Tag Archives: movies

First Froglets?

17 Monday Nov 2008

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Dear Mr. President Elect,

It has come to our attention, thanks to the national media and your own recent press conference in Chicago, that you and your family are seeking to adopt a pet to join you in the White House when you take up residence in January. While your stated intention to adopt a shelter dog is certainly laudable, we understand that this causes some difficulties due to your daughter’s allergies. We feel in a position to offer a unique solution to this quandry: adopting a froglet.

Froglets are small, orange amphibians living on the Clanger planet. Their two natural habitats are a TARDIS-like top hat and a vertical mud puddle some distance below the surface of the planet. Clangers themselves are friendly, clever pink aliens who – if history is a reliable indicator – would most likely welcome a long-distance relationship with a harmonious earth government.

The froglet diet consists of blue and white pudding soup, which is obtainable from the soup dragon on the Clanger planet (if you ask nicely), and which can also double as a convenient jumper on cold winter days. This will be of particular value in the Obama White House, as we are sure you are planning on implementing an economically responsible and energy-efficient policy.

While you have only thus far indicated an interest in a single pet, the froglets seem happiest in triads. While they have a disconcerting habit of appearing and disappearing without vocal announcement, they are otherwise quite unobtrusive – once one becomes accustomed to their habit of bouncing when showing extreme emotions such as pleasure and discontent. Their presence would, we feel, be a comfort to your daughters during this period of transition and also serve as reminder to the White House staff and all officials you meet with of the need to maintain a sense of humor even during times of extreme stress.

Sincerely,

Hanna & Anna

If You Love Wallace & Gromit

18 Saturday Oct 2008

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Hanna has claimed–entirely appropriately–the finder’s credit for first spotting this rather indescribable artifact of 1960s British television on a Dr. Who episode [Update: Hanna says it’s “The Sea Devils”]–and later coming across a blog post (I’m sorry! I’ve misplaced the link), which led us to this adorable-yet-strange British stop-motion animated series called The Clangers.

This two-series show (which ran from 1968-1972) is made up of ten-minute episodes featuring the Clangers, a race of small pink knitted aliens, and a cast of characters including the Soup Dragon, the Iron Chicken, the Hoots, the (terrifying) Froglets, and the Music Note Trees.

Here is the episode called “The Treasure”:

While the complete series is only available from the UK on Region 2 DVDs, you can view a number of episodes on YouTube:

The Intruder.

Music.

The Pipe Organ.

The Visitor.

And Hanna’s favorite, The Iron Chicken.

They make great study-break or bedtime viewing. Just the thing by which to nod off over a mug of whiskey-laced hot chocolate with vanilla marshmallows.

Teeth: A couple of thoughts

01 Friday Aug 2008

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I finally got around to watching Teeth, last year’s campy horror flick about a teenage girl who discovers during a sexual assault that she has an unusual genital mutation: a toothed vagina (“vagina dentata”) that doesn’t hesitate to defend her by dismembering her attacker. There has been a lot of comment about this film on the feminist blogs I read, and discussion about the movie’s messages about female sexuality, teenage sexuality, and abstinence.

There were some priceless moments. My own favorite scene was Dawn, the main character’s, first pelvic exam, which she schedules after her impulsive break with chastity goes horribly wrong. The (male) gynecologist is bumblingly patronising and when he fails to respond to Dawn’s nervous cues in a respectful manner things get bloody. Dawn is a teen spokesperson for an abstinence program called modeled after such programs as The Silver Ring Thing which allows the film to highlight the hypocrisy of “education” programs that spread ignorance and simplistic fantasies about sexuality. And given its plot, the film makes some particularly well-pitched points about our cultural ignorance about teen and female sexuality.

But overall, I was not impressed. One of the most striking things, to me, was the film’s overall lack of positive male characters, and boys or men who act in a positive way toward Dawn as a sexual being. Her stepfather is kind, but peripheral. All the other boys and men in the story are violent, duplicitous or otherwise creepy. Okay, I know it’s a horror story, but it struck me as particularly unfair that while the film wrestled in a serious way with an (apparently straight) teenage girl’s sexuality, it failed to offer any possibility of non-combative sexual relationships for its main character.

I’m glad a saw it, but it’s not on my list of top-ten feminist faves.

