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.

From the past

I have just reached a goal I have been (occasionally) striving for since I started this blog!
Finally, I have managed to hack into my old myspace page and find the very first pieces of writing I did on horror movies. My birthday is coming up, so it seems a good time for reflecting--shall we take a look?

February 27, 2007--while watching house of wax

scarry mooviee!!

Current mood:scared

  (look at  how hilarious these smiley faces are!!)

scary movies. quite an interesting topic, no? some people must enjoy being scared out of their minds, and believe me, i like to be a little bit frihgtened (woo spelling!) as much as the next guy or girl, but eriously (spelling is fun!). come on. i like scary movies that are only scary while your watching it. like House of Wax. I've watched that at least three times and am no more afraid of things than i ever was before, except of course huge mansions made completely of wax and wax faced people with really sharp swords and creepy mechanics. the only way anything like that could happen to me is if i went to a small mechanical town on a camping trip and was stupid enough to take advice from a creepy mechanic.(it took me a minute to figure out what mechanical town meant. Everyone in the town in that movie is a robot.) plus, the town was burnt down at the end of the movie, so i pretty much need not worry about that ever happening to me. but some movies, like when a stranger calls and others liek (hooray spelling!) that, leave the ending wide open. it is perfectly possible that a creepy stalker could come and terrorize me and kill all my friends when i was babysitting at a large mansion.or this one im watching right now, The Hills have Eyes. now im going to be petrified of drivnig through the desert and accidnetly trapping myself in an atomic testing zone. i mean. i could just put on my tinkerbad (tinkerbad was a character i made for myself to channel all my socially inappropriate urges, like watching slasher movies and being devious and...talking to boys, perhaps?) face and sit numbly through the whole thing (ok, so tinkerbad isnt completely numb, but you get it,)(what. what. what.) but afterwards i would still be scared of atomic testing zones...not like i wasnt in the first place. but moreso.

"didnt she die?"

"oh yeah! she got the pole stuck through her head.!"

"but what about the other guy, is he dead?"

"sort of..."

(that's a conversation that my brother and I had while watching House of Wax, the first horror movie I really saw.) 

I sort of agree with myself in the past, I suppose, about a lot of this. The movies that are really situational--House of Wax--are much less scary in the long term than those that can happen to anyone--that is, of course, the brilliance of teen slasher films. Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance, could easily happen to me--I've got a boyfriend, i have friends, my parents leave town sometimes, our elementary school janitor was a child molester (?). But Burnt Offerings, which I'm about to watch, is about fear in a very specific situation. I constantly fear (in a non-serious, analytical way,) that when I'm with my friends we'll end up in a slasher movie, but I don't really think about the spirit of a vacation house that I stay in with my family driving me crazy. 

So those were my first ever thoughts on scary movies that I felt were worth sharing. I wish my spelling was better--what was that? I totally one the in-class spelling bee in eighth grade too, what is up with that nonsense? 

Here's the second one, an hour and a half later that day--much less articulate, much less true

HOW TO SURVIVE A SCARY MOVIE

HA! This is fun! pshycology of scary movies.

(yes! go little me! even though you can't spell psychology this is true! if only you knew then that this realization would be such a defining moment in your life, maybe you would have spelled it correctly.)

HOW TO SURVIVE A SCARY MOVIE

gotta say, I am proud of myself for intuiting the formulaic nature of slasher movies after watching...one of them...)

1, at the beginnign (spelins are phun) of the movie, dont be cool. be lame. be super jerky and you'll probably survive. (Obviously this isn't true. I was basing it off of Chad Micheal Murray's character in House of Wax, who was kind of a loser and survived, and this character in The Hills Have Eyes who wasn't really a jerk, but smoked cigarretes, and also survived because of his action movie hero attributes, if I remember correctly. At the time I was very misguided and though that Jarad Padalecki was cuter and a nicer guy than Chad Micheal Murray. Cool guys do usually get killed though. )

2. little cute kids usualy live. if your a cute little kid, your in luck. the scary movie industry has a soft spot for you. (false. This is true in Hills, but not really in any other movies I can think of off the top of my head. The way movies tend to deal with children is to make them as creepy as possible. I haven't seen a lot of family horror though, so I could be wrong. Poltergeist is in my instant queue. Also, this is hilarious, because I was a cute little kid when i wrote this. 

