Thoughts on SATC2

So I have a confession: I've never been a tremendous Sex & the City shipper. I'd catch the (tragically censored) reruns on TBS; once in a while I'd watch it on DVD with friends (which was always better, with the abundance of hot male ass), but I never stuck with it, & so missed the end of the series & the first movie. But, you know, I can name the gals; I can generally follow the plot even if I'm coming into the middle of a storyline; but let's just say this movie was on my unconscious never-to-be-seen list. ANYWAY, ran into my fabulous roomie on the way home from the T last night; we grabbed a drink & a smoke, & she ended up asking me to see it with her (& with sister/sister's fiance). Since I only had the joy of apartment hunting & syllabus revisions ahead of me, I emptied a water bottle, filled it with white wine, grabbed my smokes, & we hauled ass to the theater.

Cutting to the chase...if you've ever wondered why multitudes of people around the globe find Americans so terribly repellent, just see the cultural icons that are most strongly identified with the US. Watch SATC 2 & tumble into 2.5 hours (MY GOD WHY WAS IT SO LONG?) of the most repulsively indulgent, extravagant, decadent, consumerist escapism of your life. The characters are so far removed from reality that you feel almost as if you're watching slightly different blowup dolls moan & groan about their phenomenally challenging lives. Everything is shimmering & polished; the fucking film opens with My Big Fat Gay Wedding (a contrived relationship, to boot, which I won't spoil here), replete with LIIIIIZZZZAAAAAA cameo (also, I don't care what people have been saying; Liza BUTCHERS "Single Ladies"--it was embarrassing to watch) & the most ridiculous displays of wealth you could ever imagine.

The show of course always adorned the ladies with glamorous wardrobes & Park Avenue apartments &co&co, but the movie takes this decadence to an entirely other level. At one point Miranda & Charlotte raise a toast to "mothers without full-time nannies"--but the moment falls totally flat and suddenly you're disgusted by the film's inability to consider anyone that doesn't have more money than they know what to do with. OF COURSE we'll all jump on the opportunity to have FOUR private vehicles in the Middle East, even though we'd all fit in one & this is supposedly a "gals-getting-crazy-together-trip." OF COURSE we'll take advantage of private butlers--what amounts to personal (and orientalized) slaves. OF COURSE we're only going to wear couture the entire movie (except when we get out of the shower, & are draped in 40k towels).

Toss this atop the rampant racism in the film's portrayal of the Middle East (much elementary commentary on the wearing of the veil--with the four SATC gals realizing that they're SO liberated in the US), blatant displays of disrespect towards non-Western culture which are never *really* reconciled (except in an almost ludicrous literal un-veiling scene), and conflicts & resolutions that seem so generated as to have come from a fill-in-the-blank wordgame--and you've got one of the most disingenuous & pathetic examples of film I've seen in years.

The show had a sense of whimsy, joy, tongue-in-cheek awareness of the extravagance & escapist tendencies; the film took everything jubilant & wrung it out until the interactions between the characters felt forced, the travels & the clothes seemed disgusting instead of glamorous, & the jokes seemed dried up & dejected. The writing was atrocious, the acting was mostly pretty terrible (the one great moment of the film was when Miranda & Charlotte admit to one another that motherhood is tough), the shine was too glimmering, & all in all, the movie infuriated rather than titillated me. Two thumbs way down, my friends.

Because I'm not fucking old enough to do a Best-of-the-Decade List (Part I)

I was thirteen-years-old when the big, bad Y2K apocalypse threatened us all; my memory is so awful that anything before that moment is a bit hazy. As such, I’m not going to pretend that I can wield any goddamn best-of-the-decade lists. Here’s a few things from the year that I loved; if you trust my judgment at all, check them out. Trusting my judgment™ is recommended by 0 out of 5 ADA-approved dentists.

The movies list is sadly incomplete, as I really haven’t seen that many from 2009; the books, likewise, are comprised almost entirely of books *read* this year, though not published in 2009 (except for Atwood’s Year of the Flood). The books are alphabetical; the films are basically unranked, except for Bright Star and Inglourious Basterds, which were my two favorite films of the year. The albums list isn’t too bad, though, and so there’s a pretty strict ranking system there.

In conclusion, 2009 had its high points—I completed my thesis with highest honors, I somehow managed to sneak into graduate school, I read about a million books, and survived the two most harrowing academic semesters of my career thus far—and its low, which I have no desire to get into, but all in all, I’m ready to kiss that shit goodbye. Not sure what 2010 has to bring, but as Ella F sings, something’s gotta give, and hopefully, this year will at least run a bit more smoothly. Cheers to you all.

Films

Best film of the year:

Bright Star












Runner up:

Inglourious Basterds












Honorable Mentions:

Star Trek
Coraline
Drag Me to Hell
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Up

Disappointments:

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Halloween II
Paranormal Activity

Books

I read approximately 82 books this year (which means I didn't reach my goal of one hundred), and these were the ones that stuck out for me:

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
Jane Austen, Emma
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
A.S. Byatt, Elementals
A.S. Byatt, Possession
Angela Carter, Wise Children
William Faulkner, Light in August
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Toni Morrison, Beloved (re-read)
Alice Munro, Open Secrets
Sapphire, Push
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Music, 18-11

18 Martha Wainwright, Sans Fusils, Ni Fouliers, A Paris: A Tribute to Edith Piaf
17 Nellie McKay, Normal as Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day
16 St. Vincent, Actor
15 The Decemberists, The Hazards of Love
14 Marissa Nadler, Little Hells
13 Little Boots, Hands
12 Karen O and the Kids, Where the Wild Things Are
11 Tori Amos, Abnormally Attracted to Sin

To be continued...

Film Review: "Drag Me to Hell"

Confession: a good friend of mine (who is notorious for loving absolutely god-awful movies) pointed this out to me when the trailer surfaced, saying he thought it would just be so. great. I was, not surprisingly, unimpressed. Sure, I like Alison Lohman; she was fabulous in White Oleander (a book and movie I find severely underrated), and, well, what has she done since then? I have no idea, but I was excited to see her getting work, especially with a big name director like Sam Raimi (of Evil Dead and Spiderman fame). Back to the trailer. Whatever else I’m called, I’m really not a film snob; many of my favorites are a bit weighty on the pretension scale (see: Lars Von Trier’s films, David Lynch, The Hours, underground stuff like Birth, Margot at the Wedding, and foreign directorial empires like Hayao Miyazaki and Wong Kar-Wai), but I’m assuredly not above seeing complete and utter train wrecks. Especially with the horror genre, to which I am entirely and nerdishly devoted. I saw The Eye (with Jessica ‘Don’t Call Me Latina’ Alba) in theatres, for christ’s sakes. So when my friend said that Drag Me to Hell looked ‘great,’ my skeptically-arched brow rose, even though I knew my seeing it would be inevitable.

The sister paid for my ticket last night. She owes me, as usual, and none of her prissy/skanky Twilight-loving accomplices would see it with her—so she came to me. We have a history of sibling-bonding over horror films; last summer, we saw The Strangers in a deserted theatre, late at night, and spent the entirety of the film with our knees at our chins and our shrieks echoing through the soiled seats. (At the end of the film we discovered that there had been only one other person in the theatre with us—a shadowy man sitting in the very back row, directly behind us. Needless to say, that alone would have scared us shitless.) So we waded through the previews; Orphan looks like a really eerie The Bad Seed remake; Bruno will likely play right into the hands of the homophobic audiences of America; a couple of bang-bang-boom-boom action flicks look just the same as all the many, many others that are infesting the silver screen now—and have since the dawn of time and scrotal ignorance.

Then, the opening of Drag Me to Hell, replete with a scene as likely to come out of an INS cautionary video as a creature feature. Cue entrance of small, cursed Latino boy, worried, Spanish-spewing parents, foreboding gypsy (?) medium, bad music, and somewhat laughable special effects. Sister whispers in my ear: “Is this going to be really fucking dumb?” I glance over at her. “I don’t know.” And you know what? At several points it was pretty fucking dumb, in the most wonderfully campy of senses. At turns horrifying, gag-inducing, laugh-out-loud hilarious, and a bit puzzling, Drag Me to Hell has a little something for all horror-lovers. My sister said at the end of the film that she simply didn’t have an opinion; she didn’t know what to think of it. For me, the film evoked the same kind of schizophrenic experience as watching a zombie film often does. I think, for example, of the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead, where you spend half your time shrieking in terror, and the other half guffawing, as when the survivors blow out Zombie-Jay Leno’s brains, or when the pregnant woman propels a zombie infant from her rather unfortunate twat.

Here, however, we have a vomitous octogenarian Gypsy woman who inflicts the—DUN DUN DUH—curse of the Lamia on well-meaning, former porker, Alison Lohman. Until the Lamia arrives, however, Lohman is subjected to the old woman ralphing a bucketful of maggots on her face, the woman futilely attempting to gnaw on her with toothless gums, and a nosebleed of epic proportions. My sister claims to have not caught the humor; but when Lohman shrieks at her coworker to get his “Filthy pig knuckle off my desk!” or when the gross-out moments are so over-the-top as to have you giggling and holding back bile simultaneously, I don’t know what else to call it, but incredibly dark (and yucky!) humor. The premise is simple enough, and Lohman’s guilt is something any viewer can sympathize with; she makes one vaguely cruel decision in the effort to grab onto a promotion at work, and suddenly she’s got a demon throwing her across her own kitchen, and eyeballs exploding on her porcelain cheeks. Not to mention the fact that the films offers quite a bit of worthwhile character development—the boyfriend is a psychologist without much faith in Lohman’s fears (though he ends up tugging our heartstrings), the potential in-laws are sneeringly blue-blood, the aforementioned coworker is a sexist bovine who actually deserved the curse of the Lamia. In the end, we are inextricable from Lohman’s character, because we’ve all been in these situations with our coworkers or our family members and friends; and we’ve all got guilty consciences that may have us rolling between the sheets at night, praying that we never have a nasty run in with a half-blind gypsy freak.

The movie falls in line with the aesthetic of old-school horror, with the added benefit of a strong cast (which in itself is an achievement for the horror genre) and modern moviemaking techniques. It’s got the gore of a slasher flick, the camp of a zombie flick, and the psychological depth of a character piece. It’s not perfect; American horror movies really rarely are these days (the only ones in recent memory are The Ring, The Descent, and The Strangers)—but if you’ve got a sense of humor and a non-existent gag reflex, Drag Me to Hell will prove an enjoyable little feat of escapism.