the “sex by surprise” account, Talbot joked, “That sounds kind of pleasant,” while Bazelon — ordinarily a highly informed expert in the law — first offered the bafflingly unenlightened observation that “I think one of the reason this story’s so titillating is that there’s no real way to know what went on” (Emily, have you never heard the details of a rape case before?) and then suggested that she saw two possible interpretations of the case:  either they are “avenging radical feminist devils, basically, who are out to get Julian Assange,” or, more likely (according to her):  

[I think] this kind of weird thing happened where all these people are kind of paranoid, right — they all, if you hang out with Julian Assange then you must have some streak of suspicion and anti-authority-ness in you.  And so these women, you know, had what seemed like, you know, just, like, sex with Julian Assange, they were hanging out with him the next day in both cases I think.  But then they got mad at him because he disappeared on them and somehow in the conspiracy-laden world they live in they decided they had to track him down, and that then they had to go to the police to do that, and then things kind of spun from there.

A quick enumerated response:

1. Really?
2. How much do you get paid to spout off on the Double X Gabfest podcast?
3. Considering that Slate is a Washington Post affiliate, what is their excuse for not having read Valenti’s Post story of a week ago — at least to get their facts straight?
4. Why do I still listen to this piffle?  (Answer:  it’s like picking at a scab. And it gets sent automatically to my iTunes with the wonderful Slate Culture Gabfest podcasts.)

This is not to say there hasn’t been an American feminist response to the story.  Jill Filipovic of Feministe had the tidiest statement yet asserting that we can take rape charges seriously at the same time that we can also see ramped-up international interest in the story being linked to the WikiLeaks controversy.  And the women at Tiger Beatdown are bound and determined to bring attention to those major media figures of the left, like Michael Moore and Keith Olberman, who have pooh-poohed the rape tale.

I keep insisting on neutrality about Assange’s guilt or innocence because I’ve become overly invested in other rape cases in the past, and had my heart broken at the results.  It’s a tragedy of our current political culture here in the U. S. that so many charges of rape have been stunningly and overwhelmingly proved to be false.  A tragedy for three reasons:  first, that such incidents contribute to the generalized skepticism I’ve already described, which hinder other women from using the law; second, that these women latch onto the charge of rape — a serious criminal offense — because they do not have other legal or cultural means of redressing lesser wrongs; and finally, a tragedy for the specific women who are so spectacularly discredited in public.  I’m thinking here in part, of course, of the woman who charged members of the Duke lacrosse team of rape in 2006; but that’s only the most vivid of many such cases in recent memory.  Thus, I know perfectly well that some women initiate charges of rape which are later proved to be false or exaggerated.

But in the meantime as Assange sits through house arrest while the charges are worked out, let’s get the facts straight, refrain from pre-judging the case, and — for heaven’s sake — stop giving powerful men the benefit of a culture that doesn’t take rape seriously.  Beware of doing otherwise, for the future looms before us.

The NY Times sniffs at Sofia Coppola

The Sunday New York Times Arts section is typically full of generous articles about movies designed for those of us who love film — but not so Dennis Lim’s article this week about Sofia Coppola.  Let’s see if we can sense … oh, let’s call it the slight whiff of patronizingly sexist disdain here in his first paragraph:

AT 39 and with four features to her name, Sofia Coppola finds herself caught in something of a double bind — the predicament of the auteur whose constancy risks being seen as predictability, or worse.  Her admirers detect in her work a good eye, impeccable taste, an exactitude with indistinct moods and feelings.  Her detractors claim that her frame of reference is narrow, that she makes the same film over and over again.

Lim continues in the next paragraph:

By her own admission Ms. Coppola’s first three movies — “The Virgin Suicides” (2000), “Lost in Translation” (2003) and “Marie Antoinette” (2006) — constitute a trilogy about young women on the awkward verge of self-definition.  As her critics see it, the problem is not just repetition but a kind of solipsism.

