Film Archive for September, 2009

Jennifer's Body: Good Feminist Horror, or Just a Bad Film?

What with all the being sick lately, I didn’t get to catch Jennifer’s Body, but I have been keeping up with the reviews of the film. One of my favorite defenses of it so far can be found on the site Girldrive, in a thoughtful, well-written post titled “Jennifer’s Body and the feminists who hate it.”
In this piece, the author both defends the film and enumerates the reasons she feels it’s been inappropriately attacked by some critics (in particular, she takes issue with critics she feels are bashing the film as an extension of the ever-popular post-Juno Diablo Cody bashing).
I was led to the piece by Mary Ann Johanson, writing a weekly roundup for Alliance of Women Film Journalists. Johanson’s take on the Girldrive piece was very different from mine; she concludes her writeup with this: “And for me, or any feminist, to suggest that I must support any movie, no matter how good or bad it is, merely because women made it, is ridiculous.”
I don’t believe that was the point of the author at Girldrive at all. In fact, she explicitly says, “And I’m not implying that women should get off easy–just that they shouldn’t be written off after 31 years on earth and a meager two screenplays. Maybe Cody just wanted to have some campy, squeal-inducing fun. I’d argue that she succeeded, without exploiting young women or killing them off in rapid succession. Considering the sizeable chick carnage of other recent teen girl horror movies, that’s actually pretty radical.
I haven’t seen Jennifer’s Body yet, so can’t weigh in one way or the other on whether I think it rocks or sucks, but I’d love to hear some input from those of you who have seen it. Radical feminist horror manifesto, or just more annoyingly trendy, overly Diablospeak wrapped around a not-so-great attempt to deconstruct the horror genre?
Weigh in, film freaks.

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Cloudy with a Chance of Michael Jackson, Jim Carrey and the Mad Hatter

I’m spending a nice, quiet weekend with the kids after returning from Toronto, and since they were itching to see Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, that’s what we did. I thought the movie itself was okay, but not great. The socio-political slant was a little too close to the much better WALL-E for me, and I’m still pretty firmly in the “3-D is kind of overrated” camp. And I thought Up was a far, far superior film in every respect.
We did see some cool trailers the kids got excited about. Surprisingly, they all want to see the Michael Jackson rehearsal footage movie. Perhaps less surprisingly, since I came of age during Michael Jackson’s Thriller era, I want to see it too.
All the kids in the theater oohed, ahhed and laughed out loud over the trailer for A Christmas Carol, and my brood wasn’t alone in reaching out to grab snowflakes. Response was a bit more muted from the kiddie set for Alice in Wonderland, but the adults in the crowd seemed excited about that one. I thought it looked awesome, myself.

Back to the Game

Getting back into the writing swing after a month just doing behind-the-scenes work while I took some time off to deal with moving my dad from Oklahoma City to Seattle.
In other news, there’s a press screening Friday for Agnes Varda’s Beaches of Agnes, which I’ve been dying to see forever, so I don’t even have to wait until Toronto to be excited about a film! Look for a writeup of Beaches of Agnes over the weekend, and I’ll be getting back into posting more regularly now that I’m settled back into real life. And yes, I’ll be at Toronto, running frantically to screenings. If you’re going, I’ll see you there.
It’s good to be back.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon