Hope for Hathaway

Okay, people, I need to get something off my chest here. What the hell happened to Anne Hathaway?

As I watched the Oscars, with poor Hathaway so gamely and desperately trying to make it work, I just felt … sad, I guess. What happened to the Anne Hathaway who showed such damn promise in Rachel Getting Married? Who the hell has been helping her choose her projects since then? I mean, really. Let’s go to the map:
Read the full article »

And … the AOL Axe Comes Down (Again), While Arianna Scoffs at Her Unpaid Writers

… to the tune of 900 employees laid off in the wake of the HuffPo buyout. I hate to play Nikki Finke and be all “Toldja!” but really, did anyone not see this coming?

I love how AOL CEO Tim Armstrong tries to play this down. He “lamented” the cuts and says AOL is “much more healthy” than it was a year ago. Aw, gee, you’re a prince, Tim. I’m sure those laid off employees feel so much better knowing you lament canning them. But I bet you don’t feel bad enough to take a bit of a pay cut off your multi-million dollar compensation package yourself to ensure the continued health of AOL, do you? Of course you don’t.

The 900 layoffs suck, but that’s not the full story here. Let’s go back to this CNN piece from October of last year and unravel this ball of yarn a bit, shall we?
Read the full article »

1,000 Monkeys: Bullying Behavior

Film critic Thelma Adams, who, like me, also does a lot of writing that has nothing to do with movies, has this great essay up on her site called “Fat Ten-Year-Old,” in which she details defending her daughter from a sullen, bullying former classmate. This piece really struck a chord with me, as I must confess to having felt that “Mama Grizzly Bear” urge myself on more than one occasion when my own little cubs have faced social challenges.
Read the full article »

Dan Savage vs Fatties?

I was perusing Facebook last night when I came across a link to this excellent post taking sex columnist/homosexual activist Dan Savage to task for his stance on fat people.

Now, I am a big fan of Dan Savage. I think his “It Gets Better” campaign to help gay youth who may be struggling with coming out or dealing with the aftermath of doing so, is one of the best examples of “pay it forward” and compassion that I’ve ever seen.

I also think that the author of this post, titled Savage Intent, has an excellent point when she points out the similarities between gay acceptance and fat acceptance, and the good fight Savage fights daily for the homosexual community while he slams the fat community. I also take issue — as I have for years — with Savage’s seemingly callous dismissal of the correlation of body acceptance and shame with eating disorders. The clincher of this post, for me, is this:

It’s the same fucking ignorance, the same fucking hatred that you are fighting against on behalf of gay Americans. The only difference is that your aesthetic displeasure is on the other side of the fence now. Now you’re the one who feels disgusted and appalled by the public display of what you deem unattractive or unacceptable. And now you’re the one dispensing baseless conjecture, stereotypes and unfounded “science” to claim that your opinions, regardless of how hateful, are fully justified.

And of course, media, including — perhaps especially — movies and television, continues create a barrier for a genuine understanding of the myriad issues that affect weight AND mortality. How many overweight — or even normal-sized — women do you see playing lead roles in movies or on television?

Regardless of where you think you fall on the whole issue of fat acceptance and why people are fat, I have to think that reading the scientific issues laid out the way the author, Shannon, does in this piece cannot help but at least make you think about the assumptions many of us tend to make concerning weight, health and mortality.

P.S. Shannon’s piece is very long, but please take time to read it in its entirety. There’s a ton of useful, relevant, scientific data in there, summarized in a way that really works.

P.P.S. I also thought it was pretty cool that the link to this article on Facebook came from Savage’s colleague at The Stranger, film critic Lindy West.

We Interrupt This Blog for an Important Message…

… my baby is all (sniff) grown up and blogging.

She’s also (finally) updating her web comic, Stick Figure Yaoi. It’s only taken a year to get a second strip out of her. Yeah, sure, she’s been busy, what with school, being in two plays, assistant stage managing a third play, and writing a novel and a graphic novel. Slacker.

That is all. Carry on.

Anime Girlfriend

There’s a new episode of My Anime Girlfriend up over on Atom.com. I kinda dig this little web series about a data entry dork and his anime girlfriend, Yuruki. I’ve seen a lot of little gems at Atom over the years … more so before they got bought by MTV and essentially made into a web channel for Comedy Central a few years ago, but you can still find a lot of good stuff over there.

