Greatest review of “Garden State” ever

Just do yourself a favor and read Lindy West’s “I Re-Watched Garden State and Will Never Feel Again” over at Jezebel. You will laugh. You will never watch Garden State again.

A snippet:

Natalie Portman’s character claims to be a human being but is actually a genie that exists entirely within the mind of Zach Braff’s dreaming penis. Much has already been written about this, so I will not rehash it in great detail. She tap-dances. She lies, puckishly. She emcees somber hamster funerals. She introduces strangers to her blankie. She figure-skates in a crushed-velvet alligator costume. She wears an epilepsy helmet just long enough to facilitate a wise and bittersweet moment and then never wears it again. She walks over to her record player and opens the lid but doesn’t put a record on just to make VERY SURE you know she has one.

Here are some words that Zach Braff wrote down for Natalie Portman to say throughout the course of the movie:

“My hair’s blowin’ in the wind.”

“Can we have code names?”

“You know what I do when I feel completely unoriginal? [WORST THING EVER HAPPENS] I make a noise, or do something that no one has ever done before. Then I can feel unique again, even if it’s only for a second.”

“If you can’t laugh at yourself, life’s going to seem a whole lot longer than you’d like.”

“I’m weird, man.”

OH, ARE YOU? TELL ME MORE.

If I were, say, 15 years younger I would aspire to such writing, but at my advanced age I think it would be unseemly. Still, I envy her final two sentences with a passion that rivals what I feel for a certain pair of boots that cost an amount I am not allowed to spend on anything whatsoever. 

Blecch, Garden State.

The manly, thick eyebrow (a complaint about “Scandal”)

I like Scandal (2012-present) because I can’t think of a better way than giving my brain a luscious sugary treat than sitting down to watch Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) do anything whatsoever. My only complaint: I just don’t find President Grant (Tony Goldwyn) attractive. And after two years of mulling over the problem, I’ve decided that it’s because his eyebrows aren’t thick enough.

That’s right. Of all the inane, random things to write about, I’m writing about men’s eyebrows. (And it’s not just Fitz. The whole show is littered with men with light eyebrows!)

So, at the risk of embarrassing myself further, let me offer a visual history of thick brows that have titillated me throughout my personal life (in rough chronological order as I discovered them):

 

Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch

Alan Bates, in case you don’t recognize him

George Clooney from the ER days

 

Ahh. That feels better. Back to more serious feminist work soon, I promise.

Two thought provoking things of the day

Hi. Remember me?

This is the problem with blogging: I love it, and I don’t have time to do it properly (i.e., daily/biweekly). Forgive me for being so AWOL and know well that it’s not because I’m not watching female-oriented film or foaming at the mouth about the bullshit in the media, my university, etc.

But today I have two things for you. First is a lovely, two-minute long thought-piece video on a tic in Wes Anderson’s films. Go here to Vimeo to watch “Wes Anderson | Centered” by Komogado, a video artist who also has a wonderful tribute to Ozu.

And on the subject of Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, I loved loved loved it, even though it’s not really subject matter I typically discuss here (i.e. a film about men. Anderson’s films are always really just about men).

My second link is hard to read because it’s so enraging, but it’s vital. It’s “Dear Harvard: You Win,” a letter to the editor of the Harvard Crimson from a woman sexually assaulted by a friend in her university residence house and abandoned by the university that purports to respond to such abuse.

Only 25 more weeks in April before the semester ends. This is how I comfort myself.

 

Female buddy movies: “Connie and Carla” (2004) is a drag (pun intended!)

As I wrote about Nine to Five a couple of days ago I kept thinking about all the categories within the genre of female buddy movies — the road movie, the wedding/bridesmaid comedy, etc. — but this one doesn’t fit into any category, except camp. It’s a retelling of Some Like It Hot (1958), except in this case Connie (Nia Vardalos) and Carla (Toni Collette) are already women, so when they go on the lam to escape the bad guys, they disguise themselves as drag queens.