On second though, maybe that's really disturbing.)

3. keep your shirt on. it sounds weird, but its true. if ever a mutated villain is going to come and chase you to who knows where, it will be when your wearing the least amout of clothes possible with still being in your rating zone. the best way to avoid this is to wear clothes at all times, especially if you happen to be tall and blonde, or Perez Hilton. (go eighth grade me!! so right!)

4.dotn fall in love. if you fall in love, the person you fall for or yourself is sure to get massacred. (I was a very cynical fourteen year old. But true. Based on both Hills and House of Wax, but it applies pretty well to some classics. Could we get into a debate here about whether or not the type of people in slasher movies have the capacity to be in love? Let's not.) 

5.if you have blood on you, dont panic. it may just mean that the people around you are bleeding, so dont worry that you will bleed to death. if your going to die, it will be very violent. (This is a big one. I applied this two years later in Getting in Trouble. It's very true.)

6.understand the misunderstood. there is usually an underhanded evil villain, but they're usually just using a misunderstood mutant to kill people for them. if you try to convince the mutant that they dont need to kill you, you might get lucky. maybe. (ok, so maybe there was only a really underanded villian in charge in House of Wax, but it is kind of a common theme. The argument could be easily made that Jason is the mutant under control of his manipulative mother--same with Norman Bates, even. So close, but not quite.)

7.it is very risky to be a damsel in distress. sometimes damsels in distress will live, sometimes not. especialy, obviously pretty onew who tend to flaunt their helplessness and need for the opposite gender will almost always die, while damsels who are just understatedly pretty who are sweet but not helpless or needing of a boyfriend in any way usually survive. (the first time i noticed survivor girls! and the first time i judged promiscuous girls!) 

8. always keep a full service cell phone handy. dont drop it, dont have a phone that has any less than 100% full service all over the universe. thats your best bet. (true stuff. only an issue in post-'95 horror, which is what I started watching. It's a mystery that I enjoyed horror after only watching post '95 stuff.)

9.watch your back, and your fingers. in a scary movie, theres almost always somebody who gets a pole stuck through their skull, and theres almsot always somebody who gets at least one finger sliced off. (correction, in House of Wax, 50% of the horror movies I've seen at this point, somebody gets a pole stuck through their skull an somebody else who gets one finger cut off, which were both really strong moments in an otherwise horrible film with few redeeming qualities. However, still a good rule. You need your skull to get through the rest of the movie, and if the killers got a pole, he's gonna use it.) 

Oh, little Krista from four years ago. What a crazy character. Whatever weird identity crisis I had freshman year interrupted my new fangirling for slashers, but by April I watched Going to Pieces and I was hooked forever. 

And now we are here. 

Also, here's a picture I found on my myspace. One year, we did this photo contest around Halloween with our severed limbs (....) where everyone got a turn with the camera and the limbs and put them in various places around my house. This was one of mine...

The caption under this on my myspace page was my abbreviation for "Don't question the madness!!!"

Remember, it was the adults' idea. It is their fault I am this way. 

I should probably thank them. 

Time-Warp Movies

Thanksgiving, 2010
First of all, this blog is slowly deteriorating into a blog not about scary movies and knitting, but about movies in general. For this, I apologize. I've been expanding my horizons.
But two, maybe three people read this blog. Do you care? I don't care. If you're not upset, I'm not upset.

So, with that!

