January movies

[osprey_archer]

This January, I actually did a pretty good job keeping on top of my movie reviews! It helped that I decided as part of my New Year’s Resolution to at least try to write a full-length review of each film I see by women directors: eventually I’ll probably hit one where I just can’t think of anything to say, but that hasn’t happened yet.

So the only thing I haven’t yet reviewed is I, Tonya, which is delightful, for the qualities of the delightful that include “a movie about an abused child who thinks she may be able to escape through figure-skating only to lose that escape hatch after her boyfriend, or possibly her boyfriend’s best friend who is her bodyguard, orchestrates an attack on one of her competitors which is supposed to give Tonya a better chance at Olympic gold but actually ends up getting her kicked out of skating for life.”

I cannot overstate the monumental boneheadedness of the plan to attack Nancy Kerrigan. The bodyguard has delusions of grandeur - he likes to brag about how he’s a spy and an expert on international terrorism who Knows People, when in fact he’s a dude who lives in his parents’ basement who asks a couple of his friends (who are, if possible, even more boneheaded than he is) to carry out the hit on Nancy Kerrigan. If security at the rink had been anything but super lax, they never would have got in - but it was super lax, because who attacks figure skaters?

So that part is farcical and very funny (it helps that Nancy Kerrigan recovered well enough to win silver in the upcoming Olympics - they went to all this trouble and they couldn’t even kneecap her correctly!), which is a necessary contrast to Tonya Harding’s sad, sad life. Her mom is a horrible abusive person, and then Tonya tries to escape by moving in with her boyfriend - who also turns out to be abusive, but he occasionally says nice things to her so all in all he’s still an improvement over her mother. At least until his plan to put Nancy Kerrigan out of action spirals out of control and ends with Tonya being kicked out of skating for life.

It’s a sad ending, almost cruel, because skating is the one thing Tonya knows and is good at and her coach seems to be the one decent person in her life - but at the same time, cruel as it is on a personal level, once the Pandora’s box of athletes attacking competitors has been opened, the only way to close it again is to come down on it like a ton of bricks.

***

And now it’s February! My film theme for the month is Romantic Movies (for Valentine’s Day reasons, and the movies I have on my docket are Bright Star, Sleepless in Seattle, Austenland, and Lost in Translation. Also possibly Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere, which has a romantic element if it’s not a straight-up romance, and also it would be nice to see one of her other movies before going to A Wrinkle in Time.

Comments

[missroserose]

Oh god I have so many feelings about Sleepless in Seattle. Not just about the contrived stalker-y not-romantic-at-all plot (though it is/n't) but about the film's deterministic view of maleness/femaleness and its whole attitude towards dynamics between the sexes. You could really tell it was made during the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus era. I truly never understood why it was so popular...but we can save my ranting until after you've seen it. :) I've been meaning to see Bright Star, though, maybe I'll see if I can rent it this month!

[osprey_archer]

Oh noooo. I had my suspicions, from watching You've Got Mail (which is a remake of a movie from 1940 and more sexist than the original), and what I've heard about When Harry Met Sally (which Ephron wrote but didn't direct), but it's sad to have them confirmed.

...but the movie is already in the mail from Netflix though and it's such a classic that I feel like I ought to see it, if only so I can hate it intelligently.

Let me know when you're planning to watch Bright Star! My roommate owns a copy, so I can watch it pretty much whenever: we can try to coordinate, if not to the day, then at least to watch it in the same week.

[missroserose]

Hey, I am a big fan of "watch it so you can decide what you think yourself". :) Even if you disagree with my take, I know we'll have good discussions about it!

I'd really like that, but my February is looking to be crazy packed - I leave tomorrow morning for a weeklong trip to AZ to visit friends and go to my brother-in-law's wedding, and the weekend after that my mother comes to town, and I'm already booked out for massages for the whole month (that I'm not gone) so...waiting for me is probably a bad plan, haha. That said, I can rent it off of iTunes whenever, so maybe I'll sneak a showing in on Valentine's Day - shouldn't be hard to convince Brian to watch a romantic movie. :)

[osprey_archer]

Well, let me know! I figure I'll plan to watch it around Valentine's Day, so if you do watch it then it will be a happy coincidence, and if not, no worries.