One thing, though, is that it’s all comedy now there, so a lot of the indie stuff that wasn’t comedy isn’t there anymore.

P.S. If you have a fave short film that you’d like me to check out, send me a URL. I’ve been watching more shorts of late, and I’m particularly interested right now in shorts that are really original, or even experimental.

Episode 3 of My Anime Girlfriend is embedded below. If you’ve not seen the first two episodes, you might want to watch them first. Short, but cute, especially if you’re an anime geek.

o

Marriage of the Minds

Well, this is some welcome news, even if it means I might have to finally suck it up and subscribe to HBO. Variety reports that Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Wonder Boys, Mysteries of Pittsburgh) and his wife, writer Ayelet Waldman, have a project set up at HBO called Hobgoblin, about conmen and magicians using their skills to battle Hitler during WW2.

Chabon just happens to be my favorite (living) writer, and I’m quite a fan of Waldman, who I’ve been reading and loosely corresponding with since way back when I was mommy blogging on my previous blog, Catawampus, and she was mommy blogging on Bad Mother. Chabon may be the better known of the pair, but I’ve always loved Waldman’s sass and style. I asked her once many years ago how she dealt with “competing” with Chabon when it came to work and she replied simply, “I don’t.” Well, exactly.

This project marks the first time the couple is collaborating on a project — at least professionally. They’ve already survived marriage with four kids for quite a while now, so I expect they’ve hammered a lot of the balance of how they work together out a bit. I’ll be following this project with interest, so stay tuned.

By the bye, if you’ve been wondering what’s up with the adaptation of Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, it’s apparently still a go at Sony with Scott Rudin and the Coens. Good news on that front as well … though I’m still waiting for Kavalier and Clay, which still appears to be “in development.”

Spotlight: Outreach and Education at the Sarasota Film Festival

I’ve been meaning to check out the Sarasota Film Festival for a long time now, and it looks like this year I’ll finally be heading to Florida (my first time ever to set foot in that state, believe it or not) to check it out and serve on a jury for the fest.

One of the things that intrigued me the most about SFF as a regional fest is that it has one of the most expansive and impressive Outreach and Education efforts I’ve seen at a fest of this size. Since I’m particularly interested right now in the role of regional fests in reaching young people and exposing them to a world of cinematic experiences broader than what they’d likely be exposed to in mainstream theaters, this seemed an important fest to take a closer look at.

Allison Koehler, SFF’s director of Outreach and Education, very kindly agreed to take some time out of a very busy schedule prepping for the fest to allow me to pester her with a few questions. I’ll be checking out some of the fest’s education programs myself while I’m there, too, so there will be more to come on this later. In the meantime, here’s our interview, conducted via email:

KV: What was the impetus for Sarasota to develop such a strong O&E program?

AK: Sarasota is widely known for being a community passionate about the arts. Between the Sarasota Opera, Sarasota Ballet, Sarasota Symphony Orchestra, Ringling Museum of Art and the College of Art and Design, the Historic Asolo Theatre, the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall and many, many other arts organizations and venues, Sarasota is truly a hub for intelligent, enthusiastic, and media-literate art supporters and consumers. The Sarasota Film Festival very naturally fills the role of offering the very best in film. As a non-profit organization, we have an obligation to our community to provide outreach and education opportunities that would otherwise not be available.

The school systems in Sarasota and in neighboring Manatee and Charlotte counties put a very strong emphasis on arts education. There are a great deal of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) programs and a high number of television and video production courses available at all grade levels. Again, very naturally, SFF is able to support the innovative education that is already happening here in Sarasota by providing additional opportunities for the area’s promising young media-makers.

We also do outreach in the community through extensive partnerships. Over the past few years, we’ve partnered in programming with the Jewish Federation of Sarasota-Manatee, GCC UN Women, the Sarasota Opera, and Sarasota’s LGBTQ Fabulous Independent Film Festival by offering film sidebars, networking opportunities, workshops and panel discussions, and conversation series within our festival to strengthen the fabric of the area’s arts community and introduce visiting artists, industry, and press to each other and to our local constituency.

