When did this become a blog entirely about babies?: A Lifetime Movie Review and Analysis

I'm sorry guys. This is getting ridiculous.

Apparently I'm horrified of babies, because I keep watching movies about them.

With that being said, I have a confession to make: I am currently watching a Lifetime movie called The Pregnancy Pact.


And with that being said, I'm actually really impressed.

During the summer, I regularly watch The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and it is ridiculous. I won't get into it right now, except to say that it's incredibly unrealistic, god-pushing, and badly done, right from the 2 million some-odd dollar houses in Southern California that middle class families live in, to the church that saves the day when the girl can't pay to take care of her kid, to the fact that somebody gets pregnant every season, to the bad product placement. Going into this movie, I was expecting sort of the same thing.

Use this product. Then do something with you're life, stupid lazy slut!

I am being pleasantly surprised. Mostly because the movie is 50% about teenage pregnancy and peer pressure, and 50% about how we can be affected by media, particularly how small towns can be affected by media, which is one of my pet...issues.

Considering it's Lifetime, a network I have very little respect for, they made some good artistic and plot choices. The emphasis in this movie is definitely is on the girls' delusion that it's a good thing to be pregnant, and that pregnancy as a teenager is, by default, a bad thing.

They made the choice to have the main character look like she's about ten years old, which is very, very significant. It makes it much more sad that she is going to have a baby, and it makes her naivety much more believable. Unfortunately, she acts about as well as I do, (she smiles constantly,) and her total lack of skill is pretty distracting.

Otherwise, though, they made mostly good decisions. The real main character is this crazy, wonderful journalist girl, who comes back from New York City to Gloucester (like down the road from me, and apparently just like my hometown but an island and more Catholic...) to find out whats going on with the bunches and bunches of teenaged girls who are getting pregnant. She is pro-choice, pro-contraceptives, and pro-truth, which is so refreshing in a program like this, especially since it's pretty clear that she is the good guy.

Which opinion is correct, though, is a little ambiguous--or, at the very least, there's wiggle room. Main pregnant girls' mom is head of the abstinence committee (three double letters in that word! woah!) in the town, and she is strongly opposed to the school nurse's idea to hand out contraceptives in school because of that whole, inviting-kids-to-have-sex or whatever argument, and she very much believes in abstinence before marriage. The nurse argues that the kids are having sex regardless, and nearly dozens of girls are getting pregnant. The (principal? vice principal? I forget,) argues that the girls want to get pregnant so contraceptives don't help.

And thats where the media, and the plot, comes in. The journalist is in town to find out what is going on, and it turns out (spoiler alert!) that the girls decided to make a pact to get pregnant on purpose after one of their friends did by accident. The motivation is the usual: "babies are cute! our babies can play together! babies are beautiful and certainly don't poop and throw up on everything! Gloucester (that's pronounced glow-ster for all the Russian and Canadian readers out there,) is utopia and we can just stay here and be moms and be happy forever!"

There are a few results of this--one, the media freaks out. In small towns, the media is a horrifying, horrifying thing. Because I live in one, one where a few newsworthy things have happened in the past few years, I have seen this firsthand--things get blown out of proportion. People are hurt because everybody knows everybody else, and even though that kid did something wrong, he's your librarian's son and the strangers on the news just can't talk about that. Rumors get spread. People get run out of town because of small crimes that didn't necessarily happen. It's rough stuff.

In this movie, once Time gets a hold of the story that there is a pact, every media team in Massachusetts goes to Gloucester to figure out what is going on and generally just be gossip-column story hungry. The battle between the townsfolk and the media gets more and more heated, to the point where the main pregnant girls father and boyfriend actually get into a physical fight with a news anchor and his crew. The entire town ends up in conflict over these girls, with the mayor blaming the principal, the abstinence committee turning against their president, the families of the fathers turning against the families of the mothers. The media becomes a grotesque monster (which they could have showed more artistically, but I get what they're going for,) with a voice from one mob attacking the pregnant girls yelling "can I at least get footage of her stomach?" and the girl in question following it by saying, "Now I know what it feels like to be Jamie Lynn Spears!"