Maybe I wouldn’t have liked Connie and Carla so much if I hadn’t been searching for female buddy comedies amongst such gems as Britney Spears’ Crossroads (rating = 3.1 on IMDB), Bratz: The Movie (2.4 on IMDB), or The House Bunny, in which a Playboy bunny finds a place to live in a sorority house (kill me now). Maybe. Still: I loved it.

To start, they throw themselves into their dinner theater act at the Chicago airport with ridiculous energy, no matter their audiences’ lack of interest. They ricochet through their medley of wildly incongruous show tunes and on-stage costume changes, from “Oklahoma!” to “Jesus Christ Superstar” to “Papa Can You Hear Me?” (from Yentl) to “Memories” (from Cats), all with the self-seriousness of two women who have had the same dream since they were kids.

Just because they witnessed a murder doesn’t mean they have any intention of finding a new dream.

Racing away from the bad guys, knowing that they’ll be hunted down, the two performers know one thing: “We gotta go some place where we can just blend in. Somewhere where they’d never look for us, because there’s no theater, no musical theater, no dinner theater, no culture at all.” They pause, and Carla comes up with the solution: “Los Angeles!”

It’s no surprise, then, that when they audition at the Handlebar in full drag — and actually sing their own songs rather than lip-sync like all the other contestants (Collette and Vardalos have great voices, and harmonize gorgeously and loudly together) — they’re embraced by the other queens as having real talent. It doesn’t hurt that both women look like queens without hamming it up, especially Collette, whose crazily big eyes and mouth are so perfectly suited for drag makeup that she actually scales back the broadness of her comedy because to be less subtle would go over the top. Soon they’ve created a popular new show they call “It’s A Drag (Pun Intended!)” which I would march out to see this minute.

I figure that a tale as silly as this one needs to skirt a couple of rocks and hard places: first, it needs to avoid appearing to simply use drag culture for cheap laughs; and second, it needs to avoid using drag culture as an opportunity for teaching a Very Special Lesson About Acceptance. It achieves the first better than the second, because a major subplot reveals that their beloved upstairs neighbor Peaches (Stephen Spinella) broke all ties long ago with his intolerant family, but his little brother Jeff (David Duchovny, who’s perfectly cute but zzzzzzzz) now wants to rebuild their relationship even though he feels an obvious distaste for Peaches’ feminine side and everything associated with the Handlebar’s drag culture.

For the most part the film keeps this subplot relatively light, since it’s also an opportunity for Connie to fall for Jeff and to find it difficult to maintain her drag persona around him. Can she get him to fall for her, even if he thinks she’s a man? Eat your heart out, Shakespeare and As You Like It.

More important than these narrative/casting missteps is the fact that Connie and Carla is a love letter to drag culture and the outré world of dinner theater, and it slips in some blowsy female self-empowerment along the way, too. As the performers start to build increasingly adoring audiences at the Handlebar, they start to pepper their act with banter that celebrates femininity and self-acceptance while also getting delivered with a knowing wink from these women-disguised-as-men-who-dress-as-women.

In fact, when Connie wonders aloud at an odd moment backstage whether they ought to go on diets, Carla whips her huge, makeuped face around and sets her straight: “All these women come to our show and idolize us because as men we have better self-esteem than they do!” (The diet gets nixed.)

What can I say? With great singing, all those show tunes, pretty terrific acting from Vardalos and Collette, and a goofily madcap gender-bending storyline written by Vardalos (as her follow-up to My Big Fat Greek Wedding), Connie and Carla is ridiculous but entirely enjoyable. Don’t believe those snarky reviews written by the critics when it came out — assholes! — trust the people at Logo TV who’ve got it on regular rotation. Maybe it won’t win any prizes (except one for wigs and makeup from the Canadian Network of Makeup Artists) but I’m going to put this on my shortlist of movies to watch when I’m feeling a little blue. Because Connie and Carla know how to sing through the pain — and I’ve got a drag queen buried deep inside me just itching to get out. If only I could sing like C&C.

“The Heat” (2013): oh, how far we’ve come since “Miss Congeniality” (2000)

I loved Miss Congeniality even with the secretly awful “I can be a feminist and love beauty pageants!” storyline and the makeover in which the shlubby FBI agent turns into a stone-cold babe. Chalk it up to the appeal of Sandra Bullock, madcap writing, and the supporting cast (Michael Caine, Benjamin Bratt, and Candice Bergen as the fussy cum psychotic pageant-show director). But after reading Susan Douglas’ Enlightened Feminism it got harder to watch, as it told women, “It’s okay not to be a feminist! It’s okay to want to be pretty and have girlfriends instead! Once you get rid of your frizzy hair and scary eyebrows, that superhot guy will like you!”

The Heat may not be perfect, but it dumps everything that’s objectionable about that earlier film and offers something slyly feminist while still feeling unthreatening.

Taking into account that this film will win no prizes, I kind of loved it — and even better, it feels like the kind of movie I’ll keep enjoying when it makes its inevitable appearance on basic cable in 9 months or so. The writing is tight and smart and (I think) will wear well with age. Bullock plays an older, more effective, un-made-over version of her Miss Congeniality character, except she doesn’t actually seem lonely. And Melissa McCarthy is just so good to watch — she shows that she can deliver a sly line as well as she can do physical humor. Best of all, unlike Bridesmaids, this film shows that McCarthy’s physical humor doesn’t have to descend to fat jokes. Oh, excuse me — I meant enlightened fat jokes.

The tepid reviews meant that it took me a long time to see The Heat, directed by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) and written by Katie Dippold (Parks and Recreation) — so long that I was surprised to see it still in theaters after 5 weeks here, considering how quickly films get yanked these days. Yet my theater had lots of people in it, and we all laughed throughout — even the 80-something couple behind me, who were unperturbed by the language, etc.

Let me repeat: it’s not perfect. The comedy is broad and often crude. The movie gets put on hold at the end of the 2nd act while the two leads bond by getting drunk in a bar together (right: never seen that one before). I loved the writing, but you can tell it was written for the small screen, even if it comes from a writer on one of teevee’s best shows. The Heat sometimes feels like the female comedy film is still in its awkward tween phase, with occasional disconnects between writing, acting, plot, and tropes.

But to focus on its awkward tween-ness is to miss what’s really enjoyable about this film — and that has to do with how the story of a partnership between two 40-something women is different than between men.

Some of the snarkiest comments about the film come from critics who overstate its feminist elements. “Nothing quite says female empowerment like violating the civil rights of criminal suspects, am I right?” asks Andrew O’Hehir of Salon in a review that makes me want to use a blunt instrument to take some air out of his self-inflated balloon. But then, he thought the derivative male buddy movie Two Guns was completely “enjoyable trash,” so perhaps pity is the more appropriate response.

Anyway. Is The Heat overtly feminist? No, not really, aside from a few comments about how hard it is to be a woman in law enforcement. Rather, it’s a secret, sly feminism that emerges in the way the story refuses to play by the old rules.

First is the way the film up-ends virtually every trope about female cops, as Ashley Fetters details in The Atlantic. Movies have taught us that women are the newest and least experienced cops on the force; that they hunt serial killers from a distance or in ways that don’t require mano-a-mano exchange with perps; that they don’t use violence; and that they just wanna be loved. In each respect, The Heat acts as if those assumptions never existed. 

Bullock’s and McCarthy’s characters don’t care how they look. Not only are they not looking for love, they seem to take for granted the fact that men are interested in them (and they are): McCarthy has a whole string of lovelorn former hookups who haunt the bars of Boston, hoping to run into her.

Best of all, this film was not about The Pretty One and The Fat One. Bullock’s character gets a lot of shit for her mannish looks and heavy jawline — in fact, I wonder whether I’ll ever be able to look at her again without thinking of the whipsaw barrage of questions thrown at her by McCarthy’s obnoxious Boston family. There are no fat jokes. They’re both smart and capable and competitive and capable of violence and somewhat isolated. The way they find friendship with one another is sweet without being cloying.

I also noticed the actorly generosity between the two women. There’s no doubt that McCarthy gets the better lines, but that’s in keeping with the way that Bullock’s straight-laced character has to play catch-up. “That’s a misrepresentation of my vagina,” she says lamely (and very funnily) after one string of verbal abuse. I’ve never seen either woman share the limelight so effectively.

So yeah, the movie is occasionally crude and won’t pass any authenticity tests with police-show aficionados. I’m mostly uninterested in those complaints. I want to see The Heat 2, with a more experienced Dippold doing the writing and these two growing into their characters — simply because for the female comedy film to flower as a beautiful teenager, we need plenty of funny, watchable, and well-written films to pave the way. Because in the meantime, awkward tweens can still make for damn good viewing. And what else do you want to do on a Saturday afternoon other than guffaw at a lot of goof, with women (for once) doing the goofing?

 

The hair piece: or, the subtle significance of hair onscreen

Here’s something you don’t often see onscreen: a woman who doesn’t cover up the fact that her hair has thinned.

Lidia Bastianich is PBS’s Italian cooking maven whose show, Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen (she also has spinoffs like Lidia’s Italy), always marks the difference between the overly personality-driven Food Channel shows and PBS. To wit: she doesn’t do anything to cover up her thinning hair. For comparison, let’s look at the Food Channel’s Giada de Laurentiis:

Any normal human might find a contrast between these two women absurd. Be assured I’m not trying to draw a conclusion about their respective talents for cooking — just their comparative screen appearance. (We could also discuss Giada’s obviously spectacular breasts and/or that alarming set of teeth, but let’s try to stay focused.) I just want to make the point that it is amazing to me that even good old PBS hasn’t forced Lidia into a wig. (What do I know? They may have tried.)

I got onto this subject originally because the subject of hair kept coming up in strange and interesting contexts. There was Callista Gingrich, Newt Gingrich’s wife, whose immovable helmet of hair preoccupied so many bloggers last year. Perhaps because I’m a big fan of natural hair for Black women, I have read several other bloggers who yearn publicly for Michelle Obama to stop relaxing/ironing her hair.

I’d been collecting a random assortment of hair moments onscreen for a while, but it was a comment over at JB’s terrific film blog, The Fantom Country, that gave my post clarity. Writing about how many times he’d noticed Andrew Garfield’s luscious hair, JB wrote wryly, “Perhaps he is a particularly expressive hair actor” — why, it’s comments like these that make my blog so resoundingly esoteric. (See also posts on noses, mouths, and teeth.) Esoteric it may be, but it’s my confirmed opinion that hair is an easy site for the downfall of a film or character.

Let’s start with a few actors who consistently make their hair work pretty goddamn well. I’ve seen Jeff Bridges in just about as many different hair parts as one can imagine, and they always work for me — even (especially?) when he shaved his head for the bad-guy role in Iron Man. Bridges has this way of truly appearing to be one with his hair; whether it’s the shaggy Dude from The Big Lebowski (1998) or the long-haired ex-con in American Heart (1992, below), the hair seems fully folded in with the rest of him. It’s perhaps not a surprise that an actor like Bridges, who conceals so much of his acting craft behind his prodigious modesty and naturalness, would be able to handle these hair parts so effortlessly.

Other actors, it seems, grow into their hair. I never thought much of Connie Britton as a younger woman — on the rare occasions I ever caught that Michael J. Fox show Spin City (1996-2000) I mainly thought of her as The Hair — but now that she’s in her 40s she has gotten better roles and more gravitas. I just loved what she did with her role as Mrs. Coach/Tami Taylor in Friday Night Lights (2006-2011); one never forgot how she rocked those strawberry waves, but it seemed so fully in keeping with the role. I still haven’t caught up with her new show Nashville (2012- ) despite the regular reports from blogger friend JustMeMike that I have to keep archiving for reading later. But Britton’s hair in the Nashville country music scene? It’s a hair marriage made in heaven. 

On occasion one finds an actor whose hair was so integral to her character onscreen that they become inseparable. Surely the best example one can imagine is Judy Davis’ breakout role in My Brilliant Career (1979). As Sybylla Melvyn, a teenager yearning for something beyond marriage and motherhood in turn-of-the-century New South Wales, her hair exemplified her character. Frizzy, irrepressible, flyaway, and heavy with impossibility — it fit so perfectly with Davis’s plain, freckled face and her terrific intelligence that it’s impossible to think of that role being taken on by anyone else.

Judy Davis in The Eye of the Storm (2011)

A note: I’ve been disappointed to see that Davis rarely shows that hair anymore. Like so many women, she now keeps it straightened and severely managed. I still can’t see her onscreen without wondering where her hair went.

There are occasions when an actor with forgettable hair takes on a great hair part. The best example I can think of is from last year’s Prometheus (2012): Michael Fassbender’s turn as the creepy robot with a fixation for Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). It’s one thing to admire O’Toole’s brassy, glinty-eyed heroism; it’s another to emulate his hair. What a nice touch that was. One couldn’t look at Fassbender throughout the film without seeing the robot’s own self-consciousness of carrying that carefully coiffed hair — hair that symbolized so much.

Click on this image of Fassbender and you’ll get a nice .gif of the hair regimen.

Sadly, it’s more common that I notice hair more like Andrew Garfield’s — hair so demanding that it ought to have separate billing. Pushy, greedy hair; hair that demands a little too much screen time.

Yes: I am speaking of Merida’s hair in Brave (2012). Yes: I loved what the illustrators did with this. But yes: it took over.

Nor is this a fault limited to animators. Why, just last week I complained about Jessica Chastain’s hair in Zero Dark Thirty — what was wrong with those hair people on set? If there’s one thing I know a lot about, it’s how (cough) the rigors of personal hygiene and grooming have a tendency to drop away when one is single-mindedly working on a problem and scrutinizing the evidence. Por ejemplo: I’m sitting here right now on a Sunday afternoon, furiously typing a blog post about hair and movies, having not even run a comb through my hair all day. This is how us ladies behave when we’re focused. We do not fuss with ‘dos like this:

(And honestly, the movie wasn’t about some nice lady professor who keeps a blog. Chastain’s character went to black sites to witness torture of detainees! She sat around in a dreary cubicle at a CIA outpost in Pakistan! Argh.)

I have to conclude with a big hair role that stymies me: Penelope Cruz’s mane in Nine (2009). It’s so absurdly great that, for me, it veers between unbelievable and some kind of parasitic being from another planet that has attached itself to her beautiful head. I mean, us ladies have a lot to envy when it comes to Cruz, but nowhere does her hair appear to such effect than here, teased and streaked to the point that it ought to have its own life insurance and bodyguards. Just watch this sexpot number unfolding in the imagination of Daniel Day Lewis:

See what I mean? it’s just so much hair that every time I see this scene I wonder if the hair & makeup people actually added more to her head to enhance the excess of it all as she shakes it all over Lewis’s body. No wonder so many of us fantasize about sex and hair — criminey, see here for the definition of fetish. 

As with all my most esoteric pieces, I can only hope that my hair fixation rubs off on you and you start to scrutinize the hair acting of all your favorite/hated actors. And when you do, I hope you post a comment about the people I’ve forgotten, the great hair roles of yesteryear, and the Hair Aliens Attack parts that I need to watch.

Which reminds me. Jennifer Aniston: greatest or worst hair actor of all time?

Introvert’s paradise: “The Hedgehog” (2009)

Grading completed. Committees survived. The inevitable debriefings afterward — which often take as much time as the meetings themselves — turn out to be not painful, overly gossipy, or derisive about certain colleagues’ intelligence. I breathe a sigh of relief as I retire to my house for winter break.

Last night I made baked ziti (talk about comfort food! it’s that pinch of nutmeg in the ricotta/ spinach/ artichoke heart mixture) and made holiday cookies for tonight’s neighborhood party. In short, it’s almost like living a normal life again.

And I watched a film. A real film, not the comic pablum my partner has demanded for the past few weeks. Mona Achache’s The Hedgehog is the filmic rendition of Muriel Barbery’s wonderful The Elegance of the Hedgehog (L’Élégance du herisson) which I loved reading a couple of years ago. The film has won a pile of awards and deserves every one of them, even as I insist the book is still better.

The story is an introvert’s paradise: a meeting of the minds between a bespeckled, smartypants 11-yr-old named Paloma (Garance de Guillermic) — who despises her bourgeois, clueless family — and Renée (Josiane Balasko), the dowdy, gruff 50-something concierge who manages the apartment building full of rich families. That Paloma sees something in Renée is saying something about the little girl’s powers of observation. Even better, she describes the older woman as much like a hedgehog: prickly on the outside, but inside she is elegant, intelligent, surprising.

With her Japanese pen and ink, Paloma renders her discovery, along with her namesake:

Renée does a great deal to maintain her disguise. She keeps her TV on when she’s likely to be approached by the building’s residents, all the more to confirm their stereotypes about the working-class individuals who take positions as concierges. But secretly she keeps a closed, book-lined study where she retires with a refined cup of tea and sits with her blissed-out cat, Leo.

One day she blows her own cover. Upon being introduced to a new building resident — the white-haired Kakuro Ozu (Togo Igawa) — she mutters, “Happy families are all alike.” Ozu immediately responds with its companion line from Anna Karenina: “But every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Moreover, he guesses that her cat is named for Tolstoy.

Why doesn’t she want them to see who she really is? It seems obvious to those of us who are also hedgehogs. She has worked out a deal with the world, and it allows her to experience a rich inner life. It also reflects her belief in the impermeability of class divisions: no matter how elegant her thoughts, the well-heeled residents of her building will never acknowledge it. Her disguise allows her to blissfully read a difficult, mind-expanding text while eating a perfect bar of dark chocolate.

Her tentative friendship with Paloma changes that. Not to mention the gentle but insistent expressions of interest from Ozu, the new resident.

I still hate the ending, and I’m mixed on the fact that the film emphasizes the perspective of Paloma rather than Renée, but what a delight this film is. Quiet, funny, and full of great female characters — a perfect midwinter treat.

Can you tell? My own delight in hedgehogness is beginning. Ahhh, winter break.

“I Wish” (2011): wisps of hope and magic

“Maybe a miracle will happen,” ten-year-old Koichi (Koki Maeda) says, after hearing from a classmate a rumor about the new bullet train. The rumor is that when the incoming and outgoing trains pass one another, each racing at 160mph, one can make a wish and it will come true. What Koichi wants more than anything is for his family to be back together.

But Koichi isn’t the only one putting his eggs into a superstitious basket. One of his best friends wants to marry their lovely, bare-legged school librarian. His grandfather believes he can perfect a recipe for karukan cakes and make a tidy income on the side. A classmate wants to become an actress and beat out the more gregarious and self-absorbed girl who has already experienced more success in commercials. In essence, director Hirokazu Kore-eda asks gently, isn’t this how we live? We experience our world through a haze of magical thinking. (This lovely, sweet film is streaming now on Netflix.)

Koichi and his mother have moved to live with her aging parents in Kagoshima, a city perched across a bay from a volcanic mountain, Sakurajima. Every morning when he wakes up, he retrieves his air-dried swimming trunks from the balcony outside only to find that they are covered with volcanic ash, which he disgustedly knocks off. He fastidiously wipes down the floor mats in his room, as if to express his hatred of the entire situation.

In semi-secretive phone calls to his little brother Ryu (Maeda’s real-life little brother Oshirô, equally geeky and winning) — who’s living in Osaka with their musician/lie-about father — Koichi tries to persuade him to conspire to bring their parents back together. As much as he misses his brother, the happy-go-lucky Ryu appears less eager to reunite their parents, for reasons we see only gradually.

Nor are children the only ones who believe in some form of magic. Koichi’s parents separated because his father (Jô Odagiri, aka total hearthrob) put more effort into his music than earning a living — a fool’s errand if ever there was one. An elderly couple spends an evening pretending that perhaps that sweet child really is their grandchild, the child of their long-gone daughter. Koichi’s ham-fisted homeroom teacher, Mr. Sakagami (Hiroshi Abe, hearthrob x2) believes with one clunky gesture that he might serve as a father figure for the boy. Once we start to see the full landscape of wishes, foolish hopes, and magical thinking, we realize that there are so many competing and contradictory wishes swirling around the universe that they kind of cross each other out.

I’ve only seen three of Kore-eda’s elegant films, yet I’m completely in love with his vision. The best was Still Walking (2008), with its tense family reunion of people disappointed with one another. Kore-eda has a way with children, as he showed in Nobody Knows (2004), a wrenching film about a family of children effectively abandoned in a tiny apartment by their mother whose best (worst) advice was to remain under the radar of neighbors and the authorities. I Wish is sweeter, gentler, more evocative — and his two main stars, the Maeda brothers, have a grace before the camera that feels magical on its own.

This film feels so much kinder than this director’s previous films that its ultimate themes of reconciliation and realization sneak in slowly. On some level, we start to see that we engage in magical thinking at the very same time that we are realists. It’s one of the gentlest films about existence I’ve seen. But just because its protagonists aren’t faced with life and death terrors doesn’t mean the stakes are low, or that the director has nothing important and original to say.

Frankly, after seeing films that put their child characters at serious risks, it was a relief to see these children permitted to be children, given the gift of wishing without the horrors of what I think of as “movie reality” dashing all their innocence to shreds.

I will also say that this film benefits from subtlety and the specificity of culture — one must watch carefully, rather than get distracted during the bits that might look slow to someone used to over-caffeinated Hollywood fare. It feels quite Japanese, with its references to karukan cake and Japanese baseball heroes and J-TV that most Americans won’t recognize.

But I hope you watch it anyway and let the unfamiliar bits wash over you while you focus on the director’s larger themes (as well as those impossibly wonderful Maeda brothers). I loved this film, and am now working to find a way to see Kore-eda’s back catalogue of directorial efforts.

Meanwhile, for those of you awaiting Hurricane Sandy’s wrath: good luck!

“It rhymes with shmashmortion”: enough talk about exceptions

In the film Knocked Up (2007), when Ben (Seth Rogen) tells his stoner friends that his one-night stand Alison (Katherine Heigl) is pregnant, they offer up a wide range of responses — from congratulations to hoots. Only one of them expresses skepticism about the whole thing. And he can’t say the word.

Jonah: You know what I think you should do? Take care of it.
Jason: Tell me you don’t want him to get an ‘A’ word.
Jonah: Yes, I do, and I won’t say it for little Baby Ears over there, but it rhymes with shashmortion. You should get a shmashmortion at the shmashmortion clinic.

That’s the thing, you see: no one’s willing to say it these days. Thus, let me proclaim it loud and clear: WE NEED ABORTION. And I’m really sick of hearing about exceptions. (And watching films in which the woman always chooses to keep it.)

It’s a campaign year, so our politicians are full of new and creative ways to denounce abortion. The latest and greatest, of course, is the Todd Akins and Richard Mourdocks who seek even greater restrictions on abortion by redefining rape as, alternately, God’s gift for impregnating the ladies OR God’s way of preventing pregnancy. (Yes, my head hurts, too.)

As easy as it is for me to get sucked into that conversation, like I did the other day, the real problem is that they’ve succeeded — they’ve skewed the conversation away from a question of “choice or no choice?” to a question of “how many abortion restrictions can we pile on to an America that’s already restricting abortion at every turn?”

What’s really going on is two separate ideological movements– one about eliminating abortion and the other about redefining rape — merged into a single conversation intended to distract us.

We need to stay focused on the fact women seek abortions, whether it’s legal or not. Given that fact, the only way to ensure anything resembling equal rights in this country is to ensure that abortion is safe and legal and private. Women who live in states with radically restrictive abortion practices are already flooding into Mexico to purchase abortifacients even if they don’t understand how to take that medication. One might also say that the only way to raise a healthy young population of children is to ensure that they are loved and wanted and live with families that can afford another mouth to feed. But most of all, women need the abortion option because the men they have sex with are morons — as well illustrated by the aforementioned Knocked Up. Ben’s friends ride him for not wearing a condom:

Jonah: I can’t believe you didn’t fucking wear a bag. Who does that? 
Jason: Why did we go to Costco and buy a year’s supply of condoms if you weren’t gonna use ’em, man? 
Jonah: I can’t believe you did this. You fucked everything up. 
Jason: The real point is not to get yourself into this position, that’s what you have to realize. You gotta know all the tricks like, for example, if a woman’s on top she can’t get pregnant. It’s just gravity. 
Jonah: Well that’s true. Everyone knows that. 
Jason: What goes up must come down.

ARGH. These are the guys who grow up to become Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin, people. They can’t say the word abortion aloud. But they want to tell you all about their crackpot theories — whether it’s about sex or God or pregnancy. (Their scene, holding forth on pregnancy, floats virtually every one of the Mourdock/Akin theories, BTW.)

The time has come to tell them to stop. This is terrifying — and not just for women who are raped or whose pregnancies might kill them. This is about women’s rights.

“Charlotte Rampling: The Look” (2011)

Charlotte Rampling was breathtakingly beautiful as a young woman. She is now 66, still gorgeous, and vexingly still wears same dress size, still appears in bathing suits on screen. Angelina Maccarone’s documentary explores a woman who has let us look at her onscreen for nearly 50 years.

She has never made it easy, specializing in difficult, hard characters with complicated motives. The bitch in Georgy Girl (1966), the wife who falls in love with a chimpanzee in Max (1986), or — most infamously — the concentration camp survivor who carries on a strange relationship with a Nazi guard in The Night Porter (1974); all these parts made her inscrutable, kept us from liking her. Famously, her co-star Dirk Bogarde called it “The Look”: those distinctive, hooded eyes that achieve so much without giving much away. As she’s grown older and her face acquired more character, she has acquired a capacity to convey not just disdain but a degree of self-loathing so all-encompassing that it chills.

What we see of Rampling onscreen is a mystery of minimalist emotion that nevertheless somehow smacks you in the face. About her role in the new film, The Eye of the Storm (2012), David Denby writes, “Speaking in not much more than a whisper, [Rampling] is magnetically evil, with occasional flashes of a complex sensibility and poetic invention — often just a flutter of her eyes or a strategic turn of her head.” How does she do that?

 

In Charlotte Rampling: The Look she explains that early on she learned she was exceptionally photogenic; yet she had to learn how to survive the constant appearance of the camera before her. “Exposure is huge,” she explains. “You have to find a way not to feel invaded all the time, by lenses, by people looking all the time. If you are to give anything worthwhile of yourself, you have to feel completely exposed.”

Perversely, Maccarone’s documentary begs you to read in between the lines. It does not seek exposure but something more allusive, abstract — the passing of time, the inevitability of change. She shows Rampling in conversation with old friends and collaborators, conversations that allow Maccarone to trace those earlier appearances on screen and in photographs. At times, Rampling even revisits old sets like a staircase she rambled down in Georgy Girl or a room where she danced, bare breasted, to a Marlene Dietrich tune in The Night Porter.

 

Maccarone never asks how Rampling feels about her sister’s suicide back in the 60s, nor about her relationships with men, nor whether she is close to her children. In avoiding those gossipy realms so stereotypical of “women’s lives” as produced by Hollywood, the director clearly wants to make a point about respecting the actor’s craft, her career. This is a film about Rampling’s achievements, one of which is the flowering of her ability to play ambivalent, morally questionable, and occasionally impossible characters like Sarah Morton, above, in François Ozon’s terrific Swimming Pool (2003).

And yet I completed the documentary still feeling that the director hadn’t done justice to Rampling’s skills; I think I wanted a more explicit directorial hand in showing us, as Denby did in that great quote above, what Rampling can do with her face. But Maccarone stays out of it, allowing us to arrive at our own conclusions. Perhaps rather than see this documentary one ought to see Under the Sand (2000) or even her small, despicable part in Melancholia (2011) instead. And yet for the unadulterated pleasure of seeing La Rampling, well, it’s streaming on Netflix.