If you’ve been following Ree’s career as long as I have you might be dazzled, as I have, at her meteoric rise to success from blogger to big time blogger to book author to TV show host and now, no doubt, to million dollar enterprise a la Paula Deen, Rachel Ray, and The Barefoot Contessa. Anyone who watches these shows knows that you don’t watch them for the food and cookin and recipes – you watch them for the lifestyle the host is pushing. The same formula that draws millions of viewers to Ree’s blog every day is the same thing that will likely draw them to her TV show on the Food Network. But watch out, you might find yourself yearning to be one of those Stepford Wives, you know, an eager to please robotica?
Category Archives: FILM
Frowning Girl Speaks for a Generation
I love the Frowning Girl meme. It is the gift that keeps on giving. Here is the latest one, sent via Dave Itzkoff’s twitter:
Frowning Girl seems to be always saying: make it stop, make it stop, make it stop. She shot to fame by photo bombing the royal kiss between Kate Middleton and Prince William. Since many of us out there were already sick to death of the royal wedding — I am embarrassed to be a woman the way women fawn all over weddings — the Frowning Girl seemed to say it all, with one expression: STFU.
Here are more Frowning Girl photos.
Women: What Have they Done to Our Song?
When I was growing up in the 1970s there really was such a thing as feminism. I guess today’s feminists would call it “old school” feminism. But this was, to my eyes, as one of four kids scrambling around after our young single mother, something to bear in mind looking forward. My mother wasn’t really a feminist but she was someone educated feminists would likely defend in an ethics class: unmarried, not religious, working and raising kids. It came at a cost to her and it came at a cost to us. Had she been a feminist in thought and ideas she might have pointed her three daughters more towards education, teaching them that strength comes from awareness, intelligence from curiosity, and power from knowledge. Her lessons, though she did the very best she could, were more about this: most men are creeps, if you’re going to marry make sure you marry a rich man, and work very very hard, save your pennies because you don’t know where your next meal might be coming from: these are the goals of the desperate – and it was into this atmosphere that her daughters were raised. Her son seemed to take things in stride – after all, he was born into a culture that, for a handsome white male, opportunities did not depend on a husband, but simply on whether he took them or not: the choice was his.
But you’d have to have been completely out of it not to take notice of the feminist movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s, especially in Topanga where we were growing up. Women did not wear bras and in fact, they burned their bras. Can you imagine such a thing happening today? It simply wouldn’t. There is no such thing as a woman who would ever, in a million years, proudly burn her bra. In the age of Victoria’s Secret (I am a slave to this) and the female icons of our day, bras are a vital piece of clothing. I own many of them and love all of them; to that end, I am not sure what bra burning accomplished at all. Was our goal to be able to let it all hang low, like the tribal women in certain places in Africa? Or was it: men don’t wear them so why should we?
My bras.
I used to see my mother come upon women who probably were feminists. Certainly my best friend’s mother, with whom I spent a good deal of my childhood, was one — educated, observant, forward-thinking. But something happened in the 1980s — that check the feminists wrote was never really cashed. It just got worse in the 1990s and now it seems like you have to fight hard to get anywhere without also being desired sexually. The media, if you’ll allow one sweeping, unsubstantiated generalization, seems to have become a yawning chasm of the male gaze. There is no end to it. Women should rule the world. But we don’t, BLANCHE, we don’t.
I read with great interest this column by Carina Chocano for the New York Times on two movies that seem
If, as the film historian David Thomson wrote, “Pretty Woman” was a film about “three very compelling items in the American dream: sex, shopping and transformation,” then “Thelma and Louise” was a film about another dream: sex, not shopping and transformation. Yet in the end, only one of these fantasies could prove triumphant — and it’s not the one I believed in back in 1990s San Francisco.
The character of the ingénue in literature often functions as a transitional figure: at the end of the 19th century, for example, she embodied the instability of the moment as the Victorian era shifted into the modern one. Girls of my generation were transitional, too: we were generational ingénues, moving from one sense of identity to another. And identity, as about a million people from Joan Didion to Jean-Paul Sartre to Oliver Sacks have observed, is really about narrative. It’s a story you tell yourself about yourself, but it’s also a story others tell you about you.