KV: You do O&E both in and out of classrooms. In what way do you coordinate with school districts to reach students in the classroom? Do you partner with other educational not-for-profits in outreach?

AK: We work closely with the Board of Education, school principals and other administrators, and more often than not, directly with individual educators who are looking to integrate film studies into their curriculum. We also partner with local community and not-for-profit organizations to collaborate on film and event programming, promotional support, and outreach opportunities to strengthen and unite our community as a whole.

The festival’s community partnerships have included: ALSO Gay Youth Services, Community Foundation of Sarasota County, First Step of Sarasota, Florida Film Commission, Florida Studio Theatre Improv Troupe, Florida West Coast Symphony, Film School of Florida State University, FSU/Asolo Acting Conservatory, Girls Inc., John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Manatee Community College, Manatee County Arts Council, Museum of Asian Art, Ringling School of Art and Design, Rowlett Magnet School for the Performing Arts, Sarasota County Arts Council, School Board of Sarasota County, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, United Nations Development Fund for Women, Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, YMCA Community Coalition for Children, Young Professionals Group of the Sarasota Chamber of Commerce among others.
Kim Voynar: Has your fest developed an actual written curriculum in some format, a template that you follow year to year? Or do you develop a new curriculum each year depending on the interests of the students?

Allison Koehler: Our Outreach and Education Department designs curriculum based on the program offerings for the year. We have a general outline for each program and then tailor the curriculum specific to the year’s focus.

For example, our Reel Life Studio program at its most basic is a hands-on filmmaking program for high school students. Each year, we place special emphasis on a niche area of filmmaking in an attempt to introduce areas that students may not have exposure to in their school media arts classrooms. In 2009 we focused on documentary filmmaking. Last year we chose Dogme 95 and this year we’re taking a closer look at the audio/visual relationship by having students create a short film around a piece of instrumental music. The structure of the program remains the same. Generally, the program starts a little over a month before the festival and we meet as a large group two or three times where we outline the program and its guidelines, teach the history and theory behind the program’s focus, and hold workshops that include screenings, writing and pitching sessions, and review.

Other programs like our Junior Jury and Classroom Critic programs also keep the same basic structure and curriculum but have changing content relevant to the year. Both programs focus on film review and our goal is to expand the curriculum in each program each year as our department continues to grow.

Traditionally, the Junior Jury is responsible for screening all of the youthFEST short films programmed for the year’s festival and charged with determining the winner of the official Best Family Short Film Award presented each year at our Filmmaker Tribute. Over the years, we’ve developed and continued to modify screening review forms specific to the program and add elements that further increases student participation. For example, this year, the Junior Jury members are also responsible for writing written reviews, conducting interviews with filmmakers, screening and reviewing feature films, assisting in curating the youthFEST short film programs, and blogging about the process.

Classroom Critic was developed as a supplement to Junior Jury so we could reach more students. For this program, we design a film review curriculum and distribute it to participating middle school educators who incorporate our materials into their existing teaching format. This began with a simple guide to film review and now has the original guide plus additions like a screening review form, film analysis question prompts, film review suggestions and tips, and a glossary of film terms.

KV: You also do a lot of O&E that seems to be year-round — the young filmmakers and screenwriting programs, for instance. Are these programs entirely run by Sarasota staff? Volunteers? How do you manage such a large O&E program?

AK: The majority of our educational programming runs from December through the end of the festival month (April). Our goal has always been to expand into full-time, year-round operation, but with the way the economic climate has been over the past few years, as I’m sure is the case for many arts organizations, our dream has not been able to be fully realized yet. However, things are looking up! This year we were able to bring back our popular Moonlight Movies series which provides the tri-county area with evenings of free family-friendly film programming. We had a fall/winter line-up at the end of last year, a full spring schedule, and are working on finalizing the summer series now.

Many of our programs and much of our curriculum has been integrated into area classrooms which, of course, operate outside of the festival timeline. Phoenix Academy, for example, has created a screenwriting mentor group within their school to continue supporting the student writers who have participated in our programs and those who have a general interest in the subject. Booker Middle School educators are using parts of our curriculum throughout the year as a way to merge film and media studies with the english, literature, and language arts curricula they already have in place.

Our programs are created, designed, managed, and taught entirely by our Outreach and Education Department staff which currently includes two full-time staff members– myself as Director of Outreach and Education and our Production Manager George Denison– with support from part-time Program Coordinators Lacey Sigmon and Datev Gallagher, and Production Assistant Mohamed Younes who work for either intern credit or stipends. Volunteers are also essential to the successful operation of our department as they provide valuable support with distributing curriculum, organizing outreach efforts, event staffing, and more. How do we manage such a large list of programs? We put in a lot of hours!

KV: Your fest offers a really broad scope of educational programming at no cost to students. Is your program entirely funded by AMPAS grants? Do you have a staff person(s) dedicated to researching and writing grants to fund your O&E program?

AK: To my knowledge, we have received an AMPAS grant every other year since the department was created. We also receive funding from the Famiglio Family Foundation, Amicus Foundation, Gulf Coast Community Foundation of Venice, Publix Charities, and the Woman’s Exchange, and part of our department’s budget is paid for by the Sarasota County Tourist Development Tax Revenues. Additionally, a portion of our funding comes from corporate and individual donors. Our festival staff works closely to research and write grants to fund the O&E Department.

KV: And finally, looking at regional fests generally, what do you see as the role of O&E in building and growing a solid regional film fest?

AK: Generally, hmm. I think the role of any Outreach and Education Department, generally, is being the roots– the foundation of the building and growing of a regional film festival into a solid one. Two of our overarching goals in the department are to promote and proliferate community involvement in the arts and, through our programs, cultivate media-literate individuals. As our lives and the lives of young people are surrounded by, saturated in, and oftentimes overwhelmed with media, being able to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, and compute becomes increasingly more essential. Being a media consumer is unavoidable. Media literacy makes the situation an empowering one for individuals of all ages. By offering all of our educational opportunities for free– keeping them accessible for all– and focusing outreach on integration, we’ve really done a nice job in Sarasota of building and growing a solid festival and supportive community.

The Outreach and Education Department is also important in building a strong film festival because it establishes relationships with talented filmmakers very early on and continues to be a role in their success far beyond the time young people spend within one program or another. We’ve had so many students come through our programs and then, years later, submit fantastic work to the festival. They are making films and coming back. Our festival is not only part of the foundation from which they came, but we’re also a big part of their future as successful filmmakers.

On the Talented Miss Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith’s biographer, Joan Schenkar, has a most intriguing blog post up on The Paris Review about her experience delving into the dark mind of the prolific, famously dark Highsmith (who wrote, among other things, Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley). A snippet:

Like almost everything she turned her hand to her, her list—“Little Crimes for Little Tots1,” she called it—has murder on its mind, focuses on a house and its close environs, mentions a mother in a cameo role, and is highly practical in a thoroughly subversive way. It’s also vintage Highsmith: the writer who entertained homicidal feelings for her stepfather since grade school looks at six-year-olds and sees only the killers inside them.

If you’re a fan of Highsmith, or even if you’ve never read her but enjoy your fiction dark as dark can be, reading Schenkar writing about the process of delving deep into the late Highsmith’s mind via her many journals and private diaries can’t help but make you intrigued to read the book, titled The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. I want it. Now, please.

Thanks to the divinely brilliant Howard Rodman for pointing to this piece.

Inside Out

If you liked Exit Through the Gift Shop as much as I did, you might think this is pretty cool. French street artist JR was awarded this year’s TED* prize, for which he was awarded $100,000 with which to make his “One Wish to Change the World” happen.

The Guardian has this interesting piece up about the latest project by the artist, Inside Out, which he announced last Wednesday at TED2011, but he needs more than just himself and his team of helpers to pull this one off: He needs me and you and everyone we know to get involved in what may just end up being one of the biggest collaborative efforts by a world-wide community to enact an art project in all corners of the globe. Here he is explaining his project at the TED conference:

JR is known for doing some really cool socio-political art using photographs. One of his most famous projects, Face2Face, involved putting billboard-sized portraits of Israelis and Palestinians who do the same jobs and putting them up side by side on both sides of Israel’s separation barrier in 2007. For the Inside Out project, he wants people to send him their own photos. Basically the idea is: You upload a photo and tell him what you want to do with it; he sends you back a huge poster-sized print that you can post where you want.

