Hi guys.
So it’s been a busy psychological week! For my fellowship, I’ve begun the entry of a never-ending set of data I helped collect in Viet Nam in May. My fellowship advisor has given me and my data entering partner/classmate unheard-of permission to take data home to work on it, which is dreamy. Data entry may not be terribly glamorous, but data entry *from home* is a pretty amazing luxury.
Much more exciting: at the very generous, gracious invitation of one of my professors, I delivered a lecture in schizophrenia for his undergraduate Abnormal Psychology class on Wednesday. There were seven whole students in attendance! It was SWEET.
Seriously though. It was pretty awesome. I’ve wanted to teach psychology for a long time, and this is the first time I’ve taught a real live class. Even if I didn’t have the most abundant audience in the universe, it was really fun preparing and delivering a lecture—especially about such a dramatic, interesting topic. Because schizophrenia is one of the oldest recognized mental illnesses, there’s more extensive research on it than many other disorders; I got to talk about brain changes in schizophrenic patients, heritability studies, childhood-onset schizophrenia, and family dynamics that lead to increased relapse rates. It was really cool!
The BEST part of the lecture was that PEOPLE ASKED QUESTIONS. Not only did they ask questions, but those questions met three crucial parameters which make for a fabulous teaching experience:
1) Their questions indicated they were listening to the words coming out of my mouth,
2) Not only that, but their questions indicated that they were *curious* about the topic at hand, and
3) I actually knew how to answer their questions!!
Me teaching FTW!!
As if that weren’t enough, I also think I’ve actually had a mini-breakthrough on my master’s. I’ve been feeling really intimidated by the prospect of writing my thesis proposal. However, I recently discovered/remembered/finally let it really sink into my brain that all my proposal has to be is essentially the introduction and methods portion of the research article my thesis will eventually be. So basically I have to write a miniature literature review (based on literature I’ve already read) and specify my selection criteria for the research that will be used in my meta-analysis. This will still take a decent amount of work, but having a concrete idea of what’s expected to me—and feeling like I know how to complete it—is a huge relief. I’ve already written a very rough draft of the introduction, and plan to finalize my selection criteria in the next week or two.
Hold me to that, please.
So I’m where-I-grew-up home again to celebrate my little sister’s birthday. Last night I decided to go see a movie, since I rarely go to theaters at where-I-live-now home, where movie tickets are way more expensive and theaters are a bigger pain to get to, since I don’t have a car. Based on many positive reviews and my love of its three headliners, I decided to see “The Kids are All Right” (2010). It was a marvelous decision.
“The Kids are All Right” tells the story of a lesbian married couple, Jules (played by Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Benning) and their two children, Joni and Laser (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson). Laser becomes interested in meeting Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the man who served as his and his sister’s anonymous sperm donor. He and Joni meet him, and hilarity/drama ensues.
This is a film of startling, vivid intimacy—not just in terms of the closeness with which it considers its characters, but also in terms of catching moments of intimacy that feel breathtakingly, painfully real. There is a rare reality in the fleeting gestures of affection between Nic and Jules that makes you feel the weight and temperature of a hand, the gentleness of the stroke of another’s hair, the firmness of a kiss and embrace. The mothers speak to their children and each other in what at times seems like their own personal dialect, with carefully crafted phrasing and selected words meant to serve as scaffolding for the emotional environment they’ve constructed, instilling love, open-heartedness, and tolerance even as they attempt to negotiate conflict. These moments and details stand in contrast to the myriad little snips and chafings of their long-standing marriage, proof that no two people could ever be perfectly suited to a lifelong partnership. Yet the two kinds of moments reinforce each other. When late in the film Jules proclaims, “Marriage is hard!”, she summarizes what the movie has already artfully laid before its audience: marriage is both beautiful and (nearly) impossible. Without being pathologizing or pollyannaish, “The Kids are All Right” shows us a union that neither strains toward “perfection” nor wallows overly in its shortcomings. Through portraying a partnership between two imperfect people who nevertheless love each other very much, the movie serves as a revisualization of what an ideal marriage looks like. Life is long, marriage is hard, and for a partnership to survive its members must remain mindful of and ready to forgive themselves and each other.
To be fair, part of the reason this movie cuts so close to me is that I saw little glimpses of my life in it. I saw my brother in some of Laser's moments, and saw my could-have-been/alternate universe life at the beautifully filmed college that looked to me so much like Stanford (actually Occidental, I believe), which I applied to and my father attended. Not to mention that as a child of divorce, any examination of the complexities and perils of marriage—particularly one that attempts to explain how, in spite of adversity, a marriage can last—is bound to hold my attention. I don’t know how generalizable my experience of the film was, but for me it felt intensely, personally relevant.
The acting in this movie is pretty delightful. Something about the joint acting effort of Julianne Moore (who I always love) and Annette Bening is completely intoxicating to watch. Their beautiful faces (Bening’s is refreshingly lined and yet still radiant) are infinitely communicative, flickering with emotion, processing thoughts, choosing whether to react or stay silent. I’ve seen relatively little of Mark Ruffalo, but something about his performance in Blindness (2008) made him seem instantly likable. He has a genuinity I find very appealing, and it didn’t fail here. Josh Hutcherson does emotionally muted boy very convincingly. He was very fun to watch.
All that said, I think the biggest acting surprise of the movie was Mia Wasikowska. I was almost to the end of the movie before I realized that she was Alice in Tim Burton’s horrendous remake/sequel of “Alice in Wonderland” (2010), and had an experience much like the first time I saw Natalie Portman in something after the new “Star Wars” movies. That experience was something like: “Wow, she’s actually not bad!” and then: “George Lucas/Tim Burton ruins EVERYTHING.” I don’t mean to unduly compare Wasikowska to Portman (who I really think is one of the best modern female actors), but you get the idea: put her in a decent movie and don’t make her talk in a stupid, fake-sounding accent, and magically the audience can see that she’s actually quite talented.
I know I’m probably not making many friends by criticizing Burton, but seriously, I could not be more over that guy. We get it. You're dark and weird. Can we move on now? Can we evolve already?