For the few years after the release of “Thelma and Louise,” the culture seemed unusually and (in hindsight) unbelievably receptive to the plaintive howls of a generation of girls who, as I did, felt exiled from the culture. Within a few more years, though, the whole thing would be supplanted by a far more chipper, more palatable, more profitable version of itself. It’s now nearly impossible to imagine a time, not so long ago, when popular culture was more interested in cool girls than hot girls — or a cultural moment in which girls could become iconic for airing their grievances and not simply their dirty laundry. As it turned out, it was a quick traverse from “revolution grrrl-style now” to “girl power,” as Riot Grrrls gave way to Spice Girls and the dominant pop-culture narrative about femininity went the way of “Sex and the City.” And Carrie Bradshaw (among others) stands pretty clearly as a descendant of Vivian, not of Thelma or Louise.
Ultimately, “Pretty Woman” wasn’t a love story; it was a money story. Its logic depended on a disconnect between character and narrative, between image and meaning, between money and value, and that made it not cluelessly traditional but thoroughly postmodern. Revisiting “Thelma and Louise” recently, I was struck by how dated it seemed, how much a product of its time. And “Pretty Woman,” it turns out, wasn’t a throwback at all. It was the future.
My only beef with this piece, which I think pretty much says what I’ve been ruminating on for a few years now, about why the role of women in film and in media has become so … so … disposable, is that Thelma and Louise was controversial during its time not just because it was supposedly feminist, but because it wasn’t: many people complained that the only kind of liberating that went on was that they just got sexier as the movie went along. Chocano says that Pretty Woman was the future – it was. But so was Thelma and Louise because this movie was the starting point for the eroticizing of girl women and violence. This is so commonplace now that most people don’t even recognize it – but it’s the notion that a sexy woman on film can only really be sexy if she does some high kicks, lays out a villain or two, pulls out a gun and shoots someone. In Thelma and Louise, they start out feeling remorse for what they’ve done. But as the movie goes on, their remorse is less and less.
Unfortunately, the movie ends with the two women driving off the cliff and ending their lives. While I thought it was a great movie overall, this ending has always left me less than satisfied. I don’t think that women and minorities always have to be role models in movies. And they don’t always have to do the right thing. But they should, at the very least, be true to their characters. Neither of those two women were quitters to me. And ending their lives like that? It seemed out of character to me. But then again, what do I know.
“Our Love is God. Let’s Go Get a Slushy”
It has been a while since I’ve seen Heathers. There have been a few “burn down the high school” about girls since then, Juno and Mean Girls to name two. It seems like this young generation, though, doesn’t know or remember Heathers, which is too bad. It seems to have been born out of a time when things when dark humor was appreciated and welcomed. Now, it’s so easy to offend, so hard to go dark.
I showed my almost-13 year-old daughter Emma Heathers. And yes, while it has lines like “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw” it is pitch-perfect in its tone, sarcastic, deep, right-on and funny as hell. My daughter was hooked immediately. Now all she can talk about is Heathers, Heathers, Heathers. She appreciated the elfin charm of Christian Slater (someday I will show her True Romance but not quite yet) and found in Ryder’s character a funny, smart, interesting, strong, rebellious HERO.
Love the shoulder pads, bulimia jokes, scrunchies, Swatches, busy eyebrows, The Limited, the constant repetition of “Oh the humanity!”
Heathers is about the horrors of high school, popular girls, yes. It is also about Winona as ballsy heroine out to make the world better – we need more Veronicas out there in high school land. First, she hooks up with a bad boy whom she cannot resist. Then people start dying, “my teen angst has a body count.” You don’t think they’re actually going to die but they really do start dying. That’s what is so funny, and so unusual about it.
Another reason people don’t revisit Heathers, probably, was untimely end to Winona Ryder’s career, which is hopefully back on track with her appearance as the aging dancer in Black Swan. But when Heathers came out, Winona was the IT girl. She seemed to have it all — and whatever it was she had was sucked up and owned by Julia Roberts a short while later — she looked like a pinup girl but talked like a boy. I guess that is what is meant by having it all. In the movies, anyway. For starlets anyway.
