1. Some Sex & the City reviews of note: Anthony Lane in The New Yorker; Ed Gonzalez in Slant Magazine; Peter Sobczynski at eFilmCritic; Roger Ebert for the Chicago Sun-Times; Alonso Duralde for MSNBC; Owen Gleiberman for Entertainment Weekly; and A.W., of course, for the New York Press.
["Sex and the City's superficial fans couldn't give a shit, but I still have to ask: Is a demeaning representation better than no representation at all? When Jennifer Hudson appears on screen in Sex and the City, the only sane way to respond to the Oscar-winning actress's performance is with a Homer Simpson-esque shudder, not because Hudson can't act—most people could tell you that from watching Dreamgirls, in which Hudson's "soulful" singing was meant to distract (some might say successfully) from reality—but because the American Idol also-ran allows herself to be typecast as a modern-day mammy to Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw. The way Michael Patrick King tells it, you wouldn't think much has changed since the Civil War-era plantation, as Hudson's Louise is exactly to Carrie what Butterfly McQueen's Prissy was to Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. "]
2. Happy Birthday to Agnès Varda, who turns 80 today. GreenCine gathers the few tributes so far. Let's get some more out there.
["Let's not leave Johannes Bock dangling alone in the wind (or rather, the Tagesspiegel) with his congrats to Agnès Varda on her 80th today. We don't have to reach far back to find appreciations in English; in January, Criterion released its collection, 4 by Agnés Varda, and I collected reviews and interviews here."]
3. "Comic actor Harvey Korman dies at 81": R.I.P.
["Comic actor Harvey Korman has died at 81, according to the UCLA Medical Center. Korman died at the center four months after suffering complications from the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm."]
4. "Monkeys Think, Moving Artificial Arm as Own": It's a madhouse! (Hattip: Kevin Seaman)
["Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday. The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology."]
5. "Clay Aiken reportedly expecting a baby": I'm resisting the punchlines. I really, really am.
["Clay Aiken is reportedly going to be a dad. The former “American Idol” alum, 29, will be the father of Jaymes Foster’s baby, the sister of record mogul David Foster. Celebrity Web site TMZ.com reports that multiple sources have confirmed the news to the gossip site. Foster, 50, who was reportedly artificially inseminated, is due in August. The two live together in Los Angeles. The singer will have an active role in raising the child, reports TMZ."]
Quote of the Day: Giorgio Armani
Image of the Day (click to enlarge): One of the images from a BBC story about uncontacted indigenous tribes. (Hattip: Ali Arikan)
Clip of the Day: Video of the monkey soon to be our master.
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged. Suggestions for links are also welcome. Please send to keithuhlich@gmail.com.
Friday, May 30, 2008
Links for the Day (May 30th, 2008)
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31 comments:
#1: A fun game might be to print excerpts of reviews of the same movie and have us guess from a list of critics which one wrote what. I thought for sure the "superficial fans" quote was Armond. It's tougher than it looks.
Image of the Day: Well, those natives had been plastered in the walls of their Peruvian Mayan temple for 500 years until Indy showed up. They'd have been easy to overlook.
Re: Image of the Day
"No! Don't tell us what happened in the Lost finale; we've TiVo'ed it for later!"
craig - My other caption was "Aliens? Seriously?"
But I decided against it lest it implied I, too, was in that camp, which I most definitely am not. Just sayin'.
Re #1: Here's Manohla Dargis' review of "Sex and the City," which, while negative, is a lot more nuanced -- hell, let's say it, less sneeringly hostile and condescending -- than the ones collected in this roundup. (At least Anthony Lane's pan had jokes -- this is a rare instance where his cocktail party detachment is just right for the subject matter.)
Manohla writes at the end of her piece, "There was something seductive about the bubble world that the show created back in 1998, in the fantasy that all you needed to make it through the rough patches were good friends and throwdown heels. That was a beautiful lie, as the show acknowledged in its gently melancholic return in the wake of Sept. 11." That's acknowledging that the show's loyal fans knew full well that they were indulging in escapism -- that the show was the pay cable version of a day spent shopping for shoes (an activity that's not limited to rich white ladies, guys). The fake humanism showcased in 1930s comedies and melodramas about po' folks hobnobbing with the rich swells and ultimately learning it's what's inside that counts wasn't innately less bullshitty than what Carrie Bradshaw and company served up -- it's just chaste, black-and-white and consecrated by time and film history textbooks, so critics don't feel empowered to climb up on the soapbox and tell us how they expressed the bone-deep rottenness of the ruling class.
A question worth pondering: how is the real-estate-and-clothes porn of "Sex and the City" inherently more "meretricious" than the obsessions with honor, pride, vengeance and loyalty showcased in action films and war movies -- genres that male critics are more inclined to discuss in a non-condescending way?
I don't doubt that the "Sex" movie is bloated and shallow and ultimately cynical, but it's awfully condescending to assume that audiences are too stupid and dishonest to know what they're buying a ticket to see. And in any case, the spectacle of male critics lecturing women on the corruption of feminism is more hilarious than anything Michael Patrick King could come up with.
The sight of middle-class to upper-middle class big-city writers who spend a good deal of their lives in screening rooms and on the Internet decrying Carrie Bradshaw's disconnection from reality is also funny.
The casting of Jennifer Hudson as Carrie's gal Friday is definitely cringeworthy, though.
I think Sex and the City was a terrible show. I am pretty sure that view is going to extend to the film, as well. However, I have found myself, in the recent days, getting almost defensive for the movie because of the sheer amount of misogynistic horseshit being leveled against the film masquerading as wit. Some guy even applauded Roger Ebert on his blog - for his admittedly excellent - review of the film, congratulating him for being brave in taking a stand against it.
Ebert’s review is one of the few ones I’ve read, along with Dargis’s piece that Matt has kindly linked to, that is fair. The in-thing is to take potshots at the film now, many of the culprits getting lost in a frenzy of sexism that most probably harkens back to the days in high-school where the only ladies (or gentlemen) they ever got to meet were Madame Palm and her five lovely daughters.
A friend of mine was bitching about the film the other day, complaining about how so many women falsely identify themselves with the characters ("I am such a Samantha," etc). This is annoying, sure, but not more so than men watching Judd Apatow films, and going, "Dude, I am SO Paul Rudd." You wish, arsehole.
A man might not go out and spend a thousand dollars on a pair of shoes, but he would go out and blow that much on a Star Wars figure (well, this man would, at least).
If anything Sex and the City proves to me that men and women are not from Mars and Venus respectively. What we are is the same, even though what we want is not.
Step aside, Dr Phil.
Sorry I missed including you above, Manohla. Total brain fart on my part.
A day for the ladies, eh?
Bravo, Matt, for your response in the comments to the SATC critics---the casual presumption with which male critics dismiss things that women watch, like, or do is pretty goddamn offensive, and I'm not even voting for Hilary!
And meanwhile, Varda's birthday---an occasion for real celebration! Her films are astonishing, not just for their achievement, but also for the lack of presumption, pretension, and general aesthetic heavy-breathing required to achieve artistic liftoff. A lot of directors aiming for the stars could learn from her ability to both be incredibly smart and make it look easy to think that deeply.
Hopefully we'll someday get the full measure of her work over here---I'm still upset that Cinevardaphoto doesn't seem to have come out... anywhere.
I saw "Cinevardaphoto" at Film Forum in its brief theatrical run here and would like to see it again. It's irritating to hear that it wasn't distributed more widely, but given the state of foreign language film distribution right now, it's not too surprising.
A question worth pondering: how is the real-estate-and-clothes porn of "Sex and the City" inherently more "meretricious" than the obsessions with honor, pride, vengeance and loyalty showcased in action films and war movies -- genres that male critics are more inclined to discuss in a non-condescending way?
The question answers itself: men look up to heroes, women to gold-digging trollops.
Dude, if the heroes you mean are of the super variety, you seriously need to start looking for new ones.