Wooaahh. It's at that point, I think, that it really hits home that the movie is not only about how the media can feed off other people's misery, but how we feed off it in turn. Really, the whole reason that the girls are so eager to be pregnant is, besides peer pressure, the depiction of motherhood and babies in the media and in our cultural ideal. The conflict between the main girl and her boyfriend centers around the fact that he wants to marry her, but in California, after they go to college, and all she wants is to stay in Glowster and marry him now and have kids, and be a stay at home mom forever and be happy, which is a slightly hyperbolic but also true reflection of the sort of expectation that there is of what it means to be happy--not career, not adventure, but motherhood and love.

Not to mention the way teen pregnancy is normally depicted in the media--I'm looking at you 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom, Secret Life of the American Teenager, and even Juno. And Twlight. Getting married at eighteen doesn't make getting pregnant at eighteen not subject to the normal issues of teen pregnancy. And Bristol Palin and Jamie Lynn Spears. A big issue presented in the film is that the girls don't know what is going to, realistically, happen to the once they have the babies--they don't know how much going through labor sucks, and are very surprised when the first girl to give birth does so to a premature baby the size of a newborn Panda and gets violently injured in the process, and then has implied post partum depression. The main girls' boyfriend leaves her because she's crazy and intentionally got pregnant and ruined his life. All the babies, in the off-screen future, probably have fetal alcohol syndrome because all the girls went to a crazy party and got extremely drunk. (So much more realistic than Secret Life! Yay Lifetime!)
 There is no "oo dressing up in matching outfits!"

They didn't do a terribly fantastic job wrapping up the movie, just like I'm not doing a terribly fantastic job wrapping up this nonsense blog post. The moral ends up being that teen pregnancy is complicated and personal and there's no one right way to deal with it, and all options are viable. (There are no abortions, but it's implied that they're acceptable early on.) Unfortunately, cool journalist from the city basically says, "I have learned that teen pregnancy is complicated and there's no one right way to deal with it," so even though I think the moral is a good one, they're still pushing it on us pretty hard and not veiling it in any way.

Even though I liked this movie, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone, unless you're particularly interested in studying how the media deals with small-town scandals and teen pregnancy. Or you're really into Lifetime movies, in which case you've probably all ready seen this. It's a watchable film, and there's a lot more going on than I expected--a lot of latent content. But that doesn't mean you should run to onDemand right now and watch it.

Oh, and apparently today is the ...38th (?) anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. Yay babies!

I promise soon I'll write a real review of a real movie. American Psycho or Black Swan. It'll be fun stuff. I promise.

  

Moar babies, chick flicks, and cannibalism

I am a bad, bad child. The very last thing in the world I should be doing right now is blogging. I have a paper to write for Friday, scales to practice for tomorrow, laundry to do, and on top of everything my wrists have been bothering me so much that I haven't been able to type for two days.

But there is much to discuss. We make sacrifices.

I just finished watching Grace, a movie that came out a little while ago (2009,) when I frequented bloodydisgusting.com, and there was quite a bit of hype in the horror community about it, if I remember correctly. It's been in my instant queue for a long time, but I just got up the courage to watch it today.

I highly, highly recommend this movie. Unless you are a male. Or know any males. Or have a baby. Or know anyone that has a baby or lost a baby or you were a baby yourself once.

Of course, that sounds like I don't watch anyone to watch this movie, I suppose, but that isn't what I mean. It really is a brilliant film, but it is a chick flick. An extreme chick flick. If you're driving on the road of chick flicks, drive past The Notebook and When Harry Met Sally, take a left at The Devil Wears Prada and then drive for a long time, past Ms. 45 and I Spit on your Grave, then maybe you would get to this movie.

I say "chick flick," meaning that this movie literally is almost entirely made up of females, and there is a lot of imagery in it that men, I'm sorry, are just not strong enough to handle. A lot of women probably aren't, either. There's a lot of menstrual symbolism, and a lot of very very nonsexy images of breasts, and a looot of babies.

The feminist message is very strong in this film, with a mother going to every extent to save her child. Even though the baby supposedly dies in utero at eight months, Madison, the heroine protagonist main character insists on carrying it full term and delivering it naturally. Luckily, the baby comes back to life when it is born (but it's dead for a long time, which is horrific and sad,) but isn't a normal baby--it has a thirst for human blood.

This baby wants some meat

Best. Baby. Ever.

The main themes in this movie are pretty intense, and pretty obvious. Madison, like I said, goes to extreme extents to keep her child well. Equally strong is the theme of white science vs. black magic, with white science being the masculine and black magic the feminine.

