osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2013-12-08 12:11 am
osprey_archer) wrote2013-12-08 12:11 am
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Hanna
I recently watched Hanna, because it fit with my brother and my not-very-overlapping movie tastes. An action thriller (good for him!) with a non-sexualized teenage girl protagonist (hooray for me!), which fortunately turned out to be excellent, if kind of trippy.
The action begins in the frozen arctic, where Hanna’s ex-CIA father trains her in all his ex-CIA know-how; continues once Hanna has been whisked away to a labyrinthine top secret base; and then follows Hanna’s road trip adventures, where it quickly becomes clear that her father’s years of intensive training totally failed to teach Hanna the most basic ability of spycraft: being unnoticeable.
Hanna is not merely not unnoticeable, but endearingly incapable of fitting in at all. At one point, a boy is about to kiss her, and she says, “Kissing requires a total of 34 facial muscles, and 112 postural muscles. The most important muscle involved is the orbicularis oris muscle, because it is used to pucker the lips.”
Oh Hanna. As if that line weren’t enough, she proceeds to deck him. It’s probably just as well for him, though, because people who spend too much time with Hanna tend to end up running afoul of the CIA and getting killed…
This leads me to one question the movie leaves open, which is driving me mad. Hanna spends a large portion of the movie traveling about with a dysfunctional British family with the world’s most obnoxious daughter. The husband and wife constantly snipe, the daughter is forever rolling her eyes, but Hanna is nonetheless enchanted: her childhood was so devoid of warmth and fun that the family delights her.
Eventually, of course, the family fall into the hands of the CIA, and we see them being questioned. But the movie just drops the plot thread! Perhaps we’re supposed to assume they were killed? Maybe the director felt a big squeamish about killing off the kids on screen? But I want to know...
And then Hanna confronts the big bad in a dilapidated fairy-tale theme park, which is satisfyingly surreal. Hanna is not a retelling of any particular fairy tale, but there is a sense of fairy tale hanging over the whole story: Hanna’s only storybook, for instance, is a German book of Marchen. There’s a sense of eeriness, almost a fascination with the grotesque, that hangs over the story: it’s reminiscent Twin Peaks if it’s like anything, but it’s really not much like anything else.
***
Incidentally, if you have any ideas for good movies that my brother and I could watch over Christmas, please share. So far I have Iron Man 3 and perhaps The Incredible Hulk, because Marvel movies also fall into that amorphous category of “movies we might both enjoy.” Maybe Skyfall?
The action begins in the frozen arctic, where Hanna’s ex-CIA father trains her in all his ex-CIA know-how; continues once Hanna has been whisked away to a labyrinthine top secret base; and then follows Hanna’s road trip adventures, where it quickly becomes clear that her father’s years of intensive training totally failed to teach Hanna the most basic ability of spycraft: being unnoticeable.
Hanna is not merely not unnoticeable, but endearingly incapable of fitting in at all. At one point, a boy is about to kiss her, and she says, “Kissing requires a total of 34 facial muscles, and 112 postural muscles. The most important muscle involved is the orbicularis oris muscle, because it is used to pucker the lips.”
Oh Hanna. As if that line weren’t enough, she proceeds to deck him. It’s probably just as well for him, though, because people who spend too much time with Hanna tend to end up running afoul of the CIA and getting killed…
This leads me to one question the movie leaves open, which is driving me mad. Hanna spends a large portion of the movie traveling about with a dysfunctional British family with the world’s most obnoxious daughter. The husband and wife constantly snipe, the daughter is forever rolling her eyes, but Hanna is nonetheless enchanted: her childhood was so devoid of warmth and fun that the family delights her.
Eventually, of course, the family fall into the hands of the CIA, and we see them being questioned. But the movie just drops the plot thread! Perhaps we’re supposed to assume they were killed? Maybe the director felt a big squeamish about killing off the kids on screen? But I want to know...
And then Hanna confronts the big bad in a dilapidated fairy-tale theme park, which is satisfyingly surreal. Hanna is not a retelling of any particular fairy tale, but there is a sense of fairy tale hanging over the whole story: Hanna’s only storybook, for instance, is a German book of Marchen. There’s a sense of eeriness, almost a fascination with the grotesque, that hangs over the story: it’s reminiscent Twin Peaks if it’s like anything, but it’s really not much like anything else.
