Perhaps you’re thinking to yourself: she’s watching films like Magic Mike and Ted? Mainstream comedies in regular theaters oriented to general audiences?! Has this blog been hijacked by an evil-minded imposter?
(I admit: in retrospect it appears that watching Ted at the theater goes against all my principles. All I can say is that my friends chose it.)
But I must defend my anticipation of Magic Mike — because it’s being eagerly anticipated by so many of my favorite gay and/or female film critics, including Louis Virtel’s videos The Weeklings:
[Sidebar: I’m relatively new to The Weeklings, but I have now scanned about one-third of these 2- to 4-minute videos and they’re so quick-witted that sometimes you have to watch the videos 2 or 3 times to absorb everything. To wit: the episode in which Louis Virtel takes issue with moron Adam Carolla’s views on whether women are funny. Or when he proposes to do a proper interview with Anderson Cooper about coming out — his list of questions is genius! “How do you feel about forcing straight kids to come out as uninteresting?” Or when he joins the rest of his troupe, The Gay Beatles — oh, the episode in which they explain which Beatle they would be … which leads them to explain which member of Sex and the City they would be, or which Cosby Kid, or which Fanta Girl….]
But back to the issue at hand: Magic Mike. Because I believe it is my duty as a woman — nay, as a human being — to hand over my money to see a film about male strippers. I fully expect that within a few days’ time, I will be back reporting that Magic Mike is, indeed, the Citizen Kane of male stripper films.
I confess: that is not my line. It really belongs to film critic extraordinaire, Libby Gelman-Waxner.
My most secret and powerful desire might be to get paid to write film reviews not just with a nom de plume, but an entirely made-up persona like hers. When I was in college I discovered Gilman-Waxner’s genius reviews in Premiere magazine. She is a middle-aged wife of a dentist, mother, suburban New Yorker, and buyer for the juniors department (also: “she” is secretly screenwriter/ humorist Paul Rudnick). She’s always spot-on with her criticism, like when she describes Daniel Craig in Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: “He wore reading glasses, which on a dreamy guy like Daniel are the male equivalent of a nurse’s uniform or a schoolgirl kilt.” In short, Libby is the perfectly melded combination of gay man and straight woman.
Tanning salon-driven dramatic tension in the dressing room between Channing Tatum and Matthew McConaughey — but over what? I can hardly wait!
That’s the real secret, you see: Magic Mike represents the sweet spot where the interests of people like Libby Gelman-Waxner, The Weeklings, and Feminéma converge. Libby and I agree that there’s basically zero chance I will not enjoy this movie. Moreover, it is SO much fun to anticipate seeing it. I mean, just listen to her imagine the possible plot points:
And I’m praying that one guy is stripping his way through medical school, and that another guy gets drunk and falls off the runway, and that finally all of the strippers pull together and become a family and strip to rebuild a local orphanage, and that someone declares, “We’re gonna help those kids because, dammit, that’s what male strippers do.”
I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? I walk out and say, “The dancing was awesome, but it wasn’t gay enough.”
Want to know what I concluded after seeing it? Here’s the answer!
I think the feeling is mutual.
The problem is not that writer-director MacFarlane’s show Family Guy is unwatchable; nor is his film début Ted, for that matter. It’s that 90% of McFarlane’s humor belongs to a 13-yr-old, and 90% of that is about pushing at your boundaries. Jokes about gays, trashy white women, Asians, more gays, prostitutes, fat kids, Jews, and gays — and all with the gleeful “will you let me get away with this?” spew that I have only witnessed from unreconstructed frat guys who don’t know they’re being overheard.
To which I suppose MacFarlane would respond, “Hey, I know all about feminism and how wrong it is to make homophobic cracks or racist jokes about an Asian guy with a duck — I’m doing it ironically!” Thus, you’re the asshole if you complain.
So the whole audience will laugh at the gay jokes because no one wants to be an asshole, but the jokes are actually not funny even if you’re not a humorless feminazi like me.
The remaining 10% of jokes are better, and the film sports an incidental moment or two in the dialogue that are so good they make me want to weep for all the time this writer-director wastes on the other shit. There’s one particularly perfect reference to Flash Gordon (1980) that was so crystalline and throwaway it almost felt like something I’d hear from a friend of mine. MacFarlane’s scattershot references to other films are clever and enjoyable.
But … the rest of it? It’s Mark Wahlberg. Who has a life history (and criminal record) of thinking homophobic/ racist jokes like this are funny. (And who, BTW, cannot pass as a 35-yr-old. Sorry.)
Mila Kunis is charming as always, yet this material reminds me that a hefty chunk of her acting career is with material like this (That 70s Show, Meg Griffin on Family Guy). I’m not sure whether this is a problem of typecasting, craven career decisions, or that she actually thinks this stuff is funny.
And oh, did I mention? The story is about a boy who has no friends other than his teddy bear, a boy who grows up to become a man who has no friends other than his teddy bear. Autobiographical? You be the judge.
Dear International Tennis Federation/ Women’s Tennis Association,
I am writing to thank you sooooo much for your soon-to-be-implemented grunt-o-meter, to be utilized only in women’s tennis matches to make sure those ladies stop screaming so loudly during their matches! (And thank you soooo much for the fact that this is not a joke! I have been reassured by some guy who writes for Business Insider that this is not sexist for being a rule that won’t apply to men!)
Ever since the days of Monica Seles (whose pro career took off in 1989) I’ve been complaining that those screeches are no fun for me to listen to as I sit on my sofa and watch! Thank you so much for finally bowing to negative fan and media reaction by slowly implementing this new plan!
Their grunts have made it particularly disturbing for me to watch all-star blonde hotties like Maria Sharapova and Victoria Azarenka — the current world #1 and #2. I mean, how can I enjoy their beauteousness if they let loose animalistic screams after every shot? And who, I ask, is tennis for if not for me and my ideas about how ladies are supposed to behave?
Now, I’m not a petty person. After much consideration I have also developed another argument besides “it’s annoying” for eliminating lady-screeching: their grunting must be distracting to their opponents, perhaps even amounting to a form of gamesmanship. Or at least that’s what I heard a commentator say one time.
To express my gratitude, I’d like to recommend that you look into several other matters that are exactly equivalent to the screaming issue — equivalent, that is, in that they bother me. Remember: the customer is always right!
1. Andy Murray’s facial hair. Now, I don’t like to be mean-spirited, but I think we can all agree that Murray could be at least a slightly more appealing-looking figure if he’d engage in a little more personal care. Staring at the hair growing all over his neck is surely distracting to other players as well, perhaps amounting to a form of gamesmanship. But what do I care about how other players feel? It’s nasty to me personally. (Also, the teeth. Don’t they have orthodontists in Scotland?)
2. Rafael Nadal’s ritualistic routine before each point. One writer reckons that this routine has eleven steps (although sometimes a single step has several parts to it, like #5: “Wipe your nose, then your forehead, then tuck your hair behind your left ear, then your right. In that order”). Eleven steps?! some of which sound like this?! Criminey!
Now, I don’t really care whether Nadal’s superstitious — what I care about is my own precious time! His matches take forever! I mean, honestly, that 2012 Australian Open men’s final took five hours! I have other things to do!
3. Players who curse or talk to themselves in their native languages. Now, as hard as it is for many Americans to believe that other people grow up speaking something other than English, I speak for all of us when I say that I want to know exactly what it is that those Belorussian or Chinese players are saying to themselves when they finish a point and spew out a line of something.
Please see what you can do to institute an all-English language rule so we Americans don’t need to feel excluded when a player has a lot to say to him/ herself during a match. It’s rude, and rudeness should not be permitted in a genteel sport like tennis!
4. And speaking of people who slow down the game, let’s talk about players who slow down the pace of play even when they’re not serving. The rules of play require that they move at the speed of the server, but chair umpires appear unwilling to reprimand players who refuse to go along. It’s yet another way that players use to get inside one another’s heads.
5. And speaking of people who try to get inside their opponent’s heads, what about those often off-camera incidents that indicate the far more serious inter-personal battles that take place on court? The nasty comments that only the other player hears; the body checks when they switch sides; the evil glares; the locker room drama. Why focus on grunting as a form of gamesmanship when the entire sport is full of it? Because … it is a sport, after all!
If you want to stick with the “let’s police female behavior” theme, perhaps you could institute a Nice-O-Meter that players have to pass.
Also, shouldn’t all the female players just smile a lot more? Tell them they’ll do better on the Nice-O-Meter if they smile and look prettier on the court.
Anyway, this is all to say “cheers” to you for inventing the idea for the new grunt-o-meter, and don’t let this be the only way you interfere with players’ concentration and intensity during matches! So what if grunting actually fosters focus during matches, as Katy Waldman argues (very effectively)? I say that the ladies must be reminded of their lady-ness as much as possible! And I’ll be sure to write again when I’ve got more useful recommendations for you!
Hugs and kisses,
Feminéma
Serena Williams’ natural hair
7 July 2012
I’m having my own breakfast at Wimbledon and finally putting to webpage something I’ve marveled at for the whole tournament: Serena Williams’ beautiful natural hair.
You’ll excuse me if I see this as a statement. A growing number of Black women have chosen to reject the plethora of hair straightening products and treatments in favor of natural hair lately — a choice that isn’t necessarily easy. The artist Zina Saro-Wiwa recently talked about her own transition to natural hair and the strange emotional ambivalence that accompanied giving up on forms of Black hair that you’ve been told are more beautiful. It’s hard to give up the sense that one’s own hair is somehow … in need of alteration.
If white women have their own madness around hair, Black women experience those crazy emotions about their hair as all the more aggravating. Despite the ascendance of the Afro in the 70s, many Black women can’t escape the feeling that their natural hair is ugly, frizzy, and unmanageable — and they’re willing to undergo all manner of chemical treatments to straighten it or achieve soft waves.
Given that many have had lifetimes of hair-straightening treatments, what would it take to chop it all off and start over with natural hair? What would that hair look like if you just let it go?
So after years of great and distinctive ‘dos each year from the Williams sisters (this year Venus sports very long braids, which she often ties into an elegant bun), I have to gush about Serena’s natural hair. Is it a political statement about Black women’s beauty? I’m not sure it matters whether Serena intended it that way — in our era with the ever-proliferating chemical industrial complex that profits from women’s insecurity about their appearance, Serena sporting long, beautiful natural hair can’t help but say something important to fans.
I say yes.
Michelle Williams’ mouth
2 July 2012
Michelle Williams’ mouth is the thing I stare at when I watch her. As an actress she can be a chameleon — I mean, Marilyn Monroe! — but in the end her mouth alone does so much to convey complicated emotions. Her mouth is what always makes her performance so distinctive.
Her mouth has gravity. Her mouth shows her disappointment, her struggles. Michelle Williams has the mouth that belies all her other beautiful attributes. Even when she enacts (very effectively) the lusciousness of Monroe, her mouth brings us back:
Whereas the real Monroe’s mouth only confirmed our mythos about her (tongue is in evidence):
Readers will know that I’ve always got my eyes open for actresses who break out of the ridiculously strict Hollywood standards when it comes to noses, mouths, body size, and other body parts so frequently adjusted by plastic surgeons. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not saying that Michelle Williams’ mouth is unattractive or shaped oddly — far from it. Williams is a beautiful woman in many, many conventional ways.
And yet. Her full cheeks and mouth do things that render Williams’ conventional beauty so much more interesting. Her mouth almost makes me think that she doesn’t truly know how beautiful she is.
Her mouth can do things that Monroe’s refused to do: be hard, express shame or blubbering lack of control, convey a lifetime of disappointment. Whereas it seems impossible for Monroe to appear plain, Williams is at her brilliant best when that mouth draws downward and all we can see is her bald emotions, her character’s true despair.
Think about her role in Brokeback Mountain (2005) as Alma, that ordinary little thing who marries Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) knowing they’ll have a hard life together. They’re both quiet (bordering on silent, really) and dirt-poor, and once the babies start coming they’ll be poorer. That’s okay with her. It’s not like she expected anything else; she knows they’ll get old and stiff long before they ought to. But then she sees her husband kissing his friend Jack with a passion, sheer hunger and the attention she’s never gotten from him, not even once:
That bottom lip of hers is so full, so heavy. At first she’s just registering all this new information — she’s so stunned she doesn’t know how she feels. Then she knows only that she’s hurt, and the mouth drops. She’s so close to becoming ugly, and she knows she’ll be ugly if she cries.
She lets herself be ugly when they fight. She’s too angry to care anymore. She doesn’t know whether to be afraid or dare to believe that she’s the one with the power now.
That’s Williams at her most extreme, the far end of the spectrum from her Interview Face. When she sits for interviews, she disguises her expressive mouth behind a lovely and enigmatic smile. She is very good at appearing so self-possessed as to be quite evasive, as if she’s an ideal 19th-century demure heroine.
Get it, people? She is just beautiful — a woman with spectacular cheekbones and an ability to pull off that pixie haircut. If this was all we ever saw, I’d have nothing much to say.
If I’m going to be honest, I’ll admit that what I find so great about her mouth is that it has the same natural droop as some of those older women in my family — you can see it in photos of my hardworking, stone-faced granny when she was middle-aged and saddled with an alcoholic husband. You can see it in the family photos of those other abuelas who picked cotton and had too many children and worked in canneries and stayed poor all their lives.
So maybe part of my love for that mouth is the fact that she can harness it in her acting to evoke other lives.
Williams is still too young (she is 31) and too sweet-cheeked to show the lines around the mouth that my granny had, of course. But with characters like Emily Tetherow in Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and even Cindy in Blue Valentine (2010) she shows that she can look far older than she is, far too aware of the dark side, caught in vise-like gender traps.
She has that capacity to look emotionally bruised, resigned, on the brink. She somehow encompasses both fragility and a growing hardness.
I never watched her first big role in Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003) as Jen, the city girl who grew up too fast and got sent down to live with her grandmother in a more restrained setting. From the photos I’ve seen, she appears as a far more glamorous pretty girl than I’ve seen her from her career as the darling of independent film. I prefer the latter-day Williams, discovered and used to such effect by Kelly Reichardt in Wendy and Lucy (2008) and later in Meek’s Cutoff. To find someone to inhabit the roles of these quiet women who wrangle with overwhelming problems, Reichardt needed someone with a face.
Reichardt needed someone with a face that could indicate a complicated personal history because her films don’t belabor those back stories. You need to be able to look at Wendy’s face (below) and know that, when things get complicated, she might not have the strength to face it all, partly because she’s had to face hard things before.
I’ve been marveling lately at an emotion you don’t often see on American actors’ faces, but which British actors in particular excel at: self-disgust. Nor is this emotion limited to character actors with funny faces. This emotion is most striking when it appears on the face of a strikingly attractive person. I think I first noticed it when I saw Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect (maybe even that first series, all the way back in 1991), but I’ve seen Tilda Swinton, Richard Armitage, Pierce Brosnan (of all people) and even Hugh Grant (when he’s not being a toothy douchebag) show us that they can be susceptible to the same private self-loathing as the rest of us. Mirren and Swinton are especially good at showing us that expression when they look at themselves in bathroom mirrors.
Michelle Williams hasn’t quite gotten all the way to self-disgust. Or at least I haven’t seen it yet. But we see other dark moods cross her face that aren’t quite so clear-cut. And when they do, that’s when her acting becomes most lyrical.
She’s so good at becoming that character who goes inside herself, who shuts herself off as in Blue Valentine, or who flits between her fear of uncertainty and her temptations to adultery in Take This Waltz (2011). She’s one of those actors who fosters an extraordinary relationship with her viewers (perhaps even most her female viewers, who recognize those facial expressions?) because of her seeming isolation, her impulse to make herself invisible, and the emotional gymnastics it takes for fragile people to deal with isolation.
Sometimes it just takes a small purse of the lips. To allow one’s eyes to get a bit more hooded.
Which brings me back to the odd choice of opting to portray Monroe. Why would an actress do that to herself? Why would an actress be persuaded to step into the shoes of a woman so iconic, so famed for her beauty and full-to-bursting sensuality?
For Michelle Williams to take on the role of Marilyn Monroe is not equivalent to Meryl Streep’s roles as real-life/ historic figures. Honestly: to me it sounds like a nightmare. Who among us could survive the inevitable comparisons, the naysayers who say she’s not beautiful enough to play Monroe?
Yet after thinking so extensively about Williams’ mouth and its frequent on-screen plunges downward, its gravity and its evocation of disappointment and pain, I have now determined that this must have seemed like the most extraordinary physical challenge for an actor. She has spoken extensively about gaining weight for the role and learning how to wiggle across a room with curves (whereas Williams is normally a tiny slip of a thing, like all actresses these days).
Yeah, whatever. Actors are always gaining/ losing weight and making a big noise about it, like they want to be congratulated for how hard it is. If you ask me, the real challenge was to use her mouth differently, and thereby the rest of her face. She had to loosen up her mouth, widen her eyes, adopt a new openness and insecurity to convey a wholly different breed of fragility.
In a Vogue interview, Williams said some fascinating things about stepping into this part by thinking about Monroe’s relationship to the world:
Someone once said that Marilyn spent her whole life looking for a missing person — herself. And so she cobbled together what people thought, felt, saw, and projected onto her and made a person out of it. She had no calm center inside herself that she could come home to and rest.
The challenge was to play a person so eager to please, so eager to be visible. Marilyn’s mouth always conveyed her availability; even 50 years after her death, a photo of her will make you want to run your tongue all over her beautiful open lips. What could be a better challenge for an actor like Williams — who’s prone to such a rigid private reserve — than to try to become that woman who “had no calm center inside herself”?
It’s too bad My Week With Marilyn wasn’t a better film. But that’s really beside my larger point. Someday soon I’m going to rent it again just to watch again how Williams loosens up the bottom half of her face for the role, and think again about how it contrasts with her versions of hard, disappointed, downtrodden women like Alma and Wendy.
Is there another actor out there whose mouth does so much of the heavy lifting in her acting? And in the meantime, have you gotten around to seeing her in Take This Waltz yet?
Brave is not just a Pixar film with a female lead (two female leads, really), but one about a girl who doesn’t want to be told how to act, how to live her life. Merida wears dresses and likes to shoot arrows. She has long, gorgeous hair but wears it in a big mess of a red tangle. She runs and jumps and acts exuberantly rather than behave like a lady, as her mother desires. She finishes her father’s stories and can’t breathe in a corset. Most of all she doesn’t want to get married off to one of the three eldest sons of neighboring clan leaders.
So critics started a conversation about whether she’s gay.
“Because,” as Stephen Colbert put it nicely on last week’s Colbert Report, “any 15-yr-old girl who rejects an arranged marriage has got to be gay.”
Is it so radical for a girl to just want to be herself — before being crammed into other roles, like girlfriend, wife, gay, straight, tomboy, girlie-girl? Is it so radical to allow her to not define herself according to hoary stereotypes?
What is wrong with us that we’re so eager to slot children into sexual boxes? Is it so hard to fathom that some kids just don’t want to be sexual creatures yet? That some kids’ gender identities don’t fit into molds, and that those gender identities don’t necessarily signal anything about who they will want to sleep with down the road?
Now, I realize I’m as guilty as the next person when it comes to watching media with a queer eye — when I sang the praises of the feminist potential of the Women’s World Cup last summer, it was partly because “whether or not they’re gay (and open about it), many female players have embraced butch haircuts or personal styles that signify at least tomboyness if not queerness — and this is good both for gay rights and for helping to blur a gay/straight binary.” I loved The Celluloid Closet for its analysis of how, in an era during which homosexuality was erased from film narratives, viewers scoured early American films for the slightest, tiniest evidence (clothing, effeminacy, a snippet of dialogue) that a character might be gay.
But hello, that was about adults.
Is it the most radical thing to allow kids to not be sexual — to allow them to express their gender freely without leaping to conclusions about what their gender performance signals about their sexual orientation?
I’m thinking here about my sister, who dressed as a tomboy till she was about 15. No, she’s not trans. No, she’s not gay. She just liked dressing as a tomboy. She wasn’t interested in playing any kind of boyfriend game just yet. Get over it.
Feminéma 