Summer at the Movies

16 Wednesday Jul 2008

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I’ve obviously been delinquent posting to the FFLA this past month. I’m enjoying being able to come home from work at the end of the day and not turn on my computer if I don’t want to. Instead of being on the computer 24/7, Hanna and I have done a lot of walking, cooking, sleeping, ice-cream eating, and movie-watching. In particular, this seems to be the summer for vintage movies. Hanna got a series of vintage science fiction films from the 1950s for her birthday, and this past week we discovered such little-known classics as Warning From Space, a 1956 Japanese film about aliens shaped like starfish who land in Tokyo and The Wasp Woman (1959), about a cosmetics magnate whose quest for eternal youth goes horribly wrong.

One of the advantages of being in a big city is cinemas that play classic movies, foreign films, and documentaries. In the last month, I’ve been able to see Out of Africa at the Coolidge Corner Theater just up the street from our apartment, and on the 4th of July weekend the “final cut” of Bladerunner at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. Last night, I returned to the Brattle with my friend Natalie to see All About Eve, the 1950 Bette Davis film in which Davis plays a stage actress, Margo Channing, who is stalked by a young fan (Eve, played by Anne Baxter) who ingratiates herself into Channing’s life and eventually starts to take it over. It’s a truly creepy movie.

I had also forgotten how openly it wrestles with the question of Women Who Have Careers and whether or not such careers are compatible with romance. Davis’s character has a loving and sexually active relationship with her director, a man several years her junior, whom she ends up marrying in the course of the film. He loves her in no small part because she’s strong-willed, talented, and independent. At one point he rejects Eve’s advances without a second thought because “I’m in love with Margo.” And yet the film still finds it necessarily to give Margo a midlife crisis in which she wonders how she can possibly be “feminine” if she isn’t a housewife.

Oh, and Marilyn Monroe makes a very early appearance as someone’s “dumb blond” dinner date with a vaguely foreign accent and several of the funniest lines in the film!

This weekend, the weather’s supposed to be hot and sticky; we’re going to escape the apartment on Saturday night by attending an open-air production of As You Like It which is being performed free on the Boston Common. As You Like It, being one of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, has all the usual chaos of inconvenient love, exile, disguise, cavorting about in the wood, and reconciliation and marriage at the end. In short, good summer fare.

When I’m done with the last paper . . .

02 Friday May 2008

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This weekend, I’m working away on one final history paper on mid-twentieth century feminist historians and Native American women’s history–if you’re interested in details, check back in a month when I have more perspective! But in the part of my brain not preoccupied with academic writing, I’m happily assembling the beginnings of a summer reading/viewing list. At the top are . . .

  • Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, by Daniel Radosh. I don’t know what it says about me that at the end of term, what sounds most appealing to me is to pick up a rollicking bit of journalism that allows me to laugh at the “parallel universe” of Christian fundamentalist evangelicals . . . but this one’s at the top of my list.
  • My latest issue of the journal Radical Teacher, which just arrived in the mail this evening, is the first of a year-long subscription I picked up with Christmas money, and I look forward to perusing it. Ms. also has a new issue out I haven’t had a chance to look at.
  • Tasha Alexander’s latest mystery featuring you widow Emily Ashton, Fatal Waltz, is out in bookstores and I’m looking forward to a bit of historical-mystery-romance escapism if I do say so myself.
  • He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know, Jessica Valenti’s latest, is unlikely to have anything terribly mind-blowing, but I’m looking forward to it nonetheless–when someone offers you astute feminist analysis in a book that doesn’t require note-taking to make sense of it, why not spend an afternoon enjoying yourself?
  • My friend Joseph gave me Anne Fadiman’s collection of essays, At Large and At Small, at Christmastime and I’m ashamed to say I haven’t yet found time to read it.
  • Plus, I still have the last four episodes of Torchwood, season one, waiting to be watched, and Hanna reports that Prince Caspian is opening in the weekend of Simmons’ graduation.

So I’m sure I will have no trouble filling my leisure time . . .

I have a few other more substantive post ideas that I hope to work on after my brain recovers–check back in a couple of weeks.

Because it’s all I can muster . . .

07 Monday Apr 2008

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As the semester winds down toward May 7th (the date my last assignment is due), I’m fairly sure that the blog entries will slow to a trickle. I had two migraine headaches this week, which was no fun. I also had my first oral history interview with a doula from here in the Boston area who’s been practicing since 1969 as a birth educator and support person for women in labor long before the modern meaning of “doula” was articulated in the 1990s. We talked for over an hour and a half and there was so much more I would have loved to talk with her about. Happily, I’ll be taking her doula training workshop this summer, so will have an opportunity to learn a lot more about the work she and others are doing in the area.

After the interview I was ready to crash, so Hanna and I got together, ate chips, dip, and pocky, and watched Mystery Science Theater 3000, an episode that lampooned this “horror” film with agonizingly slow pacing, nonexistent plot, lots of sunshine, and lines like “this is where the fish live.” We followed it up with Stranger Than Fiction (which was just as good the second time as the first).

I hear that Spring is finally arriving in Michigan, so I hope all you Third Coasters are enjoying the end of a grueling winter.

More news as soon as the term ends and I settle in to my new apartment in the middle of May (I promise pictures eventually!)

Golden Compass: Feminist Theology?

12 Wednesday Dec 2007

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. . . Not if you see it on the big screen, at least according to Hanna Rosin’s review, “How Hollywood Saved God” in The Atlantic Monthly.

While I am very much looking forward to seeing the movie adaptation of The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman, on the big screen this weekend (my first movie in the theater since . . . um . . . well, before I came to Boston, I swear on both volumes of my Shorter OED) it’s been interesting to hear some of the debate about the film, the books, and their treatment of religious issues. While I’m not sure I would go so far as to label it a “controversy,” as it was billed on this morning’s “On Point” discussion on NPR, it does seem to have stirred up a little, shall we say, dust in Catholic and Evangelical circles.

In the books on the other hand . . .

“On Point” actually had some extremely thoughtful guests (Ms. Rosin among them) who were discussing the theological themes in both His Dark Materials, the book trilogy, and the movie-makers decisions to elide most of the deeper re-workings of Biblical and spiritual themes. Professor of Religion Stephen Prothero won my heart with his passionate defense of literature as a way for young people to explore the Big Questions and engage in meaning-making for themselves, as well as his delight in Lyra, the series’ protagonist, as a feminist heroine:

My daughters get dressed up as Hermione for Halloween and for the Harry Potter parties, and you know Hermione is a wonderful character but she’s sort of carrying the water for Harry Potter, who gets to be the hero . . . and I love that about the books [that Lyra gets to be the heroine]. I think it’s wonderful to tell girls to question authority, to make a little trouble, to be suspicious when people talk in God’s name as if God is speaking to them through an earphone.

Even more radical, of course, is Pullman’s project of writing an “alternative Genesis” with Lyra as a new Eve whose initiation into sexual awareness is the catalyst for redemption. The narrative is an explicit “response to the church,” Rosin points out, drawing on her interviews with Pullman himself, “this idea of patriarchy and misogyny and the idea that she should be Eve, and she should re-write the story of Eve.”

“And I would argue,” Prothero follows up, “that what we have there is something quite like feminist theology . . . that we shouldn’t be thinking about God as this old man with a beard in the sky . . . why do we have to have the woman be the villain here? Why can’t she be the hero?” Amen.

Plus, I hear that seeing the daemons on screen is worth the price of a ticket. So see you at the theater!

As an aside: My one reservation about the books, incidentally, is the way they are being marketed–much like the Harry Potter books–to a pre-teen audience when they are actually much more dense and in some ways more frightening, than Rowling’s series.

Also, Tom Stoppard wrote one of the early screenplays–wouldn’t you love to have seen that version??!

Two movies

03 Monday Sep 2007

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Yesterday, I watched the 1957 Hepburn-Tracy film Desk Set, in which Katherine Hepburn plays the head reference librarian at a media corporation and Spencer Tracy plays the computer engineer whose machine, Emmerick, threatens to make her job obsolete. Of course there’s romance involved–with the right man (Tracy) and the wrong one (the junior executive who expects her to drop her career and move to California when he gets a promotion). It’s a charming film, though like with so many other Hollywood romances, you wonder how someone as utterly with it as Hepburn could possibly have been dating the wrong guy in the first instance, from which relationship doom Tracy subsequently rescues her?

While you’re hunting down Desk Set (available through Netflix!), also check out Next Stop Wonderland, since it’s set in Boston and features some of the very spots I have been (or soon will be). It’s a slow-moving love story about a biologist-plumber and a recently-single nurse whose meddlesome mother places a personals ad for her in the newspaper. There is also a side-story involving a fish-napped puffer fish from the Boston aquarium. Kenneth Turan wrote a nice review in Never Coming to a Theater Near You, which is how I originally found it.