***
Incidentally, if you have any ideas for good movies that my brother and I could watch over Christmas, please share. So far I have Iron Man 3 and perhaps The Incredible Hulk, because Marvel movies also fall into that amorphous category of “movies we might both enjoy.” Maybe Skyfall?
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I find apocalyptic stories incredibly stressful, but my brother likes them, so maybe I'll recommend Summer Wars to him.
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Apocalyptic is perhaps an overstatement for Summer Wars. Maybe check out the Amazon summary? Personally I find the movie a light hearted film about family. The drama is more about a rogue computer program. Although idk if you're much of an anime fan? The director is somewhat of a rising star in the movie circuit.
tl;dr essay, sorry
I agree with some of what she wrote, but I don't think Skyfall was a step in a 'more' feminist direction from Casino Royale and (especially) Quantum of Solace, although possibly I'm the only person in the world who actually liked QoS overall; she does discuss the rapey shower scene in a later post in the series, although she seems better able to compartmentalize it as "maybe they didn't mean for it to be creepy" than I could. I also don't personally agree that these are the most nuanced and three-dimensional women in Bond movies ever, but that's probably a matter of taste as much as anything else.
Tangentially to the feminism issue (I do not expect feminism from Bond movies ever hahaha, even if the first couple Craig movies gave me glimmers of hope for at least less paternalistic misogyny), I felt like the movie set up some really fascinating and difficult moral questions around M's character arc and career and then copped out of resolving them in a way I personally found deeply unsatisfying. I'd contrast to the British TV series Spooks, which often dealt with similar moral issues related to intelligence work and the decisions made by people doing it and what's in the public interest, but which didn't conveniently sidestep examining the tough questions, as I felt Skyfall did by [spoilery resolution].
But pretty much anything else I have to say is spoilery (esp. the M-related stuff), plus I haven't seen Skyfall or the preceding two recently enough to argue precisely even if this were the right place to do so. Maybe eventually I'll rewatch the three back-to-back and try to form a coherent essay (I used to have vague thoughts of writing a passionate essay about how the Craig Bond movies were moving towards a quasi-feminist franchise and then Skyfall happened and I felt like it was a throwback to classic Bond but with a bigger budget and better cinematography).
But I fully recognize that what I get out of Bond movies, and what I want out of them, is very different from what most of either fandom or your typical viewing audience wants. YMMV, of course.
Re: tl;dr essay, sorry
I agree the shower scene is creepy as all hell.
As for Eve though, I both like her and know I'm not the best person to discuss her depiction as a black woman in the Bond franchise.
Although, while I eyerolled very hard at another effeminate bisexual villain, I did very much enjoy Bond's response to Silva.
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I didn't hate Skyfall and there were things I liked about it, and I wouldn't say it's the most sexiest Bond movie by a long shot--I just feel it's a step backwards overall rather than a step forwards as far as the Craig movies are concerned.
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Well, it's not just the assassination--but I felt they set up some really interesting, crunchy questions about ethics and intelligence work, and instead of actually dealing with them, they killed off M, so she dies tragically/heroically and they never really did attempt to answer whether the actions she was being investigated over were justifiable or not.
They then replaced her role--by far the best-developed female character in the Bond movies, and a recurring character who is also not subordinate to him, one of the characters who has since her introduction actually commented on misogyny and sexism explicitly in-text--with a charming good ol' boy who feels like he'd be right at home in a classic Bond movie (if less sexist himself than prior male Ms). Bam, right there they took away the biggest critique of sexism within the movies and replaced her with yet another man (a man who is interesting and likable in his own right but...a man).
I get that Judi Dench probably wanted out, and that actually examining the ethics of espionage is better-suited to a TV series than to an action thriller--but in that case I wish they hadn't even set that up as M's character arc, failed to deliver on resolving it, and then tidily killed her off in a way that sends her off sympathetically as a person and sidesteps the question of whether the audience should be sympathetic to her moral choices. I feel like if a movie is going to ask tough questions it should at least attempt to examine them.
That said, while I felt they handled the M arc in a really unsatisfying copout way, there was some really interesting M character development and Judi Dench was great, as always. If the fandom were interested in writing long plotty AUs exploring M's choices rather than endless Bond/hipster!Q, I might actually read fic. :-/
(I wasn't exactly thrilled about Silva, either, on multiple levels, and I'm not sure I'd consider Bond's reaction to him as pro-queer, but I'd have to rewatch to go into detail about that, and I...kind of really don't want to.)
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because yaoi.no subject
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