Papa can you hear me? A look at feminist ideas in Pixar’s “Brave” vs Disney’s “Mulan”.

Let’s face it – Pixar’s female characters aren’t having a very good decade. Much like Afghan rape victims, they are basically expected to die and get out of the way so that the guys can have cool adventures. Just think of Coral, Nemo’s mother – a victim of her husband’s unwise real-estate decisions. Or sweet Dory – she suffered brain damage so that we can learn about living in the moment. And poor barren Ellie Fredricksen, who’s life with her husband was the best adventure she could’ve wished for, but unfortunately he didn’t share that sentiment. And what about young Colette - bravely chopping her way through the male-dominated world of fine cuisine, until some talentless boy shows up, steals her heart and her career through a combination of cheating and nepotism, and makes her a waitress in his rat infested death trap of a restaurant. All in all, the 2000-s have been tough.


That’s why, when Pixar started advertising “Brave” as their great feminist epic, I was intrigued and skeptical. And, sadly, my only surprise was at just how hateful this movie really is to women. Who has hurt you, multiple screenwriters, and when will you let go of the pain?


 I would like to impose upon your patience by going over the major points of the story and comparing it to the story of Mulan, which is a much better written film, with better characters and ideas, and it is indeed very feminist in its slightly old-fashioned way. There are going to be spoilers, so if you haven’t seen Brave yet you should look away right about now.

And so, we have on the one hand Mulan – she reads, she does chores, she’s friends with a puppy. She’s a little clumsy, but cute clumsy, not Sandra Bullcok can’t-be-allowed-out-on-her-own clumsy. Her parents are cool – her mom’s kind of a defeatist, but they seem to have raised her well. On the other hand we have Merida – the proverbial selfish teenager. Her dad spoils her rotten and undermines her mom’s authority. He doesn’t believe in rules, and the mother only believes in rules for the girl child. The world of men is a big playground where you let your hair down and solve everything with brutal force, and the female world is an avalanche of rules. No wonder that Elinor, so playful in the film’s opening, is now a tired old desperate housewife. But hang in there Elinor, it gets worse.


Mulan wants to make her parents proud. She wants to be a good person in the only way she knows how, and when she fails she thinks that she’s worthless. When she runs away to join the army, she doesn’t do it out of rebellion, or to break conventions, or for love - she does it because giving her life to save her father is the only way she can think of to be useful. Merida doesn’t have any noble interests, she wants to be left alone to thrash around the forest and shoot arrows.


 So, off goes Mulan to the army to save her father’s life, and off goes Merida in a tantrum, not even caring that her father’s guests might slaughter him if she doesn’t return. And while Mulan’s family care enough to send someone after her, Merida wanders on her own and runs into the witch from “The Princess and the Cobbler”, instantly recognisable, though robbed of her charm and sex-appeal by the third and fourth dimensions. You might say that Merida’s rebellion against arranged marriage is somewhat of a feminist act, but I propose that she would’ve bucked in the same way if she had been asked to clean her room, do her homework, or stop texting at the dinner table.


The important questions – what were our characters supposed to learn from the story, did they learn it, and how? Mulan, for example, learned a bunch of important stuff – she learned that she is a strategist and a leader, which is more important than being strong or pretty. She learned that men are under a lot of pressure to live up to expectations as well. She learned that even if your friends are angry with you, you don’t abandon them in danger, and that your loyalty will make them love you. And she learned that she doesn’t have to wear the mask of a perfect lady, because the right guy will love her for who she is, when he knows her well. I can’t even be cynical about this – these are all very cool messages for girls and boys.


And what about our Scottish friends? I guess the point was for Merida to learn responsibility, and for Elinor to learn to relax and let her hair down from time to time. Did Merida learn anything? She did get her message across to the parents that their ways are outdated and teenagers rule the world now – how horrible. She did learn that her actions have consequences, and that feeding your mother an unknown substance might be a bad idea. I’ll give her that, but was it worth doing all that to poor Elinor?


Let’s talk about what happened to Elinor. Elinor, the female center of the story - uncool, uptight, her hair in unforgiving braids. How did we teach her to loosen up and enjoy life? Every sensible person, presented with the idea of a young girl who accidentally turns her mother into an animal, would think – ah, so she becomes a bird, or a horse, or a deer, and they go off together into the woods, and she gets to feel the freedom and beauty of nature and remembers her own youth. Even James Cameron would’ve done it that way, for god’s sake! But no, not Pixar. In Pixar’s eyes, the sin of being a well-groomed female is so terrible, that you need to be turned into the most grotesque creature available – a bear (seriously, not even a dog?). You shall be hairy, heavy and clumsy, your children shall run away from you screaming, your husband will chase you with an axe, and not even that shall be enough. You need to let go of all your humanity, and only when you’ve eaten from the ground snarling and beaten another bear to death, only then are you allowed back into human form. No running around with the wind in your hair for you, only terror, and wondering if the little snot that poisoned you will manage to thread a needle.