As much as I love his side-stepping use of these unnamed “critics” and “detractors,” let’s set aside the patronizing air for the moment to ask whether he has seen anything other than Marie Antoinette.  (And I hasten to add that I really liked that film, though I know some didn’t.)  How, Mr. Lim, can anyone characterize her first two films as about “young women on the verge” when The Virgin Suicides is at least as much about boys who look at and admire a group of unknowable sisters, and Lost in Translation is about a relationship between a shlubby, aging actor and a woman less than half his age?  Deep into the article Lim recounts Kirsten Dunst’s exasperated response to this charge at Cannes several years ago:  “Observing that ‘mopey-man movies’ often get a free pass, Ms. Dunst suggested that there is less tolerance for feminine introspection.”  That’s the very least one can say about movie-makers’ tolerance for male solipsism.

Most of all, Lim casts a skeptical eye on the fact that Coppola is the “supremely well-connected daughter of Francis Ford Coppola” and that this has dictated her interest in filming what he calls “the luxe life.”  (Again, have you seen the decidedly middle-class The Virgin Suicides?)  No one doubts that her family ties have helped her, but they didn’t bring her the multiple awards she’s received, including a Golden Globe (for Lost in Translation) and the Golden Lion (for her current film Somewhere).  And I ask you, Mr. Lim, have you ever described Jeff Bridges, Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen, Kiefer Sutherland, Jaden Smith, director Jason Reitman, or even Coppola’s cousins Jason and Robert Schwartzman as the “supremely well-connected son of …”? 

Turning to Lim’s sexist and patronizing dismissals, let’s tick through some of his charges:

• Her work is predictable
• Her work is somehow about herself
• Her work is solipsistic
• She got where she is due to nepotism
• Her films only portray the cloistered elite, because that’s all she knows
• She is well known to love fashion, “which seems to have contributed to a perception that there is something frivolous about her films” (we here at Feminéma LOVE the use of the passive voice!)
• She has responded to past criticism by turning her film Somewhere into a minimalistic film about a male perspective
• Her films are “delicate”
• Coppola displays a “lack of awareness” about her films as a group, a lack of awareness Lim calls either “blissful or protective” (hang on, she’s both solipsistic and blissfully unaware?)

Great job, Dennis Lim!  Let’s hope that your own supremely well-connected work with The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Moving Image Source, the Museum of the Moving Image, The Village Voice, The Village Voice Film Guide, the National Society of Film Critics, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the 2010 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, and many film festivals including New York, San Sebastian, Vancouver, Tribeca, and South by Southwest Film Festivals — to name only a few I found online — permits you to continue to offer such useful assessments of one of the very few top-shelf female directors in the world.  The New York Times does it again!

The Onion’s 10 Most Powerful Women

What can I say that nails it better than this?  Except to remember that one time a student suggested that I teach an entire course on the (then) TV show Sex and the City.  “It would be awesome!” she trilled.

I wish I could join the creative team at The Onion that gets to spend its time thinking up satirical versions of Sunday news magazine covers.  One of my favorites was “America’s 10 Richest Pets.”  And “The 10 Products That Will Make You a Good Parent.”

File this under “humor for the Post-Teaching Trauma Disorder set,” as per yesterday’s post.

End-of-semester blues

Early in the film A Room With a View (1985), Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) sits in the parlor of her Florence pensione playing a sonata on the piano, to the delight of Rev. Beebe, an old family friend.  “Mother doesn’t like me playing Beethoven,” she explains to him when she finishes it, an inexplicable look on her face.  “She says I’m always peevish afterwards.”  I love that line; and I’m reminded of it every single time I finish a great movie or a great book because it so aptly captures that sense of dissatisfaction once you’re finished with a piece of art so magnificent and moving.  I finished Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog last night, for example, and have felt peevish ever since.  But if peevish captures that feeling so neatly, how to describe this feeling us teachers experience at the end of every semester, these end-of-semester blues that hit us every time?

My neighbor, a grammar-school teacher, calls it post-traumatic stress syndrome.  It’s hard to capture in words, but surely it’s a close relation of depression.  I’ve found myself irritable, weepy, paralyzed with ennui, and/or outright pissed off, even during those semesters when I haven’t done an onerous amount of grading or had to wrangle a difficult student.  There’s a profound sense of failure no matter how well one’s classes went.  During semesters when I knew I had to spend the winter break finishing a piece of writing, I often found it impossible to do anything besides lie on the sofa for a week feeling like a professional failure as well as a lousy teacher.  I think perhaps it comes at least in part from the enormous emotional outlay required by these long semesters — giving advice and one’s time generously to students — all of which becomes perverted by the end, as we pour over grade sheets and try to determine whether Johnny deserves a B or can be bumped up to a B+, while Katie failed so miserably on the final that we can’t possibly give her the same gift.  We spend so much time thinking about students’ needs and merits that by the end we have nothing left to give ourselves.

