Movies & stuff
Sep. 19th, 2008 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileTheme... feminazism?
Movie: Waitress. Chick flick/romantic comedy type thing (yes, I know I said I wasn't watching another one this year after Mamma Mia). Has Nathan Fillion in it, which is a plus. It's about a waitress in a pie diner who (of course) makes the best pies in the history of liek evar, has the world's most obnoxious and controlling husband (his name was Earl, which made me think of the Dixie Chicks song "Goodbye Earl," and I was hoping he would meet the same end but alas, no murders in this movie), and is pregnant. She makes several plans to run away from Earl but they keep getting foiled, and then she has an affair with her doctor, who is Nathan Fillion, being hilarious and dorky as always. Just when the main character's game plan of "be conciliatory and keep Earl happy until I can figure out how to run away from him instead of telling him to go fuck himself" was starting to really, really get on my nerves... she goes into labor. And just when I was thinking "I hope the pain of labor makes all her nastiness come out, like that story about my Great-Aunt Mary becoming a royal bitch after she broke her hip," waitress-chick comes out with something along the lines of "NO YOU CAN'T HOLD THE BABY, EARL; GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. I WANT A DIVORCE AND IF YOU EVER COME WITHIN SIX YARDS OF ME AGAIN I WILL POUND YOUR SORRY ASS INTO THE GROUND." And then she also ends the affair with Nathan Fillion, because his wife seems like such a nice person. And then her happy ending is that she opens up her own pie diner with her baby and her best friends and is single and successful, the end.
And then Clare says, I THINK I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS MOVIE SINCE I WAS SIX.
Movie: Teeth. Really weird indie. It's about the legend of the Vagina Dentata. Is in many ways really not a very great movie--plot is very simple and predictable once you've been told the premise. If you had ten seconds to come up with a plot for a movie about the vagina dentata myth, what would you come up with? Would it be "Virtuous girl gets sexually assaulted, discovers she has teeth in unusual places, has a royal freak-out, eventually decides this power is kind of awesome and uses it against assorted ebil nasty mens perving on her"? Yeah, me too. The characters are horribly, horribly stereotyped. The main character is not just sexually conservative, she and her best friends are hyper-prudish-even-by-my-standards Jesus freaks who head their school's abstinence-only/"purity" program and won't watch PG-13 movies. Her stepbrother, who is the main bad dude, is obviously a bad dude because he is sexually active, mistreats his girlfriend, refers to all women (including his own mother) as 'bitches,' smokes, drinks, has tattoos and piercings, listens to heavy metal, owns a big ugly dog, painted the walls in his room black, blah blah blah ridiculous 'rebel' bullshit to the twelve million and Columbine-th degree. Because people with tattoos are always self-absorbed and disrespectful to women and their parents, right?
That said, once the actual vagina dentata business shows up, the movie takes a turn for the gruesome in (for me) a very satisfying way. Dawn (the main character) is raped, and she bites the offender's man-bits off. She then goes to the doctor, who sexually assaults her; he loses four fingers. She sleeps with a guy who makes the mistake of telling her he was only doing on a bet while they're in bed; he gets *ahem* dis-membered. There's a whole crazy subplot with her mom being sick and she dies and the stepbrother's girlfriend says something like "I'm so sorry, I heard her screaming but he said just to ignore her, she does that all the time," and so Dawn seduces him and he goes six inches forward and five inches back. And then the dog eats it.
People with less deep-seated anti-male and anti-sex sentiments might find it somewhat female-chauvinistic that she does not get involved with one single male character who does not turn out to be an objectifying, chauvinist perv and gets to keep all his body parts, but I am not one of those people. I am not interested in seeing healthy relationships depicted onscreen. I have no experience with healthy relationships, I cannot relate to them, and they are fucking boring for storytelling purposes. I just want to see men who objectify women get their cocks bit off.
And I did. And I laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and went to bed in a very good mood yesterday.
Books: Dead Until Dark. Vampire novel! Whee! I borrowed this from Beth, but I think I want to buy myself a hardback copy, so next time someone tells me Edward Cullen is "struggling" with the changes in the way women are viewed since he was a human, I will have something appropriate to beat them senseless with. In this book, we have Bill Compton, my new favorite fictional vampire ever (sorry, Lestat), who actually is. Like, he will do something ridiculous and overprotective (but still usually not too limiting to Sookie's personal freedom), and then Sookie will be like "Dude, you can't do that, this is the twenty-first century" and Bill will say "I'm sorry, I'm still getting used to how women want to be treated in this century" and then HE WILL KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF. Yay for characters who are capable of learning, and actually concerned about what their girlfriends want! And capable of acknowledging simple truths like the passage of time, and make any sort of effort to adapt to them!
Sookie's also pretty awesome. She is, of course, in the disadvantaged position of being the human among vampires for a lot of it, and is therefore dependent upon Bill's protection while frequenting vampire bars and stuff, but she also does other things besides sitting around needing saving (like, as mentioned before, standing up for herself). And she can read minds.
Vampire Elvis wins, obviously.
Currently reading: Mary Prince's autobiography. Am about twelve pages in and already going SEE? SEE? STRONG WOMEN TOTALLY EXISTED BEFORE THE SIXTIES!! TAKE THAT, WUSSY HISTORICAL FICTION WRITERS!! I don't know how I never heard of Mary Prince before; I am ashamed.
Movie: Waitress. Chick flick/romantic comedy type thing (yes, I know I said I wasn't watching another one this year after Mamma Mia). Has Nathan Fillion in it, which is a plus. It's about a waitress in a pie diner who (of course) makes the best pies in the history of liek evar, has the world's most obnoxious and controlling husband (his name was Earl, which made me think of the Dixie Chicks song "Goodbye Earl," and I was hoping he would meet the same end but alas, no murders in this movie), and is pregnant. She makes several plans to run away from Earl but they keep getting foiled, and then she has an affair with her doctor, who is Nathan Fillion, being hilarious and dorky as always. Just when the main character's game plan of "be conciliatory and keep Earl happy until I can figure out how to run away from him instead of telling him to go fuck himself" was starting to really, really get on my nerves... she goes into labor. And just when I was thinking "I hope the pain of labor makes all her nastiness come out, like that story about my Great-Aunt Mary becoming a royal bitch after she broke her hip," waitress-chick comes out with something along the lines of "NO YOU CAN'T HOLD THE BABY, EARL; GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. I WANT A DIVORCE AND IF YOU EVER COME WITHIN SIX YARDS OF ME AGAIN I WILL POUND YOUR SORRY ASS INTO THE GROUND." And then she also ends the affair with Nathan Fillion, because his wife seems like such a nice person. And then her happy ending is that she opens up her own pie diner with her baby and her best friends and is single and successful, the end.
And then Clare says, I THINK I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS MOVIE SINCE I WAS SIX.
Movie: Teeth. Really weird indie. It's about the legend of the Vagina Dentata. Is in many ways really not a very great movie--plot is very simple and predictable once you've been told the premise. If you had ten seconds to come up with a plot for a movie about the vagina dentata myth, what would you come up with? Would it be "Virtuous girl gets sexually assaulted, discovers she has teeth in unusual places, has a royal freak-out, eventually decides this power is kind of awesome and uses it against assorted ebil nasty mens perving on her"? Yeah, me too. The characters are horribly, horribly stereotyped. The main character is not just sexually conservative, she and her best friends are hyper-prudish-even-by-my-standards Jesus freaks who head their school's abstinence-only/"purity" program and won't watch PG-13 movies. Her stepbrother, who is the main bad dude, is obviously a bad dude because he is sexually active, mistreats his girlfriend, refers to all women (including his own mother) as 'bitches,' smokes, drinks, has tattoos and piercings, listens to heavy metal, owns a big ugly dog, painted the walls in his room black, blah blah blah ridiculous 'rebel' bullshit to the twelve million and Columbine-th degree. Because people with tattoos are always self-absorbed and disrespectful to women and their parents, right?
That said, once the actual vagina dentata business shows up, the movie takes a turn for the gruesome in (for me) a very satisfying way. Dawn (the main character) is raped, and she bites the offender's man-bits off. She then goes to the doctor, who sexually assaults her; he loses four fingers. She sleeps with a guy who makes the mistake of telling her he was only doing on a bet while they're in bed; he gets *ahem* dis-membered. There's a whole crazy subplot with her mom being sick and she dies and the stepbrother's girlfriend says something like "I'm so sorry, I heard her screaming but he said just to ignore her, she does that all the time," and so Dawn seduces him and he goes six inches forward and five inches back. And then the dog eats it.
People with less deep-seated anti-male and anti-sex sentiments might find it somewhat female-chauvinistic that she does not get involved with one single male character who does not turn out to be an objectifying, chauvinist perv and gets to keep all his body parts, but I am not one of those people. I am not interested in seeing healthy relationships depicted onscreen. I have no experience with healthy relationships, I cannot relate to them, and they are fucking boring for storytelling purposes. I just want to see men who objectify women get their cocks bit off.
And I did. And I laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and went to bed in a very good mood yesterday.
Books: Dead Until Dark. Vampire novel! Whee! I borrowed this from Beth, but I think I want to buy myself a hardback copy, so next time someone tells me Edward Cullen is "struggling" with the changes in the way women are viewed since he was a human, I will have something appropriate to beat them senseless with. In this book, we have Bill Compton, my new favorite fictional vampire ever (sorry, Lestat), who actually is. Like, he will do something ridiculous and overprotective (but still usually not too limiting to Sookie's personal freedom), and then Sookie will be like "Dude, you can't do that, this is the twenty-first century" and Bill will say "I'm sorry, I'm still getting used to how women want to be treated in this century" and then HE WILL KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF. Yay for characters who are capable of learning, and actually concerned about what their girlfriends want! And capable of acknowledging simple truths like the passage of time, and make any sort of effort to adapt to them!
Sookie's also pretty awesome. She is, of course, in the disadvantaged position of being the human among vampires for a lot of it, and is therefore dependent upon Bill's protection while frequenting vampire bars and stuff, but she also does other things besides sitting around needing saving (like, as mentioned before, standing up for herself). And she can read minds.
Vampire Elvis wins, obviously.
Currently reading: Mary Prince's autobiography. Am about twelve pages in and already going SEE? SEE? STRONG WOMEN TOTALLY EXISTED BEFORE THE SIXTIES!! TAKE THAT, WUSSY HISTORICAL FICTION WRITERS!! I don't know how I never heard of Mary Prince before; I am ashamed.