Just kidding, I don’t go to the Oscars (but, since moving to LA, I can claim some friends who do). Never fear, dear reader, even without actually going to the Oscars, I can still have strong opinions about the films nominated. Specifically, this year, the 2, count ‘em 2, films by women directors – An Education and The Hurt Locker – which are nominated for Best Picture. (The Hurt Locker is also nominated for Best Director. Which, for those keeping track, a woman has never won. I’m just saying.)
Now, there is lots of talk about What it Means for a woman to be a film director. Apparently, if you’re Nancy Meyers, it means making movies where Meryl Streep does a lot of this.
Whereas if you’re Nora Ephron, it means making movies where Meryl Streep does a lot of this.
But, use of Meryl aside, is there some definitive quality to lady-directed films, particularly when, as with the two films this year, those films are written by men?
Manohla Dargis, who has done way more research into this than me, follows the money in the New York Times, and follows the relationships, more colloquially on Jezebel, and she answers the “female director sensibility” question by saying that:
“Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary. That’s all we need to say about that.”
But is it, Manohla? Is it? When there is a MediaUnbound blargh out there?
I understand the reticence to attribute a gendered lens to art-making – but I think the quality The Hurt Locker and An Education have most in common is not their girliness, or even their womanliness, but their rejection of the standard movie version of – yes you again, Nancy Meyers – What Women (and People) Want. To talk about this entails a lot of talking about endings, so if you haven’t seen these movies – and seriously, you should – maybe stop reading right . . about . . now.
Okay, so The Hurt Locker is an action movie, almost exclusively about men and, as best as I can tell, it vividly captures the experience of going through daily life when your mortality is in constant question and your morality is none too sure. In scenes like this . . .
. . . you’re on the edge of your seat because the characters are on the edge of their seat, and then you follow them back to their camp and watch them have to deal with what living like this does to them. In the final 10 minutes of the movie, the main character, William James (no not that William James) finally finishes his tour and gets to go home. To his beautiful wife, his cute baby, to peace and domesticity and all the things that movies tell us people – and especially women – like. And you know what? He freaking hates it. He’s back on the next plane to Iraq. He loves his family, yeah, but he loves his job more.
Now, An Education.
The plot couldn’t be more different, right? British schoolgirls in 1962 wearing little bow ties, having romances with dashing Peter Sarsgaard, nothing at all like Explosive Ordance Disposal. Except for, it kind of is. Because, again, at the film’s end, the main character doesn’t pick love, or family, or the mushy Bride Wars crap that even smart movies like to show as women’s major concern. She picks herself, her schooling, and, we’re left to believe, having finished An Education can now embark on A Career.
One of my biggest beefs with movies written/directed/staring/about men is that male characters have lives and women characters have men. This can be summed up no more perfectly than in this exchange in the annoying-yet-charming-just-like-its-pointless-parantheses (500)Days of Summer. (Cute dance sequence, though).
Main boy, Tom, meets up with main girl, Summer, after not seeing her for, oh let’s say a couple hundred days.
Summer: You’re not working at the greeting card company anymore.
Tom: No, I’m working as an architect. You’re married.
And boom! That’s it. End of scene. That’s all they need to know about each other. He has a career life (and of course he also has a love life – it’s a romantic comedy) and she has just a love life. She’s not working for the company either, she quit before he did, but she doesn’t need to find a job because . . .she’s got a man, apparently.
See how differently this goes with a small adjustment:
Summer: You’re not working at the greeting card company anymore.
Tom: No, I’m working as an architect. Where do you work now?
Summer: Oh, you know, I got a job cutting bangs.
Tom: Cool. And you’re married. Because one can do both.
If there’s any trait that having a female director encourages, maybe it’s this: the realization that life’s work can be really important, worth sacrificing over, and ultimately deeply meaningful. I would guess that women who have worked hard enough to end up directing films of this caliber know from important work. And I mean, hell, even Julie and Julia got that part right.
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE FOLLOWING:Up in the Air, Juno, and… uh… 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Up in the Air is a really good movie. You should go see it. George Clooney is admirably crinkly and Vera Farmiga is sexy and Anna Kendrick is several of my college roommates put together (or maybe several of my put-together college roommates).
Now, that that’s out of the way, there’s something else you should know. Jason Reitman is sad Judd Apatow. This is okay, Judd Apatow is also really talented, but the movies these two men are making are odd inverses of each other, and somebody should let them know.
First, to the delay the placement of spoilers: Juno is sad Knocked Up. In both cases, they’re movies about couples composed of a focused women (Jennifer Garner, Katherine Heigl) and a charming man-child (Jason Bateman, Seth Rogen) dealing with a baby. Yes, Jennifer Garner is focused on a getting a baby and initially Katherine Heigl is focused on her career but they’re both up-tight and down-to-business, while their partners wear ratty old t-shirts and either smoke or really wish they could smoke a serious joint while playing a guitar/video game. Knocked Up is an all-out comedy, so in the end the couple has the baby and stays together, growing to accept each other along with their unexpected blessing. In Juno, not so much. The man-child splits and stays split. The focused women’s lesson in acceptance comes to be about acceptance of single parenthood. Which is a sadder (and probably more statistically common) end to what happens when you add a baby to a profoundly mismatched couple. P.S. Just in case you’re wondering, Juno is not about Ellen Page or Michael Cera. I mean, they’re cute and all, but it’s really not. It’s about the grownups and the poster is a charming lie. I don’t know if screenwriter Diablo Cody knows it, but the heart-hitting punches come to the adults in the movie and the teenagers get away blessedly unscathed with their stripey stocks still up. Though, as she is a divorced person, I bet she does.
Now, to current releases. Up in the Air is sad 40 Year Old Virgin. “What?” you say. “But George Clooney is not a virgin! He is silvery and foxy and . . . and crinkly!” Indeed. But he is, in this movie, an emotional virgin. He’s a grown up who never grew up, traveling to avoid settling down, and surrounded by – you guessed it – competed, well-organized, slightly-dead-inside women. Again, paired up with an older, wiser women (Vera Farmiga instead of Apatow’s Catherine Keener), this half-man/half-boy gets a chance to truly grow up. Although because Jason Reitman makes the sad version, Clooney’s character (spoiler alert) doesn’t end up with the comedic happy ending given to Steve Carell, and the possibility remains that if one spends one’s putative adulthood racing around, one might, in fact, miss the chance to become a man.
Finally, just in case you are uninterested in either Jason Reitman or Judd Apatow, because, I don’t know, maybe you’re five years old, there is another version of this exact story in theaters now. It’s about a driven woman and her immature lover and it’s called The Princess and the Frog. Don’t worry, it works out for them okay.
The sight of Ed O’Neil struggling to connect to his dopey son and hot blond daughter, under the watchful eye of his grating sexpot wife is, if you are a member of my generation, comforting – like macaroni and cheese for the TV-watching soul.
At first glance, the new ABC sitcom Modern Family seems a clever update of our old familiar ’80s friend, it’s Married with Children, for the 21st century and post-Arrested Development: Remarried with Children meets Gay-Married with Children. It’s a single-camera, faux-documentary show set in the suburbs about the trials and travails of family life. And Ed O’Neil gets to be grumpy-but-loveable and put-upon, like when he attempts to welcome the adopted baby daughter of his son and son’s partner. Or when he sorts out a family misunderstanding by pushing his whole brood into the pool.
You know, just like sitcoms used to be . . . except, wait, I’m sorry, they have a pool? Like a giant, marble Olympic-sized pool? Yes, because here’s the unspoken thing about this show: everyone on Modern Family is rich. They live in big houses and do expensive things, like, for example adopt babies from Vietnam (average cost of international adoption = $25,000). Maybe not rich like Gossip Girl but definitely rich like Brothers and Sisters, and – here’s where I really get weirded out – no one notices or cares.
There have always been rich characters on TV shows, from The Beverly Hillbillies to Beverly Hills 90210, so it’s not their wealth that’s surprising, it’s the fact that it’s not of interest to any of the characters, primary or secondary – or presumed to be of interest to the viewer. You’re supposed to accept that we’re in a TV world where Ed O’Neil can say things like, “But we’re supposed to go to wine country”, and be taken seriously, or an episode can revolve around the planning of an extravagantly elaborate birthday party with no inclusion of its inherent expense.
On some level, watching such unrepentant consumption and upper-middle-class privilege can be kind of soothing – like, say, eating $15 truffled mac and cheese – but it also leaves out several chances for this family to grapple with wealth the way they would in real life. Don’t worry faux-documentarians – you traffic in the humor of your characters’ pain . . . it will only be funny when Phil Dunphy (Ed O’Neill’s son-in-law) goes bankrupt because the Southern California real estate market collapses, leaving his stay-at-home wife blond Claire to go back to work. Hijinks will ensue! I promise. Kind of like the time when Al told Peggy, Kelly and Bud to get jobs.
Except probably Claire won’t end up as a rock slut in a music video. Because no one watches music videos anymore. [editor's note - Ouch! Some of our finest customers still get their users to watch music videos. . . And YouTube would probably beg to differ with that sentiment. . .]
Okay, okay, writing staff of Glee you heard me (kind of) and at least gave some of your minor (cough not-white or in a wheelchair) characters some stuff to do in recent weeks, and you even included a moment of not totally unearned tenderness for Sue Sylvester, who’s, you know, a lady. I’m still waiting for some actual plot development on the Mercedes/Artie/Tina front – and, based on last week, I think that one guy is now just going to be known forever as “other Asian” – but my real beef is that you’ve gone squishy. I know I worried about your getting all hateful, but now you’ve got characters tossing their whole, erm, character out the window so as to advance heartwarming plot points. What are you, television?
Like, two weeks ago when Sue was being her normal evil self right up until mysteriously adding a girl with Down’s Syndrome to the cheerleading squad. The final reveal is that Sue herself has sister with Down’s Syndrome whom she visits at the end of the episode. So far, so believable. Grumpy people sometimes have complicated families . . .or so I hear . . . I’m with you, Sue. And then she starts to read.
Little Red Riding Hood.
And just when the writers have this chance to show her being the Sue we have come to love and hate and show us something new, they whiff. She just reads the book, sweetly, like everyone’s idea of how you behave around a disabled person, unless you’ve enough experience to realize that you mostly behave like your damn self.
My ending? Sue picks up the book, looks at her sister (who’s also in bed, weirdly – like, did she break her leg, too?) and starts to read.
SUE:
Little Red Riding Hood was a degenerate tramp who should have known better than to walk in the woods at night wearing an outfit like that, and got what we all knew was coming to her.
Or, last week, when after Quinn gets kicked out in a pretty moving and real-for-TV-on-an-essentially-campy-show way, her glee-mates sing “Lean on Me” to her and Finn. Oh wow, I just got that. Finn and Quinn. Anyway, annoying hokey song for annoying hokey purposes aside, Puck (real baby daddy and arch-rival to Finn and closest thing to a boy-villain around) joins in.
What? No he doesn’t! He stands in the hallway glowering and looking in menacingly through the window. Because he won’t stand by them – oops, lean on them – oops, offer himself to be leaned upon. Soaps, people, soaps!
One of our employees is married to a playwright. As they watch TV, they talk about what makes them good and how they could be better. She makes very interesting connections, which we’ve used in some of our video work. And now, we’re passing the goods directly from the manufacturer to you. Take it away, Dorothy.
Everybody loves “Glee.” Or, at least, way way more people love “Glee” than could reasonably have been expected – it’s like the United States is a giant college campus and we’ve just been waiting, without even knowing it, for a televised evening a cappella concert. An album of songs from the show – yes, that’s right, a quirky mix of pop standards in choral form – is number 1 at iTunes, and, at least based on my friends’ Facebook updates, “Glee” is the new black on Wednesdays. Or something.
After eight episodes this fall, it’s been on a brief hiatus, and, while we all wait eagerly to see how long a fake pregnancy can stretch if no one knows what month it is in TVtime, some suggestions for “Glee”:
1) Repeat after me: “against type.”
I know you’re all post-modern and self-referential and stuff, but it can be hard to distinguish a show with narrowminded characters from a show that’s just narrow-mindedly lazy. If Sue Sylvester (yes, Jane Lynch, you’re a genius, you’re fabulous, moving along) calls two of the kids “Asian” and “other Asian” – it’s only really a “joke” if the characters have distinguished themselves as anything else during 8 episodes. And, no, having one of the Asian characters also stutter doesn’t equal plot. Characters who are anything other than white and straight are pretty much asked to do things that line up with their non-white and non-straightness – for Mercedes and Kurt, this means a lot of “being a diva” in a C storyline. (For the guy in the wheelchair it means, er, being a guy! In a wheelchair!) Not only does “impotent fierce” not propel the action in surprising ways, it also cuts out a lot of chances for genuine musical surprise. There’s a whole cannon of songs to chose from – try letting some of your nonlead actors sing them (and no Mr. Schuster doing “Bust a Move” doesn’t count. Really. My suggestion: What if Mercedes had a real, non-impossible romance, and then sang “Fifteen” when her heart got broken? For example, by “other Asian?”
2) Keep being gay. Keep being so gay. Watch the misogayny.
A primer: Having Kristen Chenoweth guest on your show is gay. Having Kristen Chenoweth guest on your show and sing “Maybe This Time” from Cabaret (the movie, not the play, going full Liza) is so gay. Having Kristen Chenoweth guest on your show and sing “Maybe This Time” as a delusional doomed alcholic is so gay as to approach what I call misogayny. Or what my darling friend Josh at Tarhearted describes in this way:
This probably isn’t very politically correct, but I wonder: do gay men hate women? Look at the women who are gay icons. They are universally over-the-top and often unkind or laughably vain. Sometimes even alcoholics or drug addicts. I wonder why that is. Do gay men idolize a strong woman and a dramatic story, or do we like laughing at train wrecks? Or is it both?
Look, by all means, fill your shows with terrible people. It makes for more drama, I understand it. You’re a third of the way through your first season and you’re already at mid-Melrose levels of lunacy. I get the need, I do. But, I’m saying, hey – your crazies are, um, largely ladies. And they lie, um, constantly, about really big deal things, like marriage and babies. And the men – Mr. Schuster, Finn, even Puck – are sweet and dopey and eager to believe the lies that the crazy women tell. I know you don’t want anyone to be too happy because you’d run out of story, but Kurt got to come out, dance to Beyonce, win the football game and his father’s acceptance in ONE EPISODE. Maybe something good could happen to or by a girl. Or even both.
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