Carol Clover, one of my very favorite film theorists/professors of comparative Scandanavian literature (?) who wrote one of my favorite books ever, talks about this a lot. It's a very common or even unavoidable theme in possession films, and this movie borrows a lot from possession films. The influence of Rosemary's Baby is particularly evident, (as it should be in any movie with a demon infant,) particularly in the scenes where Madison decides its time to go buy some raw meat, and in the opening scene, where her husband makes passionate love to her while she just kinda lays there and stares at the ceiling.

Black magic, in possesion films, represents the "spiritual," earthy-crunchy superstitious voodoo priest, native American shaman, or, in this case, midwife that is the essence of all things feminine and natural, and is often on the side of the wife. Take, for instance, Poltergiest II, which I haven't seen but Carol Clover told me about. Or, if I'm remembering correctly, The Exorcist, where there is conflict between doctor and priest. Another one: The Serpent and the Rainbow. The closest example to my mind right now is actually from way way back, in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors--when the main character's wife thinks he is crazy, she and her sister bring in Dr. Pinch, a crazy exorcist, to rid him of the spirits. The black magic team is often represented by a team of people against one man, the man of white science.

This movie, like Rosemary's baby, is a little different, and I really like that. We don't know in the end if we should be spiritual yoga vegans or high-class doctors.

Madison's veganism is heavily criticized, both by her husband, her mother in law, and the family doctor--the characters that represent white science. Spoiler alert--all of these characters die. We do get the feeling that Black Magic wins out here, because it is the midwife, Patricia, who ends up saving the day for the most part. However, even at the end of the movie it is implied that the reason the baby needs blood is that Madison's breastmilk is not sufficient due to the lack of meat.

"Black Magic" is also sort of played down here, or at least to be a good thing, besides the ambiguity of Madison's veganism. Patricia the midwife is made out to be very, very smart and down-to-earth, and suggests many times that Madison go to the hospital. Upsetting images of animal slaughter are played on the TV in the background of the kitchen (a little forced...) and much of the background music can only be described as if Enya worked with Bernard Herman or Wes Craven. Also, the fact that every representative and 2/3 of the males in the movie (there are three males in the movie,) die is a pretty strong indicator that women win. There's quite a bit of implied lesbianism too, but we shan't get into that this evening.

Here's the catch though, you guys--prepare to have your mind blown. I just found out that this movie was written and directed by a dude. A MAN. Whaat? I am so impressed with this guy. His name is Paul Solet, and his IMDB biography says that he majored in film and psychology at Emerson (<3!) and then got his masters in screenwriting. Then! Worked on some movies with his menor Eli Roth!! (<3<3swoon!!). This guy is either gay or has a seriously seriously strong stomach. Some of the images in this film are really really brutal, with a lot of bleeding from the breasts, and I honestly didn't think a guy would be able to handle it let alone direct it.

I'm scanning his bio more, and my point is proven. Look at this: "Since its (Grace's)premiere at Sundance 2009, where two men in the audience passed out from the intensity of the film..." 


Obviously this guys amazing, then, if he, as a man, could create feminine images so horrifying as to bring men to faint. It sort of goes back to Steven King and Carrie, (the book,) which really makes you wonder how a guy can put out a piece of literature that is so incredibly...well, girly. And girly in the sense that it's so girly girls probably can't stand to read or watch it. I was also thinking about this whole situation in light of American Psycho, (which I watched at 12:00 Monday morning--easily one of my top ten favorites.) With that movie, it's reversed--though a man wrote the book it was based off, two women directed it, which sort of nullifies all of those cries that it's one of the most misogynist movies of the last decade, in it's parody of men. However, Grace and Carrie (all right boys, good job on the stories but get some more creative titles pleaase,) were created by men but were not at all parodying women, but celebrating them, perhaps a bit in fear and respect of their awesome power to have babies and bleed all over stuff. 
Most slasher movies, though considered masculine and misogynist, are very feminist indeed, probably due to the rise of feminism that went along with the rise of film and later, horror. I'm going to start rambling very soon, so I'm cutting myself off on this topic for now. Go read Men, Women, and Chainsaws.

In closing, I'd like to share with you this article that I found the other day (on somebody else's blog--. It's very disturbing, but brings up some interesting questions. I think about cannibalism a lot, and obviously this movie deals with some sort of innate cannibalism that this baby girl has. So, with that--Is cannibalism innate?

I found that on a blog called "And Now The Screaming Starts."  No promises on the up there.

Ohwait.
Real conclusion to a movie review.

I loved this movie. The cinematography is artistic and amazing, (which I didn't get into,) the imagery is disturbing and powerful, the plot is fast-moving and suspenseful, the themes presented are thought provoking, I'm going to marry Paul Solet if he isn't gay.

Good movie. Netflix it up if you aren't too scared of bleeding girl parts and zombie babies.

Merry Christmas...

Babies.
For the last three weeks, this has been the topic of probably forty percent of all conversations. We talked about parenting during Frankenstein in English class, my ecology teacher is pregnant so everything in that class is about babies, we're learning developmental psychology in AP Psychology so that's all about infants, one of the documentaries we looked at in film studies was about gender in babies, a friend of a friend of a friend is pregnant so that friend has been talking about babies quite a bit, the human relations kids are carrying these little robot babies around, every sitcom i watch is about pregnancy somehow, and every night i take a pill to prevent the agony that comes from the workings of my body that someday could allow me to have a baby, god forbid.
So it's only appropriate that this movie i just watched was baby themed too.
Regardless of that, this is one of the best and most underrated slasher movies i have ever seen.

Black Christmas was released in 1974. Woah. I don't know if you understand what that means. While Halloween is credited as being the first "slasher," this one definitely deserves that title.
Don't get be wrong, i'm not hating on John Carpenter, I love Halloween, and it makes sense that it often gets credited with being the father of slasher movies, even down to it being the literal son of the unarguable grandfather of slasher movies, Psycho, the former having its main actress as the daughter of the latter's main actress. But this movie, Black Christmas, is much more related to the slasher movie as we think of it today, it came first, and it's...brilliant. Everybody should watch this movie, including non genre fans.

So the plot focuses on a group of sorority sisters and their brother fraternity (postmodernism ftw?), around christmas time, and they're getting all these weird phone calls from this guy who talks about all these weird, sexually perverted things. Nothing much going on, it's a sorority, sorority stuff happens. Most of the girls leave for Christmas vacation, and one of them gets killed by a totally unseen person.
To be honest, it wasn't until this point, (approx. ten minutes in) that i started paying attention, because this kill actually made me jump. I started watching this film as some festive background to my knitting and dress designing, but i quickly realized that it deserved a more thorough viewing.

Soon enough, we find out that survivor girl is British pregnant, the insanity of which i cannot even express. Keep in mind that there really hadn't been any formula slashers before this one, and besides this little problem, this movie kinda follows the formula (therefore setting it,) to a T. Even more insane than her being pregnant, she wants to get an abortion and doesn't want to marry the father. Sins on top of sins on top of sins! This girl is just full of sins and she's foreign! Kill her right away!

It becomes pretty clear pretty fast, however, that she's our main girl, and the movie, instead of focusing on the group or the killer like (i think) previous films had done, focuses mainly on her. The conflict becomes juxtaposed between the small town where they live looking for the first girl that died and the sorority dealing with the creepy phone calls, and Jess (survivorbritishgirl) negotiating her pregnancy with her angsty pianist boyfriend. As the latter conflict progresses, the former conflict gets closer and closer to it--the calls start seeming to come from/represent Jess's soon to be aborted fetus. And it's amazing. The whole movie has this outer conflict--the town looking for the first girl and trying to help a mother find her thirteen year old daughter, who is missing,--and the inner conflict, with Jess dealing with her potential motherhood/murder. It's just brilliant. The theme of parenthood and children run through the whole thing (am i crazy? have i just been reading too much Mary Shelley and learning too much about neonatal development?) There's this one really significant scene right when we're about to get to the battle where all these little children come caroling and Jess just looks at them all motherly and you can see the little hormones running around in her brain like "babies! look how nice they are!"
A really interesting thing is the babylike nature of the killer, and the killer in general. Mainly, the fact that we know nothing about him. We don't even ever see his face: just his hands and his eye. I suppose, in retrospect, that this is because (SPOILERS!) we're led to believe that Jess's boyfriend is the killer, which was a weirder part of the film.
When the killer (Billy/Agnes,) calls on the phone and when we hear him talk, it seems that he's got a bit of a Bates syndrome thing going on: He seems to speak for himself (who is a very childlike, innocent thing,) and for his mother, (more of a Grendel's mama deal,) who is the perverted violent killer, perhaps. It's never made very clear, but it's very creepy. This is all we see of him:

I paused this shot and just stared at it for probably a minute and a half.

Also, he makes the calls from the house mother's phone, which is pretty significant symbolism, if you ask me.
The movie has a lot of great symbolism, especially in the whole phallic weapon department, which is only appropriate considering it is a slasher movie. When promiscuous horrible drunk girl gets killed, it is in bed amongst flying blankets and hands reaching up and screaming and the like, and I'm pretty sure we're supposed to think that church lady, who is outside with her aforementioned choir of caroling children, thinks that someone is having sex in the house and therefore leads her children away hurriedly. We know that the fight is about to start when survivorgirl looks over and very significantly sees a nice stick like fire poker deal, which even gets its very own super close up.

Freud is so happy right now.

She then goes on to kill who she thinks is the killer, her boyfriend, the father of her baby, with the penis  firepoker. OHMYGOD. Did they mean to have this much symbolism? Normally i would say no, but i find myself having a lot of faith in this movie. And it's just to good to pass up. She kills her boyfriend, who "stabbed" her with his "firepoker," if you will, and got her pregnant, and who questioned her choice to get an abortion, the combination of which seems to be causing this whole thing. Brilliant. Amazing. Slasher Perfection.

So the big question now is, why isn't this the movie all of us slasher devotees worship instead of Halloween? Why has this movie been thrown into the chest of weird low budget movies based on holidays instead of given the love and praise it deserves? And why on earth do we let foreign pregnant sin girl live?

Well, really, it can be argued that we don't let foreign pregnant sin girl live, because this movie wasn't very well received and doesn't have the legacy it deserves. This movie really sets the standard for that whole representing the time thing that maybe will make me a lot of money in book form some day, considering this whole nonsense about abortion happened at the Vatican a month before the films USA release, and that whole ERA thing that was going on in the seventies. So clearly, abortion and a woman's right to choose, or to kill their boyfriend with phallic symbols, was on the public brain when this movie came out. However, they made the fatal (haha,) mistake of not punishing these things. I'd say that by '74 we were on a downhill (sorry guys, politics,) slope to the new right of the 80's and sledding quickly away from that whole...thing that was the 60's. Four years later, Halloween's virginal Jamie Lee Curtis, who fears men and sex but adores children, made forty seven million dollars and our dear Jess here only made four million. If Jess had been killed, and maybe boring, pre victim Claire had survived instead, maybe the movie would have the legacy it deserves.
It probably didn't help either that the film is Christmas theme and was released on December 20th, right when people are finishing up their holiday shopping. I think this is most of why, straight up marketing wise, Halloween was so much more successful. Around the end of October you want to be scared, you want to go with your friends to the movies and vicariously be stabbed/stab, you want to think that every door that opens is going to lead to your worst nightmare. Even teenagers, though, feel a little less like that around this time of year, (unless they're me, apparently,) and even if they do still want to go to the movies and be horrified, there are family events and stuff to go to, and there's just no way your parents are going to let you skip out on decorating the tree with aunt Margie to go see that new gory trash at the cinema.
That's the other thing--with this and Halloween being the parents of slasherdom, why has it, even from the very beginning, had such a bad reputation for being gory and sex-filled? Slut-girl in this movie has a lot of weird scenes talking about sex, but there's no nudity and the gore is very, very minimal. Look, it's all wrapped up in plastic and clean....

It's really not that bad at all. The only reason i wouldn't recommend this to anyone, specifically non genre fans, is because if anything it's a bit slow. It's so clearly dealing with important issues though, and not just being a sex and gore fest. I know standards were different in 1974, but seriously. Less than a bottle of ketchup used for this film. Like Psycho, it is high quality in that all of the violence is implied, we don't see it happen. It's a bit disappointing at times, especially in that Jess killing her boyfriend is represented only by a scream, and then a shot of her with his dead body across her lap. Very simple, very smart.
Also, the cinematography is brilliant and highly underrated. Look at this.

Oh my god. Oh. My. God. I died. This is so beautiful. What is happening? Why is there a series of small square screens with blue backlighting in the basement of the sorority house?
I don't care at all. I want to paint my wall with a mural of this shot, it's so amazing.
The ending is also just...pure film happiness. Film magicalness. One of my favorite things ever is keeping the camera in the same place while action goes on basically without noticing it--the shot is static, and people come and go as the please, and you hear what they're doing and therefore know what you need to know. The camera then pans around to all the dead bodies, and we hear that the killers still alive, and the credits happen over a long, high angle shot of the house with the phone ringing and getting progressively louder until it ends.
Film gobledeegook, i know, but...magic. Magic magic magic. It made me so happy.

Here's more film gobledeegook: listen to this symbolism i just noticed. If Halloween, focusing on feminine themes but also masculine ones with the doctor and Micheal Myers, is the father of slasher films, then this film, with it's strong focus on a female lead and a gender ambiguous killer and maternal themes, is the MOTHER of slasher films. With that in mind! The fact that it was not well received says some serious things about how slasher audiences and filmmakers think they look at motherhood.

Woah guys. Woah. That is something to think about while you eat your Christmas pie.
If you're weird, like me, and think about gender in horror while at family gatherings.

Happy Holidays, all :)

When the divorce rate for our generation goes up, we know who to blame...

Twilight. Overall, a pretty unimpressive film, but as we all know, it has started the biggest teen-pop culture sensation since Harry Potter, and, according to my bff IMDB, was the second most popular film in 2008, next to The Dark Knight. Seriously, guys? Seriously, females of my generation? Dark Knight is probably going to be considered in ten years to be one of the best movies ever made, and you already can't mention Twilight without every male or cultured female in the room either groaning or laughing at you.
But no need to get into that. Along with a lot of angry ranting that went through my head (and came out of my mouth, I'm sure, much to the chagrin of my best friend,) during this movie, and the added hilarity of the rifftrax we played along with it, (http://www.rifftrax.com/), I came up with three questions that I needed to find some answers to-1,Why did we like this? 2, Why do people still like this so much? And 3, I wonder how many relationships this movie has corrupted?
So when Twilight came out, my very best friend read it, and fell in love with it. It wasn't popular yet, and she, being very dark, fell in love with the atmosphere, and could relate to Bella living in an excruciatingly small town. I read it to, of course, and didn't mind it so much myself.
Now you must understand, my friend and I are not your typical everyday vampire fangirls, nor were we then. We were the outcasts at our school, we intentionally avoided every trend we could. And that is the girl that Bella is really meant to relate to. She cares more about school than she does her appearance or the opposite gender (well..), she isn't athletic, her family is a little off. Her character, and the whole book, really play to a trend that was very popular at the time that I like to call pop-emo. I think (or like to think) that this has been sort of displaced by the indie thing that's happening right now, but when Twilight started, when I was in about seventh grade, this "emo" thing was very popular. And if any of you four or five people reading this are very sensitive about this sort of thing, I don't mean really emo. There's emo, then there's "emo." There's The Cure, and then there's All American Rejects. There're nose piercings, then there are little rubber bracelets with skulls on them. There's Sylvia Plath, and then there's twilight. It was definitely the book of this softcore cultural movement, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't at least a little bit invested in that movement myself, at the time. It's angsty, it covers most of the life questions that thirteen year old girls have thought about, the atmosphere is dark.
And quite frankly, it's just a fun book to read. I wouldn't be the first one to say that the reason Bella is so painfully boring is because the less personality she has, the easier it is for middle school girls to cut and paste themselves into her character and be swept up in the unlikely romance. And the romance really is what makes the book, or more specifically, the fact that the romance is happening in Forks. I live in a place not unlike Forks, in a state not unlike Washington, and though I don't really want a vampire to be stalking me, shoot, at least it'd be something interesting to spend my time paying attention to.
I think it's fair to say nowadays that the oh-so-cute pop-emo movement has pretty much left the mainstream and a good chunk of the girls who are so obsessed with Edward Cullen are not the social outcasts of their school and cannot relate to Bella's trouble fitting in quite so much. Quite frankly, to be a proper Twilight fangirl, you have to have a lot of pep, and you would not be able to fit all the gloom that is necessary to really relate to Bella, the gloomiest gloomster in the gloomiest town in the continental US. So what's the appeal now?
Sexual harrasment, guys. That is the appeal. I'm only sort of kidding. Edward and Jacob are the reasons girls watch these movies now--they are so, very very invested in themselves--i mean Bella making her choice.
First of all, Team Jacob, you need to stop. Bella ends up with Edward. Jacob ends up with Bella's newborn daughter. You're fighting a loosing battle. That being said, I'm not going to really get into the Jacob thing, because he has less than ten minutes of screen time in Twilight, and i've opted not to watch the rest of the saga.
So after some serious discussion last night, my friend and i determined why Eddie is so attractive. And they aren't bad reasons to be attracted to someone--he's smart, he's unique compared to the other guys in Forks, he's musical, he has an old fashioned sense of chivalry and romance, his family loves and welcomes Bella and treats her like she belongs. And I'm not gonna lie, those are some of the things that make my very stereotypical high school relationship nice. My boyfriend threatens to beat up someone who threatened me somehow? Swoon! His family is incredibly sweet? How perfect! He doesn't act like the other guys at school? How refreshing! He's a homicidal maniac who likes to spend time with me because I smell like his favorite meal? Ama-wait. Here's where the problem is, people. Edward uses his good qualities to hide the fact that he's a horrible womanizing freak. Never have i felt less good about being female than after watching this film. Bella is supposedly a tough chick--and she totally is, until she moves to forks. It's like small towns secrete some sort of sexist ooze. Bella grew up with no men in the house, taking care of her mother, being an individual at school, and studying literature. As soon as she gets to forks, she's cooking and cleaning for her father, and as soon as she meets Edward, she's constantly being taken care of like some helpless cripple. Edward is so superior to her in his male-ness that he actually carries her around most of the time instead of letting her walk. He watches her sleep--and that's ok, because he's just being protective. The movie doesn't even try to hide this, like, at all--at one point, they are trying to run away from something, and instead of being rational and letting her get in the car to save time, he opens her door for her, pretty much picks her up and places her in the car, and then actually starts to buckle her seat belt for her. Seriously?
And unfortunately, i cannot answer question number three, but i can only guess it's a lot. Twilight teaches us that our high school sweethearts will be our significant others for the rest of our lives, and we should act as if our happiness forever depends on the success of that relationship. It teaches us that we only can ever have one real relationship--bella and edward get married at eighteen and they are immortal, werewolves imprint on someone and are with them forever, Bella's dad can't have another relationship because he loved her mom, etc. It teaches us girls that overprotective, chauvinistic men who are also aggressive, controlling, and violent make the best boyfriends--can you say abusive relationship? And it shows us that when we are really in love with someone, when they leave, for whatever reason, the most logical reaction is to give up on life and go into a deep, nearly irreversible depression and do life-threatening things all the time. I've seen it happen, guys. Don't let your relationship be...bellafied. Nothing good will come of it.