Matt, you ask:
"The sight of middle-class to upper-middle class big-city writers who spend a good deal of their lives in screening rooms and on the Internet decrying Carrie Bradshaw's disconnection from reality is also funny."
Like Owen Gleiberman and David Edelstein, both of whom luved the movie? But maybe someone who doesn't fall into a lower-class income bracket like I do could grapple with your assertion better.
Fuzzy Bastard:
"Bravo, Matt, for your response in the comments to the SATC critics---the casual presumption with which male critics dismiss things that women watch, like, or do is pretty goddamn offensive, and I'm not even voting for Hilary!"
Either I read Matt's comment wrong or your knee-jerkingly sweeping the SATC critics cited here with the "critics" who post on Rotten Tomatoes and whose only contribution to discussion of the film is talking about how SJP looks like their ballsacs. I have no problems with the films "women watch" any less than I do with the films "men watch"; I just hate bad movies. But maybe I'm the wrong person to grapple with your assertion since I have actually supported Hillary Clinton.
I disagree with Dargis that the series delivered over all six seasons, since the weaknesses she discusses (particular with relation to the male regulars) were also glaringly present in the show (just consider the Miranda/Steve storyline). SatC took four strong female characters and, starting somewhere in the middle of its run, steadily diminished them for reasons I still don't understand -- a lack of imagination, I think. I had actually thought a timely movie (made, say, instead of the last season) might have served the show well, since on the big screen the writers could really have explored the melodramatic potential of the material in a way they couldn't on the small screen (but always seemed to tiptoe close to, like the Miranda/Steve marriage or the oblique acknowledgments of Samatha having lived through and lost friends to the AIDS crisis). It would have been a way to make the argument that, even though these characters were often unserious -- and _would remain so_ -- they deserved to be taken seriously.
Most accounts seem to suggest this is not that movie (though Gleiberman's review, upon preview, suggests bittersweetness). The most shocking line in Dargis' review, in my opinion, was the revelation that the movie is 2 hours and 22 minutes long. That's so absurd it beggars the imagination. If it was a breezy 90 minutes I would have expected it to be comparable to the new Indy movie, a reliable but not exceptional trader in familiar tropes (not a view of Indy IV shared by the House, I realize). But 145 minutes...
All in all, I would have preferred a Golden Girls movie instead.
Anon
Ed: I bet I made less than you in the last couple of years, but comparing tax returns would only distract from the fact that social class experiences aren't inextricably intertwined with income level. The life of a 21st century journalist is, in character, fundamentally middle-class, usually higher: spending a fair part of each day in screening rooms, filing copy on a laptop in a coffee shop or airport waiting area via wireless card, going to film festivals, interviewing notable cultural figures (often in lavishly appointed hotel suites), sorting through Appalachian mountain ranges of free DVDs and CDs, etc. We're not stepping around land mines or bribing customs agents so they don't confiscate our cameras.
I wasn't trying to single you out, Ed. The political consistency of your writing gives you bona fides that most of the critics panning this movie lack (and there are a lot of pans).
The point I was trying (and evidently failing) to make was that the "Sex" characters aren't evil parasites living a life fundamentally different from most of the critics who are writing about how easy they've got it. Carrie and company own more expensive shit, but we're all inhabiting the same urban consumer culture, and we tend to be slaves to it even when we go through the motions of trying to stand outside of it or deconstruct it. I'd like to see that plain fact openly acknowledged in these pans -- which, taken in totality, have a touch of, "Get a load of consumer culture's shallow slave bitches! Aren't they pathetic? I'd bust on them some more, but I'm about to start my nightly shift at the soup kitchen."
Anonymous: The question answers itself: men look up to heroes, women to gold-digging trollops.
Do you mean heroes like Tony Montana, or Iron Man?
Ed, you're one of the most perceptive, original critics out there, far more politically astute and knowledgeable about cinema than I; but comments like your "superficial fans" broadside -- the knee-jerk sweeping remark that kicked off this discussion in the first place -- turn me off enough to not even bother reading the rest of the review. It doesn't stimulate thought or engage a dialog with either the critic or one's response to his criticism; it just shuts it down.