According to Ryder, there may be a Heathers sequel in the works — sounds like a weird idea but if it brings newer, younger peeps to revisit the original Heathers, maybe it’s not such a bad idea. Seems to me it’s not unlike Mean Girls, though, only without the murder and mayhem. Heathers took no prisoners. It didn’t try to be PC or worry about offending whole groups of people. Mean Girls, as funny as it is, want to be too nice to everyone. And that is really what the transition from the 1980s to the 2000s has been about: not offending.
I hope they make Heathers into a Broadway musical, if they haven’t done it already.
Catfish, Angela and Those Opportunist Filmmakers
I saw Catfish. I hated it. I wrote up a review. But the comments were too much for me to take — they got personal — so I removed the review. But people still come here to discuss it and want to know what I thought of it. I probably was too impulsive removing it – I tend to be too impulsive about a lot of things – but it wasn’t worth the grief, that’s the truth. But here is what I thought of the movie, for one of the readers here – Chris – who asked me.
First, I didn’t think it was “fake” particularly. What I do think about that part of it is that we know these dudes filmed everything in their lives. So we know it’s not unusual that a camera would be around filming events that happen on a daily basis, from the mundane to the profane. But this much we do know, we older people who have been around long enough to remember life before video cameras even — this idea of living in public, living a life either online (as Angela did) or on video (as they dudes did) means that you have to do eventually become a performer in your life: you have to give your audience what they want.
For Lev and co. that meant they knew exactly what kind of extraordinary story they were stumbling upon and, to me, they were performing for the cameras in the ongoing narrative that was their lives. And for Angela, well, we know what that was about. Heartbreaking as it was, it was also a kind of performing.
I came out of it being repulsed by the boys, sympathetic of Angela and her family. Mostly I was grossed out that once they found out the real story that they pinned the camera on her and then decided to use that story to become famous. It was, to me, exploitative and opportunistic. I know a lot of people disagree with this. And here’s why: there are a lot of Angelas and a lot of Nevs out there. To varying degrees.
Angela’s heartbreak, her sad story, is the only part of the film of any worth at all. And the reason is that her truth is the only truth revealed. My main gripe with the film itself is that they don’t turn the cameras back on themselves and reveal their own truths. Why did Nev fall for what any intelligent person could see was an illusion?
What was he looking for? What did he expect to find? It was so obvious to anyone who uses Facebook — and this is where the opportunistic part comes in — that it is virtually impossible for a girl who looks like THAT to have only a small handful of “friends.” My 12 year old daughter has more friends than the fake Megan had. So that should have been a red flag right there.
But more than that, if the filmmakers felt they were mature enough to expose this story to the world — which they were not — then they should have had the balls to turn the camera on themselves: why did they want to tell this story? Why was it important to THEM to show this woman’s life. When Werner Herzog made Grizzly Man he did not just let the film rest on how weird Timothy Treadwell was and how ironic and absurd his death was – no. Herzog asks the tough questions about nature, about humanity, about our desire to see the footage of Treadwell being attacked. That is what is called being a true artist and a responsible documentarian. It is not enough to find something “weird, dude,” throw it up on camera and call it a day. The depth was lacking. The point was lacking.
However, that said – on the positive side, internet immigrants (as opposed to natives) might be shocked, shocked to find that people actually fake their identities on the web. Most probably don’t go to the lengths Angela did; she was clearly both arrogant enough to think she had it all under control, and in love with Nev enough that she lied to herself about what she was doing to herself, to him, potentially, and ultimately, to her family.
I have never thought “oh poor Angela.” She is diabolical. She probably knows it. What grossed me out was the exploitation from people who should have known better, the insult to injury of the film’s marketing campaign, and mostly, the people who weren’t part of the clusterfuck being dragged into it and humiliated all the same – the daughter (s), the husband, the disabled stepsons. It isn’t worth a dumb movie to expose those people to the world and do that kind of damage.
Many people will disagree with this, as there are a good many out there who fell in love with this film. I totally appreciate that, I really do. But for me, I was just grossed out by them. I think they should be putting their talents elsewhere. And I hope Nev has lost his virginity by now.