“Brave” is not a feminist story. It draws a male and a female world, and clearly prefers the male one. Only the male world is so pathetically superficial and brutal, that I think men have the right to be offended by it as well. Me, I’ll be getting my feminist materials from Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Neil Gaiman, and Lars von Trier.

March 8-th 2012

Usually I don't make a big deal out of international whatever's day, but today I feel inspired, so here are a few nice things about women:

Valentine's Day 2012

All day yesterday I thought it was the 14-th, then I woke up and discovered it's today. I tend not to love by schedule, but there's one thought I'd like to share with you, and recommend a movie you might like to watch with your loved one tonight.

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind",  aside from being a story with a deep understanding of what love is and how we feel and remember, is the only film I know that acknowledges the fact that Valentines Day is weirdly placed in the middle of one of the coldest and more depressing months of the year.



It is also the only Gondry film I like :)

The Three Musketeers 2011

People who didn't spend their primary school years carrying around Alexander Dumas' novel everywhere they went, can probably let this year's cinematic adaptation pass without comment. I am not such a person, and also I'm not a person who likes to let things pass without comment. And so, here we are.

From this point on, this post contains spoilers for both the book and the movie. The movie, of course, cannot be spoiled, and if you haven't read the book by now you have only yourselves to blame.

The creators of this film obviously found some of the book's elements too vulgar for their tender tastes. For example, all the nasty extramarital affairs, and unsightly female deaths. So they took them all out - the gentle queen Anne, of course, did not have an affair with Buckingham, and the sweet young Constance was not, of course, married. How could she be? She was waiting for the love of her life to ride in from the sticks on his orange horse. And of course she survives all the dangers on the way to have her kiss at the end of the movie. Even the wicked wicked Milady gets to live - and why shouldn't she? Her worst crime in the film was loving her career more than her moody boyfriend Athos. Surely spoiling her outfit with a little salt water is enough to sort her out. Also gone are the captain of the musketeers De Treville - one of my favorites characters, the musketeers themselves - apparently disbanded just before D'Artagnan shows up due to double-dip recession, and most of the plot, especially everything that happens after the diamonds adventure.

Strangely, after cleaning the storyline of these nasty nasty things, the writers found that they needed to add some vulgarities of their own - as big and vulgar as they could think of. So they turned the musketeers - the only three they had left (hey, the title only calls for three after all) into some kind of Mission Impossible secret scuba squad (I'm not kidding, they scuba!), added flame-throwing air ships (they make the annoying trip to and from London so much easier), turned the Duke of Buckingham into a total douchebag (that way the queen couldn't possibly like him), crash-landed into the roof of the Notre Dame, and, of course, had D'Artagnan kill Rochefort in a long and boring rooftop sword fight. At the end of the book, of course, D'Artagnan and Rochefort become friends, but that would've just confused today's tender-hearted viewer. Oh, and Rochefort had an eye missing. Scars are so subtle.

Having said all that, I need to insist that there were several excellent things in this movie, which made it almost worth watching:

All of the production design was breathtakingly beautiful, as was Milla Jovovich (what the hell is that woman made of?!). Most of the casting was spot-on, in ways that it hasn't been in previous adaptations. D'Artagnan was an adorable young goofball (the kid leading the horse), and so was the king - excellent! It was very smart to make them so much alike, in fact in all their scenes together they look like they're about to collapse into each-other's arms.

Usually the Cardinal and Athos (feather hat guy) are the sexiest men in the story, but this time Athos was totally flat, and Christoph Waltz as the Cardinal was good, but unexciting. This made room for two very sexy actors to take the parts of Porthos and Aramis (the big one and the one with the cross). I dare any hot-blooded  woman to watch this film and not fantasize about a threesome with those two!

The fact that they made Buckingham a strutting douchebag bugged me, but on the other hand Orlando Bloom as a strutting douchebag was great, and it's about time for him to lay off the elf stuff.

In conclusion ... oh hell, I don't have a conclusion. Long live the king, long live Paris, long live the Louvre, Notre Dame Cathedral and the Musee d'Orsay!

Fat lies and the fat lying liars who make us fat.

Al Franken once wrote a book named "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them". It's hard to think of another title for this post, when I think about how millions of people in the world torture themselves with low-fat and low-calorie diets.

I was lucky enough to be exposed to most of this information in my early twenties, when I developed some blood sugar problems, but I didn't have a good enough tool to pass the information on to others, until now.

The first three parts explain how there really is no connection between cholesterol and heart disease. Weird, right? Well, it has been known for decades, and still they keep lying to us. The last two parts explain why eating low-fat food and counting calories will not help you lose weight, but will in fact make you miserable and fuck up your metabolism. Sound a little more familiar? I should hope so.











P.S. The documentary Mr. Naughton keeps mentioning is called "Fat Head". It's his answer to "Super Size Me", and it covers all those issues and many more, but in kind of a "talk to the audience as if they were kids" way that I don't approve of. Still, it's an hour and a half well spent, if you want to check it out.

me vs the world 6

Stuck in Boromir limbo

Something needs to be done for actor Sean Bean. He appears to be stuck in the worst case of typecasting I've ever seen. It's not that he keeps playing the same type of character, he seems not to have had a change of clothes since 2001.

This is him in "Fellowship of the Ring"

"Black Death"


...and now "Game of Thrones"




















As we say in the cyber circles, what the wtf?!

P.S. My libido is very much in favor of this look, and isn't concerned at all with the damage to Mr. Bean's carreer.

Roman Polanski's "Bitter Moon"

A couple of years ago I sat in the first lecture of a course about Roman Polanski in the Tel-Aviv university, given by a much beloved but very pompous professor. He began by listing all of Polanski's films, and I fell into his silly little trap by raising my hand and pointing out that he had left out "Bitter Moon". His well-rehearsed answer was "I've left it out, because it isn't worth talking about, and I'd rather forget that it was ever made".
Then he spent a month talking about "The Tenant".

"Bitter Moon" - in French, "Lunes de Fiel", meaning "Moon of Gall", as opposed to "Lunes de Miel" which means "Moon of Honey" i.e. "Honeymoon" - is one of the most underrated films in history. Just as the wonderful "Starship Troopers" is mistaken for a cheesy action film, when it is in fact an earth-shattering social commentary, so "Bitter Moon" is mistaken for a romantic drama gone wrong, when it is in fact a grotesque indictment of the modern ideas of romantic love.

As I read some of the reviews for this film, my hands start to shake with anger. The consensus seems to be that Polanski started out with the intention to describe a moving love affair, then got lost in his stupid desire to create provocations by inserting as much soft-core porn as he could get away with. They mock the cliche lines that Peter Coyote's character speaks with a straight face: "Have you ever truly idolized a woman? Nothing can be obscene in such love. Everything that occurs in between it becomes a sacrament." and nobody knows what the hell Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas' characters are doing there. Roger Ebert is the only one who seems to have some kind of idea of what this film is really about. So, listen carefully, I'm only going to explain this once:

Oscar and Mimi are living out the romantic fantasy of romantic Parisian romance that we've been conditioned to want and fantasize about. He is a brooding American writer who lives in Paris and expects to become the next Henry Miller or Ernest Hemingway. He meets a divine creature on the bus and falls in love at first sight, but doesn't get to speak to her. After looking for her for months and almost giving up, he finally runs into her by mistake, and this "written in the stars" affair can finally begin. Of course she remembers him, of course she has also fallen in love with him at first sight. As they crash into each-other's arms with phrases like "I might have been Adam with the taste of apple fresh in my mouth. I was looking at all the beauty in the world, embodied in a single female form.", they reach the point where Meg Ryan films usually end, and step into uncharted territory. What happens next, or rather what doesn't happen, is that they never reach the comfortable, "boring" stage of the love affair. They never learn to enjoy eating breakfast together without tearing their clothes off and licking milk off each-other. They giggle and kiss while shopping for sex toys, but they will never giggle and kiss while shopping for groceries.

And so the grotesque part of the story begins - how far can you go on desire alone? At what point does sexual exploration become a silly cartoon? What do you do when a person kneels at your feet and tells you "You can do anything you want to me, just don't send me away"? How does it feel to go in an instant from being all-powerful to being completely powerless? And after all the battles have been won and lost, how do you spend eternity? Perhaps by poisoning the lives of a young couple you meet along the way, by mocking their seemingly boring and lustless relationship, and forcing your personal hell on them.