It’s not enough that his remake of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (original 1971, remake 2005) was an abomination, an utter cinematic heresy against Gene Wilder and all that is good in children’s film. It’s not enough that he’s stolen Johnny Depp from us over and over again, forcing Depp into complicity in his assault on cherished characters from classic films. No. He has to go on to make an “Alice in Wonderland” that is so utterly bored with itself it makes a mockery of its own name. It’s “Alice in WONDERland”. Where in God’s name was the wonder?? When does this cinematic barbarism stop??
Thank goodness Mia got the chance to act in something else, because otherwise I would’ve just assumed she sucked, just like I once foolishly thought of Natalie. Tim Burton is foiled!
Anyway. I came out of the movie into a gorgeous summer storm, with fat drops of rain, hot gusting wind, and lightning flashing behind the mountains I could see from the escalator exiting the theater. With the exception of my family and a very few friends, these storms are what I miss most about home. Well... that and the Mexican food. In any event, it made for a really nice after-film digestif.
All that being said, the movie (perhaps fittingly?) wasn’t perfect. Infidelity is such a commonly-exploited mechanism for stressing a marriage in film (or any other storytelling medium really) that it can feel unimaginative. This particular attitude of mine is probably the result of watching too many Woody Allen* films, and to be fair to this particular movie, it certainly contains a pretty inventive iteration of adultery. Beyond that, I also wasn’t completely satisfied by the film’s conclusion, since it didn’t satisfyingly resolve (or leave unresolved) its major conflicts. What happens to Paul? What happens to Nic and Jules? While I certainly buy into the whole “life isn’t about the destination; it’s about the journey” thing—which seems somewhat to be the mentality of the movie—that just doesn’t really work in cinema.
But the journey *is* pretty lovely. I gave the movie a 4.
And with that, I’ll sign off. See you soon!
<3
* = Woody Allen has a history of sexually exploiting women and of being a hand-wringing apologist in support of men who sexually exploit women. I no longer support his work.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Friday, July 23, 2010
“Toy Story 3” vs. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”
Hello dahhhhhlinks.
Since this review is a double-header, it’ll be longer than usual. I don’t have a ton to report on the psych front, so that’s all the better. This post will be solely devoted to cinema.
For some time now, I’ve (perhaps insufferably) vowed to only let my (hypothetical) children watch Wallace and Gromit, Miyazaki, and Pixar movies. This commitment deliberately excludes all non-Pixar Disney movies from the (hypothetical) child viewing menu. When I attended a double-feature of “Toy Story 3” (2010) and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (2010) at a drive-in theater this week, I stood reaffirmed in my hard-assed non-Pixar anti-Disneyism.
In the grand Pixar tradition, “Toy Story 3” is both comfortably and surprisingly wonderful—comfortable in that it is fresh, lovely, genuine cinematic gold in a way all Pixar movies are, and surprising in that creating a third chapter of a winning franchise that stands up to the original is an almost unattainable feat, if you take the pool of other “Whatever Movie 3’s” as any indicator. The first “Toy Story” was released in 1995, with the second installment arriving in theaters in 1999. The 11 years it took to complete the current chapter in the “Toy Story” saga may seem excessive, but are actually commendable: It is clear that Pixar resisted the urge to rush to meet the significant demand for another installment of this highly successful series of films, and instead gave this movie its due time to percolate, develop, and be lovingly, beautifully animated with a finesse of which only they appear capable. This film is emotionally rich and skillfully told, and stands as proof that Pixar is truly peerless in the world of computer-generated animation. If they needed 11 years to make this fabulous movie, it was time well spent.
Another thing (of many) I love about Pixar is that they endeavor to make movies for families that are truly, uncompromisingly appropriate for children. Their films stand as a testament to the fact that thoughtful, funny, and interesting movies can be made for kids that are nevertheless thoroughly enjoyable for adults—no stupid, cliché, poorly-veiled scatological or sexual jokes necessary. Not only do I rarely find those nods to the grown-ups in the audience amusing, I also find them insulting to the intelligence of children. While most kids may not completely *understand* those jokes, I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of them are aware that *something* was just said that was expected to go over their heads. Much like parents talking about “grown-up things” in front of their kids as if the younger people in the room didn’t have ears attached to their heads, I find this underestimation of the awareness of children obnoxious. It’s rude to make inside jokes during a conversation and not make sure everyone present understands what you’re talking about—why is it any better to do that to kids in a movie that’s supposed to be for them? In summary: I appreciate that Pixar lets kids’ movies be truly kids’ movies. If you want “adult” humor, go see a Will Ferrell movie. Or something.
(Caveat: I only very vaguely remember what appeared to be an attempt at an “ass” joke (as in alluding to the word “ass” by over-emphasizing the first syllable in a word like “assume” or maybe “ascot”), but I could have been imagining things. If I wasn’t, I think it’s appropriate to give them a pass(ssssssss.... heh) given Pixar’s otherwise exemplary record of child-friendliness.)
Spoiler alert (this paragraph only): One particular part of “Toy Story 3” I personally appreciated was also the scariest. After an almost-successfully escape from the horrifying Sunnyside Day Care, our little band of heroes is trapped in a garbage truck, deposited at the city dump, run down a conveyor belt of burnable trash, and dumped into an incinerator. After running, clinging, and climbing in a failed effort to elude their own destruction, Jessie turns to Buzz, desperate for a solution, and asks, “What do we do??” His response took my breath away. Wearily aware of their looming demise, he wordlessly reaches for her hand, accepting their destiny—and in so doing, showing her they don’t have to die scared or alone. Following his cue, everyone reaches out to their nearest friends to take their hands and meet their end together. This scene showed a depth of maturity and dignity in confronting death that I’ve seen far too rarely—a truly Zen moment. It may have been a bit heavy for a children’s movie, but that is precisely what made me so proud that it was included in the film. I think introducing people to the idea early in life that they can meet death consciously and calmly is a really beautiful act.