Legally Blonde+I Know What You Did Last Summer=...

The House on Sorority Row! It's been too, too long since I've watched a good old fashioned slasher, and it makes me feel so good to do so again. So I decided to write a little rant about it.
First of all, lets define "good old fashioned slasher." I'm kind of a stickler for the rules on this one. And the rules are, as I've observed, are these:

1. Teenagers: The "victims" in a good, true, old fashioned slasher, are teenagers, and they deserve whatever they get because they drink, do drugs, have sex, or, in a few special cases, kill old people. We'll be discussing this tonight.
2. Survivorgirl: This is also referred to as "the last girl." There is always one girl, who either is reluctant to or completely avoids doing all the other bad teenager things her pals are doing. You may find yourself wondering, "why is this nice, smart girl who's probably valedictorian of the class hanging out with all these deadbeat potheads?" She, as the name implies, survives, and is the often the special interest of the killer (ie, Prom Night, Halloween.) Some newer movies like to play fast and loose with the rules here and have a boy and a girl survive (Nightmare on Elm Street 2010, House of Wax 2005, etc)
3. Killer: The killers in good old fashioned slasher movies do not use guns. Traditionally, we do not see him until the end of the film. They are driven by some sort of motive, normally of a vengeful variety. 
4. Ahab: This one doesn't always happen, but usually in slashers you see one important adult who explains the killer (often a doctor,) and who represents goodness and safety for the teens. Usually he comes too late to help much. 
5. Plot: The plot goes like this: Teenagers do stupid things. Mysterious stuff happens. Teenagers ignore it and continue to do stupid things. People start disappearing. Teenagers stop ignoring it. Everyone dies. Ahab arrives too late. Survivorgirl bests killer, with some help from Ahab. Movie sets up for sequel. 