Pretty cool.

It kind of reminds me of Life in a Day, the YouTube project that asked people to send in a video of what they were doing on one day, June 10, 2010, and then send the video in. Director Kevin Macdonald and producer Ridley Scott poured through the entries, cutting the whole massive project down into a 90-minute or so film.

Interesting speech from JR at the TED conference (above), interesting idea. Question is, what picture would you take? And where would you paste it?

*What’s TED? (from The Guardian website

*TED official Website

Consenting Adults

Still one of my all-time fave short films, directed by pre-Thank You for Smoking Jason Reitman:

Weekend Special: Axe Cop Awesomeness

In honor of Emerald City Comicon, which is happening right here, right now: Axe Cop.

Happy weekend. Remember Wheaton’s Law.

Apparently, It’s Not Just Natalie Portman Who’s Having Sex Outside of Marriage …

Is it really easier than ever for 20-something guys to get sex with no strings attached? And even if it is, is that necessarily a problem?

“A heterosexual community can be analyzed as a marketplace in which men seek to acquire sex from women by offering other resources in exchange. Societies will therefore define gender roles as if women are sellers and men buyers of sex.” — from the Abstract for the article Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions, authors Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs

I came across a link to the above article, published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review, while I was reading this Slate piece by Mark Regnerus about how today’s young men, while “failing in life,” are not failing to get laid.

I found the Slate piece interesting and … well, depressing, in the way in which it reduces sex, which to me should be something (usually) intimate and (always) passionate — even if it’s a one-nighter — down to a purely economic exchange of values. I mean, I get the theory behind it, sure, but I also think that theory is inherently sexist in that it assumes that men want sex MORE than women do, which may be the case for some men and some women but is certainly not a universal truth.

Nonetheless, here’s how the Slate piece more or less breaks it down:

A) In times when women outnumber men (assuming that women are competing with each other for that smaller number of men and not just buying a good, reliable vibrator instead), men become an increasingly desirable commodity;

B) This shifts the balance of power between the sexes, essentially shifting the power structure of the bartering value of sex acts, meaning that men have to exchange less of perceived value (primarily commitment to an exclusive relationship, engagement, marriage, and children … although for some women what they want in exchange is more material) in order to obtain sex from women;

C) When this happens, young women are forced to engage in more casual sex outside the context of a committed relationship in order to gain the value of having any sort of relationship, committed or not, and are willing to entertain the possibility of a wider array of sex acts that men are likely to find more appealing.

D) In order words, what your grandmother told you was true: Men don’t need to buy the cow when they can get the milk for free. When the balance of sexual power has shifted to the male side of the equation, we see more short term relationships, casual hookups, more couples living together long term rather than getting married.

Now, all this is well and good, but it also assumes that there’s something wrong with that. Not that there’s anything wrong with marriage and long-term relationships — I’m married myself — but I don’t think everyone has to get married or that being married is necessary for raising healthy, happy kids. Lesbian partners raise kids. Single moms (and, for that matter, single dads) raise kids. Even Natalie Portman can raise a kid.

And I don’t believe that all young women who are engaging in casual sex are doing so purely out of the economics of relationships. Isn’t it possible — just possible — that 40-some years after the advent of the feminist movement, and 38 years after Roe v. Wade, a lot of these young women have simply grown up in a time when virginity is less important, and when the primary concern around casual sexual encounters is more about avoiding unwanted pregnancies and STIs, rather than whether the guy will marry you after you negotiate the terms of your sexual relationship?

The nuclear family model we’ve been conditioned to accept as the brass ring girls are supposed to be reaching for from the time they first dress Barbie in a wedding dress isn’t necessarily all that it’s cracked up to be. Conservatives like to point a finger at the feminist movement and blame the divorce rate on uppity women and their feminist ideas. To an extent, they’re right: feminism has empowered women to no longer believe that they need to get married, or stay in a bad or unfulfilling marriages. Feminism has encouraged women to balance having kids with having careers, which in turn makes it easier for women not to be trapped in bad marriages for financial reasons. And feminism is responsible for things like birth control and legal abortion, which make it easier for young women to enjoy an active sex life.

One of the points in the Slate piece has to do with the “low cost of sex for men,” which the author backs up, in part, with these stats: “Take the speed with which these men say their romantic relationships become sexual: 36 percent of young men’s relationships add sex by the end of the second week of exclusivity; an additional 13 percent do so by the end of the first month.” Another 30%, he says, have engaged in sex without any wooing necessary at all. (These stats are pulled from a source that’s pretty reliable, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health ).

But isn’t it possible that, for some women, there’s also a perceived “low cost of sex” from her perspective as well? After all, if a young woman in her 20s wants to steer clear of the entanglement of a committed relationship but still wants to enjoy a healthy, vigorous sex life like the boys do, what the hell is wrong with that? I’m assuming here, kids, that we’re all old enough to be smart about birth control and condom use and having regular checkups to ensure we’re not picking up and passing around any STIs. But these are all things that BOTH men and women having consensual sex with multiple partners should be doing anyhow, right? Get laid all you want, but be responsible about it.

The problem with the Slate piece is that it’s operating from the assumption that the young men in question — these unmotivated, uneducated, unemployed or under-employed, video-game addicted slackers of whom the piece speaks — should actually be desirable to these young women as anything but sexual partners, or, potentially, as future sperm donors should these young women some day desire to have a kid. Why would a smart young woman even want to have a commitment from someone who isn’t committed to his own life?

I’m reminded of a conversation my mom overheard at the store between a couple of 20-something hipster guys:

HIPSTER GUY #1: So, you find a job yet?

HIPSTER GUY #2: Nah, but it’s cool. I got a girlfriend who has one.

Girlfriend, trust me. You can do better than that.

On the Stupidity of Mike Huckabee and Michael Medved Taking Harvard-Educated, 29-Year-Old, Pregnant Natalie Portman to Task for Setting Such a Bad Example

**Editor’s Note: A lot of smart people have gone to Yale, but Natalie Portman was not one of them. She went to Harvard. Correction duly made, with thanks to the reader who spotted my egregious error, apologies to Ms. Portman for insinuating she chose Yale, and Harvard people everywhere offended by the mix-up. Mea culpa.

So former presidential candidate/former governor of Arkansas (and, let’s not forget kids, likely presidential candidate in 2012) Mike Huckabee has an issue with Natalie Portman being unwed and pregnant. So sayeth The Hollywood Reporter, who picked it up from MediaMatters.org.

If you read the Media Matters piece, you’ll note that this all actually came from an interview with Huckabee on the February 27th edition of The Michael Medved Show, which makes it even less surprising. The controversial quote happened in response to Medved complaining about Natalie Portman’s speech, in which she thanked her choreographer fiance, Benjamin Millepied, for their soon-to-be baby. Medved took issue with this: “He didn’t give her the most wonderful gift, which would be a wedding ring! And it just seems to me that sending that kind of message is problematic.”

Huckabee responded at length, but the bit that’s seemed to set people off the most is this:

“Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out-of-wedlock children.”

But apparently Ms. Portman, who is 29 years old, has a high-paying job and a degree from YaleHarvard, and can surely afford to raise a child with or without being married to any man, is setting a bad example for young girls who will see her all preggers and think, “Hey, if a rich movie star like Natalie Portman can afford a baby, I can too!” Or not.

Huckabee opposes sex education and abortion, so apparently in spite of his issue with supporting the children of single mothers — a problem that will no doubt increase by a multiple of at least 10 due to the unsavory influence of Natalie Portman — he would like there to be MORE children born to mothers who are ill-equipped to be parents. Brilliant, just brilliant.

Here’s Huckabee from the Republican presidential debate in South Carolina:

“I’m pro-life because I believe life begins at conception, and I believe that we should do everything possible to protect that life because it is the centerpiece of what makes us unique as an American people. We value the life of one as if it’s the life of all …”

Well, that’s good to know, Mr. Huckabee. I hope you have a plan in place to personally financially support those lives that we should so protect. Seeing as how we value the life of one as if it’s the life of all, and all.

What’s that? You’re a Republican who doesn’t support those socialist ideas about it taking a village to raise a child? But how can we value the life of one as if it’s the life of all, and then NOT think it’s important for the ALL to have things like food to eat, a safe place to live, universal access to health care? Better not think about that one too hard.

So how do you feel about sex education, Mr. Huckabee? From ProLifeBlogs.com:

“Abstinence education provides a valuable counterweight to peer pressure and the message young people get from the popular culture encouraging casual relationships and separating sex from love, commitment and marriage. I do not believe in teaching about sex or contraception in public schools. That is the responsibility of parents.”

Then it would logically follow that it’s the responsibility of those parents to financially support the babies born out of wedlock to their sexually active teens if they fail to teach their kids about sex and birth control, right? Because what if, in spite of being taught that Abstinence is Good, instead the kids look at pregnant, 29-year-old Natalie Portman and decide to get knocked up anyhow? We value ALL life, remember? Those unaborted babies aren’t going to raise themselves, someone’s gotta do it. Gosh almighty, what a conundrum.

Young women get pregnant without benefit of marriage for a lot of reasons, Mr. Huckabee — most often because they are having sex with men (sometimes young, sometimes not) who are also not married to them at the time. They get pregnant because they are uniformed about how pregnancy happens and how not to get pregnant, when they don’t have access to good sex education — which Huckabee opposes. Sometimes they get pregnant because they have been raised by crappy, unloving parents and mistakenly believe that if they have a baby, someone will love them. Sometimes they get pregnant by immaculate conception, but that doesn’t happen too often.

So to sum up where Huckabee stands:

1. Sex outside of marriage is bad. Everyone without a wedding ring should be abstaining from sex.

2. Abstinence is good. Everyone without a wedding ring should be abstaining from sex.

3. Abortion is bad. So don’t get pregnant if you don’t want a baby. Also, everyone without a wedding ring should be abstaining from sex.

4. Sex education is bad. And remember, kids, everyone without a wedding ring should be abstaining from sex.

5. Waiting to have a baby until you’re 29 years old, have a degree from Yale, and a successful career, is also bad. Because everyone without a wedding ring should be abstaining from sex.

6. Don’t do what Natalie Portman does, kids. Follow Mike Huckabee’s advice instead: Everyone without a wedding ring should be abstaining from sex.

Got it? Good. Because Mike Huckabee values all life so much that he wants to tell you what you can and cannot do with your own uterus, young women. He values all life, but he doesn’t support having access to universal health care once you’re born to ensure you stay healthy and alive. He values all life, but he doesn’t value yours when you have to get a back alley abortion because he gets elected president in 2012 and manages to get Roe v. Wade overturned. He values all life, but not if your mother is a successful career woman who can afford to support you, but doesn’t happen to want to get married just because she got pregnant.

Now I don’t think that any girl will get pregnant because she saw Natalie Portman give her Oscar acceptance speech while unmarried and pregnant. But time and statistical data could prove me wrong on that count. It’s possible that 10 or 20 years from now in an alternative universe that we will have scientific data to support Mr. Medved and Mr. Huckabee’s assertion that Natalie Portman has set a bad example by thanking the father of her kid in her Oscar speech.

Until then, they both continue to be idiots.

P.S. If you are having sex, married or not, and you don’t want to have a baby, USE BIRTH CONTROL. Abstinence only works if you aren’t having sex. And having sex safely and in a way that fits your PERSONAL belief system, is a Good Thing.

P.P.S. If you do get pregnant and do not wish to be, you still have the legal right to get an abortion. Even if you live in Kansas.

Spotlight: Ann Arbor Film Festival

Much of the indie film world is gearing up for South by Southwest, which runs in Austin (the film part, anyhow) March 11-19. And they have a swell slate, and Austin’s a fun town, and SXSW is always a great party sandwiched around some interesting films, but you already know that. Love SXSW, love the folks who run it, but you already know about that fest, right? Probably you already have your digs set, your plane ticket purchased, your film-and-party slate lined up.

What you may be less aware of is the Ann Arbor Film Festival, which runs March 22-27 in lovely Ann Arbor, Michigan. When I went there a couple years ago, it was C-O-L-D! And it snowed during the fest. In March! But I didn’t care, because the films that Ann Arbor programs are so engaging, and their primary venue, the Michigan Theater, is just a lovely place to celebrate film.
Read the full article »