Just like Mimi and Oscar's love, Roman Polanski the masterpiece director is gone now, and it's too late to hug his ankles and cry "Please don't go, I'll do anything!". Instead, we can quote another cliche and say "We'll always have Paris", we'll always have "Chinatown", "Rosemary's Baby", and "Bitter Moon".

Tron Legacy

For the life of me I can't understand why, in this age of over-population, the majority of texts our mainstream culture manages to produce still preach the doctrine of reproduction above, and instead, of all other acts of creation.

Kevin Flynn has attempted the god-like act of creating an entire alternative universe from scratch, and he expects to get results from it that will benefit our world as well - something about perfecting the human genome, eliminating disease and so on that I didn't entirely follow. But oh no! He has been swallowed up, literally, by his work, and can't spend time with his son. How unfortunate. Too late he realizes that the only perfection he should've ever attempted is the one that hides inside this child. All his ideas about making the world better for the kid to grow up in - too bad, he should've scrapped those the moment the stick turned blue.

 Well, I'm sorry, but screw you, Mr. Kosinski, and screw you, eight (!) people it took to write this script, and screw you (passionately and at length, and sleep for a while and wake up and then screw you again, but always with contraceptives), Mr. Bridges, but being able to create something other than offspring is what separates us from the animals. It's one of the few good things that separate us from the animals. If you don't mind, some of us would like to keep that option open.

From Kurt Vonnegut's "Bluebeard"

At the very end, her brain-surgeon husband couldn't talk anymore, but he could still scrawl short messages with his left hand, although he was normally right handed. His left hand was all he had left that still worked a little bit.
According to Circe, this was his ultimate communiqué: "I was a radio repairman."
"Either his damaged brain believed that this was a literal truth," she said, "or he had come to the conclusion that all the brains he had operated on were basically just receivers of signals from someplace else. Do you get the concept?"
"I think I do," I said.
"Just because music comes from a little box we call a radio," she said, and here she came over and rapped me on my pate with her knuckles as though it were a radio, "that doesn't mean there's a symphony orchestra inside."
"What's that got to do with Father and Terry Kitchen?" I said.
"Maybe, when they suddenly started doing something they'd never done before, and their personalities changed, too --" she said, "maybe they had started picking up signals from another station, which had very different ideas about what they should say and do."

* * *

I have since tried out this human-beings-as-nothing-but-radio-receivers theory on Paul Slazinger, and he toyed with it some. "So Green River Cemetery is full of busted radios," he mused, "and the transmitters they were tuned to still go on and on."
"That's the theory," I said.
He said that all he'd been able to receive in his own head for the past twenty years was static and what sounded like weather reports in some foreign language he'd never heard before. He said, too, that toward the end of his marriage to Barbira Mencken, the actress, she acted "as though she was wearing headphones and listening to the 1812 Overture in stereo. That's when she was becoming a real actress, and not just another pretty girl onstage that everybody liked a lot. She wasn't even 'Barbara' anymore. All of a sudden she was 'Bar-beer-ah!' "
He said that the first he heard of the name change was during the divorce proceedings, when her lawyer referred to her as "Barbira," and spelled it for the court stenographer.
Out in the courthouse corridor afterwards, Slazinger asked her: "Whatever happened to Barbara?"
She said Barbara was dead!
So Slazinger said to her: "Then what on Earth did we waste all this money on lawyers for?"
¬
* * *

I said that I had seen the same sort of thing happen to Terry Kitchen the first time he played with a spray rig, shooting bursts of red automobile paint at an old piece of beaverboard he'd leaned against the potato barn. All of a sudden, he, too, was like somebody listening through headphones to a perfectly wonderful radio station I couldn't hear.
Red was the only color he had to play with. We'd gotten two cans of the red paint along with the spray rig, which we'd bought from an automobile repair shop in Montauk a couple of hours before. "Just look at it! Just look at it!" he'd say, after every burst.
"He'd just about given up on being a painter, and was going into law practice with his father before we got that spray rig," I said.
"Barbira was just about to give up being an actress and have a baby instead," said Slazinger. "And then she got the part of Tennessee Williams's sister in The Glass Menagerie."

