from now on maybe I'll just write about previews instead of actually watching the movies

I have written here before about how I didn't get Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, even though I really REALLY tried to like it. I think I have a reasonable imagination. I read books and watch movies and I relate to the characters in them. I don't generally have a sociopath-style lack of empathy, and I rarely have trouble understanding and getting emotionally involved the story of a fictional character, even a character whose life is very different from my own. And yet I can't get my head around Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And I suspect the same thing is going to happen with Spike Jonze's new movie, which people are raving about, and which also seems to portray a relationship between a flesh-and-blood human man, and a woman who is not a person. In the case of Eternal Sunshine, the relationship was between a) a man and b) his internal reconstruction of a woman who actually exists. In Her, the female lead is an AI, an operating system. 

I don't know why but I feel compelled to clarify: I'm not saying that my feminist ideals stop me liking Eternal Sunshine out of some political or moral commitment. I promise I am quite capable of enjoying a movie that is at odds with my personal and political beliefs. I'm saying that when I watch that movie, I just plain don't get it. 

And also, I'm not saying Her can't be a very good movie. It might even explore ideas of gender and romance in ways that are interesting. I'm just scared that it will be one of those forehead-crinkling experiences where I question my basic humanity/cognitive function/sanity, because everyone else gets it and even though I am pretty sure I'm not stupid, I do not get it. I might just not see it, because this experience is so genuinely alienating when it happens. 

Maybe also, we could work on a list of movies where women play a central role, and have relationships with male characters who are not really experiencing the story. I can't think of any, but of course I haven't seen every movie ever made (yet). It's true that a lot of romantic comedies are populated by implausible weird ideal men who probably don't exist in life, and the women are (slightly) more realistic, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm looking for stories about heterosexual romance in which the story is told from the perspective of the woman, and the man has a questionable if any lived experience of the story. My sad little list is very unsatisfying: Bicentennial Man, Edward Scissorhands, Making Mister Right, The Purple Rose of Cairo, the relationship between Data and Tasha Yar. Mostly, that's just a list of movies in which ladies made it with robots. Which might be a useful list, but which is not totally relevant here, especially since most of those stories are pretty focused on the experience of being a whatever-non-human-thing. 

Frozen

It's hard to say what's great about Frozen without giving away parts of the ending, and while the ending is pretty well telegraphed from the first, um, ten minutes?...it's probably the polite thing to avoid giving it away while the film is still in theaters. What is great about Frozen, to put it in the vaguest terms possible, is that it questions/subverts a bunch of fairy tale traditions that Disney has mostly promoted over the years. Also pretty great: Idina Menzel singing, Kristin Bell being funny, the song "In Summer."

What is weird about Frozen is easier to talk about, and that is the Disney traditions it fails to subvert, in particular a few very boring ideas about what is pretty and what people (or girls, or princesses) look like. Princesses are pale pink and very tiny in the waist and very big in the eyes. Yawn. I'm not mad about it, but it is a little boring. I've been defending Disney (mostly in imaginary conversations with people I don't actually know) against the charge that their recent movies about marginalized (non-white, non-European, etc.) characters were a kind of PC box-checking. Native American? Check. African? Check. African American? Check. My theory is that maybe there's a more generous interpretation, in which someone noticed that there are vast stores of characters and narratives to be mined outside the Grimm/Anderson cannon they had explored (but not nearly exhausted) in the first 50 years of the Disney Princess franchise. (It's probably not exactly fair to retrospectively label it a franchise, but I think it was Disney Marketing that did that, not me.) So they made a movie about a little Black girl in Louisiana in the twenties not because of idealism about diversity, and not because little African American girls are an untapped (or, um, undertapped) market for Princess merchandise,* but because they noticed that it would be a fresher, newer kind of character, and because 1920s New Orleans (jazz! voodoo! parades!) is a cool setting for a story.

But it seems we're back to Grimm and Anderson now.

Linda Holmes on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour pointed out that if you look closely at the two princesses in Frozen, you'll quickly see that their eyes are the same width as their waists. Here is a quick illustration:

One more bit of cut-and-pasting further illustrates the weirdness of gender portrayals in this movie:

Doesn't Princess Anna look pretty cute with the eyes of Hans? 

*Obviously this is the real reason for diverse characters. I remember standing at the fabric cutting counter at Joann's the year The Princess and the Frog came out, and talking to the clerks about how ALL their Tiana fabric had sold out before the movie even started playing in theaters.

Happy Halloween Month NTC!

it's not that Elysium is too political but that its politics is dumb

Part One: Elysium's Politics

Elysium looks cool, with its pervasive filth, massive disorienting cityscapes, and exoskeleton-related gore. I enjoyed watching it. I was never bored watching it either. And I guess I should say, I am a sucker for a simple (simplistic even) sci fi premise with a heavy-handed political message. And boy is Elysium that. But there's something deeply and fundamentally wrong with the politics of the movie, and it's not that it's too far left. 

There's a scene near the beginning of the movie where Matt Damon's character goes into a room and he is exposed to a bunch of radiation, and then an alarm goes off, to let everyone know that "organic material" was detected in the blast room. Think about this for a second. Someone built a machine for irradiating materials. They then added an Organic Matter Detector, which detects organic matter in the chamber, but only after the radiation burns through the room. Why? Why would you design your machine to detect organic material in the chamber after the blast of radiation? The only answer I can think of is one that Elysium seems really comfortable with: Because you are evil. 

I expected to feel a little awful after seeing this movie, because I thought it would make me think about privilege and wealth disparities and the very real lack of affordable healthcare for lots of people in the world. I thought it was going to force us to confront the fact that in this real world where we actually live, there are people who starve even though there is enough food for everyone. Those real life problems result from complicated, flawed economic systems. They are hard problems to solve, and worth solving. 

But Elysium actually makes it easier to ignore these problems, because it allows its audience to utterly fail to identify with the bad guys. I'm not like her, I think. And as long as I'm not just plain evil, motivated solely by evil, I guess I'm one of the good guys. Or at least, I am not part of the problem. If the problem is "people who actively want to keep poor people from getting healthcare and good food out of pure malice" then I am definitely not the problem. 

Part Two: A short list of cliches and confusions that bugged me about Elysium, apart from the politics problem. 

1. Jodie Foster's character has this evil plan where she is going to install a program that will rewrite the government of Elysium. For a minute, I thought this meant that all of Elysium was some sort of Matrix-style virtual reality. But it's not. I think we're just supposed to believe that if a computer says President Patel is no longer president, then he will actually no longer be president. Why? How? (Note: someone said that maybe it's the law enforcement robots that get reprogrammed, so those robot guys will recognize Jodie Foster as president and do what she says.)

2. The threat of sexual violence as a motivator for the protagonist, because he cares about the victim. Because you see, the thing about sexual violence against women is that it's so hard on the men who love those women. Eye roll. 

3. It is a little weird to me that in a movie that's all about class and poverty and inequality, the main character is Yet Another White Dude Who Saves Everyone. Read this 

4. The replacement program, the one that the good guy hackers install instead of the evil one Jodie Foster was planning to install, declares all residents of Earth to be citizens of Elysium. That's cool. Even the part where the hacker changes a line of code, something like "earth residents status: illegal" to "earth residents status: legal." That's okay--I like heavy-handed. But it then displays the following error: "Cannot arrest citizen of Elysium." Seriously? They can't arrest any citizen of Elysium? For any crime? I guess? I don't think I want to live there. 

Two Aprils ago Lydia wrote basically the only appropriate response to Ruby Sparks, and the all kinds of awful, the really just awful, of making a movie about the grim reality that at least one person in the world thinks it's romantic to replace a viable leading female figure with an entirely fictionalized character written by the male lead, so as to eliminate any pesky human-ness she might have.

To spite its title, it's a thoughtful post.

I'm less thoughtful tonight, so I photoshopped my responses to the preview for About Time.

So it goes.

Charlie Kaufman Writing ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Movie for Guillermo del Toro

(How they gonna do four-dimensional aliens? I hope not like that Donnie Darko hooey.)

Happy 4th of July NTC!

Longmire...

is terrible, which is too bad because it's a sort of detective / western set in Wyoming and filmed in New Mexico, which combines my favorite genres and settings with beautiful long shots of the landscape.

It's awful because of the writing and the acting, but the cinematography is pretty good, which really leaves me wanting to like it. That, sadly, is impossible, mostly because of the representation of Native Americans, but also of women, and of the mennonites, who they can't keep separate from the Amish, and even if they'd said "Amish" instead of "Mennonite" they wouldn't have gotten that right anyway.

I want to make a law for all of Hollywood: All nicely shot southwestern detective programming must be well written and at least tolerably acted because I wish to watch it.

[photo: Longmire - it would be too shaming to make eye contact.]

Room 237 (with Upstream Color spoilers)

Room 237 is a documentary about people who are a little obsessed with The Shining--and with their interpretations of it. When you hear the synopsis, you think it's going to be about lunatics--e.g. one of the subjects of the film believes The Shining represents Kubrick's confession to his role in faking the footage of the moon landing. What makes the movie interesting is that these people are decidedly not lunatics. They come across as surprisingly sane and ordinary. Each of them just happens to be a little obsessed with one idea.

I saw Room 237 a few weeks ago, not long after seeing Shane Carruth's new movie Upstream Color. It was not until I saw Upstream Color for the second time (after Room 237) that I thought of Rosemary's Baby when Amy Steinmetz's character cut her hair short. Haircuts are not so uncommon in movies (in fact, I once spent a very long time digging around a website someone had made that was just a catalog of haircuts in movies), so I didn't think too much about the similarity. But then at the end of Upstream Color, there's a scene where Steinmetz cuddles a pig, as if it were her child (which it sort of is).

My point is, a person wouldn't have to be very obsessive or nutty to get...preoccupied with finding evidence of the validity of an offbeat interpretation of a film. It only took me about an hour to find these parallels:

John Cassavettes and Shane Carruth look good in button-downs under pullovers. 

beds outdoors 

haircuts

board games as important props

Not pictured: long period of fasting followed by eating frenzy, cuddling and lullabying the hideous monster that is sort of her baby.

Some of these pictures are from:
http://metallicimagery.blogspot.com/2013/04/upstream-color-review.html 
http://veryaware.com/
http://www.zontikgames.com

Speaking of esoteric in-jokes

http://extension765.com/products/T027

If you were thinking of buying me one of Steven Soderbergh's new post-retirement line of film-inspired Tshirts, this is probably the one I want.

It is the only one I immediately recognized. Here's Slate's list of the sources.

David Bordwell on Hollywood in-jokes

These movies were made by youngish people who liked to have fun–sometimes at each other’s expense—and nothing is more fun than very esoteric in-jokes.

http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2013/05/27/on-the-more-or-less-plausible-sneakiness-of-one-preston-sturges/

Oblivion, etc.

Remember when we started NotThatCritical and we meant to write briefly and quickly, with no pressure, because no one would be reading it? I think it was supposed to be: 1) no more than five hundred words per movie, and 2) write something every single day. We never really kept up with every single day part, but, you know, like Maude said, consistency is not really a human trait.

I saw Oblivion a couple weeks ago. Well, "saw" is probably overstating it. I was present for it, although I might have fallen asleep once or twice. I did gather that it was about killer drones (topical!), and I can report that during the time I was awake, Tom Cruise occupied probably about 85% of the screen time. Maybe 90%. I remember just one scene he was not in, where stoned-eyed Andrea Riseborough (who seems familiar but imdb reveals nothing I remember seeing her in) talked with Melissa Leo, but I think their conversation was mainly about the Tom Cruise character, so it does not pass the Bechdel Test.

Speaking of Tom Cruise, I read this Vulture article a month or so ago, and I just saw Lindy West's response to it, which is, as usual, pretty much spot on. The only thing I need to add is that when they say "analyzed the data" they really mean, "made up a bunch of data points and wrote down some ideas about them." Which is cool, that's mostly what we want from Vulture, right? But this actual data exists--you can get all of imdb's data, for money--so is someone doing an actual analysis of actual data? Because that could be really interesting.

This research on gender and the movies was released recently from the Annenberg School: http://annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Communication%20and%20Journalism/~/media/5DB47326757B416FBE2CB5E6F1B5CBE4.ashx
This paper interests me, but this sort of analysis is necessarily so very subjective, despite best efforts. See for instance, from page 11:

All characters were evaluated for attractiveness. This measure ascertained whether one or more characters in the plot verbally (e.g., “You are so hot!”) and/or nonverbally (e.g., cat call, whistling, gapping mouth) indicated the physical desirousness of another character. Self references did not count. Characters were coded as not attractive (i.e., no verbal or non verbal references), attractive (i.e., one reference), or very attractive (i.e., two or more references). These latter two levels were collapsed prior to analysis.

Makes me a little dizzy, trying to think of ways to make an objective character attractiveness criteria.

I feel pretty certain that are fewer leading women in the movies now than there used to be, and fewer of those leading women are tough. But I have no real idea of how to objectively assess that statement.

Ripley: tough
(wikimedia.org)

Katniss: also tough
(www.fanpop.com/)

I love this blog! I wish this blog were a job I could apply for.

Netflix is making amends for last summer.