I’ve turned in all my grades … and now I dread the inevitable email from students complaining about them.  Bereft of Muriel Barbery, I scan the shelves looking for something to replace her as bedtime reading.  I disgruntledly rearranged my Netflix queue tonight and complained about the fact that none of the celebrated Oscar-worthy movies are in the theaters yet.

So here’s a thought:  find the email address of a teacher you remember and send her/him a note.  Explain that it may have been a while, but that class meant something to you and you’ve always remembered it.  Tell the teacher what you’re doing now.  And end your note by saying, “I know you’re busy and might not have a chance to respond, but I wanted you to know that you had a big effect on my life and thinking, and I still remember it.”

The Brainy Bunch, girls edition

Has anyone else noticed that articles like this one in New York Magazine don’t get written about young female actors?  “The Brainy Bunch” is about five young men (Jesse Eisenberg, Michael Fassbender, James Franco, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Tom Hardy) who, according to the journalist, bust a bunch of stereotypes because they play twitchy, complicated, and most of all brilliant characters.  The author marvels that these smart actors “bring the raw nerve of indie sensibility” to the screen; moreover, “in so doing, they are reimagining the mainstream.”  Articles like this one are inevitably about men — not because actresses aren’t smart, but because they’re not playing smart onscreen.  This has lathered me up into a rant because I think this is yet another example of the exceptionally disturbing moment we’re living in, during which women’s primary value is their hotness, not their smartness.  Considering that I grew up in an age when the tomboy/ smartypants Jodie Foster was the pre-teen It Girl — a multilingual woman who graduated magna cum laude from Yale — I’m not prepared to let men be smart while women commit their energies to being hot.

Yet I’ve been putting some muscle into coming up with a similar list of remarkable young female actors who play smart onscreen and it’s really hard.  Not hard for older women, mind you; as a culture we seem perfectly willing to grant brains to women over 35 (witness Helen Mirren, Holly Hunter, Tilda Swinton, Charlotte Rampling, Frances McDormand, Judy Davis …).  The one vivid exeption to the rule is Mia Wasikowska (above), she of that remarkable 1st season of In Treatment, Alice in Wonderland, as the teenaged daughter in The Kids are All Right, and the upcoming Jane Eyre.  Other than that?  Can you think of a single young actor who plays smart onscreen from one role to the next?

I can’t.  As much as I loved the fast-talking smarts of Carey Mulligan in An Education and Emma Stone in Easy A this year, there’s one thing that ruins those tales for me:  ultimately these smart characters are shown to be dumb when it comes to men and sex (respectively).  Get it?  Smart girls aren’t smart about everything. I can think of a couple of one-off performances this year — Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone and Noomi Rapace in the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo franchise, but I have yet to be convinced that these actors can translate one excellent part into the kinds of careers that New York Magazine‘s favorite young men have achieved.  Consider the career of Harvard grad Natalie Portman, who’s now getting close to 30 (and therefore into the age range wherein Hollywood allows women to be brilliant) — has she ever played smart onscreen?  And don’t even get me started on the fact that the last time I saw a smart young Latina, Asian, Native American, or black woman onscreen was Shareeka Epps in Half Nelson (2006) — and where have the roles gone for Epps in the meantime?

If any of you doubts the perversity of this trend, consider one of the prevailing cultural anxieties appearing in major media of the past six months:  the idea that boys are falling behind girls (or, in Hanna Rosin’s trademark hysterical terms, THE END OF MEN).  At the same time that we watch smart boys and hot girls onscreen, we’re also supposed to feel anxious about the fact that girls do better in school and young women are going to college in vastly larger numbers than boys (they make up roughly 60% of college populations).  This has prompted Rosin and her ilk to proclaim that women are “winning” some kind of battle against men.  Thus, the fact that our films persist in peddling some kind of retro fantasy about boys’ smartness seems to reject our anxieties that girls might be pretty and smart, and reassures us that smart dudes will always bag the hotties.

