Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is not the movie it appears from the trailers. It's not a comedy, even though it has some very funny parts. In tone it reminded me of The Invention of Lying, another film that started with a very funny first act based on a high concept and then became a serious philosophical examination in the third act. Lying was a movie that was actually about religion, and even though it was written by an atheist it actually made a good argument that faith in a higher power gave people happiness even if it isn't true. Seeking a Friend is a movie about love, but even more about being alone.
Dying alone is the ultimate fear for most people. Being alone in life is annoying, but the taunt isn't "you're going to spend the weekend alone" it's "you're going to die alone." That when the show is over you will be by yourself with nobody left to mourn and nobody to remember you were ever here. Seeking a Friend gives that fear of dying alone a timetable. The world is ending in 21 days. There is no hope. There is no Bruce Willis to save the day (the movie starts after the action movie heroes who were going to save Earth end up failing- the implication being that as long as that chance of a rescue still existed that people were not ready to deal with the true finality of death). You are going to die, and unless you get into gear, it is going to be alone.
Steve Carell plays Dodge, a guy who has played it safe his entire life. The film starts with his wife leaving him (well, running screaming from him when she hears that the rescue mission has failed on the radio). He wants to love someone and be loved, but he also doesn't really want to put the effort into actually falling in love when they're going to die anyway. He isn't very upset about his wife leaving. He admits he married her because he was afraid of dying alone. He is torn between wanting to have someone to share these last days with and recognizing that the entire thing in pointless.
From there he meets Penny (Kira Knightly doing a good job of being more than just a manic pixie dream girl) and goes in search of his high school sweetheart and reconnects with his past. Look, it's a movie that is pretty good. You should see it. You'll cry for the last 15 minutes of the thing. And then on the drive home.
What I loved about it is Dodge's central dilemma- love takes a lot of time and effort. Is it worth it to go through all that crap when it's going to end anyway? It is an interesting question because it's true even when the world isn't ending. The best possible ending for your love affair is that you both die at the same time. Every other option involves one person leaving the other (either breaking up or dying). When Romeo and Juliet is your happy ending then it shows how fucked up the entire world it. Why even worry about romance when the end is predetermined to be bad?
The reason is because love is great. Being loved is nice, but the greatest joy is in loving someone else. It's going to end. It will probably end badly. The flower is going to die, that doesn't mean it isn't lovely to look at right now.
There's another message in the film. Dodge and Penny have a great love story, but they aren't some perfect couple. If the world didn't end they'd probably just grow apart because they are so different. But they can be the loves of each others lives right now, because they both have decided to just love unconditionally. In this world where internet dating has made finding a mate similar to shopping for shoes. I've been known to read a profile and be thinking the guy is interesting but... The DaVinci Code is your favorite book? Pass.
We all have this idea that if we look long enough and far enough we can find the person who has all the traits we want and who wants all the traits we have. That's a crapshoot. We could also just learn to love people as they are (even if they have terrible taste in books) and be happy with that. Loving someone is as much about our willingness to open our hearts to their flaws as it is about them meeting some checklist of worthiness.
Although, it is much easier to do that when you know that you only have 3 weeks left. It's hard for me to give up on finding a guy who loves old movies and Kurt Vonnegut novels when the end seems so far away. Even though part of me knows that I might be passing on wonderful people in the process.
Showing posts with label pop culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pop culture. Show all posts
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Roger Ebert's Brave Review Gives Me a Sad
I love Roger Ebert.
The guy is not just one of the best movie reviewers in modern history, he'd just a hella great guy. Love his books. His interviews. His blog posts. I love the guy.
Which is why his review of the new Pixar movie Brave is extra head desky in the final paragraph.
To which I say... huh?
Let me break down the logic here, LSAT style. Merida rejects her suitors. She seems to be happy without a husband. Therefore- Brave is not dealing with her femaleness.
See, that can't be right. Because for that to be true he would be saying that femaleness is defined by wanting a husband. That's just silly. There are plenty of women who don't want a husband who don't give up their gender in doing so. There are also lots of men who do want a husband who don't suddenly become women when they acquire this desire. I'm not saying that a woman needs a husband like a fish needs a bicycle. The early feminist ideas of defining modern womanhood as a rejection of marriage is just as limiting as a world where womanhood is defined by wanting marriage. A woman can want to get married or not want to get married without it needing to take on some symbolic meaning about her relationship to her gender.
I really am hoping that the Brave review is just some type of editing error. That there is a whole other paragraph that got cut out of it that clarifies how the fact that a pre-teen character doesn't want to get married is related to the movie making her male. I commented on the related facebook post to the review and there is some good discussion going on about it. For the moment I'm going to give Ebert the benefit of the doubt and hope that there is a clarification coming soon.