Now that we've done that! We can get on with the review.

This movie came out in 1983, well into the slasher movie epidemic. So of course, it's pretty much whats to be expected. Which i loved. The cast of b-list actors (two of the seven sorority sisters are now prominent enough to have pictures on IMDB--nobody else in this film does) added a bit of extra cheese to the film, especially the lead actress, who looks like a mixture of Helen Hunt and Kirsten Stewart...

Needless to say, I was surprised when her blind date didn't try to suck her blood.

The movie begins with a nice flashback of a woman going through some seriously strenuous labor, and it is implied that she miscarries. (spoilers: she doesn't.) Then we quickly get to some good old sorority fun. Not any bouncy wet tee-shirt pillow fights like i was expecting, but instead a nice eighties version of the opening scene from Legally Blonde. Which was hilarious. Long story short, the girls are staying at their sorority house for a few extra days to have their crazy graduation party, much to the dismay of their elderly house mother, who is (gasp!) the woman from scene one. Extra-snob girl gets upset because elderly house mother tears a hole in her waterbed, so the sorority kills her. By accident. Then, one by one, the sisters get killed off mysteriously by a force with the SAME WEAPON that the elderly person they killed carried.

Wait, wrong movie. 

This makes it even easier for us to route for the killer. Yeah, i know they didn't want to kill the old woman, and they didn't mean to dump her in the pool when she was actually still alive, but honestly, they haven't even starting drinking yet. Make some judgement calls. I don't even have any sympathy for survivorgirl here, she so easily could have called the police and just opted out of it. Usually slasher movies are pretty subtle about the teenagers being punished--mainstream culture doesn't want to be too in their face about saying that drinking and having sex will get you killed. But its pretty much safe to assume that the viewers won't get contradictory with this message. Don't kill old people, kids. Its bad, you'll have a lot to clean up, and their ghosts will probably come back from the dead and stab you with weirdly weapon like old people stuff. 

     Luckily, the film does have a plot twist at the end, (though not one I had too much trouble predicting.) The doctor that delivered the house mothers baby comes back, in true Ahab style, and him and Bell-i mean survivorgirl figure out that all the other sisters have died, and are not being killed by old lady house mother, but the allegedly miscarried son, who was horribly disfigured and lived in his mothers attic for the past twenty two years. 

So over all pretty white bread and ketchup movie. My favorite part was definitely some of the especially gruesome death scenes.

This made me so happy

And some pretty beautiful clown imagery, which connected very nicely back to the house mother's obsession with her (unborn?) child and ended up doing some serious damage at the end of the film.

When you see the jack in the box, it means you're about to die.

But the thing i really want to rant about is this: the killer. Because Eric (house mother's son) was born as part of some sort of in-vitro fertilization experiment gone wrong, he was born with a horrible disfigurement that makes him look like every other disfigured serial killer before him. which made me realize: society sucks. Theoretically, we depict in films that are supposed to be scary things that supposedly scare us, and, theoretically, we fear what we don't know. So i guess it makes sense that a lot of movies depict children born with weird disfigurements (note: in slasher movies, "disfigurements" often stands for "downs syndrome," but people like to pretend it doesn't) because at the time, and still, we don't really understand things like that and every mother fears that her child will be born that way. And often they act the way they do because they were bullied or mistreated as children. But seriously? This depiction of them isn't really helping their rep, guys. "Hey, you better be nice to people with cognitive disorders and facial disfigurements, they're people just like us, and if you aren't nice to them, a screw will come loose and they'll grow up to kill your children in horribly heartless ways." Being disfigured puts our killer in league with some of the best, including Jason and Leatherface, and less famously, Victor from House of Wax (2005? Chad Micheal Murray and Paris Hilton? Anyone?) Often the killer is upset because his mother was murdered, which gets into the much less offensive themes of killer as victim and the devotion a mother has for her son being repaid posthumously, which is probably a more overlying theme. But we form opinions based on what we see being depicted in the media, no matter how subtle--so just make sure that when you watch this movie, you keep in mind that people with birth defects do not usually grow up to kill teenagers.

Even if those teenagers really deserve it.