If you need an explanation for my bleak mood, it’s because I just finished reading Gary Shteyngart’s incredibly disturbing dystopian novel, Super Sad True Love Story.  In this America of the future, women wear clothes made by the JuicyPussy brand, Total Surrender panties (which pop off at the push of a little button), and have their hotness level perpetually broadcast to everyone around them via a version of a smartphone called an äpparät.  It’s a brilliant characterization of the future (I cringed and laughed at the fact that the hero’s love interest, Eunice Park, majored in Images and minored in Assertiveness in college — we all know that’s where we’re heading) but ultimately one that reiterates that tired trope:  shlubby, bookish, imperfect, aging hero falls for very beautiful, very young, very anti-intellectual woman — and wins her, at least for a while.  You know what?  I love shlubby men in real life (hi, honey!), but I have grown to despise their perpetual appearance in narratives.

So to cleanse my palate of the oily aftertaste of Super Sad, I’ve plunged myself into Muriel Barbery’s wonderful novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which moves back and forth between the interior monologues of two brilliant women:  the autodidact Renée, who hides behind her mask as an unkempt, sullen concierge in an elegant Paris apartment building; and Paloma, the precociously intelligent 12-year-old who lives upstairs and despises the pretentions of her family, teachers, and classmates.  They seem to be on a path to discover one another — but I’m at the point in the novel when I’m so enjoying just listening to them think out loud that I’m not sure I care whether the narrative goes anywhere (Paloma has a diatribe about why grammar is about accessing the beauty of language that’s so wonderful I’m thinking of plagiarizing it for use in my classes).

Here’s what it would take to cultivate a generation of young actresses known for their braininess:

1. Just jettison the smart vs. hot binary for women onscreen already.  If I see glasses used as the “smart” signifier one more time…
2. Write some stories in which young women aren’t just interested in dudes all the time, but have wholly stand-alone loves of language, art, math, con artistry, biology, music, sports, comic books, religion, killing demons, other girls, or food — even drugs or booze, for gods’ sake — just like actual women.
3. Stop resigning smart girls to the sidekick position in kids’ films like Harry Potter, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, and TV shows like Buffy, etc.
4. Show that smartness isn’t just a magical quality endowed by nature, but is something that takes work.
5. Show that smartness can pose a problem beyond scaring off potential dudes — when young women face idiotic, paternalistic bosses, teachers too tired to teach to the top 1% of a class, or families in which no one has ever gone to college.
6. Let girls play brilliant anti-heroes along the lines of Jesse Eisenberg’s take on Mark Zuckerberg — or, hell, just weird antisocial types like Lisbeth Salander.
7. Let girls play funny.
8. Let young female actors fail occasionally in a part the way we just keep forgiving failures by Jonah Hill, Zach Galifianakis, Ashton Kutcher, even Robert Downey, Jr. — the list goes on — without career consequences.
9. Give me a central female character besides The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo who’s a computer whiz.
10. Display explicitly feminist characters onscreen, and have them explain their opinions.

Maybe then we won’t experience that odd whiplash of suddenly having our actresses arrive at the age of 35 and suddenly become smart (does this read as unattractive and/or ball-busting to male viewers, I wonder?).  I, for one, am looking forward to my movies looking a bit more like reality.

Helen Mirren hoiks her spanx

Helen Mirren received the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award on Wednesday at the annual Hollywood Reporter Women in Entertainment breakfast, and used the opportunity to fiddle with her underpants (“hoik my spanx,” to the utter delight of the entire room) and speak the truth about women in film.  “With all respect to you many brilliant and successful women in this room, really not much has changed in the canon of Hollywood filmmaking that continues to worship at the altar of the 18- to 25-year-old male … and his penis,” she explained when talking about the struggles of older women to get parts.  As I noted in an email to my sister earlier today, I really must make a mental note to be more like Helen Mirren.

One cranky final word:  why is it that these events so frequently take place as the “women’s breakfast”?  I’ve attended many “women’s breakfasts” at professional conferences in my academic field and every time I wonder why it’s not a “women’s cocktail party.”  Truly:  there’s nothing particularly glamorous about dragging oneself to a 6:30am bowl of fruit with weak coffee in one of those bleak conference hotel ballrooms.  (Of course, we don’t have Helen Mirren types giving rousing speeches.  Maybe that’s my true complaint.)

