also I was hangin’ with a white dude who was like “well, my aunt’s lived in Paris for the last 20 years and she said it’s great, so it’s great” and I was like “it’s just so… WHITE,” to which he responded “well, YEAH, white people problems” and I laughed and said something like, you know, #WOODY ALLEN IS THE STATE. needless to say, Mr. White Dude who has a hard-on for Nader—and, hey, I really, really like Nader!—asked me “what that means” and I was like, omfg I can’t believe I have to explain this to you, I thought you loved Emma Goldman, I thought you knew better and ugh /rant
I watched it on a plane and I hated it so much it made me retroactively hate Annie Hall.
Joss did two super Joss things in The Avengers, one that I will always love, one that I don’t really like.
The first one is the one I love, in the scene where the Black Widow’s introduced. We see Scarlett Johanssen, tied to a chair, being dangled over a hole in the floor by some dudes who are about to torture her. It looks bad. Then one thug’s phone rings. It’s for her. It’s home office getting her to come in. “I’m in the middle of an interrogation,” she complains. “This idiot’s giving me everything.” The Russian bad guy is like “No, I’m not.” She gives him a look like O RLY. Then she manages to kick all their asses while still tied to a chair. It’s one of his best moves, to introduce a stock movie situation with a scared, vulnerable lady, and then flip things so it turns out she’s actually in total control and then punches a bunch of guys. (I know people don’t like ScarJo but I thought she was perfect for this and her flatness read as impassive hardness.) It’s totally the first scene of Buffy, where a blonde girl and a kind of creepy jock are sneaking into the school after hours and she seems a little scared — before she sucks out all his blood, because it’s Darla.
The other thing that is classically Joss is the shockingly killing off a likable minor character to raise the emotional stakes thing. This is a Joss favourite. I like it less because I feel like sometimes it’s dramatically called for (the death of Jenny Calendar), and sometimes he uses it like a bludgeon (the death of Fred Burkle). This time it worked okay.
Other than that, it was practically the perfect superhero movie. I liked how he managed to make a bunch of people who could not be more deeply embedded in the military-industrial complex seem like ragtag rebels.
(I will also note for movie record keeping posterity that I saw Thor and Captain America in preparation to understand the plot of this one. I liked both a lot more than I thought I would, especially Captain America. It was smart to keep the army superhero tied to WWII, otherwise I think stuff could’ve gotten really disturbing. I liked when the love interest punched that guy.)
(I will further note that I have actually missed writing up a bunch of movies that I’ve watched this year because of reasons; am probably going to have some very vague short backlog type posts coming up soon?)
Keyhole is lesser Guy Maddin; I mean, I’ll watch any Guy Maddin, I really relate to his sensibility and as a Canadian I think I am socially within three degrees of him. (Two if you count the time I met Mark McKinney.) I relate to the world in terms of old movies an embarrassing lot and I really like ghost stories. Lesser Guy Maddin means that it was still a joy to watch; even goofier than usual, if a bit less beautiful. It uses a lot more 1930s-40s pulp gangster movies than he usually uses as sources (which Jason Patric was perfect for). A lot of people were acting in a lot of different styles and registers, which always makes me think of John Waters. I mean, Isabella Rossellini and Kevin McDonald were just in the same movie. So it was hard to get swept up the way you can with his best work; I don’t think that has to be a bad thing, but it’s what I look to Maddin movies for if that makes sense.
We spent a while on the subway ride home trying to figure out what if anything were supposed to do with the Odyssey references but we couldn’t really come up with anything concrete other than the fact that there were a lot of them.
- I’m in a really Joss place right now. I’ve been watching Buffy reruns and this got me watching Angel on Netflix. I get that Joss can be annoying (valid critiques usually involving smugness + “Funny Games for fanboys”), but I find his whole brand of playful genre exercises + feelings + making ideas that are usually metaphors into the story central enough to my own aesthetics that my critical faculties are basically disarmed in the face of Joss-ness.
- But I still kind of feel like there’s something vaguely embarrassing about my Joss love. I don’t know if I’m doing some kind of commodity fetishism here or if I feel embarrassed because it’s actually great, but I do feel like I need to acknowledge that along with my love.
- The best thing about Cabin in the Woods is the way it slowly reveals its central metaphor, the horror movie as ritual sacrifice. I think it’s made pretty clear long before Sigourney Weaver (final girl extraordinaire) comes along to explain it.
- I like how the cabin-in-the-woods characters have to be drugged and manipulated into acting like the characters from a horror movie.
- The part where the girl makes out with the wolf. The part where the girl makes out with the wolf. I want to see a whole movie that felt like that.
- I like how the good/evil status of the control room staff is unclear. At first it seems like they’re really nonchalant bad guys. But then, slowly, their spectatorship starts to look really familiar, and it does become clear that they have their reasons for doing this. They need to make this sacrifice to keep the demons at bay.
- This is why it’s kind of hard to watch them die, because they’re us, really. They start out snarky, but by the end they kind of find themselves rooting for the last girl alive.
- But on the “Funny Games for fanboys” tip, for someone as historically invested in the horror genre as he is, Joss has a history of this kind of thing outside filmmaking. Remember when everyone was really mad about Captivity, a completely mediocre entry in the post-Saw ”torture porn” generic cycle? Joss wrote a blog post comparing it (based a trailer) to a video of an actual girl getting stoned to death. I can’t even. I mean, I’m glad he’s in favour of women not getting murdered for being women, but I think it’s probably important to make a distinction between a real, horrible, awful thing that happened and a made up thing that is supposed to make people uncomfortable sd its primary function. (I watched Captivity for a paper and it’s really not defensible, but there’s the symptom and there’s the disease, and while I can understand that the symptom is upsetting to people I feel like stamping out the symptom is going to fuck-all to cure the disease, but that’s just me.)
- Anyway, if Cabin in the Woods is supposed to make me feel bad for liking movie violence, it did a pretty bad job of it, what with some of the best scenes involving hilarious movie violence. (The motorcycle jumping the gorge and crashing into the forcefield and the killer unicorn.)
- I think it succeeds as a horror comedy - and in the fact that it disrupts the rules just enough that I legitimately had no idea how it was going to end.
- But I do think it could have done that and been more scary.
Realness, part 1: Dunham uses her own family, her own high school friend, her own apartment, her own video art in the movie. But it’s not an amateurish movie. There are a lot of just perfectly framed shots. In the movie, her sister calls her “desperate”, calls her work desperate for attention, mostly because she’s not wearing pants. I read that her dad wouldn’t participate in the movie, because of privacy concerns.
Realness, part 2: What really won me over was Dunham’s enactment of failed femininity. Representations of girls who don’t just “naturally” exude cuteness and sweetness and girlness are really important to me, and I love how Dunham does this. Her hair’s unbrushed, she never wears pants, she has zits. When she wears lipstick or whatever it doesn’t look perfect or natural or right still. Don’t get me wrong, I think Dunham’s super-cute IRL, but she really, in the movie, works at looking ordinary. She kind of exposes herself to you, like she did in her video art, which draws a lot of comments on Youtube about how “fat” she is. I found it surprisingly compelling to be confronted constantly by a body that looks…a lot like mine. It seems counterintuitive to want to fix the problems of the male gaze by putting more partially dressed women on film, but it was really powerful for me.
Sex in a Pipe: I can’t even find anything to say about the sex-in-a-pipe scene, but I think it’s probably really important to the overall context of the movie and I just want to remind myself when I think of the movie not to forget about it.
Vulnerability is a privilege: I know one of the critiques of Dunham is that she’s uber-privileged. Her family’s well-off, her parents are successful in the art world, it kind of seems like she should have nothing to feel bad about, or no “real” problems or whatever. But I think that all those layers of privilege probably are what allows her to be this vulnerable, in her work. Just to feel safe exposing that much.
Being Successful: I like the part where Aura’s friend Charlotte tells her that their people are assholes, their parents are assholes. Aura insists that her mom isn’t an asshole, and Charlotte replies that she must be an asshole to be as successful as she is. I feel like the movie kind of posits the successful = asshole equation. Certainly true of “he’s a big deal on youtube” guy. While this isn’t true at all in my experience, I do feel like it’s probably something Aura believes. In the last scene, when Aura’s in bed with her mom, she tells her that she doesn’t want to work a crappy job, she just wants to be successful. Maybe this is how she’s desperate.
I don’t think that anybody looks at me and says, “she looks amazing and I want to be that lady,” but I think that there’s a thing that people trying to present their own experience, there’s a little bit of “who told you you were allowed to do this and why do you think we’re interested?” phenomenon, which I completely understand, although I think that people challenge women more who want to tell their own story.
Nobody challenges why they want to watch Larry David at lunch. You know why you want to watch Larry David at lunch: Cause he’s fucking hilarious and it’s amazing to watch him at lunch. You don’t care that he’s mean to his friends and lives in a giant house, it’s just interesting, and I think that women often have to make more excuses for why they want to portray themselves. I used to always apologize, to say, I’m so sorry for bringing misogyny up, but I’m going to stop apologizing for bringing it up, because we all know it’s real.
Lena Dunham! I am really into Lena Dunham this week.
I also really liked the parts where she talked about hate-reading turning into love-reading and her hatred of pants. (I just saw Tiny Furniture and have a lot of feelings about it.)
A lot of parts of it were a bit too too on the nose. Like, she’s still stuck on her life in high school and she writes young adult novels and she’s such a jerk for feeling sorry for herself when her drinking buddy was actually, physically, scarred by high school.
But it kind of still worked, for me. Parts of it hurt to watch, a little; I’m not exactly like Mavis but I did kind of identify with the kind of awful cringey feelings of going back to the high school home you left and seeing everyone kind of happily having gotten on with life, and on the one hand you feel superior because you “got out” and you live in the big city and whatever; but on the other hand seeing your exes and your old friends all settled and happy and “normal” seeming gives you this weird kind of uncomfortable nostalgia.
Things:
The way Mavis listens to the mixtape he gave her (though it was kind of ridiculous to pretend one of those Minis would have a tape player). When his wife’s cute hobby band plays “their” song and it almost kills her but she still tries to turn it around.
The way she constantly watches bad reality shows on E!
The way she actually gets to the point where she’s quoting shit she heard a teenage girl say at Taco Bell as a seduction move.
What I loved about Young Adult is not just that it’s a story about a female fuckup, but it’s not just like a gender-reversed fuckup story. Femininity is such a big part of it. She spends half the movie slumping around with messy hair and last night’s smudged mascara and Uggs and baggy Hello Kitty t-shirts. And then she “gets ready” to see Buddy. All the scenes with her doing her makeup and getting manicures and putting on her hairpiece (to cover up the gap from her trichotillomania) are so perfect, so elegant in showing how all this femininity work is about getting her game face on. About making herself look perfect – for the occasion – so she doesn’t have to deal with how chaotic she feels.
There is a shift once she returns to Vienna, from girl Lisa to woman Lisa, that is marked by the look. Girl Lisa is constantly gazing, almost invisible. She she’s peeking in windows and hiding in staircases, and the camera really follows her eye. Her perspective is overwhelming. But woman Lisa is constantly, aggressively visible. She actually works as a model in a dress shop; it’s during this time when Stefan finally looks back. But of course he doesn’t really see her. He just sees a pretty girl who’s making it easy for him.
![Notes on Cabin in the Woods [includes spoilers]
- I’m in a really Joss place right now. I’ve been watching Buffy reruns and this got me watching Angel on Netflix. I get that Joss can be annoying (valid critiques usually involving smugness + “Funny Games for fanboys”), but I find his whole brand of playful genre exercises + feelings + making ideas that are usually metaphors into the story central enough to my own aesthetics that my critical faculties are basically disarmed in the face of Joss-ness.
- But I still kind of feel like there’s something vaguely embarrassing about my Joss love. I don’t know if I’m doing some kind of commodity fetishism here or if I feel embarrassed because it’s actually great, but I do feel like I need to acknowledge that along with my love.
- The best thing about Cabin in the Woods is the way it slowly reveals its central metaphor, the horror movie as ritual sacrifice. I think it’s made pretty clear long before Sigourney Weaver (final girl extraordinaire) comes along to explain it.
- I like how the cabin-in-the-woods characters have to be drugged and manipulated into acting like the characters from a horror movie.
- The part where the girl makes out with the wolf. The part where the girl makes out with the wolf. I want to see a whole movie that felt like that.
- I like how the good/evil status of the control room staff is unclear. At first it seems like they’re really nonchalant bad guys. But then, slowly, their spectatorship starts to look really familiar, and it does become clear that they have their reasons for doing this. They need to make this sacrifice to keep the demons at bay.
- This is why it’s kind of hard to watch them die, because they’re us, really. They start out snarky, but by the end they kind of find themselves rooting for the last girl alive.
- But on the “Funny Games for fanboys” tip, for someone as historically invested in the horror genre as he is, Joss has a history of this kind of thing outside filmmaking. Remember when everyone was really mad about Captivity, a completely mediocre entry in the post-Saw ”torture porn” generic cycle? Joss wrote a blog post comparing it (based a trailer) to a video of an actual girl getting stoned to death. I can’t even. I mean, I’m glad he’s in favour of women not getting murdered for being women, but I think it’s probably important to make a distinction between a real, horrible, awful thing that happened and a made up thing that is supposed to make people uncomfortable sd its primary function. (I watched Captivity for a paper and it’s really not defensible, but there’s the symptom and there’s the disease, and while I can understand that the symptom is upsetting to people I feel like stamping out the symptom is going to fuck-all to cure the disease, but that’s just me.)
- Anyway, if Cabin in the Woods is supposed to make me feel bad for liking movie violence, it did a pretty bad job of it, what with some of the best scenes involving hilarious movie violence. (The motorcycle jumping the gorge and crashing into the forcefield and the killer unicorn.)
- I think it succeeds as a horror comedy - and in the fact that it disrupts the rules just enough that I legitimately had no idea how it was going to end.
- But I do think it could have done that and been more scary.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2ykbwPyAp1qz82t0o1_1280.jpg)