Because, I am curious about how Pixar is going to deal with its first female lead character. Pixar has a troubling relationship with women in their previous films. Toy Story was a great movie, but it was a film about male friendships. Toy Story 2 got better with Jessie, but the audio commentary for the film has the writers admitting that the original script featured Jessie as being little more than a damsel in distress until Joan Cusack suggested letting her save the day. They hadn't even considered that option when they were writing. I don't think it is that they were sexists, but they were more invested in Buzz and Woody. They hadn't even considered that Jessie could be the hero.
Monster's Inc. is another film that does great with male friendship but places women either as girlfriend, crone, or semi-silent pet. Look. I LOVE Boo. I sometimes just scream "Mike Wazowski" imitating her little voice. But it isn't like a little girl could watch Monster's Inc. and say "yes, I want to be like her." While Sully or Mike have traits to be admired, what did the women really do.
The original opening scene of The Incredibles featured Mrs. Incredible getting into a fight with her new neighbors at a picnic when one of them was dismissive of the fact she was a stay at home Mom. The scene was later cut and the film moved to focus more on the mid-life crisis of Mr. Incredible than on the work/life balance issues of the Mrs. Which makes sense in a narrative sense even though I wish I could have seen the film with a bigger focus on the women. This is just more of Pixar's problematic relationship with women. It isn't that I think the studio is sexist or that they hate women. It's just that they tend to place the focus of the story on men. Maybe it's because that's what most modern films do and you just pick it up as a storytelling device. But it doesn't make it any less upsetting.
Their best treatment of female characters are often when they are barely seen. The opening scene in Up that followed a fearless little girl as she went on an adventure, fell in love, got married, lost a baby, and never gave up on her dreams of the world might have featured Pixar's most fully formed female character. Then she died. (Ask yourself for a moment if the film would have been made any different by having the boy scout who ended up on the adventure be a girl scout. The story would have been as good with the bonus of giving little girls a character they could see themselves in). Eve from Wall-E is also a great female character who just happens to never talk. Cars, for being a film that seems made just for boys who like toys, had its heart in the female character voiced by Bonnie Hunt, a big city gal who gave everything up to live in the place she loved. The female chef in Ratatoulle showed how hard it is to be a woman in a man's world, but still got upstaged by a rat.
Until Brave, Pixar's biggest female character would probably be Dory from Finding Nemo. She's more memorable than Nemo's Dad (I literally can't remember his character's name...never a good sign). She's a good loyal friend who does her best even with a handicap which makes her unable to remember things. She starts off seeming like just a joke, but by the end of the film I didn't really care if Nemo and Albert Brooks were reunited as long as Dory was with people who accepted how awesome she was.
I am worried about what type of female Brave will give us. Will we have a complex character like Dory, Eve, or Mrs. Lou Grant from Up? I wish I could look to the Ebert review for help, but instead he just makes me even more concerned about what the media thinks of my gender.
The guy is not just one of the best movie reviewers in modern history, he'd just a hella great guy. Love his books. His interviews. His blog posts. I love the guy.
Which is why his review of the new Pixar movie Brave is extra head desky in the final paragraph.
But Merida is far from being a typical fairy-tale princess. Having flatly rejected the three suitors proposed by her family, she is apparently prepared to go through life quite happily without a husband, and we can imagine her in later years, a weathered and indomitable Amazon queen, sort of a Boudica for the Scots. "Brave" seems at a loss to deal with her as a girl and makes her a sort of honorary boy.
To which I say... huh?
Let me break down the logic here, LSAT style. Merida rejects her suitors. She seems to be happy without a husband. Therefore- Brave is not dealing with her femaleness.
See, that can't be right. Because for that to be true he would be saying that femaleness is defined by wanting a husband. That's just silly. There are plenty of women who don't want a husband who don't give up their gender in doing so. There are also lots of men who do want a husband who don't suddenly become women when they acquire this desire. I'm not saying that a woman needs a husband like a fish needs a bicycle. The early feminist ideas of defining modern womanhood as a rejection of marriage is just as limiting as a world where womanhood is defined by wanting marriage. A woman can want to get married or not want to get married without it needing to take on some symbolic meaning about her relationship to her gender.
I really am hoping that the Brave review is just some type of editing error. That there is a whole other paragraph that got cut out of it that clarifies how the fact that a pre-teen character doesn't want to get married is related to the movie making her male. I commented on the related facebook post to the review and there is some good discussion going on about it. For the moment I'm going to give Ebert the benefit of the doubt and hope that there is a clarification coming soon.
Because, I am curious about how Pixar is going to deal with its first female lead character. Pixar has a troubling relationship with women in their previous films. Toy Story was a great movie, but it was a film about male friendships. Toy Story 2 got better with Jessie, but the audio commentary for the film has the writers admitting that the original script featured Jessie as being little more than a damsel in distress until Joan Cusack suggested letting her save the day. They hadn't even considered that option when they were writing. I don't think it is that they were sexists, but they were more invested in Buzz and Woody. They hadn't even considered that Jessie could be the hero.
Monster's Inc. is another film that does great with male friendship but places women either as girlfriend, crone, or semi-silent pet. Look. I LOVE Boo. I sometimes just scream "Mike Wazowski" imitating her little voice. But it isn't like a little girl could watch Monster's Inc. and say "yes, I want to be like her." While Sully or Mike have traits to be admired, what did the women really do.
The original opening scene of The Incredibles featured Mrs. Incredible getting into a fight with her new neighbors at a picnic when one of them was dismissive of the fact she was a stay at home Mom. The scene was later cut and the film moved to focus more on the mid-life crisis of Mr. Incredible than on the work/life balance issues of the Mrs. Which makes sense in a narrative sense even though I wish I could have seen the film with a bigger focus on the women. This is just more of Pixar's problematic relationship with women. It isn't that I think the studio is sexist or that they hate women. It's just that they tend to place the focus of the story on men. Maybe it's because that's what most modern films do and you just pick it up as a storytelling device. But it doesn't make it any less upsetting.
Their best treatment of female characters are often when they are barely seen. The opening scene in Up that followed a fearless little girl as she went on an adventure, fell in love, got married, lost a baby, and never gave up on her dreams of the world might have featured Pixar's most fully formed female character. Then she died. (Ask yourself for a moment if the film would have been made any different by having the boy scout who ended up on the adventure be a girl scout. The story would have been as good with the bonus of giving little girls a character they could see themselves in). Eve from Wall-E is also a great female character who just happens to never talk. Cars, for being a film that seems made just for boys who like toys, had its heart in the female character voiced by Bonnie Hunt, a big city gal who gave everything up to live in the place she loved. The female chef in Ratatoulle showed how hard it is to be a woman in a man's world, but still got upstaged by a rat.
Until Brave, Pixar's biggest female character would probably be Dory from Finding Nemo. She's more memorable than Nemo's Dad (I literally can't remember his character's name...never a good sign). She's a good loyal friend who does her best even with a handicap which makes her unable to remember things. She starts off seeming like just a joke, but by the end of the film I didn't really care if Nemo and Albert Brooks were reunited as long as Dory was with people who accepted how awesome she was.
I am worried about what type of female Brave will give us. Will we have a complex character like Dory, Eve, or Mrs. Lou Grant from Up? I wish I could look to the Ebert review for help, but instead he just makes me even more concerned about what the media thinks of my gender.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Leslie Knope is my Hero
(Spoilers for the latest episode of Parks and Recreation)
A friend and I recently had a discussion (ok, a fight) about what Thursday Night TV show is best, Community or Parks and Recreation. He said Community was the best because it was bold, interesting, and doing things that no other show on television does. He's totally right. But I love Parks because it doesn't reinvent the wheel. It's pretty much just the Mary Tyler Moore show (down to a curmudgeon boss... Lou Grant and Ron Swanson would be great drinking buddies) but with more surrealism in the comedy. I grew up watching Marty Tyler Moore on Nick and Nite and it still remains one of my favorite shows of all time. The fact that Parks and Rec is just an evolved version of it is no insult on my part.
Just as a generation of women were inspired by watching Mary Richards as she made it on her own as a working woman in TV News (Oprah talks lovingly of the series and how it inspired her to be a journalist), I know that many young women look up to Lesley Knope.
Leslie is also shown as being capable and smart. What other tv character is shown that way? Not since Murphy Brown has a comedy allowed its female lead to be something other than goofily bumbling through life. Ally McBeal and the shows that followed it had flawed female characters who seemed to barely be making it through the day. Carrie on Sex in the City couldn't manage money, had an affair with a married man, and seemed to always be in one crisis after another. These characters were an interesting response to the Amazonian Superwomen of 80s television series like The Golden Girls and Designing Women. The message was that even if you didn't have everything figured out you were still a good person.
That's a great message, and one that is currently being shown on HBO's Girls, but when the entire teleision landscape for women became flightly girl-women who represented them it crowded out representations of the strong women who they could one day become. For the longest time the strongest feminist character on television was 8 year old Lisa Simpson. At least until Leslie came along.
Let's be clear, Leslie isn't perfect. She's pretty, but she admits that best friend Ann is the beautiful one. Leslie is a borderline hoarder, she eats a diet mostly made up of waffles, and she is terminally uncool. Her office is decorated with pictures of her heroes like Hillary Clinton and not her boyfriend or some pop culture icon. The first season got a lot of traction out of Leslie's tendency to talk about historical political issues with people the way most would discuss American Idol. Even the most recent show made a joke over the fact that Leslie has about 20 replicas of the Washington Memorial in her office. What is different is that in the early seasons the jokes seemed to be directed at her. Now, we laugh because that is just something Leslie would do. It's the way you chuckle when you're friend who is into gadgets says he has to new iPad on order. Yes, of course he does. It's part of the reason you love him.
Leslie's dedication to her town, her love of her city, and her desire to be in politics to help others aren't funny anymore. They are things that we respect about Leslie. They are things we admire about her and, hopefully, traits that we want in our own lives. Watching Leslie winning her election gave me such a thrill. My interest isn't in political office (oh, god, no... I am pretty much unelectable) but I do want to work in the law or government in a way that helps people. And it's nice seeing that sentiment being shown on television.
The fact is that Leslie is my hero. I also hope that she's a hero for other women out there who will feel free to talk about politics without being embarrassed or having to play dumb in the process. It's going to be interesting to see who will end up taking her place in the Parks Department (April? Tom? Damnit, not Jerry!) but I'll be tuning in to see more of Leslie Knope being herself without any apologies.
A friend and I recently had a discussion (ok, a fight) about what Thursday Night TV show is best, Community or Parks and Recreation. He said Community was the best because it was bold, interesting, and doing things that no other show on television does. He's totally right. But I love Parks because it doesn't reinvent the wheel. It's pretty much just the Mary Tyler Moore show (down to a curmudgeon boss... Lou Grant and Ron Swanson would be great drinking buddies) but with more surrealism in the comedy. I grew up watching Marty Tyler Moore on Nick and Nite and it still remains one of my favorite shows of all time. The fact that Parks and Rec is just an evolved version of it is no insult on my part.
Just as a generation of women were inspired by watching Mary Richards as she made it on her own as a working woman in TV News (Oprah talks lovingly of the series and how it inspired her to be a journalist), I know that many young women look up to Lesley Knope.
Leslie is also shown as being capable and smart. What other tv character is shown that way? Not since Murphy Brown has a comedy allowed its female lead to be something other than goofily bumbling through life. Ally McBeal and the shows that followed it had flawed female characters who seemed to barely be making it through the day. Carrie on Sex in the City couldn't manage money, had an affair with a married man, and seemed to always be in one crisis after another. These characters were an interesting response to the Amazonian Superwomen of 80s television series like The Golden Girls and Designing Women. The message was that even if you didn't have everything figured out you were still a good person.
That's a great message, and one that is currently being shown on HBO's Girls, but when the entire teleision landscape for women became flightly girl-women who represented them it crowded out representations of the strong women who they could one day become. For the longest time the strongest feminist character on television was 8 year old Lisa Simpson. At least until Leslie came along.
Let's be clear, Leslie isn't perfect. She's pretty, but she admits that best friend Ann is the beautiful one. Leslie is a borderline hoarder, she eats a diet mostly made up of waffles, and she is terminally uncool. Her office is decorated with pictures of her heroes like Hillary Clinton and not her boyfriend or some pop culture icon. The first season got a lot of traction out of Leslie's tendency to talk about historical political issues with people the way most would discuss American Idol. Even the most recent show made a joke over the fact that Leslie has about 20 replicas of the Washington Memorial in her office. What is different is that in the early seasons the jokes seemed to be directed at her. Now, we laugh because that is just something Leslie would do. It's the way you chuckle when you're friend who is into gadgets says he has to new iPad on order. Yes, of course he does. It's part of the reason you love him.
Leslie's dedication to her town, her love of her city, and her desire to be in politics to help others aren't funny anymore. They are things that we respect about Leslie. They are things we admire about her and, hopefully, traits that we want in our own lives. Watching Leslie winning her election gave me such a thrill. My interest isn't in political office (oh, god, no... I am pretty much unelectable) but I do want to work in the law or government in a way that helps people. And it's nice seeing that sentiment being shown on television.
The fact is that Leslie is my hero. I also hope that she's a hero for other women out there who will feel free to talk about politics without being embarrassed or having to play dumb in the process. It's going to be interesting to see who will end up taking her place in the Parks Department (April? Tom? Damnit, not Jerry!) but I'll be tuning in to see more of Leslie Knope being herself without any apologies.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)