Last night I took the plunge and watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which I missed when it originally came out in 2008.
    2008 was quite a year for movies. I wouldn't be too hard pressed to argue that it was one of the most important years for film in the past decade. It held the release of such brilliant films as The Dark Knight, Wall-E, The Changeling, Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, the Hurt Locker (The last four of which i didn't see so i'm guessing,) Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Doubt, and...Twlight? The Happening? Bolt? You Don't Mess with the Zohan? 
2008 was when i really started noticing movies, and I certainly noticed some of these, and continue to today. I suppose the summer of '08 wasn't that long ago, but it feels a bit like it was, and I wouldn't be afraid to say that it was a really important moment in modern cinema.
     Benjamin Button shares a lot of similarities with another 2008 film that I hated, Marley and Me. They're both horrifically sad, include a deliberately casted leading man who narrates every single second of the film, and, most importantly, take place over a very very long time.
      Benjamin Button, of course, is a much better film than Marley and Me, if nothing else just because it's a more serious film. Really, though, it's not just my opinion: Benjamin Button was the twentieth top-grossing film, with a significant stack of Oscar nominations, and Marley and Me placed somewhere around fifty seventh, according to IMDB.
     Still, the format is the same, and I have a problem with it. Here's an idea: Greek Theater Conventions. Unity of Place, Unity of Action, Unity of Time. I know very well that we are, quite literally, centuries away from the requirements of performance inherent to the ancient Greeks, but still, it's the beginning. If i were a director, I'd keep them in mind. These movies throw them out the window. And then watch them get run over by an eighteen wheeler full of clocks going backwards and time machines, or something.
Maybe they're doing this intentionally, like some movies might do with other conventions pretty effectively (though i can't think of any--even with subplots, even with location shooting, the characters and plots are connected somehow and there is some central "home" place.)

Continuation: Today


I suppose there are movies (which i haven't seen,) that include many different characters and plots that don't seem to connect at all, and I hear that they work pretty well. So you certainly can abandon theater conventions, but you have to do it intentionally. I'd make the case that Benjamin Button and Marley and Me are just biting off more than they can chew.

I would venture to say that one of the biggest advantages of following someone for a large part of their life/entire life would be that you'd get some serious character development, but these movies really don't do that. Movies are able to portray character through tiny details, showing not telling. In the movie about  me, for example, you don't know that i knit because somebody comes up to me and says, "hey, girl who knits!" in the hallway or whatever, you know because the movie starts with a pan of my yarn collection and then a shot of me getting ready for school or sitting at my desk feverishly blogging or, if we're being really over the top, knitting. When you have narration throughout the whole movie, it's easy to cheat your way out of this and even important. I'm thinking specifically of Benjamin Button's transition from innocent old man child to promiscuous hunk. One minute he's turning down Daisy's invitation for sex because of his morals, and the next, we get a weird montage of him bringing girl after girl home, and Brad Pitt in voice over is like, "heh heh...yeah, i might have had me more than a coupla' girls..." They're showing me this, and they're telling me this, but i still don't understand at all why it's happening and how Benjamin became such a ladies man, because we skipped all the filler stuff that was important to his character. (Obviously i do know why Benjamin is a ladies man--because he's Brad Pitt.) Same with Daisy being a dancer--we see her as a child, and then we see her as a dancer, and that's the most important thing about her character. But when I met her, she wasn't a dancer, so to me, this is a new weird phase she's going through, and when she can never dance again, i'm not that emotionally distraught. In Marley and Me, when the family moves to Florida (?), theres a party and there are all these friends, but where did they come from? Are they the parents of the kids friends? How did they make those friends? Do i care about them? Also, it feels for a long time like all that Jennifer Aniston does is miscarry babies, because that's the only even that we see.

Obviously, you couldn't possibly include all that filler information, but it's important, and when you're only covering a little bit of time in somebody's life, you can do that. You can focus on your characters and their relevant goals without the audience missing some important thing about them. Relationships can be formed in little montages, and we care about the characters because we see a lot the events in the short time that tie them together. There is certainly some potential merit to seeing a variety of events over a person's life that make up their personality, but you can't possibly see them all, and if you're advertising that I'm seeing this person's whole life, gosh darnit, i want to see all of it.
But i also don't want to watch a movie any longer than Benjamin Button was, probably.

To be fair, i need to mention that in the time between me starting this rant and finishing it, I did watch Annie Hall, and that movie did something right, I think, because I liked it a lot. I was missing some stuff about the characters sometimes, but I could deal with it, and it worked out in the end. Possibly because it was coming straight from the horses mouth--we only knew what Woody Allen knew, we didn't start the movie the minute he was born (I actually missed the first three minutes, so don't quote me on that,) and we get the events he tells us are relevant. Furthermore, everything connects some way to his relationship with Annie, and as far as we know, there's nothing else really worth knowing. Benjamin Button is an interesting dude, I want to know what his doctor says about his condition, why he wasn't in more newspapers, what the heck is going on with that clock, etc, but we mostly just get the story about Daisy with some other random events thrown in. I understand that the clock is thematic, (and brilliantly so,) and Daisy is the one telling us the story so she is the most important character, but I guess what i want is all or nothing .You're either telling a story about yourself, and your life, or you're telling a story about your relationship with another person. We get a weird mixture, and I'm not sure I'm entirely ok with it.
Annie Hall also isn't presented in any logical order, so we expect less logic from it, I suppose. It's clearly a collection of a kind of crazy persons memories, while Benjamin Button is a weird guy's memoir that we're supposed to trust in it's accuracy and that is also all in chronological order. It's too logical--it makes hyper sense--how do we know that Button knows how his birth took place? Is the film just filling in the gaps for us? Is this what Daisy is picturing as her daughter reads her the diary? He wasn't there when Daisy crashed, how does he know what happened? We're getting a first person story but it's not in first person camera at all, we're pretty much omniscient.

That's all getting much to deep, though, I suppose, and I'm not prepared to make a formalized argument for or against the mood and POV that the cinematography creates, because I wrote most of this on Thanksgiving and it has been quite a while since then. Obviously I am over thinking it a little bit or a lot in trying to pinpoint what bothered me about it, but really, I did like a lot of the things the movie did, and more than its weird use of time, its most important contributions to cinema were artistic, in makeup, costumes, editing, adept use of symbols and parallel plots, and cinematography. And there were definitely some very important and very impressive things there.

What bothered me about it may have just been Brad Pitt, because I hate him a little bit.

I decided to finish it today, because I needed to get the juices flowing to write a psychology paper in which i analyze how my personality has developed based on various events in my life so far that i have a limited amount of space to present .

Luckily i age forwards, so it shouldn't be too complicated.

Felting is Fun...? UPDATE: Felting IS fun!

I have never felted before. It's a pretty cool process--basically taking some knitted stuff (out of wool,) and washing it so the fibers all stick together and make, well, felt. It's technically called fulling, but if you google that you won't get any results because everyone calls it felting. 

I'm knitting this hat in my insatiable desire for a proper cloche, which i refuse to buy on principle or because they're all expensive or uncomfortable or something. But I'm a little scared, because this is what the hat is supposed to look like:

http://theanticraft.com/archive/samhain05/flowersonagrave.htm

And this is what the hat does look like:

Pre-felting

It's extraordinarily enormous. Felting/fulling is supposed to make things a lot smaller, and i certainly trust the Anticraft for the pattern, which I followed pretty closely. But this hat is huge. Really, really big.  It's a foot tall and has a thirty inch diameter at the brim. 

We shall see how this turns out. 

Update:

OK. Felting SUCCESSFUL. 

Felting is ridiculously fun. My favorite thing about knitting is that it's taking something very raw and simple, yarn, and doing a series of actions that seem to have no connection to each other or the goal, and creating something useful and beautiful that is completely different from what you started with. This is like that but MORE, because once you have that beautiful, useful final thing, you change it more, so you can't see the connection between the first thing and the last thing even a little bit. It's absolutely magical.

I followed this wonderful tutorial from knitty, everybody's favorite knitting e-zine, and it worked really well. I already knew the general process of felting, but I had an idea that it was probably more complicated than just throwing it in the washing machine, which it most certainly was.

A lot of tutorials said to put it in a pillowcase, which i did, to keep all the little fuzzies from getting all over the washing machine and destroying the entire plumbing system. The hat fell out of the pillow case pretty quickly, so that was unsuccessful. I definitely recommend using a zippered pillow case or pinning the top closed if you decide to do this, because getting all the lint out of the machine basin is quite difficult.