Finally, while I truly did love this movie, I was somewhat disappointed in one element of the story. I know the lion’s share of this post is seemingly devoted to cementing my reputation as an overly analytical hard-ass, but I can’t help it: my progressive eyeballs are ever-watching, ever-searching for something to be annoyed about. In this case, I was annoyed with the ridiculing of Ken. I thought the Ken-Barbie love story was hilarious and definitely giggled over the dress-up sequence (and subsequent interrogation sequence), but was still put off by how he was ridiculed by other characters for being non-gender stereotype conforming. To be clear, I don’t think the treatment of his character should be interpreted as gay-bashing. They paired him with a girl toy, so clearly Ken isn’t gay. It has, however, been posited that many hate crimes (and other less violent acts of discrimination) committed against gay people are overreactions to a victim’s refusal to conform to gender stereotypes, so in a way this is a gay rights issue. It’s also an issue within the gay community—as Dan Savage discusses with his usual fabulousness in the "Sissies" episode of This American Life. That’s not quite the situation in this case, though. I don’t like that a male character in a kids’ movie gets mocked simply because he likes clothes or has nice penmanship—in other words, because he acts “like a girl” (or, like “a girl’s toy”). Overly rigid gender roles don’t serve men *or* women, so I wish they would’ve lightened up a little on the girly-man bashing.
Other than that, “Toy Story 3” is brilliant. I gave it a 5.
Then I saw “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. God help me.
This movie embodies almost everything I utterly loathe about conventional Disney movies. In saying that, a little background in my rejection of the movies of my childhood:
Look, who am I kidding? I *loved* Disney movies when I was little. Loved them. I have very clear memories of waiting for “The Little Mermaid” (1989) to come out on VHS when I was in preschool, and pretending to be Ariel while swimming in our pool. I had Aladdin and Princess Jasmine Barbie dolls and played with them all the time. I’m not arguing that these movies don’t have powerful appeal for children. Even so, I know my daydreams about being swept away by some rescuing dude as a too-young-for-those-kinds-of-daydreams girl are largely the responsibility of those movies. There are some seriously damnable messages about romantic relationships and gender roles in Disney movies, and they’re so consistently present in most of them it makes me want to tear my hair out. For the most part, women in Disney movies have three settings: helpless underage waifs, menopausal evil stepmother/witch hybrids, or plump and dotty old fairy godmothers. The picture for men is better, but only slightly.
“The Little Mermaid” was roundly destroyed for me during a course on women in film in the spring of my senior year of college, when my professor asked us, “What’s the name of the movie?” When we responded, she queried, “And who kills Ursula?” When we warily answered correctly that Prince Eric killed the evil [menopausal] sea witch, she said, solemnly, “Right. The Little Mermaid is at the bottom of a swirling vortex, utterly powerless, and the prince kills the bad guy. Ariel isn’t even the hero in HER OWN MOVIE.”
I had nursed my feminist grudge against Disney for years before I took that class, but never had things snapped so clearly into focus. Ariel doesn’t kill Ursula. Not only does she not kill Ursula, but at an absurdly young 16, she “falls in love” with a guy she’s *never even met*, and subsequently makes a deal with Ursula whose outcome will be either that she runs away with Eric and *never sees her family again* (again, at age 16), OR she’ll become one of those little sad wormy things in Ursula’s hellish garden. And she TAKES THE DEAL. What kind of message does that send little girls? Whatever happened to Option C: give Ursula the finger, go home, and I don’t know, finish high school??
Furthermore: Ariel has to get Eric to fall in love with her without her *voice*. She must rely solely on her beauty to secure his affections. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty aren’t even *conscious* when their respective princes fall in love with them. Sleeping Beauty doesn’t even have a real name for Christsakes—she is literally defined by her appearance. These movies are populated by young women whose only apparent joy is getting douchebags who only care about their attractiveness to love them, and who are so roundly robbed of their agency that they can’t even talk or *move*, let alone rescue themselves. It’s nauseating, and it’s definitely not that kind of bullshit I want rolling around in the head of any daughter of mine—certainly not without a serious post-viewing debriefing.
These were precisely some of the issues at play in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” that made me insane. Don’t worry, there were others too: as a result, I gave the movie a 1. Not just because of the theoretical/political/whatever issues I’ll elaborate upon shortly, but also because the lead character was annoying to listen to, the story was lame and predictable, and the dialogue was insultingly tired, cliché, and not-in-the-good-way groan-inducing. This is one of those movies where I sat watching and wondered, Seriously, if the screenwriter clearly didn’t care about this movie, why should the audience?
Beyond all that, I had my first facepalm of the movie when the main character ran into his love interest before beginning a physics lecture for a class she is enrolled in. After reacquainting themselves, she promptly admits that she doesn’t “get” physics—she loves MUSIC.
Sighhhhhhhhhhhhh
No offense meant to music, but as someone who knows blonde physics majors thank you very much, I could’ve done without the stereotypical hot blonde chick whose sweet little brain just doesn’t get along with SCIENCE and NUMBERS. To make matters worse, she inexplicably appears to fall for our “hero” in spite of his painful social maladroitness and creepy apparent obsession with her. She notices him stalkerishly peering at her through a cafe window while she hangs out with her friends, and instead of reaching for her mace, she *follows him to the dark roof of some rando skyscraper in spite of being afraid of heights*. Later in the film, she risks her life moving a satellite dish on another rando skyscraper’s roof to divert an evil beam of ectoplasm (or something less cool) that she *can’t even see* because the dude *swears* he can see it—all after something like three dates. And when he successfully vanquishes the [menopausal] supreme-o villainess, she TOTALLY agrees to be his girlfriend.
Sigh againnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
There were also other varieties of irritating crap. First of all, the villains of the film are all either ethnic minorities with annoying accents or women, while the heroes are white American dudes (and not even cute ones). The film’s apparent racism reaches insane levels when the dude who mugs the hero and his blonde love interest is, of course, a Black guy, and even the poor student/secretary who gets Jedi mind tricked by one of the villains is Indian. It started to feel like the casting director selected racial and gender minorities for all of these roles without even *thinking* about how offensive and implicitly racist/sexist those decisions were. I found myself wondering if Disney is aware of WHAT YEAR THIS IS, and also wondered if we can SERIOUSLY please move past this race and gender stereotyping bullshit now?
It’s incredibly, potently tiresome. Especially displayed side-by-side with the much-needed nuance and substance of “Toy Story 3,” I honestly can’t wrap my head around the fact that the same company released these two films. In THE SAME YEAR. How is this possible?? Why does Disney persist in peddling this tired, cliché crap when they (or at least their subsidiary) is capable of repeatedly producing truly wonderful cinema of an entirely higher echelon AND making money while doing it?