Maybe I'm just a softie, but I began regretting my own spleen-venting against the fans of Crystal Skull after listening to John and Vadim's latest podcast, and someone, I forget who, mentioned that this was the first Indy movie they would be seeing in an actual theater. It made me think of how the experience of a film can (potentially) be separate from the quality of the movie itself. I have a friend who's having a girls-night-out party to see Sex and the City. What's superficial about that? What else are they supposed to see -- Savage Grace?
I actually hope Sex and the City is a hit, just to negate the actresses-can't-open-a-movie meme being perpetuated among the studios these days. The 140-minute running time seems ill-advised, though.
I probably get a kick out of Anthony Lane more than I should. His review of The Lives of Others, a rare foray into serious criticism, is superb. And his pan of The Da Vinci Code is one of the funniest reviews I've ever read, especially his description of the opening scene: "A dead Frenchman is found laid out on the floor of the Louvre. His final act was to carve a number of bloody markings into his own flesh, indicating, to the expert eye, that he was preparing to roll in fresh herbs and sear himself in olive oil for three minutes on each side."
Matt, yes, comparing tax returns would be a distraction—not that we could, since I think I only made enough money three of the last ten years to actually justify filling one out (thank God I live in a rent-controlled apartment in Joisey I took over from my parents or I'd have to move back to Guantanamo). Putting aside the fact that there are classes even within the world of the "21st century journalist" (I still don't own a laptop and can't afford to attend a festival other than the one that costs me $2 to commute to through the Lincoln Tunnel), you're absolutely right: "Carrie and company own more expensive shit, but we're all inhabiting the same urban consumer culture, and we tend to be slaves to it even when we go through the motions of trying to stand outside of it or deconstruct it."
Another thing that's hardly acknowledged about shows like Sex and the City (and Friends) is that neither is racist simply for their lack of minority representation: Both shows seem to actually reflect the blinkered spheres of their audience. In real life, aren't minorities often background players in the lives of people who are very much like Carrie and her friends? (It just gets sketchy when artists like Michael Patrick King cave to politically-correct pressure only to default to a minstrelsy shorthand.) It's something that many of us critics could probably stand to grapple with more: Acknowledging that the insularity of the people we see on movie screens is often a mirror of the same insularity we see in real life (Sideways is coming to mind here for some reason) and just focus on the way audiences of all stripes are pulled into this sphere and how that sphere is sold to us.
The line that sticks with me from Armond's fine review is this: "Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) has been idolized as America"s greatest female fictional character even though she's little more than a good-hearted girl-next-door and a believably obsessed careerist." But it's that "believability"—I think—that makes the character so likable, and I would be lying if I said I didn't have friends who were just like her. But the Carrie I was forced to sit with on Wednesday is a fountain of mixed singles (I buy her taste in expensive things; not so much that bandaged cell phone), beginning with that shit line about "labels" and "lust." I'm also not lying when I say I enjoyed the show quite a bit, but this bald-faced movie pushes a rather reductive view of womanhood, flaunting Carrie's crass sense of entitlement and thirst for luxe as if all woman should be proud to adopt it.
And, Craig, gotcha, but I actually didn't mean "superficial" in the more condescending "I'm just like Carrie 'cause I like pretty expensive things" sense of the word but in the more "it's just escapism, stop trying to scratch its gilded surface" way. Should have picked a better, less confusable word, then.
Ed,
Just looking for a clarification: Isn't Armond's view of the show somewhat opposed to yours? White suggests that that [the movie's] chick-flick gimmick reinforces the delusion that the privileges on view are common to all females and that [the media saluted] the show as a refreshingly honest view of sex simply because it pandered to the empowered class’ wish for a guiltless view of sex and money. This seems contrary to your observation that what was refreshing about about the show (and Friends) was that both shows implicitly acknowledged the blinkered lives being depicted.