* * *

Actually, now that I think back: Terry Kitchen went through a radical personality change the moment he saw the spray rig for sale, and not when he fired those first bursts of red at the beaverboard. I happened to spot the rig, and said that it was probably war surplus, since it was identical with rigs I had used in the Army for camouflage.
"Buy it for me," he said.
"What for?" I said.
"Buy it for me," he said again. He had to have it, and he wouldn't even have known what it was if I hadn't told him.
He never had any money, although he was from a very rich old family, and the only money I had was supposed to go for a crib and a youth bed for the house I'd bought in Springs. I was in the process of moving my family, much against their will, from the city to the country.
"Buy it for me," he said again.
And I said, "O.K., take it easy. O.K., O.K."


This is a very Vonneguty month for me :)

Dinner for Schmucks

Well, I didn't want to see this movie, but now that I have I need to talk about it. If you watch it, which I don't recommend, notice this: it's a movie in which a lot of wonderful British comics take the back seat to a lot of mediocre American comics. There's Steve Carell, who is adorable, but I think everyone is as sick of him as I am at this point. There's Paul Rudd, the ultimate non-threatening "vegetarian" male lead, Zach Galifianakis, who belongs to the Tina Fey school of comedy (i.e. the belief that doing something annoying with a straight face and repeating it ad nauseum equals funny), and a female love interest - Stephanie Szostak - who, frankly, inspires even less passion than Paul Rudd. Then, in the smaller roles, you have a wonderful appearance by Lucy Punch - I've been fixating on her since Woody Allen's "Tall Dark Stranger", David Walliams from "Little Britain", and the hilarious and much loved in our house Chris O'Dowd from the cult "IT Crowd". It's a masterpiece of bad decisions, and mostly inspires wishful thinking. For example, my boyfriend (who made me watch it in the first place) said at the end how great this movie could've been if Wes Anderson had directed it. Could've, would've should've...

An interesting actress to keep an eye out for:

From Woody Allen's "You will meet a tall dark stranger", Lucy Punch.

The dimensional subtraction conundrum

This is, I guess, from the "How to train your dragon" DVD extras. Not the most necessary piece of work out there, but there are two interesting things to be observed in it. One - apparently the studios take care to invent some work for the poor 2D animators out there, maybe as a form of social security or something. Two - as they switch between techniques, notice how the transition from 3D to 2D is relatively passable, but the switch from 2D back to 3D feels odd, it leaves you with the same feeling in your stomach as when you miss a step going downstairs.

The embed video option is disabled, so here: Legend of the Boneknapper Dragon

The Social network

I'm not sure exactly how David Fincher has done this, but it's pretty amazing to watch - a story that could be utterly uninteresting and dull, told in a way that makes you hang on the edge of your seat from the very start until the end credits roll up. It's the editing of course, and the way the different parts of the story are woven into each-other. The good actors, the depth of the characters, so unusual in a film about college students. The trailer makes your skin crawl, and the film itself is fascinating.

Jesse Eisenberg is great, I hope he gets more of those serious roles.



P.S. Of course, the answer to "How has David Fincher done this?" is that David Fincher is an extraordinary director.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

If you enjoy beauty, sophisticated wit, if you like things that are original and intense, and want to see the great actors of the future in their first role (and Michael Cera and the other Culkin kid), you need to see this film.

Life-altering

Crying

This is my favorite version of Roy Orbison's "Crying":



And this is even better:

me vs the world 5

Thoughts about "Inception"

First of all, I wish Christopher Nolan would watch his films on something larger than his laptop before he sends them out into the world. Then he would know that his action scenes are impossible to follow on a big screen.

Also, Michael Caine is not an exotic condiment that you add just a grain of to your film to give it an odor of sophistication. Either make a film with Michael Caine, or leave the man alone, I'm sure he has things to do.

The same can be said about Pete Postlethwaite, but I feel more strongly about Michael Caine because me love him long time.

Lesson number one in cinema - show, don't tell. This can be said about almost everything in Inception, but I'll give just two examples:

Instead of explaining to us that the hero's wife is a haunting presence, try to find an actress that actually has a haunting presence, instead of one that looks like the best friend in a romantic comedy.

And instead of telling us about how the hero is tortured, hire an actor that has even the minimal ability to look tortured. Ethan Hawke looks tortured. Leonardo Dicaprio looks like he's had a happy childhood, gets along perfectly with his parents, always got good grades in school, eats all his vegetables, works out in the clean mountain air, and dates lingerie models.

And finally, have the balls to commit to something at the end of the movie.

Based on an actual Bruce Campbell

I've been using this sequence from "Evil Dead 2" as reference for work. My animation probably won't turn out this cool, but I'm having a lot of fun in the process: