Posted on December 17, 2013 at 3:55 pm
Jim Emerson has put together an excellent list of movies everyone should see. What’s your score?
And if you get a good score on that one, take a look at the list from the Alamo Drafthouse and this one from Time. Happy watching!
Posted on December 17, 2013 at 12:25 pm
Cheers to The Station in Bernardsville, NJ. They give patrons a basket for their phones and other devices. And then if the customers make it to the end of the meal without using them, they give 5% off the bill. Bravo! Families should do this at all meals, at home and in restaurants.
Posted on December 13, 2013 at 3:58 pm
Oscar-winning actress Geena Davis has been a leader in understanding and improving the role of women in media. The founder of her namesake Institute on Gender in Media wrote a piece for the Hollywood Reporter citing data showing that there are three male characters for every speaking female in family-rated films: “We are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space.”
She proposes “two easy steps” for change.
Step 1: Go through the projects you’re already working on and change a bunch of the characters’ first names to women’s names. With one stroke you’ve created some colorful unstereotypical female characters that might turn out to be even more interesting now that they’ve had a gender switch. What if the plumber or pilot or construction foreman is a woman? What if the taxi driver or the scheming politician is a woman? What if both police officers that arrive on the scene are women — and it’s not a big deal?
Step 2: When describing a crowd scene, write in the script, “A crowd gathers, which is half female.” That may seem weird, but I promise you, somehow or other on the set that day the crowd will turn out to be 17 percent female otherwise. Maybe first ADs think women don’t gather, I don’t know.
As Davis says, “If they can see it, they can be it.”
Posted on November 19, 2013 at 8:00 am
Alison Bechdel once had a character in her comic strip explain what she looked for in a movie. There had to be two named female characters and they had to talk about something other than men. It was a joke, but it has come to be known as the Bechdel test. And while some people point out that a movie like “Gravity” can have a strong, independent, female lead (indeed one who is alone on screen for most of the movie) and still fail the test, it is still a good reminder that many movies fail to include female characters with anything to do but sigh and say things like, “Johnny, when are you ever going to grow up and learn to commit?” (I’m talking to you, Seth Rogan and Seth MacFarlane.)
There’s a website that rates movies according to the Bechdel test. Four Swedish theaters have now made the Bechdel test an official movie rating. No one, and certainly not Bechdel, intended the test to be definitive. But, just consider, as Entertainment Weekly’s Mark Harris did, what it would be like applied to male characters.
If the Bechdel Test had suddenly landed in Hollywood with the force of law, it would have seriously jeopardized five of last year’s 10 Best Picture nominees. If we’d rewritten the rule to apply to men, it would have seriously jeopardized… um… let’s see… “Precious.” And that inequity only covers good movies. Apply the comparison to a roster of summer blockbusters, and the results are even less attractive. Not to mention Comic-Con, which now represents the ruling aesthetic of mainstream Hollywood movies and which, under the Bechdel Test, probably could have been knocked down from five days to 45 minutes and not strained the seating capacity of a local Olive Garden.
Posted on November 13, 2013 at 3:59 pm
One of the most insightful people I know about movies is my friend Michal Oleszczyk, and he has written a marvelous essay about one of my favorite movies, “It Happened One Night.” The screwball romantic comedy about a runaway heiress and a fast-talking reporter won a Best Picture Oscar and Oscars for its stars, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and for director Frank Capra and writer Robert Riskin, the only five-Oscar sweep until “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Silence of the Lambs” many decades later. Fans of the film — and those who have not seen it yet — will enjoy Oleszczyk’s witty and insightful love letter to this great film.
Pauline Kael famously said that American comedies of 1930s presented marriage and courtship as a vaudeville act, and love is indeed equaled with roleplaying throughout It Happened One Night. Peter and Ellie first click as a couple when they act out an impromptu scene to dupe the detectives sent by Ellie’s father. The entire mock-fight, taking place in a camping bungalow amidst lovingly depicted morning disarray, serves as the first instance of intimacy that’s enjoyed by both Peter and Ellie. As they impersonate conjugal strife all too plausibly (can it be that we get a glimpse into their much later married life?), they take physical pleasure in suddenly becoming a working-class bickering couple.
The scene also includes one of the loveliest and most erotic pieces of business in the film: as soon as the detectives leave, Peter kneels before Ellie and buttons up her blouse, all the while congratulating her on the performance she just gave. He doesn’t have to look down her cleavage to signal his desire: putting on some clothes had rarely been that sexy (a point made even stronger by the fact that there’s hardly a costume change in the film – Peter and Ellie are like a pair of commedia dell’arte mimes, putting on identities even as their costumes remain the same). Even more than Dirty Dancing, It Happened One Night is a movie in which sexual bliss is signified by lovers’ harmony as performers.