According to Box Office Mojo, “Toy Story 3” made $110,307,189 on its opening weekend, immediately recouping more than half the cost of making the movie ($200 million). “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” made a pathetic-by-comparison $17,619,622 upon its opening, and cost $150 million to make (ouch). The total box office earnings to date for Pixar’s film have far exceeded the expenditures necessary to make it, which is not yet the case for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. In fairness, latter film was released much more recently than its Pixar counterpart. Even so, I think it’s fair to project it will be nowhere near as profitable as “Toy Story 3”.
This begs the question: WHY does Disney make this shit?? We know they can make good movies. We know they can make film that is nourishing, smart, funny, progressive, and emotionally gratifying, that brings people together more than it drives them apart, that is free of saccharine, stereotypes, terrible dialogue and tired plots, and we know that the higher-quality films are *profitable*--arguably more so than the alternative garbage. Why then, in the name of all that is holy, are they subjecting us to this tripe when it doesn’t even benefit them, let alone their audience?
God only knows. But I’ll continue to vote with my box office purchases. And until something changes, so will my [hypothetical] kids.
<3
Since this review is a double-header, it’ll be longer than usual. I don’t have a ton to report on the psych front, so that’s all the better. This post will be solely devoted to cinema.
For some time now, I’ve (perhaps insufferably) vowed to only let my (hypothetical) children watch Wallace and Gromit, Miyazaki, and Pixar movies. This commitment deliberately excludes all non-Pixar Disney movies from the (hypothetical) child viewing menu. When I attended a double-feature of “Toy Story 3” (2010) and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (2010) at a drive-in theater this week, I stood reaffirmed in my hard-assed non-Pixar anti-Disneyism.
In the grand Pixar tradition, “Toy Story 3” is both comfortably and surprisingly wonderful—comfortable in that it is fresh, lovely, genuine cinematic gold in a way all Pixar movies are, and surprising in that creating a third chapter of a winning franchise that stands up to the original is an almost unattainable feat, if you take the pool of other “Whatever Movie 3’s” as any indicator. The first “Toy Story” was released in 1995, with the second installment arriving in theaters in 1999. The 11 years it took to complete the current chapter in the “Toy Story” saga may seem excessive, but are actually commendable: It is clear that Pixar resisted the urge to rush to meet the significant demand for another installment of this highly successful series of films, and instead gave this movie its due time to percolate, develop, and be lovingly, beautifully animated with a finesse of which only they appear capable. This film is emotionally rich and skillfully told, and stands as proof that Pixar is truly peerless in the world of computer-generated animation. If they needed 11 years to make this fabulous movie, it was time well spent.
Another thing (of many) I love about Pixar is that they endeavor to make movies for families that are truly, uncompromisingly appropriate for children. Their films stand as a testament to the fact that thoughtful, funny, and interesting movies can be made for kids that are nevertheless thoroughly enjoyable for adults—no stupid, cliché, poorly-veiled scatological or sexual jokes necessary. Not only do I rarely find those nods to the grown-ups in the audience amusing, I also find them insulting to the intelligence of children. While most kids may not completely *understand* those jokes, I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of them are aware that *something* was just said that was expected to go over their heads. Much like parents talking about “grown-up things” in front of their kids as if the younger people in the room didn’t have ears attached to their heads, I find this underestimation of the awareness of children obnoxious. It’s rude to make inside jokes during a conversation and not make sure everyone present understands what you’re talking about—why is it any better to do that to kids in a movie that’s supposed to be for them? In summary: I appreciate that Pixar lets kids’ movies be truly kids’ movies. If you want “adult” humor, go see a Will Ferrell movie. Or something.
(Caveat: I only very vaguely remember what appeared to be an attempt at an “ass” joke (as in alluding to the word “ass” by over-emphasizing the first syllable in a word like “assume” or maybe “ascot”), but I could have been imagining things. If I wasn’t, I think it’s appropriate to give them a pass(ssssssss.... heh) given Pixar’s otherwise exemplary record of child-friendliness.)
Spoiler alert (this paragraph only): One particular part of “Toy Story 3” I personally appreciated was also the scariest. After an almost-successfully escape from the horrifying Sunnyside Day Care, our little band of heroes is trapped in a garbage truck, deposited at the city dump, run down a conveyor belt of burnable trash, and dumped into an incinerator. After running, clinging, and climbing in a failed effort to elude their own destruction, Jessie turns to Buzz, desperate for a solution, and asks, “What do we do??” His response took my breath away. Wearily aware of their looming demise, he wordlessly reaches for her hand, accepting their destiny—and in so doing, showing her they don’t have to die scared or alone. Following his cue, everyone reaches out to their nearest friends to take their hands and meet their end together. This scene showed a depth of maturity and dignity in confronting death that I’ve seen far too rarely—a truly Zen moment. It may have been a bit heavy for a children’s movie, but that is precisely what made me so proud that it was included in the film. I think introducing people to the idea early in life that they can meet death consciously and calmly is a really beautiful act.
Finally, while I truly did love this movie, I was somewhat disappointed in one element of the story. I know the lion’s share of this post is seemingly devoted to cementing my reputation as an overly analytical hard-ass, but I can’t help it: my progressive eyeballs are ever-watching, ever-searching for something to be annoyed about. In this case, I was annoyed with the ridiculing of Ken. I thought the Ken-Barbie love story was hilarious and definitely giggled over the dress-up sequence (and subsequent interrogation sequence), but was still put off by how he was ridiculed by other characters for being non-gender stereotype conforming. To be clear, I don’t think the treatment of his character should be interpreted as gay-bashing. They paired him with a girl toy, so clearly Ken isn’t gay. It has, however, been posited that many hate crimes (and other less violent acts of discrimination) committed against gay people are overreactions to a victim’s refusal to conform to gender stereotypes, so in a way this is a gay rights issue. It’s also an issue within the gay community—as Dan Savage discusses with his usual fabulousness in the "Sissies" episode of This American Life. That’s not quite the situation in this case, though. I don’t like that a male character in a kids’ movie gets mocked simply because he likes clothes or has nice penmanship—in other words, because he acts “like a girl” (or, like “a girl’s toy”). Overly rigid gender roles don’t serve men *or* women, so I wish they would’ve lightened up a little on the girly-man bashing.