Revenge!

Greetings from a world in which final papers and exams cover me like a heavy snow — and hence my long silence.  And because the end of the semester always mounts a serious test of my general good will, I’ve found myself in the mood for a few good vengeance films.  Who doesn’t love revenge?  Writers, filmmakers, and actors have been exacting it satisfactorily for years.  For those of you who haven’t quite mustered a holiday spirit just yet, I offer you Feminéma’s patented Film Therapy.  (Ahhh.  I feel better already.)  I’ve got three very different films here, as we’ve all got different revenge fantasies and therapeutic needs — and I thought I’d throw a few in your way that you might not know about. 

For those of you in the mood for something quirky, funny, and lacking in much physical violence:  Shirley Barrett’s “Love Serenade” (1996).  Who’s the most cringe-making:  shy, weird Dimity (Miranda Otto, very much before her “Lord of the Rings” makeover) with her poor posture and her waitress job at the world’s most pathetic Chinese restaurant; her sister Vicki-Ann (Rebecca Frith), a hair stylist in their dingy little Australian town whose face screams, “I am desperate for a boyfriend”; or their new neighbor, a radio DJ/personality named Ken Sherry, kicked out of Brisbane after a messy divorce (George Shevtsov), who plays a lot of Barry White and who’s so sleazy that one needs a towel?  (Sidebar:  why do Australians so love to watch cringe-making people onscreen, perhaps even more than the English?)  He seduces both of them but insists that there be no repercussions.  He is so wrong.

For those of you who really need to snarl at the world before you’re ready to face all that Christmas music:  The BBC miniseries of “Vanity Fair” (1998).  Near the beginning of “Vanity Fair,” Becky Sharp (Natasha Little) says to her friend Amelia, “Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural” — thereby summing up the differences between the two women.  Whereas Amelia is a boring and note-for-note embodiment of all women were supposed to be (sweet, unimaginative, propertied, mannered), Becky…well, where does one begin?  After being treated like crap due to her low upbringing, she feels a lot of anger; but she’s also a lot smarter than the wealthy people around her.  Her eagerness to climb the social ladder manages to be transparent to most women, yet her shameless use of her beauty and sex appeal cloaks it for men.  She’s no heroine; Thackeray makes sure of that with his subtitle, A Novel Without a Hero.  The sneaky thing about that line is that it’s really Thackeray who exacts revenge, and the target is us — readers who expect happy endings, evil punished and good rewarded.  The miniseries isn’t quite so bleak as Thackeray intended, but you find yourself enjoying the misery of its vain and foolish characters nevertheless.  Script by the indomitable Andrew Davies.   And for those of you who want a feminine version of old-school Clint Eastwood without the utter bloodbath that is “Kill Bill,” you clearly need Park Chan-wook’s “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance” (2005), the final film in his Vengeance Trilogy (which includes 2002’s “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and 2003’s “Oldboy”).  Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young Ae) is finally out of prison, and still has the angelic face and gentle manner that baffled everyone 13 years ago when she was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering a small boy.  What they didn’t know was that the real murderer — a dastardly schoolteacher named Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik) — threatened to murder her baby daughter if she didn’t comply.  But Geum-ja is no angel.  She’s had vengeance on her mind for years and has done a pretty good job of settling other scores along the way.  She circles her eyes with red eyeshadow; dons a pair of red high-heeled pumps; hunts down her daughter; and gets to work finding Baek.  Okay, maybe it’s not quite Eastwood’s The Man With No Name trilogy … in fact, the film combines an unholy alliance of influences from David Lynch to Quentin Tarantino, without indulging in their excesses.  But you’ll watch every single minute and feel pretty good in the end.

And with that, I’m prepared to return to those pages and pages and pages of student writing.  This is hardly a comprehensive list, but perhaps it’ll cleanse your palate of whatever bile is keeping you from feeling generous.  Finishing these movies even took me out of my office on a tour of my neighborhood’s cheesy holiday lights display — and now I’m prepared to answer the most annoying email requests for extensions, special accommodations, and outright gifts.  But I might think about a different shade of eyeshadow for tomorrow.