I mean, I get the sense that White is criticizing the movie for not being serious enough (not enough Sadie McKee) while something in your comments seems to suggest that the movie was trying to be too serious (at least with respect to "racial balance").
I have to reread both reviews when I'm away from work, but I thought I'd ask the question while the thread was still active.
As an aside, one common theme of most of the reviews seems to be a dislike of Carrie.
Anon
Ed: "Acknowledging that the insularity of the people we see on movie screens is often a mirror of the same insularity we see in real life (Sideways is coming to mind here for some reason) and just focus on the way audiences of all stripes are pulled into this sphere and how that sphere is sold to us."
Can't argue with that.
I'd like to see a detailed comparison of "Sex and the City" and the so-called White Elephant movies of the '30s, which tended to end, like "Sex," by reassuring audiences that it's what's inside that counts, after 80 minutes of showing them the gilded palaces that were the entire reason they bought a ticket in the first place.
I'd also like to see more acknowledgments that "Sex and the City" and other properties set in slumber-party fantasy worlds are the female answer to the action movies and gangster pictures that exist to feed soft-bellied young male wage slaves' fantasies of being the baddest mofo on the block.
Anon: "I get the sense that White is criticizing the movie for not being serious enough (not enough Sadie McKee) while something in your comments seems to suggest that the movie was trying to be too serious (at least with respect to "racial balance").
I got the sense that Ed was suspicious of a movie version of a TV show that decided to add a splash of color to its cast by hiring a recent African-American Oscar winner and casting her as the white heroine's information-age valet.
I never loved or even really liked Sex and the City, but there was something in it I couldn't dismiss or write off. I doubt I'll see the movie until DVD (also, two-and-a-half hours? Really?), but I've always thought the series was a better adaptation of that much frowned-upon literary genre of chick-lit than any female-centric films of the past several years. I wouldn't ever claim the show as anything other than simple escapism for people who just want to see some pretty dresses and frothy fun, but at least it largely KNEW it was escapism (I find reading the show as a feminist tract much harder because, well, the show's feminism was rather troubling).
So there you have a bunch of words about how I never quite liked Sex and the City but I could see where people would. I'd MUCH rather watch the complete run of SATC again than Six Feet Under, to cite another HBO big hit of the time period.
Haven't seen the movie, but Carrie did have money troubles on the show, partly due to her middle-class publishing salary, and some of her own shoe fetishist making. Nothing that stuck, but the gulf between her and her more-moneyed friends was explored, or at least acknowledged. The workaday details of her single-in-New York journalist's life, mirroring my own (with the carried-over credit card balances, without the fashion shows), seemed fairly credible to me, when the show chose to address them.
But we are talking wish-fulfillment fantasy here, like on the home improvement channel shows, and those well-manicured kitchens in Nancy Shyer movies. This is, I would agree, Transformers for the ladies, and I always found talking the show over with the women in my life edifying. The Devil Wears Prada is also a good conversation starter, as is the ur-Sex, Un Unmarried Woman.
I should have known that the relationship was doomed when a girl whom I was seeing a little while ago astonished me by expressing her love for S&TC on our second or third date. But I should have known, too, that the fact that an educated, well-traveled woman in the nonprofit sector loved the show meant that it contained something -- at least, for its loyal female fans -- over and above the sex and shopping.
I always thought that the Ang Lee Hulk movie put in Eric Bana's mouth a cuttingly concise statement of the appeal of the superhero movie to the male audience (and not just the fanboys), when Jennifer Connelly asks Bana's Bruce Banner "what it's like" when he transforms: Bana looks away and says, in a sort of adolescent, breaking-through-the-fences-this-once voice of a boy trying to tell a girl how much he likes her for the first time, "It's like a dream... freedom, power."
Think about Iron Man flying from his Malibu bluff house to Afghanistan to do what he knows in his heart is right, or Batman gliding from brooding tower to gargoyled parapet, or Indiana Jones throwing a couple of shirts in a bag and heading off to "New York... London... maybe Leipzig," when life disappoints him, and tell me, if you're a man seeing those images, that that untrammeled liberty isn't an illuminating contrast to your own life.
S&TC depicts a small sort of freedom (to shop, to gossip, to put friends above lovers, to sleep around without being punished, to pause endlessly at the threshold of married adult life), but in an acknowledgedly sexist society, that may be more than enough for most women, for now.
As for the power in "freedom, power"? Well, women don't have much power in the world (no matter what the chinless wonders on talk radio may say about Hillary), even over their own bodies, even in New York City, even in twenty-first century America, so maybe the power that S&TC gives its characters over their lives is quite appealing.
On the other hand, the actresses' voices are like spikes to my temples. De gustibus, etc.
I got the sense that Ed was suspicious of a movie version of a TV show that decided to add a splash of color to its cast by hiring a recent African-American Oscar winner and casting her as the white heroine's information-age valet.
I can understand that, but the implication would seem to be that if the movie did not bow to pressure to "add some color" it would have been truer to its world (like Friends). Being true to that cloistered world does not seem to be an inherently bad thing to Mr. Gonzalez (if I understand his comments correctly), while it does seem inherently bad to Mr. White.
Anon
Ed, I enjoy your writing and reviews. I also support Hillary. And... my friend just emailed me asking about Mukhsin, and going to see it.
And this thread is a perfect example of why, as this site seems to be revamping a little, please make it a better website experience. Right now, no list of current or reviewed movies; no recent comments in the sidebar; and the first thing on the sidebar is the contributors?, not that you folks don't deserve attention, but something more related to the site's content or navigation-wise would be helpful. And tag your entries.
I'm loving this conversation, and it's making me actually excited to see this thing, which I will be (whether I like it or not) with the lady tomorrow night. Must agree with Ed in that I like quite a bit of the show, though most of my viewing is concentrated in the early seasons whereas I hear the later ones declined in most ways. I hear the preview for the movie at work about once every 30 minutes and I'm about to beat my brain out over it - yes, it could be the surplus of estrogen in my system (deep down, I'm very close to my balls and their chemical outputs), but there's something rather vile in its shoes, glamor and lipgloss = the happiness of life schtick, this also speaking as someone eternally in love with that classic New York female look. It's like the worst parts of Kevin Smith's work (I'm a fan, but when his writing is off, it hurts) with the most shrill female characters imaginable, and though I'm not outside of recognizing the humanity in those who embody those things I most dislike (excess privilege without much awareness of anything outside itself), this particular manifestation feels almost singularly rancid. We'll see...
By the way, you all can know that I'm considering going back to school, very strongly. I can't say I want to, per se, but it's apparent now that the root of my cinephilia is an obsession with cultural anthropology, and I can't pretend that getting a PhD isn't among my life's goals. I love writing and hope to do it forever ("Retirement? You're talking about death, right?" God bless you, Bob...), but let's face it: it's damn hard to pay the bills that way. It's damn hard any way right now in America if you're coming at it from anything less than upper-middle class, but I'd rather incur even more debt furthering my education in a way that I can truly use in a way befitting to my passions (political science, though great, is practically fucking pointless if you don't want to go into law) than stick it out otherwise. More on all this later, for sure...
Working on it villainx. Please bear with us.
Sex sells: The film looks to earn $70 million over the weekend, a whomping number for a film of its type. You go, girls, I say, as some of my gender lament the decline and fall of Western civilization...
Joyeux anniversaire, Mlle Varda.
Her recent work, (The Gleaners in particular) like that of Chris Marker and Robertson Davies, makes me feel better about getting old. So much of American culture is about youth, with the assumption that only those in their twenties have anything new or exciting to contribute. But there's an ease, a grace and a wit to Varda's work that reminds me that life continues to fascinate and reward you, even as you enter your eighth decade.
No problem Keith. Just saying that this is a great website, and a great resource. All the technical stuff probably is so unrelated to the joys of what this site is about: the writing, movies, tv shows, gossip, etc. And probably hella hard given, I assume, your background. But keep at it.
Has their been a discussion about Reprise? And will someone be covering the Subway Cinema thing?
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