Other than that, “Toy Story 3” is brilliant. I gave it a 5.
Then I saw “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. God help me.
This movie embodies almost everything I utterly loathe about conventional Disney movies. In saying that, a little background in my rejection of the movies of my childhood:
Look, who am I kidding? I *loved* Disney movies when I was little. Loved them. I have very clear memories of waiting for “The Little Mermaid” (1989) to come out on VHS when I was in preschool, and pretending to be Ariel while swimming in our pool. I had Aladdin and Princess Jasmine Barbie dolls and played with them all the time. I’m not arguing that these movies don’t have powerful appeal for children. Even so, I know my daydreams about being swept away by some rescuing dude as a too-young-for-those-kinds-of-daydreams girl are largely the responsibility of those movies. There are some seriously damnable messages about romantic relationships and gender roles in Disney movies, and they’re so consistently present in most of them it makes me want to tear my hair out. For the most part, women in Disney movies have three settings: helpless underage waifs, menopausal evil stepmother/witch hybrids, or plump and dotty old fairy godmothers. The picture for men is better, but only slightly.
“The Little Mermaid” was roundly destroyed for me during a course on women in film in the spring of my senior year of college, when my professor asked us, “What’s the name of the movie?” When we responded, she queried, “And who kills Ursula?” When we warily answered correctly that Prince Eric killed the evil [menopausal] sea witch, she said, solemnly, “Right. The Little Mermaid is at the bottom of a swirling vortex, utterly powerless, and the prince kills the bad guy. Ariel isn’t even the hero in HER OWN MOVIE.”
I had nursed my feminist grudge against Disney for years before I took that class, but never had things snapped so clearly into focus. Ariel doesn’t kill Ursula. Not only does she not kill Ursula, but at an absurdly young 16, she “falls in love” with a guy she’s *never even met*, and subsequently makes a deal with Ursula whose outcome will be either that she runs away with Eric and *never sees her family again* (again, at age 16), OR she’ll become one of those little sad wormy things in Ursula’s hellish garden. And she TAKES THE DEAL. What kind of message does that send little girls? Whatever happened to Option C: give Ursula the finger, go home, and I don’t know, finish high school??
Furthermore: Ariel has to get Eric to fall in love with her without her *voice*. She must rely solely on her beauty to secure his affections. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty aren’t even *conscious* when their respective princes fall in love with them. Sleeping Beauty doesn’t even have a real name for Christsakes—she is literally defined by her appearance. These movies are populated by young women whose only apparent joy is getting douchebags who only care about their attractiveness to love them, and who are so roundly robbed of their agency that they can’t even talk or *move*, let alone rescue themselves. It’s nauseating, and it’s definitely not that kind of bullshit I want rolling around in the head of any daughter of mine—certainly not without a serious post-viewing debriefing.
These were precisely some of the issues at play in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” that made me insane. Don’t worry, there were others too: as a result, I gave the movie a 1. Not just because of the theoretical/political/whatever issues I’ll elaborate upon shortly, but also because the lead character was annoying to listen to, the story was lame and predictable, and the dialogue was insultingly tired, cliché, and not-in-the-good-way groan-inducing. This is one of those movies where I sat watching and wondered, Seriously, if the screenwriter clearly didn’t care about this movie, why should the audience?
Beyond all that, I had my first facepalm of the movie when the main character ran into his love interest before beginning a physics lecture for a class she is enrolled in. After reacquainting themselves, she promptly admits that she doesn’t “get” physics—she loves MUSIC.
Sighhhhhhhhhhhhh
No offense meant to music, but as someone who knows blonde physics majors thank you very much, I could’ve done without the stereotypical hot blonde chick whose sweet little brain just doesn’t get along with SCIENCE and NUMBERS. To make matters worse, she inexplicably appears to fall for our “hero” in spite of his painful social maladroitness and creepy apparent obsession with her. She notices him stalkerishly peering at her through a cafe window while she hangs out with her friends, and instead of reaching for her mace, she *follows him to the dark roof of some rando skyscraper in spite of being afraid of heights*. Later in the film, she risks her life moving a satellite dish on another rando skyscraper’s roof to divert an evil beam of ectoplasm (or something less cool) that she *can’t even see* because the dude *swears* he can see it—all after something like three dates. And when he successfully vanquishes the [menopausal] supreme-o villainess, she TOTALLY agrees to be his girlfriend.
Sigh againnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
There were also other varieties of irritating crap. First of all, the villains of the film are all either ethnic minorities with annoying accents or women, while the heroes are white American dudes (and not even cute ones). The film’s apparent racism reaches insane levels when the dude who mugs the hero and his blonde love interest is, of course, a Black guy, and even the poor student/secretary who gets Jedi mind tricked by one of the villains is Indian. It started to feel like the casting director selected racial and gender minorities for all of these roles without even *thinking* about how offensive and implicitly racist/sexist those decisions were. I found myself wondering if Disney is aware of WHAT YEAR THIS IS, and also wondered if we can SERIOUSLY please move past this race and gender stereotyping bullshit now?
It’s incredibly, potently tiresome. Especially displayed side-by-side with the much-needed nuance and substance of “Toy Story 3,” I honestly can’t wrap my head around the fact that the same company released these two films. In THE SAME YEAR. How is this possible?? Why does Disney persist in peddling this tired, cliché crap when they (or at least their subsidiary) is capable of repeatedly producing truly wonderful cinema of an entirely higher echelon AND making money while doing it?
According to Box Office Mojo, “Toy Story 3” made $110,307,189 on its opening weekend, immediately recouping more than half the cost of making the movie ($200 million). “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” made a pathetic-by-comparison $17,619,622 upon its opening, and cost $150 million to make (ouch). The total box office earnings to date for Pixar’s film have far exceeded the expenditures necessary to make it, which is not yet the case for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. In fairness, latter film was released much more recently than its Pixar counterpart. Even so, I think it’s fair to project it will be nowhere near as profitable as “Toy Story 3”.
This begs the question: WHY does Disney make this shit?? We know they can make good movies. We know they can make film that is nourishing, smart, funny, progressive, and emotionally gratifying, that brings people together more than it drives them apart, that is free of saccharine, stereotypes, terrible dialogue and tired plots, and we know that the higher-quality films are *profitable*--arguably more so than the alternative garbage. Why then, in the name of all that is holy, are they subjecting us to this tripe when it doesn’t even benefit them, let alone their audience?
God only knows. But I’ll continue to vote with my box office purchases. And until something changes, so will my [hypothetical] kids.
<3
Friday, July 16, 2010
"Despicable Me" and My Lack of a Clever Title
Hey cats.
Last weekend I saw a movie about a tirelessly career-driven adult who stumbles into single parenthood, necessitating a reevaluation of their priorities. To my delight, this was not the tired rehashing of the work v. family debate you might expect. “Despicable Me” (2010) tells the story not of a power-suited investment banking CEO wannabe woman (or some boring equivalent), but of a second string male supervillain vying for evil supremacy. Much like the production of “Death of a Salesman” I referred to in an earlier post, where changing one trait of the central family added new dimension to a cherished narrative, performing a simple gender swap allows the audience to look at the challenges of the work-family balancing act through a male lens. This gives the old screaming match over professional and familial priorities a modernizing breath of fresh air.
Seriously though, particularly for a kid’s movie, I thought “Despicable Me” did a very nice, balanced job of portraying the conflicting pressures confronted by working parents. Gru (the main character, voiced by Steve Carell) haphazardly adopts three little girls solely to use them as bait as part of an elaborate scheme to go into space and steal the moon, hopefully securing his standing as the greatest supervillain EVER. While the “awwww” factor of the three cute girls might be enough of an argument for the joys of parenting for some movies, this film does a pretty respectable job of constructing a genuine attachment between the members of the new family. Watch out for the amusement park sequence—I thought it was utterly delightful.
However, the truly noteworthy element of the portrayal of this dilemma is that the film doesn’t undersell the unique rewards of following your professional dreams: Through a series of moderately heartbreaking flashbacks, we see a young Gru have his aspirations to go to he moon quashed over and over by a chronically unimpressed mother. By lending his professional goals emotional salience of their own, this ensures that the kids-job battle is a relatively fair fight—a tough job in a kid’s movie, where it’s probably safe to assume your audience may come down pretty solidly on the kids side of the argument. In my opinion, the resolution of the debate is pretty artful.
In any event, as a feminist I deeply appreciate a film that presumes that men can and perhaps should feel *just* as torn between work and family as women do (how novel!). Since I at least currently plan to work when I have children, figuring out a graceful compromise between family and career is something about which I have a decent level of anxiety ahead of time. Frankly, this has been treated as a uniquely feminine challenge for so goddamn long, and it’s really irritating. To state the painfully obvious, last time I checked dads contributed pretty significantly to the creation of their kids, so why isn’t this something *all* working parents are expected to wrestle with, instead of just all working moms? If balancing professional and family life is increasingly discussed as a *parent’s* issue and not just a *female parent’s* issue—even in such a silly forum as a children’s movie—maybe that could lead to more practices and supports being put into place that make the balancing act more doable for everyone.
I suppose what I’m driving at is that I like this movie largely because it normalizes something I think should already be normalized, but isn’t. I benefited from having a father who was just as active in my upbringing as my mom, and many other moms. He worked (like my mom), but made time to be at home, come to events at school, and come to soccer and softball games, all because he felt it was important for him to balance time with me with time at work. I certainly don’t mean to imply that fathers who have trouble pulling this off don’t *want* to. What I *do* think is that it is maddeningly presumed in most *workplaces* that fathers don’t want to. Normalizing a father’s desire to balance work and family as comparable to any mother’s is a weirdly belated but very needed step in establishing true gender equality in our culture.
So now that my little rant’s over, we can talk about some more fun things in the movie. First of all, Steve Carell is wonderful as Gru. While watching the movie, I found myself doubting my memory that he was voicing the main character. Some celebrity voices in animated movies can be really distracting since you’re so conscious that THAT GUY is the voice of THAT SQUIRREL (or whatever), but Carell almost completely effaces himself while still creating a very entertaining character. Also, if you can see the movie in 3D (are you even able not to? I don’t know...), do it for the roller coaster sequence. I’m really ambivalent about the whole 3D cinema thing, but that shit was cool.
All in all, this is a perfectly fun movie. I would recommend seeing it in theaters if you can. In conclusion, I gave it a 4.
In psychological news: I’ve read approximately eight more pages of my meta-analysis book. My mentor requested an email update of my progress this week, which I just sent. Mercifully, I had some things to say. I’ve done some legitimate work (I swear), but I’m still feeling frustrated that I haven’t been able to sit down and crank out as much work as I would like. Part of the difficulty is my ongoing commitment to my fellowship work--that's the project I've been interviewing people for, in addition to doing oodles of data entry. It's work I enjoy, but I would love to be able to carve out a week or two to devote solely to my thesis. We’ll see if that happens before the summer’s over... God willing.
That’s about it for now. Enjoy the weekend!
<3
Last weekend I saw a movie about a tirelessly career-driven adult who stumbles into single parenthood, necessitating a reevaluation of their priorities. To my delight, this was not the tired rehashing of the work v. family debate you might expect. “Despicable Me” (2010) tells the story not of a power-suited investment banking CEO wannabe woman (or some boring equivalent), but of a second string male supervillain vying for evil supremacy. Much like the production of “Death of a Salesman” I referred to in an earlier post, where changing one trait of the central family added new dimension to a cherished narrative, performing a simple gender swap allows the audience to look at the challenges of the work-family balancing act through a male lens. This gives the old screaming match over professional and familial priorities a modernizing breath of fresh air.
Seriously though, particularly for a kid’s movie, I thought “Despicable Me” did a very nice, balanced job of portraying the conflicting pressures confronted by working parents. Gru (the main character, voiced by Steve Carell) haphazardly adopts three little girls solely to use them as bait as part of an elaborate scheme to go into space and steal the moon, hopefully securing his standing as the greatest supervillain EVER. While the “awwww” factor of the three cute girls might be enough of an argument for the joys of parenting for some movies, this film does a pretty respectable job of constructing a genuine attachment between the members of the new family. Watch out for the amusement park sequence—I thought it was utterly delightful.
