Category Archives: media

friday fun: shaun the sheep

07 Friday Jan 2011

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This week, as a buffer between us and some stressful stuff that’s accompanied the start of the new year — not to mention the need to watch something that was diametrically opposite Torchwood‘s “Children of Earth” — Hanna and I have been watching episodes of Nick Park’s stop-motion animated series “Shaun the Sheep.”

Lots of full 20-minute episodes are available on Netflix instant and YouTube also has a bevy of clips … if you feel your day might be brightened by some claymation sheep. I particularly recommend anything involving Timmy (the lamb) and green aliens.

movienotes: holiday inn

27 Monday Dec 2010

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On Christmas Eve, Hanna and I watched Holiday Inn, a 1942 Bing Crosby/Fred Astair/Irving Berlin vehicle that I’ve heard was a precursor to the enduring classic White Christmas (also starring Crosby, though the 1954 film replaced Astair with Danny Kaye). I thought, vaguely, that I had seen Holiday Inn before.

I was wrong. So wrong.

To give you a taste, here’s the original trailer.

For those of you familiar with White Christmas, this earlier film shares relatively little with its “remake” aside from Bing Crosby, the song “White Christmas,” and the concept of rescuing a failing tourist hotel through the musical revue. There is much to cirtique in White Christmas if you’re in the mood — from the postwar nostalgia for the heroism of the war to the portrayal of gender dynamics and relationship expectations. I went into Holiday Inn expecting more or less the same, perhaps even a bit less based on my previous experience of late 1930s/early 1940s films — often, they are slightly less gender essentialist than after the end of the war.

In this case … not so much.  And in addition, Holiday Inn suffers from the additional problem of having been visited by the racist fairy and the weak plot fairy (yes, you really can have a film with less of a plot than White Christmas).

First, the gender issues. As in White Christmas, there are two women and two men. But instead of sisters, are introduced sequentially to two female entertainers, both of whom are expected to decide which of the two male leads (Crosby or Astair, the crooner or the dance man) she wishes to marry. The first woman, Lila (Virginia Dale) is the third member of Crosby and Astair’s act when the show opens, performing on stage the role she has clearly slid into in real life as well: a “who will she pick?” flirt. She is engaged to Crosby, who has plans to marry her and retire to the countryside and run a farm; on the side, she and Astair have made plans to marry instead — eloping at the last minute and heading off to a life of penthouses and entertainment glory.  The second woman, Linda (Marjorie Reynolds) is the ingénue who, in effect, takes Lila’s place when Lila runs off to marry a Texas tycoon … though Lila returns at the end so that both men have someone to marry and make the story a “happily ever after” tale.

There are some brief proto-feminist moments, such as when Linda tells Crosby off for trying to manipulate her into marrying him instead of just asking for gods’ sake.  But on the whole, the women come across as accessories to the friendship of Crosby/Astair, rather than individuals in their own right — something Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen are able to combat much more successfully in the later film, despite a similar trajectory of plot (i.e. that all healthy men of a certain age must be in want of a wife and that all “good” women are desperate to marry well).

After Crosby’s venture at the simple life fails, he decides to turn his faltering farm into an inn … an inn only open on holidays (thus giving him over three hundred days per year to rest and relax).  The two extremely unfortunate bits of the film are located at the Holiday Inn.

One is the 4th of July musical number, which devolves into mainlining propaganda for the war effort. We’re talking documentary footage of air raids and everything. Ouch.

The second, much more winceingly present problem is the racism.  First noticeable in the fact that the only black people in the cast is Crosby’s cook, Mamie, and her two unnamed children whom she continually orders to stay in the kitchen.

Louise Beavers as Mamie in Holiday Inn

Since watching Holiday Inn, Hanna and I re-watched White Christmas and realized anew how entirely white the cast is. And I mean no one with even a deep suntan. So on the one hand, I suppose you could argue that having an African-American woman in the cast — even as the housekeeper (a role played by a white woman in White Christmas) — is better than nothing?

But then there’s the blackface. Which was the bit where we just kinda lost it. Why blackface, you say? Well, mostly because they needed a plot device to keep Astair from finding Marjorie Reynolds too early in the film (’cause then the plot would be totally shot) so Crosby puts her in blackface as a disguise.  And then dresses himself up in blackface too, just for good measure.

To sing about Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

*headdesk*

It’s just … not. okay. Not even a little bit okay. And after that, the whole film starts to take on this patina of wrong that it just cannot shake. ‘Cause everything trails around it this after-image of Crosby and Reynolds in blackface. And how wrong it all was.

So that’s kinda the upshot of my review folks: looking for a Christmas movie? Avoid Holiday Inn. And if you really want to hear White Christmas as sung by Crosby, rent the redux version. Really. You’ll thank me.

multimedia monday: "doesn’t this mean we join the league of ordinary nations?"

13 Monday Dec 2010

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Yesterday, as post-semester reading, I picked up Mark Kurlansky’s brief little monograph Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea (yes, I know, I’m a political nerd … what can I say?). I’ve had the book lying around since 2008 but what with one thing and another never got around to reading much passed the introduction, which was written by the His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

A booknote is forthcoming tomorrow on Nonviolence itself, but for now — as a sort of audio-visual introduction to the topic — I wanted to share two clips from my Favorite Television Show of All Time, The West Wing, episode 3.23, “Posse Comitatus.” Because as I was reading Nonviolence — particularly the portions describing the way in which violence consolidates and corrupts nation-states — this episode was what I kept thinking of as a pitch-perfect illustration of that corruption in action.

For those of you who don’t know the series, “Posse Comitatus” is the final episode in Season 3, and one in which the President Jed Bartlet (played by Martin Sheen) makes a decision to use his power as the U.S. President to do something illegal on an international scale: assassinate (and cover up the assassination) a defense minister/war criminal from a fictional Middle Eastern nation called Qumar. In the scene below, Bartlet has waited until the final possible moment to make the decision. His hawkish Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry (played by John Spencer), wants him to authorize the assassination, arguing that the defense minister will never come to trial and if he is not killed now, he will only cause more suffering. Bartlet is reluctant, arguing that if they resort to covert violence, “doesn’t this mean we join the league of ordinary nations?”

Note: This clip is actually much longer than that conversation, which begins about 4:15 in. If you want to relive the trauma of watching Mark Harmon be gunned down and C. J. get pulled out of the theater in order to be given the news, then by all means watch from the beginning. It’s a beautiful piece of television.

So let that set the stage for tomorrow’s review of Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea.

movienotes: life with father (1947)

07 Tuesday Dec 2010

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Last night, Hanna and I took a couple of hours out of our evening to screen the 1947 William Powell / Irene Dunn film Life With Father. Why did we do this? We were looking for something holiday-centric (Holiday Inn, Miracle on 34th Street) but came up dry … and decided to give this a try instead. While I can’t say it was an unqualified “win,” I definitely found myself fascinated by the entire package for a variety of reasons.

First, the original trailer.

This film is wrong on so many levels I’m only going to hit the highlights in hopes of encouraging you to check it out. Why? Because I think films from previous eras, much like our own, are fascinating windows into the normative pressures of certain periods in time.

In this case, the way in which American cinema in the postwar era was enlisted to construct a certain narrative of gender, of family, of class, and of the American past. This film is further complicated by the fact that it is a costume drama: it employees the collective memory of/nostalgia for a bygone era — in this case, a particular understanding of upper-middle-class New York City in the 1880s.

So, a few observations.

1) According to this film, men make and understand money while women spend money without any ability to understand finance. The titular father of the film (played by William Powell) is a banker and supports his wife and four sons in a luxurious townhouse complete with servants. Nevertheless, he and his wife (Irene Dunn) constantly bicker about the household budget which “mother” is incapable of managing in the manner which her husband believes is appropriate. Some of the best comic exchanges in the movie, in fact, revolve around Father attempting to get Mother to explain how she has spent the money he has given her, and Mother attempting earnestly to account for her purchases. This trope of gender differentiation is employed for comic value without ever being challenged. Neverthess, it’s fascinating to watch how blatently the paternalism is.

2) The whole movie is worth watching for the scene where Father explains to Jr. all he needs to know about women. When the eldest son falls in love with a young Elizabeth Taylor (only three years after her breakout role in National Velvet) Father takes him aside to explain a thing or two about women. What follows is instruction in how to avoid women’s advances, what to do when they cry, and a stern dismissal of Jr.’s (veiled) questions concerning heterosexual relations. I wish I had been taking notes at the time, because it really was self-parodying.

3) Making and breaking your promises is totally manly as long as you think your wife is dying. The central conflict in the film is, for reasons that defy my understanding, that Father has never been baptized and Mother is convinced this means their marriage is invalid and that he will go to hell.  So she extracts promises from him to be baptized, all of which he breaks until (spoiler) the very end, of course, when he finally capitulates and the whole family goes off together in a horse-drawn cab into the happily-ever-after. The thing that struck me was the fact that every time Father promises to be baptized, he is inevitably extending the promise as a way to get Mother to do something (or stop doing something) he wants (or doesn’t want) … including die. Then, when the situation ceases to irritate him, or distress him, he immediately retracts the promise.  It made me think of Toad of Toad Hall in the Wind in the Willows protesting, “Oh, in there! I would have said anything in there!”

4) Women (and to some extent children) care only about men as providers. This is an extention of the first point about women and math: the narrative of the entire film, to some extent, could be read in terms of consumption. The children want new clothes and toys. The mother wants jewelry. The household must be provided for. Friends come to the city to go shopping. And Father, above all, spends the entire film fretting about how much his family is spending of “his” money. The entire household, he feels (and often says — though perhaps not in so many words) should be arranged around his needs and desires as the wage-earner. And instead, his life is “controlled” by his wife and children who spend all his money and disrupt his peace, giving him very little gratitude in return. This resentment was at the forefront of postwar gender politics, and I don’t think it’s a mistake that this narrative is so blatant. I’d argue it says more about the era in which it was made than the era it was made about.

5) Religion is the sphere of women and children. Similar to the narrative of money and gender, the narrative of religion and gender is at once drawing upon 19th-century notions of women’s particular piety and purity and twentieth-century, postwar perceptions of religion as a particularly feminine practice.  The central tension in the film revolves around the discovery that Father has never been baptized (into the Episcopal Church … the main rift in the film appears to be between Methodists and Episcopalians; any holy rollers or other non-mainstream, and/or non-protestant religious groups, including Catholics, are entirely absent).  Mother is appalled and distressed by this revelation, fearing for her husband’s immortal soul as well as for the sanctity of their marriage.  Father insists that baptism is a formality, a waste of time, and resists the pressure of his wife for most of the two hours before finally surrendering to her desires and thus restoring unity back to the household.

The centrality of religious practice — if not the more personalized faith we’ve become used to in recent years — is startling to see on the big screen, incorporated into the narrative of what it means to be a White, middle-class, urban family.

That’s about all I’ve got at the moment. You can check the film out on Netflix streaming or free through the Internet Archive’s Moving Image Archive: Feature Films collection.

movienotes: holiday (1938)

10 Wednesday Nov 2010

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Doris Nolan (Julia Seton), Cary Grant (Johnny Case) and
Katherine Hepburn (Linda Seton) in a publicity shot for Holiday (1938).

On Monday, when Hanna and I were both home sick from work and self-medicating by streaming video through our Netflix account I suggested we watch a Katherine Hepburn film and Hanna found us the 1938 Cary Grant / Katherine Hepburn romantic comedy Holiday.

In a nutshell, this is a classic “man engaged to wrong woman eventually finds the right woman who’s been under his nose the whole time.”  Thirty-year-old self-made businessman Johnny Case (Grant) becomes hastily engaged to Julia Seton (Julia Nolan) the daughter of a wealthy banking magnate while on vacation at Lake Placid. When he turns up at his intended’s house mansion to meet the family of his future bride he finds Julia’s black sheep elder sister, Linda, with whom he experience an immediate rapport.  The remainder of the movie is spent waiting for Johnny to realize that Julia’s vision of their future life together (in which he will follow in her father’s footsteps) and his own dream of quitting business and traveling the world are incompatible. And that (surprise, surprise!) Linda’s rebellious desire to escape the family fortune and see the world might suit him much better.

If I ever end up, in a future life, becoming an historian of American cinema, I can imagine quite happily building my scholarly career with a close analysis of 1930s and 40s romantic comedies and dramas, particularly those written around the characters played by actors such as Bette Davis and Katherine Hepburn.  These films fascinate me with their willingness to ask, through plot and character exposition, what it means for men and women to form egalitarian relationships (see for example All About Eve and Woman of the Year). They also openly explore issues of money, work, and class in a way that modern romantic comedies and dramas mostly fail to do.  In most television and films today, characters’ lifestyles and purported wagework rarely match up in reality. In Holiday, we are looking at the lifestyles of the rich and famous, yes, but the question of money and values is front-and-center within the plot in what I thought were some fascinating ways.

In Jennifer Pozner’s book on reality television, Reality Bites Back, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, she observes that much of reality TV involves the double-edged sword of American culture’s obsession with wealth: we are encouraged to ridicule and despise the rich while simultaneously coveting what they have and the lives they lead.  In Holiday, the main character, Johnny Case, essentially spends the entire film deciding between two relationships with money and work life. He is on the verge of closing a business deal that could either secure him a job at his future father-in-law’s bank (where he could make even more money and be the type of businessman his fiancee desires him to be) OR he could take “early retirement” and use the money to travel and explore the world while he still has the energy (as he puts it) to do so, and to discover what he wants from life.  He’s been working, he tells Mr. Seton, since he was ten years old, and he wants a change.

While this fantasy of a Grand Tour is, essentially, the sort of life of leisure open to men of Mr. Seton’s wealth, Seton himself despises the idea as positively un-American, a childish attitude that his daughter needs to school out of the future son-in-law. When one is wealthy, it seems, the only acceptable way to use that wealth is to use it to create more. 

Linda, despite the fact she is also the daughter of Mr. Seton, has rejected this attitude toward money. Instead, she encourages Johnny (and, at first, her sister with whom she vicariously identifies) to escape the family and travel.  In a way, she plays a proto manic pixie dream girl (a common role for Hepburn, although seldom with as little independent agency as she has in Holiday). We see Linda almost entirely within the confines of the former children’s play room — the only place in the Seton mansion she says she feels at home. In the play room, she and her younger brother Ned (who has retreated into the helpless infancy of an alcoholic) invite Johnny and his middle-class friends to join them in reliving the antics of their youth: gymnastics, music, puppet theater. Linda’s separation from the adult world of her father and younger sister is in part self-imposed, but it also seems she has been typecast as a permanent dependent: there are frequent allusions to “doctor’s orders” and “headaches” and “rest.”  Elder sister, in this instance, has not become a parent in the absence of her mother (who has long since died) but has rather retreated to childhood.

Linda and Johnny finally do escape the Setons and (as the viewer anticipated from the opening moments of the film) run away together to see the world. We are left, at the end, to imagine for ourselves how their lives played out from there — one assumes in a very “un-American,” Bohemian fashion. Though Linda has promised to return one day to rescue, in turn, her brother from his stultifying fate.  Father and daughter (Julia), it seems, are left to enjoy their shallow, yet unimpeachably American (read: earned not inherited), riches.

friday fun: the women of who

05 Friday Nov 2010

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I promised you cat pictures this week and failed to deliver … but I have a half hour left here at the front desk of the MHS this rainy, windy, dreary Thursday afternoon and I decided to prepare some beautiful pictures courtesy of the whospam tumblr blog and whoniverse tumblr blog for your Friday edification and pleasure.

Mercy Hartigan (Dervla Kirwan) in The Next Doctor
the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) and his real-life daughter Georgia Moffett
who plays the titular character, Jenny, in The Doctor’s Daughter.
Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan) in Blink
Nancy (Florence Hoath) from The Doctor Dances
Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), Sarah Jane Adventures

Donna Noble (Catherine Tate)
Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), Torchwood

Obviously incomplete. Have any favorite gals I missed? Leave suggestions for next Friday in comments (and picture links if you have any particular images in mind!).

Happy Guy Fawkes Day, everyone … enjoy your weekend!

friday fun: art deco smut

22 Friday Oct 2010

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In lieu of actual words and thought today, I’m sharing silly pictures.

Via queerest of them all  via drake’s way @ tumblr.com

The weather this week has been glorious in Boston and the leaves are starting to turn brilliant autumnal colors … much like the leaves strategically adorning this naked beauty. There’s something about her insouciance that I find charming. But perhaps I simply haven’t had enough coffee yet!

Hope y’all have a lovely weekend and we’ll see about getting back to more regular blogging soon.

friday fun: Jay Smooth on Christine O’Donnell’s latest campaign ad

08 Friday Oct 2010

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Hanna and I watched this on Wednesday night and were in tears. ‘Cause really, he says it all. All that is wrong with this ad and all that is wrong with hard-core populism in American politics.

I’m all for a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to smartness, intelligence, credentials, etc. But I also don’t think “common sense” is good enough, wise enough, to be an indication that we should trust someone with power.

Also: who wants to mess with the space-time continuum? Seriously!

No transcript seems to be available yet, but watch Ill Doctrine for an update on that front.

Happy Friday, folks! Have a good (hopefully three-day) weekend.

multimedia monday: "sensitivity" and "got-no-sensitivity"

13 Monday Sep 2010

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Last week on my tumblr feed, I shared a web video from the awesome Jay Smooth of Ill Doctrine on the political use of the word “sensitivity” in recent weeks. The next day, while I was doing metadata entry at work, I heard this commentary on Fresh Air by linguist Geoff Nunberg about the modern evolution of the work in our political vocabulary.

A full transcript can be found on the NPR website.

Nunberg observes (emphasis mine):

At the outset, the approach seemed to have a lot to recommend it. For one thing, it was easier to persuade people to modify their language than to get them to root out their deep-seated attitudes about race, gender and the rest. And the hope was that if you changed behavior, attitudes would eventually follow. It’s cognitively more efficient to believe the words you’re obliged to say rather than always surrounding them with mental air quotes.

But over the long run, the stress on sensitivities probably set back cultural understanding as much as it advanced it. For one thing, it permits people to blur the distinctions between mere thoughtlessness and antipathies that run deeper in the heart. It’s only insensitive when Michael Steele uses the phrase “honest injun” he probably never gave the expression any thought before. But there’s a moral obtuseness in talking about the insensitivity of carrying a sign that depicts Barack Obama as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose. A lack of sensitivity is the least of that person’s problems.

And while most people are raised to be polite, it turned out not to be such a good idea for institutions to try to impose deference to the sensitivities of certain groups. In response, a lot of people took to pronouncing sensitivity with that mocking tone and derided it under the heading of political correctness.

Points for the turn-of-phrase “moral obtuseness,” which I’m now going to have to find opportunities to use! Meanwhile, I don’t think I have anything super intelligent to say as a response, beyond the fact that it sure as hell is complicated to foster empathy and understanding between people who are divided by fear. I’m always grateful to have NPR out there sharing this sort of long-range perspective, even if they can’t offer any solutions.

sex work vs. trafficking: npr points out the difference

26 Thursday Aug 2010

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On my commute home yesterday, I happened to catch this story on NPR’s All Things Considered about a letter signed by 17 Sate Attorneys General asking Craigslist to remove its “adult services” section because they believe it helps foster illegal sex work and child trafficking.

A full transcript is provided on the NPR website. What caught my attention was this exchange between Melissa Block, the reporter, and Chris Koster, State Attorney General of Missouri (one of the AGs who signed the letter). Block is trying to nail Koster down on exactly what he find objectionable about adult women voluntarily offering “adult services” online.

BLOCK: I did try to look through some of them today, locally here, and I would assume that some of those ads, at least, would be placed by adult women who are not victims, who, this is their line of work, and they want to promote their services. Am I wrong about that?

Mr. KOSTER: Well, in Missouri, if you and I are on the same page on what you just said, in Missouri, that’s called prostitution. And that’s exactly what we are complaining and have been complaining to Craigslist for quite some time over, that some of these ads are very specific. They are clearly for sex, and Craig Newmark is providing a bulletin board for conduct that frequently violates the laws of the 50 states.

BLOCK: I take your point about these ads promoting prostitution, which is illegal. Wouldn’t that be a little bit different, though, from saying that women are being victimized? One does not necessarily imply the other, I think.

I want to say kudos to NPR and to Melissa Block in particular for pointing out that objecting to something because it is illegal is different from objecting to something because it is “victimizing” the women (or children) involved, and that there is no simple way to tell if the (adult) individuals who post on Craigslist are being exploited or not. The AG blusters on, saying

That’s right. I mean, every single ad that we see on this site, on this link, is not creating a victim. But there are far too many that do, and if you go through any town in America, certainly any town of any size, you’re going to see a large number of ads that would certainly appear as advertisements for prostitution.

Again implying that prostitution = victimization. Unfortunately, a four-and-a-half minute story is not enough to disabuse any listener who agrees with Kloster of this notion, but hopefully Block’s assertion that not all sex work is, de facto exploitation will in some small way help to shift the national conversation away from the sex work = exploitation model and allow us to ask more nuanced questions about how to incorporate, within a decriminalized sex work industry, checks and balances that would help stop human trafficking and exploitation without depriving sex workers of their livelihood.