The tutorial I used said to check it every five or ten minutes, which I did, but it's probably not entirely necessary. I just fangirled over it. Look! It's so pretty!

It's still enormous in that picture, but less enormous. And as it starts felting, the yarn i used (Lamb's Pride, I believe, which has some really lovely mohair in it,) gets all fluffy and wonderful. 

So fluffy and wonderful. 

I only put it through one wash cycle, because it seemed to be a pretty reasonable size. (spoiler alert, it wasn't.)

The most difficult part about the specific tutorial I used was that it required a pretty in-depth knowledge of washing machine cycles, which I do not have. Because of this, the hardest part was the rinsing. There was this whole thing about taking it out before the spin cycle, but putting it in the rinse cycle, but not letting it be agitated in the rinse cycle. But the spin cycle comes before the rinse cycle, and you have to get all the lint out of the water before the spin cycle, but the waters really hot and full of soap and poison and you can't put your hands in it because they might burn or fall of or something. And once you do get the hat out, you're just holding this dripping wet mop of wool in your hand and standing in front of your washing machine while it does some horrifying thing, and you have no idea what to do. 

It was a very exhilarating experience. I just set it down on a plastic bag on top of my dryer until it finished the spin cycle, and then the rinse cycle didn't seem to be doing much, so i disrupted the normal cycle of my washing machine to set it to 2nd rinse, and that filled the basin up nicely so I could dunk the hat in to get all the soap out like the tutorial said. 

This is the dangerous part of felting. I was dunking the hat into the water, just like it told me to, and it was filling up with this freezing, freezing water which was getting all polluted with little fuzzies, and I was like, "Hm, I wonder what happens when the washing machine fills up"

At that point, as I was grabbing a little fuzzy off of the spinny thing in the middle, the machine decided it was as full as it wanted to be and the spinny thing started freaking out and nearly chopped my hand off. At this point, I freaked out and stared at my hat in the agitating rinse cycle, knowing full well it shouldn't be there, and waved my arms around for a while until i figured out that I could stop the machine, just as I had done at least six other times during the process. It was pretty terrifying, but I'm ok. 

The tutorial said that a lot of people didn't put it in for the final spin cycle, but I did, and nothing bad happened to it. It seemed to be dry enough after that and my wringing it out some, so i got really excited and put it on and ran upstairs to look in the mirror. However, it wasn't dry enough, so it started dripping everywhere and I had to run back downstairs to hold it over the washing machine. I put it in the dryer for two or three seconds, because it was a little bit big anyways, and then took it out, put it back on my head, and ran back upstairs to see how it looked. 

The same thing happened, but I ignored it because I really wanted to take a picture:

Much better than the picture I posted yesterday, huh? Still a bit too big though. But it's so fuzzy and beautiful

OMNOMNOM. So WONDERFUL. 

. 

After having water drip everywhere and all over me, I ran it back downstairs and put it in the dryer for a very small amount of time--two, maybe four minutes. It got smaller enough that I'm happy with it, so i tried it on one more time...

Then I decided it wasn't quite 1920's magazine enough, so i moved it around and blocked it a little bit...

And decided I was happy with that. I stuffed it with some plastic bags to hold its shape and set it to dry on a towel on top of my dryer. The tutorial says to put hats over a head shaped bowl, but I wasn't sure how my mother would feel about me comandeering a kitchen implement to help sculpt a shedding, fuzzy, wet piece of wool. Parents don't understand sometimes. 

It currently weighs about a million pounds because of the water, and I haven't figured out if i'm going to decorate it with a simple ribbon or an applique, but I love it to death. 

Knitters, if you haven't tried felting, go get some wool and try it right now. 

Sources:

Pattern courtesy of The Anticraft, Flowers on  Grave. http://theanticraft.com/archive/samhain05/flowersonagrave.htm. The Anticraft is my favorite knitting website. It's very sacreligious and a little bit inappropriate, but it's my favorite and you should go buy their books and read their e-zine. 

Tutorial Courtesy of Knitty, Felt This!. http://www.knitty.com/ISSUEwinter03/FEATfelthis.html. Knitty is my other favorite knitting website. It's super classy but also a lot of fun, and less NSFW. 

And the internet backs me up!

Have i told you about Nostalgia Critic? I love her
http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/videolinks/thedudette/nostalgia-chick/29147-nchick-dreamworks-vs-disney-dualing

And she totally just said what I was sayin', with a wonderful quote from Mel Brooks about loving what you parody. Yaaay Nostalgia Chick!

Manly Masculine Man Movies and my life, 2010

I am a blogging machine.

Look at what the New York Times just said to me:
"6. Superheroes take a break. Yes, there was “Iron Man 2,” but even that offered a respite from the glowering, pretentious action allegories that have dominated screens for most of the past decade. The battle between good and evil rages on in some quarters, but mostly in self-conscious, self-parodic form. In the strangely similar animated kiddie comedies “Despicable Me” and “Megamind” the heroes and villains are self-conscious role players, and the villains are actually nice as well as more interesting than their occasional square-jawed nemeses. This may reflect genre exhaustion (though another round of superhero blockbusters is already on the horizon), or a measure of real-world cynicism. The investigative documentaries that proliferated this year ("Inside Job," “Client 9,” “Casino Jack and “The United States of Money”) suggest that corruption and criminality exist virtually beyond the reach of justice." ((here) 


No. Absolutely not. I disagree. 


This was a year of revelations for me, mostly about gender and movies. And with that came the revelation that I need to stop avoiding superhero movies. They are campy just like slasher movies, take place in pretty cities with pretty girls, and deserve a lot more credit than I've given them in the past, which i suppose is just from neglect rather than dislike. 


Remember that I avoid modern films usually, but regardless, were i to make a list of my top ten films for this year, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World would be probably at the top of the list, and Kick ass would be on there somewhere too. 


Granted, i did see these movies with some of my very best friends on two very significant occasions. They were spots of movie brightness on some very dark days. But i went into them surrounded by warnings of, "Krista this movie is about video games, you probably won't like it," "This is a funny movie, but you won't get most of the jokes," and most ridiculous of all, "Krista, this movie is really violent, I don't know if you'll be able to handle it." 
Sigh. 
Both of these movies made me really, really happy. They were both hilarious and extremely well done, and played directly to the normal superhero film viewing audience. ( I know this because I only talk to five or six people on a regular basis, and one of them likes superhero movies like i like slasher movies.)


I know they aren't superhero movies in the traditional sense, really at all, but if you're going to put them in a genre that's the one where you put them. Comic book movies, at least. Maybe they do result from "genre exhaustion," since they're both sort of satire/deconstruct sort of films, but at least they aren't sequels or remakes or spin-offs. I suppose that these films are evidence of the "self conscious and self parodic" films that the article mentions, but I think it's an achievement for a genre to reach the point where it has a large enough fan base and an established enough personality that it can be self conscious and self parodic and still be successful. 


I suppose that this warrants a discussion on how we would define "genre exhaustion." What the article refers to I would say was the sort of ultimate point for a film genre to achieve. This may not be the case with a more general genre, for instance, action movie, or drama, but for a genre so specific with such a specific target audience: nerds. (I use the term in the most affectionate way posisble.) Recently it's seemed like superhero/comic book movies are trying to aim for a larger audience (aren't we all,) especially with the advent of technology creating a world where movies are seen just for the special effects, and comic books are, for many, obsolete. While they can no longer depend solely on a group of cult comic fans, they can rely on the fact that those people will show up to every movie at least once. Having a devoted audience like that certainly seems to help a genre get established--take slasher movies, for a totally random example. The slasher genre is built upon independent, low budget films that, while not at all applicable to a mainstream or high-film audience, were loved and relentlessly viewed by the genre fans, and for that matter, still are today. If formula slasher movies didn't make money off of those cult fans, more movies wouldn't have been made, changes wouldn't have happened, and we never would have gotten to Nightmare on Elm Street or even Silence of the Lambs. Going even further back, Psycho's success was pretty much dependent on the "cult" fans, if you will, of Alfred Hitchcock--all of the publicity was based around the fact that it was his movie. 


When a fan base gets big enough that movies can be made by a big production company and make a profit, that seems like a pretty huge deal, not a sign of genre exhaustion. There comes a saturation point with formula films, i guess, where you have to recognize that you are a formula film--and it seems like a fantastic moment to me. Wes Cravens' career success in the past twenty years is based entirely off Scream, and while maybe that means that he's no longer making movies like Nightmare on Elm Street, it means that...well, enough people get it. Enough people have seen enough films that a movie referencing them is successful in the mainstream (you may think I'm referencing the success of the Wayan and Selzer. I am not. Do not speak those dirty words here.) And, while I'm not at all an expert or even a little bit knowledgeable about superhero/comic book movies, I think it's the same situation. When you have enough (wonderful, loveable, awesome) nerds out there to understand Scott Pilgrim  or Kickass, you're pretty set. Congratulations, you're a genre. 


What i really want to talk about is how underappreciated Scott Pilgrim is. I just read quite a few articles about movies of the year, and I've looked at Academy Award Nominees: Scott Pilgrim is conspicuously absent from all of them. There's a lot of talk about how The Kids are All Right (which i haven't seen, but i love on principle,) represents our modern family structure and changing view on social acceptability, about how The Social Network works because we're all so obsessed with the internet, how Inception captures the confused, surrealistic, escapist view of entertainment right now. 
And yeah, i guess that's pretty much whats happening in 2010, but clearly none of these people spend any time looking at internet memes or in not-so-classy clubs, because they've forgotten about two very important and potentially opposite groups that are coming into the mainstream this year: nerds and hipsters. 
Maybe I'm biased, having my personality coincidently fitting parts of both stereotypes/subcultures, but i really think that in the future when you stereotype folks in 2010, or at least in the coming decades, they will be playing videogames, watching videos of lolcats, and arguing about cult film. They will be wearing plaid and fedoras and listening to Bright Eyes and The Avett Brothers and being "all ironic." 
Scott Pilgrim did not miss these subgroups. It represented them, and perfectly. No aspect of my weird little cultural underground, that lives somewhere in my boyfriends garage where D&D is played or at the Starbucks in Barnes&Noble where my best friend and i often sit judging people, was missed. My friends, this movie is our Breakfast Club. Teenagers will watch this movie thirty some odd years in the future and say, "Oh, thats what my parents were like in 2010." Or whatever we say when we watch Breakfast Club. No movie that's on all the lists really took these groups into account, as far as i know. 
Presumably, our culture is too focused on the nonsense that MTV is putting out to notice whats really going on in youth culture, or maybe I'm too focused on what isn't going on in youth culture to notice that whatever MTV is putting out is the reality of those under thirty. I'm pretty sure I'm right, though. Scott Pilgrim captured what i see as the mood of our generation perfectly, which few if any forms of mainstream pop culture had really done, as far as I can tell. So...congratulations, nerds and hipster, you're a subculture! 


Not to even get into the fact that a lot of the technical stuff Scott Pilgrim did was just insane. It's sort of concoction of aspects of videogames, comic books, movies, internet, and weird dream sequences was amazing and incredibly innovative, absolutely like nothing I've ever seen. If it influences movies as much as it should, it may signal the beginning of a hyper-realist surrealist movement or culture. The movie makes it seem like we are getting the truth, but from Scott Pilgrim's perspective--it is distorted, but exactly in the way an identity confused youth who spends much of his time in the world of video games, underground clubs, interrupted naps and the internet would imagine it to be. 


So really, there is a lot of room for a recognition, as that article claims there is, of the unhappy realities of crime fighting--the genre is acknowledging itself as fiction, which i think is a very mature thing to do. 


So! In conclusion! I think that the exclusion of Scott Pilgrim from prestigious film critic and award nominee lists is a horrible, horrible mistake, and that the film "trend reports," if you will, that I've read very much misinterpreted what the superhero movies of this year mean for the genre and the "state" of cinema and therefore, ourselves, in general. 


However, once again, I tend to look at genres backwards (from self parodic to origin, instead of the other way around,) so my knowledge of superhero films is super limited, so please disagree with me if you feel it necessary.