However, the truly noteworthy element of the portrayal of this dilemma is that the film doesn’t undersell the unique rewards of following your professional dreams: Through a series of moderately heartbreaking flashbacks, we see a young Gru have his aspirations to go to he moon quashed over and over by a chronically unimpressed mother. By lending his professional goals emotional salience of their own, this ensures that the kids-job battle is a relatively fair fight—a tough job in a kid’s movie, where it’s probably safe to assume your audience may come down pretty solidly on the kids side of the argument. In my opinion, the resolution of the debate is pretty artful.
In any event, as a feminist I deeply appreciate a film that presumes that men can and perhaps should feel *just* as torn between work and family as women do (how novel!). Since I at least currently plan to work when I have children, figuring out a graceful compromise between family and career is something about which I have a decent level of anxiety ahead of time. Frankly, this has been treated as a uniquely feminine challenge for so goddamn long, and it’s really irritating. To state the painfully obvious, last time I checked dads contributed pretty significantly to the creation of their kids, so why isn’t this something *all* working parents are expected to wrestle with, instead of just all working moms? If balancing professional and family life is increasingly discussed as a *parent’s* issue and not just a *female parent’s* issue—even in such a silly forum as a children’s movie—maybe that could lead to more practices and supports being put into place that make the balancing act more doable for everyone.
I suppose what I’m driving at is that I like this movie largely because it normalizes something I think should already be normalized, but isn’t. I benefited from having a father who was just as active in my upbringing as my mom, and many other moms. He worked (like my mom), but made time to be at home, come to events at school, and come to soccer and softball games, all because he felt it was important for him to balance time with me with time at work. I certainly don’t mean to imply that fathers who have trouble pulling this off don’t *want* to. What I *do* think is that it is maddeningly presumed in most *workplaces* that fathers don’t want to. Normalizing a father’s desire to balance work and family as comparable to any mother’s is a weirdly belated but very needed step in establishing true gender equality in our culture.
So now that my little rant’s over, we can talk about some more fun things in the movie. First of all, Steve Carell is wonderful as Gru. While watching the movie, I found myself doubting my memory that he was voicing the main character. Some celebrity voices in animated movies can be really distracting since you’re so conscious that THAT GUY is the voice of THAT SQUIRREL (or whatever), but Carell almost completely effaces himself while still creating a very entertaining character. Also, if you can see the movie in 3D (are you even able not to? I don’t know...), do it for the roller coaster sequence. I’m really ambivalent about the whole 3D cinema thing, but that shit was cool.
All in all, this is a perfectly fun movie. I would recommend seeing it in theaters if you can. In conclusion, I gave it a 4.
In psychological news: I’ve read approximately eight more pages of my meta-analysis book. My mentor requested an email update of my progress this week, which I just sent. Mercifully, I had some things to say. I’ve done some legitimate work (I swear), but I’m still feeling frustrated that I haven’t been able to sit down and crank out as much work as I would like. Part of the difficulty is my ongoing commitment to my fellowship work--that's the project I've been interviewing people for, in addition to doing oodles of data entry. It's work I enjoy, but I would love to be able to carve out a week or two to devote solely to my thesis. We’ll see if that happens before the summer’s over... God willing.
That’s about it for now. Enjoy the weekend!
<3
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Times Are A-"Changeling"
Hello darlings.
Last week I rented Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” (2008) through Netflix. I started it a little before midnight on a night when I really needed to be asleep by twelve to be intelligible for work at school the next morning. I had a subject coming in for the study I’m working on, and had to SCID (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders) and SIDP (Structured Interview for DSM-IV Personality [Disorders]) him, a process that can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours or more. I wanted to be sharp.
So starting this movie was a terrible idea.
Really, from my little experience with his films, I should’ve known that starting *any* Eastwood-directed movie when I wanted to get to sleep on time was a terrible idea. I’m still catching my breath from “Mystic River” (2003). Eastwood is truly a formidable director, especially when he’s directing movies about bad things happening to people’s children.
So I started the movie, thinking I would watch maybe a half hour of it and finish the rest the next day. Instead, once immersed in this film, I wouldn’t have dreamt of cutting it off. This is a movie worth losing sleep over.
“Changeling” is based on the true story of a single woman in Los Angeles whose 9-year-old son disappeared from their home in 1928. The subsequent nation-wide search for Walter Collins ended when his mother, Christine, was presented with a child the Los Angeles Police Department was convinced was her son. He was not. In spite of her protestations and mounting evidence that the LAPD had, in fact, retrieved the wrong child, the police were resolute in their contention that Christine Collins was incorrect, to the point of placing her in a psychiatric hospital for her insubordination.
Angelina Jolie plays the heroine of the film. She spends much of the movie with stylish hats pulled low over her eyes, largely obscuring her face—a decision I theorize was made in part because otherwise she is so distractingly the stunning, controversial, and strange Angelina Jolie—and yet the performance that comes boiling out of her is so riveting it steals the breath. In spite of her character’s ultimate heroism, she makes you feel her gut-wrenching despair, her nauseating powerlessness in the face of infuriatingly stubborn, stupid men whose misogyny so thickens their skulls that they would rather put a woman in a psychiatric institution than believe, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, she might be right.
Oh she is so good.
She is delightfully accompanied in the film by the ever-watchable, ever-bizarre John Malkovich, who I honestly think is incapable of being bad in anything. As a Presbyterian minister and radio evangelist, he imbues each word with a taught, righteous rage seemingly meant to convert each staccato consonant into a little knife to be driven into the heart of his foes—in this case, the horrifyingly corrupt Los Angeles Police Department of the 1920’s (not to be confused with the horrifyingly corrupt LAPD of the 1950’s, as portrayed in the wonderful “L.A. Confidential” (1997), for example).
The movie follows this story’s path through places of chilling, startling darkness, far beyond even the walls of the hospital that housed Christine Collins—places that seem too terrible to be based in fact, and yet were real. Part of the reason I didn’t get to bed before 3 am was that I promptly hopped on Wikipedia and Google to verify the events depicted in the movie—it was THAT GOOD. Eastwood guides his viewer’s gaze, firmly yet without undue brutality, toward some of the most troubling abilities of humankind with a solemnity and clarity few directors possess. I obviously don’t want to ruin the latter part of the movie, but suffice it to say it’s both surprising and morbidly fascinating in a way I haven’t seen perhaps since “Capote” (2005).
Given the role of institutions of mental health in this movie, I’m obligated to make mention of the fact that I am continually disappointed by the history of my chosen profession. For such a young field, psychology has already done a number of pretty ugly things. Partnering up with a corrupt police department to file away perfectly sane women whose “affliction” consists merely of mouthing off to men in positions of authority is unsettling and awful, but unfortunately not the worst chapter in psychological history. See also: lobotomies. Or forcibly sterilizing the mentally retarded. Or conditions in state-run mental hospitals during World War II. And that’s just the shit we’ve pulled in America. Don’t even get me started on how mental health looks in less-developed nations, like Viet Nam, which I visited recently. Psychology has come a long way, but there’s still a long road ahead of us before we strike a graceful balance between protecting human liberty and dignity and effectively and consistently healing the mentally ill.
In conclusion, I gave “Changeling” a 5. Shocking, I’m sure.
In other, less depressing psychological news: I’ve read like 12 pages of my book on meta-analysis, and have learned that I can now consider myself a synthesist. Oooooh. Flashy, I know. Even though I have much more reading and work ahead of me, I’m relieved to have finally accomplished something toward completing my thesis.
I’ve also gotten to interview two subjects in the last week or so (not just the one I failed to get sufficient sleep for), which is great because a) I get to count that time as clinical hours for internship, b) I want to be a psychologist, so I like talking to human beings about their problems, and c) I have a tendency to love my participants/clients merely because they show up and talk to me about their lives (but also because they almost always reveal some unusual, special loveliness in their possession). So that was nice.
And with that, I’ll sign off. Thanks for reading, whoever you are.
<3
Last week I rented Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” (2008) through Netflix. I started it a little before midnight on a night when I really needed to be asleep by twelve to be intelligible for work at school the next morning. I had a subject coming in for the study I’m working on, and had to SCID (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM Disorders) and SIDP (Structured Interview for DSM-IV Personality [Disorders]) him, a process that can take anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours or more. I wanted to be sharp.
So starting this movie was a terrible idea.
Really, from my little experience with his films, I should’ve known that starting *any* Eastwood-directed movie when I wanted to get to sleep on time was a terrible idea. I’m still catching my breath from “Mystic River” (2003). Eastwood is truly a formidable director, especially when he’s directing movies about bad things happening to people’s children.
So I started the movie, thinking I would watch maybe a half hour of it and finish the rest the next day. Instead, once immersed in this film, I wouldn’t have dreamt of cutting it off. This is a movie worth losing sleep over.
“Changeling” is based on the true story of a single woman in Los Angeles whose 9-year-old son disappeared from their home in 1928. The subsequent nation-wide search for Walter Collins ended when his mother, Christine, was presented with a child the Los Angeles Police Department was convinced was her son. He was not. In spite of her protestations and mounting evidence that the LAPD had, in fact, retrieved the wrong child, the police were resolute in their contention that Christine Collins was incorrect, to the point of placing her in a psychiatric hospital for her insubordination.
Angelina Jolie plays the heroine of the film. She spends much of the movie with stylish hats pulled low over her eyes, largely obscuring her face—a decision I theorize was made in part because otherwise she is so distractingly the stunning, controversial, and strange Angelina Jolie—and yet the performance that comes boiling out of her is so riveting it steals the breath. In spite of her character’s ultimate heroism, she makes you feel her gut-wrenching despair, her nauseating powerlessness in the face of infuriatingly stubborn, stupid men whose misogyny so thickens their skulls that they would rather put a woman in a psychiatric institution than believe, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, she might be right.
Oh she is so good.
She is delightfully accompanied in the film by the ever-watchable, ever-bizarre John Malkovich, who I honestly think is incapable of being bad in anything. As a Presbyterian minister and radio evangelist, he imbues each word with a taught, righteous rage seemingly meant to convert each staccato consonant into a little knife to be driven into the heart of his foes—in this case, the horrifyingly corrupt Los Angeles Police Department of the 1920’s (not to be confused with the horrifyingly corrupt LAPD of the 1950’s, as portrayed in the wonderful “L.A. Confidential” (1997), for example).
The movie follows this story’s path through places of chilling, startling darkness, far beyond even the walls of the hospital that housed Christine Collins—places that seem too terrible to be based in fact, and yet were real. Part of the reason I didn’t get to bed before 3 am was that I promptly hopped on Wikipedia and Google to verify the events depicted in the movie—it was THAT GOOD. Eastwood guides his viewer’s gaze, firmly yet without undue brutality, toward some of the most troubling abilities of humankind with a solemnity and clarity few directors possess. I obviously don’t want to ruin the latter part of the movie, but suffice it to say it’s both surprising and morbidly fascinating in a way I haven’t seen perhaps since “Capote” (2005).
Given the role of institutions of mental health in this movie, I’m obligated to make mention of the fact that I am continually disappointed by the history of my chosen profession. For such a young field, psychology has already done a number of pretty ugly things. Partnering up with a corrupt police department to file away perfectly sane women whose “affliction” consists merely of mouthing off to men in positions of authority is unsettling and awful, but unfortunately not the worst chapter in psychological history. See also: lobotomies. Or forcibly sterilizing the mentally retarded. Or conditions in state-run mental hospitals during World War II. And that’s just the shit we’ve pulled in America. Don’t even get me started on how mental health looks in less-developed nations, like Viet Nam, which I visited recently. Psychology has come a long way, but there’s still a long road ahead of us before we strike a graceful balance between protecting human liberty and dignity and effectively and consistently healing the mentally ill.
In conclusion, I gave “Changeling” a 5. Shocking, I’m sure.
In other, less depressing psychological news: I’ve read like 12 pages of my book on meta-analysis, and have learned that I can now consider myself a synthesist. Oooooh. Flashy, I know. Even though I have much more reading and work ahead of me, I’m relieved to have finally accomplished something toward completing my thesis.
I’ve also gotten to interview two subjects in the last week or so (not just the one I failed to get sufficient sleep for), which is great because a) I get to count that time as clinical hours for internship, b) I want to be a psychologist, so I like talking to human beings about their problems, and c) I have a tendency to love my participants/clients merely because they show up and talk to me about their lives (but also because they almost always reveal some unusual, special loveliness in their possession). So that was nice.
And with that, I’ll sign off. Thanks for reading, whoever you are.
<3
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