[sovay]

You could really tell it was made during the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus era.

I feel peculiarly grateful that the only piece of that movie I can remember is the scene in which Tom Hanks and Victor Garber make fun of Rita Wilson for choking up while recounting the plot of An Affair to Remember before dissolving into tears over how much they love The Dirty Dozen.

[kore]

When Harry Met Sally -- apparently it was based like DIRECTLY on Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron, only they never fell in love, they were BFFs for life. (If you read some of Ephron's columns, a lot of Sally is taken directly from her, including the famous bit about the rape fantasy.) And she changed the ending, so they fell happily in love and were married ever after. I think that really changes the movie. Originally they were supposed to be friends, knew sex would ruin the friendship, had sex anyway, and then were still friends afterwards. I knew SO MANY twentysomething women in the nineties who just pined away for what Harry and Sally had, and it was all made up!

Also hilariously, a lot of the BFF stuff between Harry and Sally happened between Reiner and Billy Crystal.

[sovay]

Originally they were supposed to be friends, knew sex would ruin the friendship, had sex anyway, and then were still friends afterwards.

Oh, man, I would have infinitely preferred that movie.

[kore]

I KNOW RIGHT, it sounds so much more like actual nineties relationships (people not going out but sleeping together, being friends, not being friends, being friends again....). The ending is SO incredibly soppy. It's worse than Pretty Woman. It's like staring at a giant pack of Ho-Hos and knowing you are going to eat all of them.

[missroserose]

That is the best description and I'm so stealing it when appropriate. You know it's bad, you know you'll regret it, and yet you know it's happening anyway.

[kore]

Ohthankgod someone else who isn't gaga over that movie.

Bright Star is really good. I didn't quite agree with its portrayal of Keats or Fanny but it was such a relief not to see Fanny as a heartless bitch.

[kore]

I don't know if I can ever watch I, Tonya, because the depiction of child and spousal abuse sounds so brutally realistic, even with the fourth wall breaking and Rashomon takes and outright jokes. Last I heard, Tonya is married again and has a little boy she takes hunting, like her father took her hunting, and seems a bit happier, except for the HUGE FARCICAL TRAGEDY IN HER EARLY LIFE that will overshadow everything til she dies. At least she's not doing any more terrible boxing matches or reality shows. Margot Robbie totally deserved the Oscar for her performance as Harley Quinn -- she sounds like Tonya, but just doesn't quite click into the performance for me in what few bits I've seen. She'll probably get it for Tonya tho, because the Academy would rather die than nominate any genre film for anything big, unless it's LOTR or the original Star Wars. But I'm actually happy the film got made and is part of the #metoo era.

SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE, AAAAAAAAAGH, I CAN'T DEAL WITH THAT MOVIE ANYMORE. AGH. NO. It's not even like I think it's BAD or anything, just, AUGH. I can't deal with Ephron's romcoms. And I loved When Harry Met Sally and watched it over and over again for a while in the nineties. I can't deal with Pretty Woman anymore either. I don't know what happened exactly. I just flee the room instinctively, shrieking. It's a shame, I really like Ephron's books.

Bright Star is lovely, if sort of overly lush. I haven't seen Austenland. Lost in Translation is beautifully shot, but is really more about the white tourists feeling Lost in Japan, rather than Japan at all, which is an evergreen (or do we want to say everwhite) topic and has produced some beautiful literature and films, but at the same time I don't think you hear any Japanese person speak more than a couple of lines of English which just seems really wrong. But it's a beautiful film.

Ava DuVernay -- I actually thought Selma was really really good. David Oyelowo was excellent and totally robbed of an Oscar nom. Also, amazingly, the criticism of it was mainly "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE WHITE PEOPLE WHO HELPED??" which 1) OMG, not a documentary and 2) OMG, can you listen to how terrible you sound for just a second?
How many fucking movies have we had about black heroes told from the POV of the Honky Sidekick who is Really the Star? -- ANYWAY. 13th is an amazing documentary about the terrible problem of African-American incarceration in the US which is basically slavery 2.0. It's super depressing, though. I've heard Queen Sugar, a miniseries based on a novel produced by Oprah Winfrey, is excellent. I CANNOT WAIT for Wrinkle in Time. CANNOT WAIT.