Femonomics at the movies: Winter's Bone

The Oscar nominations are out, and I was surprised to see my favorite movie of this year getting four big nominations, for Best Picture,  Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay.  That movie is Winter's Bone, and I hope these nominations will be the push you need (yes, you) to watch it immediately.  You can rent it on Amazon for $3.99.



Winter's Bone is more than a great movie; it is the best movie I have seen in recent memory for fully fleshed out female characters that matter.  With a female heroine who never once talks about a boy, her female best friend with whom she shares a family-like bond, and a female villain from whom our heroine receives veiled, then not-so-veiled threats, Winter's Bone passes the Bechdel test with flying colors.  I want to repeat that this is a movie with a female hero and a female villain, neither of whom are sexualized.  Adding to the thrill is the fact that those characters are featured in such a fantastically, spine-tinglingly taut crime drama that you don't realize how special what you've just seen was until it's over.

The film follows 17-year-old Ree, an Ozark Mountains girl from a meth-cooking family.  Her dad is supposed to stand trial for said meth-cooking activities, only no one can find him.  Because he placed the family home and woods up for bond, Ree, her neuro-atypical mother, and her two young siblings will be left with nowhere to go if they can't manage to "turn 'im up."  What follows is Ree's search for dear-old dad, which takes her first to his menacing brother's place, and finally to the home of a local crime boss, whose wife does not appreciate the disturbance.  In a region where the code of silence is more important than family ties, Ree is treated brutally by those who see her quest as "against their ways."  She is helped, finally, by the same uncle who initially menaced her, when he decides the rest of the clan has gone too far in trying to shut down a 17-year-old's quest to keep her family from sliding into destitution.

As Ree digs deeper to uncover her father's whereabouts, a quieter tale unfolds of a 17-year-old girl, torn between home obligations she wasn't ready for in a drug-ridden community whose ways she despises, and a shaky dream of escape, to a world she neither knows nor understands.  Somehow, though, Ree proceeds on her search with an unshakable faith that this better world does exist, and that people in this iniquitous community will, when pushed, still act according to its basic tenants: help your neighbors, love your family, do what's right.  She knows that's the only way she can find her father--if one of these unmovable villains gives, just a little bit--and thus the only way to save her family.  So she fights like she's got nothing to lose.

Femonomics at the Movies: The Next Three Days

 The Next Three Days is an action-suspense movie that follows John Brennan (Russell Crowe) as he plans his wrongfully convicted wife Lara's (Elizabeth Banks) escape from prison. The film takes place in Pittsburgh, and has a long windup as we watch John plot the breakout while simultaneously raising a young son and teaching at a community college.

The Viewer's Angle
The film is very well written and tightly paced, competently following the heist / escape plotline that we've heard before. John's tricks and turns are clever, and it is fun to watch him execute his plan. However, the performances fall rather flat, and a cameo by Liam Neeson only served to remind me how much more engaging similar material is in his hands. A lack of convincing chemistry between the leads, along with limited backstory on their characters, made it difficult to care if they succeeded. If anything, having to wait through the buildup, the main reason I wanted the escape to work was so I could see the payoff of all the planning. Extraneous characters to the story, a brother and sister-in-law, way more detectives than called for, and the most beautiful playground mom ever seen, end up prematurely diffusing some of the tension, which I find critical in a low-explosion film. Overall, a bit of a disappointment, and I'm probably going to check out Unstoppable this weekend to get my action itch scratched.

Femonomics at the Movies: Salt

I'm a little late to the game on this one - it's been a week since I've seen Salt and everyone has already written about it! Easily the most anticipated movie of the year (for this mongoose, at least), the picture is Angelina Jolie's return to a starring role in an action flick (Jolie plays the eponymous Salt). I enjoyed Tomb Raider, and was a big fan of Mr and Mrs Smith - the movie that launched an entire tabloid industry. So, was I disappointed?

The Viewer's Angle

In short, no - but neither was I elated. Salt is an unrelenting action film - not an action-comedy, action-romance, or even action-drama. The basic plot is a chase, with the FBI chasing Salt, and Salt chasing a mysterious group of bad guys to which she might belong. I have to agree with David Edelstein's review that "the movie is a blast, even though - and this might be a deal-breaker for some people - it makes no sense, at all!"

Mad Hoc: Episode 1, Defining the Mad Men universe

Today brings a new, collaborative weekly television feature: Mad Hoc. Deeply Problematic blogger extraordinaire RMJ and I are huge Mad Men fans, and we both love to read all the recaps and discussions about the show.  However, we also feel like the show gets a pass sometimes because it's so good in many respects that we as viewers assume that Matthew Weiner knows all and is perfect.  And RMJ and I have something to say about that.  So each weeek, we're going to chat about the new episode, in the style of Sady Doyle and Amanda Hess’s “Sexist Beatdown." We’ll discuss a mixture of general issues and episode specifics, viewing it all through both our cranky feminist lenses, and our huge fan goggles!  These posts will usually appear on Monday or Tuesday following a new episode. 

Coca Colo: Ok, so, I think it would also be good and proper for me to tell you a tiny bit about myself and my Mad Men background: I'm a grad student, phd in economics.  And, I actually haven't watched every episode of Mad Men!  I am very into it, and read lots of blogs about it, but I haven't seen all of season three.
RMJ: I am 24, living in Virginia (originally from Kansas!). I graduated from a women's college two years ago, live with my boyfriend and two cats, work as a composition tutor.
Coca Colo: Oh, and since you do such a good job of unpacking privilege on your blog, that's something we should make explicit, and keep in mind with regard to these posts. I'm half white, able-bodied, straight, cis, size-privileged.
RMJ: Good idea! I am white, mental disabilities/physically abled, straight, cis, fat with some size privilege, class privileged.

Coca Colo: One of my things with Mad Men, getting into content now, is that it's allll about sexy whiteness and wealth. And it's not just that, it's that there is a certain amount of goo-goo-ga-ness to its presentation of whiteness and wealth.
RMJ: Yeah no kidding. That was definitely present here, with the multiple fancy interviews in fancy restaurants and the whole “TimeLife building! Two floors! Wow!”  I often feel like they're giving a nod to civil rights, as with the reference to Andrew Goodman, without seriously addressing it the way they do feminism.
Coca Colo: Even with the white people, they show there are major problems beneath the facade, but we're supposed to ooh and ah at Betty's clothes. Within that framework of showing an admittedly very appealing fantasy, how much can you be subversive?
RMJ: Well, but is it supposed to be a fantasy? I mean, I think it's supposed to be "gritty" and "revealing" to a certain extent.  Like "this is what your grandma's sex life was REALLY like! In the CAR! Have you EVER!" And “people were RACIST and women were DISCRIMINATED AGAINST! My stars!” Which is a revelation...for rich white people
Coca Colo: Yes, I agree, but I just meant that part of what they draw viewers in with is how sexy and luxurious it is. It's not a fantasy life, but it plays on our fantasies.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - in which Mongoose returns to genre fiction

It has been years since I have read any genre fiction: crime, action, Star Wars (I was once a teen, too), fantasy, etc. This was a conscious choice, so I didn't expect much from Stieg Larsson's famous crime novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But it came heavily recommended by my mom and a good friend, so I picked it up. And didn't put it down except to sleep and go to work for the next three days. It is truly riveting. This weekend, I bought the second in the trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and similarly finished it within 48 hours. If you have ever enjoyed a mystery novel, you have got to read these. I would go buy the third and final book (The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest), but it's only available in hardcover, and I have shit to do this week.

The trilogy, an "international publishing sensation," comes with its own dramatic backstory. Larsson died of a massive heart attack at age 50 in 2004 before the sales of the first book really took off - without a valid will. He had never married his partner of more than three decades, Eva Gabrielsson, and according to Swedish law his property went to his father and brother after his death, including rights to his three novels. Gabrielsson allegedly has the partial manuscript of fourth on her laptop. The court battles continue to rage.

Femonomics at the Movies: Splice

The Viewer's Angle

Splice is this year's retelling of Frankenstein, and having read several reviews convincing me it was more indie-art than monster horror, I went out (not on a date - thank goodness!) opening weekend to see it. Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody play Elsa and Clive, a couple of scientists building hybrid animals in the lab using gene splicing (don't think too hard about it) to develop pharmaceuticals. Delphine Chaneac is Dren, the monster, and primarily Elsa's creation.

The movie gets off to a great start. The pacing, the creepiness, the thought-provoking images (Elsa for a moment gets trapped by an artificial womb - I don't know what it means, but it was whoa symbolism). For the first 2/3's of the film, I was engrossed. The relationships between Elsa, Dren, and Clive develop with affection and curiosity, but also undercurrents of angst and repulsion, creating the perfect foreboding tone. The audience is also supposed to feel the moral repulsion Shelley's Frankenstein produced. In Shelley's version, I always felt too sympathetic with the monster to be completely disgusted, but Splice impressively had me nauseated half the film. Not the best feeling in the world, but I'm always excited when a movie can knock me that off-balance. (For another queasy but excellent film see Enduring Love with Daniel Craig.)

Network Femonomics: The Women of V

With Lost nearing the end of its six-season run, ABC has been trying to find an action-packed scifi replacement for primetime. One of these new shows is V, a remake of an eighties series wherein aliens come to Earth purporting to help humanity, but with ulterior sinister motives. We don't know yet what those motives are, but I think they are going to eat people. The show has excellent production values, a super-attractive cast, and plenty action and special effects (also fair-to-middling writing, but you can't have it all.) But by far the most exciting part of this show is that it features three women as starring heroes and villains.

Femonomics at the Movies: The Joneses

The Viewer's Angle

The Joneses takes us into the lives of Steve and Kate "Jones," an upper-middle (who are we kidding, upper) class family that literally has it all - the cars, the clothes, the jewelry, the toys. The twist is that this family is actually a stealth marketing unit embedded in the community as taste-makers employed to drive sales of clients' products. I personally enjoyed the movie as fairly light-hearted and mildly thought-provoking, although as Ebert notes in his review, a key flaw is the tone the movie never quite strikes. Is it a romantic comedy or a tragic morality play? It tries to be both, which is perhaps more authentic but makes the narrative jerky and leaves the viewer without resolution.

David Duchovny as Steve and Demi Moore as Kate prove themselves decent actors and do seem made for the role - sex symbols selling a certain type of conspicuously consumptive lifestyle. Ben Hollingsworth and Amber Heard play their children Mick and Jennifer, and it is quite a stretch to imagine these striking actors in their mid-twenties as high school students. Each of these characters is moderately developed in the film, but a lot more could have been done. The writers hew closely enough to common stereotypes (the nymphomaniac, the washed-up athlete, the too-ambitious single executive) that nothing is particularly provocative, a shame when the concept for the film could have been taken further.

Some TV shows take risks, and I applaud them for it

Network TV is notoriously safe.  But, it's also a huge potential avenue for change.  What we see on TV can affect our impression of "normal."  24 showed us a black president who was an incredible leader--it also subtly reframed the torture debate by making it seem like it was always a case of "OMG bomb!" instead of "intelligence gathering."  What I'm saying is, what we see on TV matters, and that's why I applaud shows that take risks.  I want to talk specifically about network TV because we're used to HBO pushing the envelope, but we forget that network TV brought us things that once seemed radical: Maude getting an abortion, upper class black families on The Cosby Show and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, people who actually had to work for a living on Roseanne (if you forget that that's radical, look at the effortless livings earned by most sitcom stars e.g., Full House, Mad About You, Home Improvement).  So here's a list of the network TV shows that are pushing the envelope, however haltingly, imperfectly, and unfortunately ephemerally. 

Jaime Oliver's Food Revolution is inspiring and maddening all at once

Jaime Oliver took on the British school food system, and won. He managed to get British schools serving healthier, fresher meals country-wide, and I'm sure the health of school children in the UK is better for it. However, it's telling that all of Oliver's efforts were scrupulously documented for hit TV series. On one hand, Oliver is the ultimate modern idealist: a David of nutrition against the Goliath agro-industrial food industry. On the other, he's the ultimate modern cynic: a natural performer who wants to create big social change, as long as the camera gets all of his best angles (in a scene at the end of yesterday's show, Oliver cries crocodile tears over the people of Huntington not understanding how much he cares. This Washington Post article sums it up: "[Oliver is] afflicted with the kind of warm-hearted caring that requires the constant presence of a TV crew."). If Oliver's new effort to put healthier food in US schools is successful, the latter won't seem so important. But if all that Oliver gets out of this is a season of good TV, I'll wonder whether there wasn't a better way to create change.

Harding & Kirby: Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere

Here at femonomics we're big fans of Shapely Prose, Kate Harding's fat acceptance blog. So, when I saw her book Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body on sale at Borders for $3.99 (sorry Kate), I had to pick it up. The book proved to be just as witty and readable as all of her and co-author Marianne Kirby's work.

The book has a lot of great things to say, that are helpful for anyone who thinks negatively about their body (not just fat people, or even women - unfortunately most people seem to suffer from this). As a relatively thin person, I don't feel fully qualified to critique the book, but it did really get me thinking. I had plenty of ah-ha! moments while reading, as well as some discomfort in having old prejudices and patterns of thinking challenged.

The main point is for (fat) people to stop worrying about what they weigh or how they look, and to be happy, along with specific mind-steps to get there. The most poignant essay in the book regards the fantasy of being thin, wherein people postpone living until they lose weight. Don't do that!

One minor criticism I have is the notion the book promotes, however, that the amount of calories consumed is unrelated to weight. I will admit that the relationship between food and weight is quite complicated, but am pretty sure there is at least a correlation. However, the book's argument that dieting is unhealthy is compelling, to the point that you really should talk to your doctor before embarking on any such course. Overall, the book is a pretty quick read and mind-expanding, and I recommend it.

Why I heart Bust magazine

Bust magazine is not your average women's magazine.  It's a feminist magazine, unapologetically.  It features discussions of current events, reviews of feminist or women-centered books and movies, and interviews with prominent female figures, frequently celebrities.  But it also has a crunchy, DIY element that I love, even though I rarely take part in its suggestions to make a handbag out of an old cassette, or cross-stich a scarf for my loved one.  The recipes, on the other hand, I frequently employ.  In addition to these features, Bust includes all the standard elements of a women's fashion magazine, with feminist tweaks.

Fashion: Instead of page after page of editorials with rail thin models, and ads for clothes we can't afford, Bust hand-picks quirky, lovely, affordable clothing to be modeled by real-looking women.  That's right, the biggest progression from other pseudo girl-power mags like Glamour and Jane is that Bust actually walks the talk and features real-sized models in their editorials.  All the women are beautiful, but all of them look like a pretty woman you would see on the subway, not an unreal ideal.

What is dry sex, and why do you need to know about it?

Two events occurred this summer that introduced me to one of the few kinky sexual practices I'd rather not hear about.  First, I spent three months in Zambia, one of the countries where dry sex is regularly practiced.  Second, I read Elizabeth Pisani's incredible book on AIDS and the AIDS industry, The Wisdom of Whores.  Because some of the language in this post is necessarily graphic, and because the content here makes me feel somewhat ill and you might be eating lunch while reading, click through if you would like to learn more.

Femonomics at the Movies: Daybreakers

The Viewer's Angle

Daybreakers is the kind of action film that I wait all year for, but thankfully Hollywood saw fit to bestow it on us the first week of January.

Daybreakers tells the story of a world where most people are vampires, and humans are a scarce resource quickly running out (read: oil, water, food, etc.). Our hero, Edward (Ethan Hawke) is a vampire hematologist with a conscious, searching for a human blood replacement and abstaining from the authentic stuff himself.

Femonomics at the movies: Welcome to awards season!

I'm an awards season fiend, and I like to try to see all the Oscar nominated films (and performances, if I'm really ambitious) before the show.  This year, awards season is upon us (the Golden Globes are Sunday), and I've only seen a few of the films.  Some I'm dying to see, others I'm happy to pass on.  Here's a list of the likely awards contenders, according to the blogs I read (Dave Karger's Oscar Watch and Pete Hammond's Notes on a Season, mostly).  I include my notes on the films I've seen or have heard something interesting about.  The other contributors will chime in with their thoughts on films they've seen, and I implore commenters to do the same!  Which movies are must-sees before Oscar season?  Who do you think deserves to win at the Globes this weekend?  Who will win?

Seen

Avatar: The plot is only serviceable, but the graphics are unbelievable.  See it in 3D or you're wasting your money (and time!).  I truly believe this film will change what consumers expect from films, and what producers believe is possible.  After seeing this visual feast, why would I want anything else?  (Now if only he'd hire a screenwriter next time...)

Femonomics at the Movies: It’s Complicated

The Viewer’s Angle

Nancy Meyer’s new film, It’s Complicated, has fulfilled its promise to be a holiday crowdpleaser, having already garnered Golden Globe nominations and grossed over $75 million domestically.

Somewhat amusing and with an entirely pleasant story, It’s Complicated primarily seduces viewers with gorgeous sets depicting luxurious Southern California living and tableful after tableful of mouth-watering food spreads. The story follows divorcee and millionaire bakery owner Jane (Meryly Streep) as she hooks-up with her married ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin) and courts Adam (Steve Martin), the architect designing an addition to her already palatial home.

These actors are able to produce some limited chemistry and are believable in their roles (imagine that! a trio of millionaires from Orange County playing a trio of millionaires from Santa Barbara County – what a stretch!)

Those looking for one of Streep’s impressive dramatic performances will not find it here, however.

Is Precious failing to cross over? Or did its distributors fail it? (And the race controversies of Precious)

EW’s Owen Gleiberman recently ran a piece on whether Precious is failing to resonate with wide audiences after a stellar run in limited release.  In another post, he suggests it “peaked too early.”  He worries that the film was only intensely appealing to African American and Art-house audiences, who largely drove its huge initial run.  Rather than psychoanalyze the film’s mass appeal, I favor a simpler explanation—the film was simply overshadowed by other Oscar-contending and heavily buzzed about pics, and didn’t reach audiences while they still had mental space for it.  To me, it seems like a case of the distributors failing to seize upon the positive initial buzz and expanding while people were still talking about the movie.  Slow releases have worked for indie films before, notably Napoleon Dynamite, but only where buzz was slow to build.  Precious has been out in industry circles since January ‘09, when it premiered at Sundance under the title “Push”, and was generating huge positive press, such as a front-cover Times magazine piece, right around the time of its limited release.  I think the distributors made a mistake by continuing to bank those big per theater grosses, without realizing they were coming at a cost to the film’s ultimate theatrical run.