Behind the Scenes: Minions
Posted on July 12, 2015 at 3:34 pm
Comic-Con 2015 Panel on Fandom: The Next Generation
Posted on July 12, 2015 at 11:16 am
I was thrilled to be invited by Betsy Bozdech of Common Sense Media to appear on a panel discussion if and how to share our nerdy passions with our children. I was even more thrilled when I found out who would be on the panel with me: Jeffrey Brown, author of Darth Vader and Son
We all dream of sharing our passions with our children. But it is important to be careful about it. Everyone on the panel had a story about sharing the wrong movie — or the right movie too soon — with a child who got upset, and feeling that we had “flunked parenting.” Young children will say what they think you want to hear and if it seems too important to you, they will tell you they like something when they really do not. Older children will say the opposite of what they think you want to hear; they will tell you they don’t like something when they really do. What matters is to let them develop their own nerdy attachments, the ones that they use to connect with their peers. Let them see you be passionate about something. If you want them to read, don’t tell them to read; let them see you read. If you want them to put down their devices, don’t tell them to put down their devices; put down your devices.
The best moment of the panel was when I mentioned Pokemon as a nerdy obsession kids love and adults generally do not, and McQuarrie said that his son had been a huge Pokemon fan, pointing to his now-adult son sitting in the audience. The entire room smiled at him and then, all at once, noticed that the young woman he had his arm around was dressed as…Pokemon!
Vox on Makeover Movies
Posted on July 11, 2015 at 3:55 pm
In my book, The Movie Mom’s Guide to Family Movies
Little girls and bigger ones see a lot of what I call “makeover movies:” in a crucial scene Our Heroine gets a new dress and hairstyle (or just takes off her glasses) and her life changes. Sometimes she transforms herself, as Ella does in “The Bells are Ringing” , causing her to have enormous conflicts and self-doubt. More often, she is transformed by someone else. Cinderella gets a dress to go to the ball, where the prince falls in love with her. Sleeping Beauty’s ballgown is so crucial that the fairies’ fight over its color literally leads the bad fairy to her hideaway. The modern counterparts are Eliza Doolittle, who, like Cinderella, goes to a ball in borrowed finery (and accent) and dazzles everyone there (“My Fair Lady” ) and “Gigi” who is actually groomed by her grandmother and great-aunt to be a very elegant prostitute, trained almost like a geisha in manners and skills for pleasing a man. Over and over, we see the heroines rewarded for being passive pleasers.
Transformation themes have been a central part of stories long before there were movies. The examples above were fairy tales before they were on screen. And girls and women are not the only ones who are transformed; superheroes all have origin stories that are a form of makeover, though they are changing to fantasy versions for themselves, and not to get positive attention from the opposite sex.
VOX has a nice commentary on makeover movies.
Trailer: Learning to Drive
Posted on July 10, 2015 at 3:54 pm
Writer Katha Pollitt found herself learning how to drive for the first time when she was 52. She wrote about it ruefully in an essay that provides the title for Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories
Here is a brief excerpt from the essay, which she discussed on NPR.
“Observation, Kahta, observation! This is your weakness.” This truth hangs in the air like mystical advice from an Asian sage in a martial-arts movie. “That, and lining up too far away when you go to park.”
The clock on the dashboard reads 7:47. We will role-play the test repeatedly during my two-hour lesson. I will fail every time.
Observation is my weakness. I did not realize that my mother was a secret drinker. I did not realize that the man I lived with, my soul mate, made for me in Marxist heaven, was a dedicated philanderer, that the drab colleague he insinuated into our social life was his long-standing secret girlfriend, or that the young art critic he mocked as silly and second-rate was being groomed as my replacement. I noticed that our apartment was becoming a grunge palace, with books and papers collecting dust on every surface and kitty litter crunching underfoot. I observed-very good, Katha!-that I was spending many hours in my study, engaged in arcane e-mail debates with strangers, that I had gained twenty-five pounds in our seven years together and could not fit into many of my clothes. I realized it was not likely that the unfamiliar pink-and-black-striped bikini panties in the clean-clothes basket were the result, as he claimed, of a simple laundry room mix-up. But all this awareness was like the impending danger in one of those slow-motion dreams of paralysis, information that could not be processed. It was like seeing the man with the suitcase step off the curb and driving forward anyway.
I am a fifty-two-year-old woman who has yet to get a driver’s license. I’m not the only older woman who can’t legally drive — Ben recently had a sixty-five-year-old student who took the test four times before she passed — but perhaps I am the only fifty-two-year-old feminist writer in this situation. How did this happen to me?
Trailer: Legend, the Story of The Crime Boss Twin Brothers, The Krays
Posted on July 10, 2015 at 8:00 am
Twin brothers known as The Krays” ran a brutal crime ring in 1960’s London. A new movie called “Legend” stars Tom Hardy as both of the identical twin brothers, Ronnie and Reggie Kray.
A 1991 film called “The Krays” starred real-life brothers Martin Kemp and Gary Kemp.
They have also been the subject of documentaries like this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEZHiEAVJz8