Last weekend, I was at a small holiday shindig of thirty-somethings, the kind where there’s often a movie on in the background but few people are actually paying attention — there’s also music and food and alcohol, after all.
This all changed when a friend hit play on Home Alone. We crept over. We sat. We quieted down.
Home Alone is not just a movie. When it hit theaters in 1990, for a certain generation, it was as though someone had reached directly into your brain, catalogued your sublimated elementary school-age fears, dreams and desires, and molded them into a blockbuster holiday release with a memorable cameo from John Candy. Kids love to fantasize about chances to display their independence, no matter how improbable (see: the cabal of 11- to 13-year-old girls running a successful, sophisticated business at the center of The Babysitters Club series). They long for opportunities to prove they’re not afraid of anything. Problem is, they’re generally afraid of lots of things. Like, say, the radiator.
I only mention this severely emotional attachment to the film as a preface because — intensely warm, spiced, jingle-bell-soundtracked feelings aside — what jumped out at me upon viewing the entirety of Home Alone for the first time in roughly a decade is how incredibly dark it is. In an excellent oral history of the movie for Chicago magazine, filmmaker John Hughes recalls taking special care to make the violence cartoonlike, because otherwise the facts of the plot — after a child is abandoned by his family, two adult petty criminals become obsessed with trying to break into his home and, soon after, with causing the child some awful yet unarticulated bodily harm — do not a feel-good movie make.
It’s a darkness that was not lost on Macaulay Culkin, apparently. Witness, below, a universe in which Kevin McCallister was scarred for life by the events of that eventful Christmas (as he probably would be, were the character real). Here we see him moonlighting as an employee (contractor?) for some kind of rideshare company; he’s in a terrifically unhealthy relationship and wants only to act out, repeating the cycle of abuse in which he was an unwitting victim so many years ago. One could also read the entire narrative as a thinly-veiled metaphor for the myriad ways the eternally hungry yet fickle Hollywood fame machine chewed up and spit out this particular former child actor and friend of Michael Jackson’s. Or not.
In any event, this concept has been brought to you by Jack Dishel of the Moldy Peaches apparently having a new webseries, plus Macaulay Culkin’s abundance of free time now that the whole Pizza Underground thing has seemingly (thankfully) petered out. Merry Christmas!
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably tuned out most Election 2016 polling data. But a recent troll-tastic Public Policy Polling survey got my attention. Apparently 30% of Republicans want to bomb Agrabah, Aladdin’s fictional hometown.
But stupidity is not just a symptom of one party: 19% of Democrats are also down to devastate a made-up land known for cute monkey sidekicks and sensual man vests.
There are two major takeaways from this poll:
Reading comprehension is at an all-time low.
Jafar sympathizers are among us.
I’ll speak for all rational, literate human beings when I say: #WeAreAllAbu!
Sometimes you have a really good night out, or your roommate’s friend who’s crashing on your couch tells a truly excellent off-color joke — but when it comes time to relay the tale to your surely eager coworkers, the anecdote just doesn’t have that punch you want it to.
Enter the Star Wars Intro Creator. Yep, it’s exactly what it sounds like: Type text into four different fields, and watch as the story of that one time you ran into that terrible OkCupid date at the burrito place at 1 a.m. becomes a terrifically exciting space opera of epic proportions. The possibilities are limitless!
But in the world of Star Wars toys, Rey’s been hard to find — and fans took to social media, under the hashtags #WheresRey and #WhereisRey, to complain about all the movie merchandise that left her out.
Target’s Star Wars figurine 6-pack? Finn, Chewbacca, Poe, Kylo Ren and two unnamed characters: a Stormtrooper officer and a First Order TIE fighter.
The new Star Wars Monopoly game was one of the most egregious offenders. It features four characters: Finn, Luke Skywalker, Kylo Ren and Darth Vader.
That’s two characters from the new films, and two from the classic trilogy, says Hasbro. Or to look at it another way, that’s — OK, OK, now it’s time for a spoiler warning from here on out — two key characters from The Force Awakens, one dude who’s on screen for, like, a minute tops, and one character who is literally dead and appears only as a crumpled helmet and a super unhealthy hero-obsession.
And no Rey, the star of the film.
The Monopoly game was targeted by many #WheresRey tweets — and by a letter from an 8-year-old fan who pointed out Rey’s essential role in the film’s plot.
“We love the passion fans have for Rey, and are happy to announce that we will be making a running change to include her in the Monopoly: Star Wars game available later this year,” the game company said in a statement. The news was first announced by EW on Tuesday night.
Hasbro said Rey was not initially included in the game to “avoid revealing a key plotline” — an argument some found specious, since she was clearly going to be a central character based solely on early promotional materials.
Hasbro also points out that Rey is featured in Star Wars-branded games of Hands Down, Guess Who and Chess, and that two new Rey action figures will be arriving in stores this month.
This morning at the ungodly hour of 5:30am, the Oscar nominations were unveiled. Last year, #OscarsSoWhite became a trending hashtag in the wake of all 20 actor contenders being white (the first time that happened since 1995). If you thought the Academy would take a long, hard look at itself and make some changes, you would be wrong. This year, all 20 slots again were given to only white people. Maybe this could have something to do with the fact that Oscar voters are 94% white, 76% men, and an average of 63 years old. Yikes. Sigh. Ugh. Blergh. I can’t seem to type out anything but one-word stand-ins for disgust so I’ll let these tweets do the talking:
There are more nominations for white men named Mark than there are for people of color across all acting categories.
Anyway, here’s how this year’s nominations shook out (if you even still give a damn):
Best Supporting Actress:
Jennifer Jason Leigh (The Hateful Eight)
Rooney Mara (Carol)
Rachel McAdams (Spotlight)
Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl)
Kate Winslet (Steve Jobs)
Major drama in this category because many are calling Mara and Vikander’s supporting actor campaigns category fraud, as they are clearly leads in their respective movies. This opens the door for more BS Hollywood machinations in the years to come. At least they finally decided to give Rachel McAdams some love for her role as Regina George in Mean Girls.
Best Supporting Actor:
Christian Bale (The Big Short)
Tom Hardy (The Revenant)
Mark Ruffalo (Spotlight)
Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies)
Sylvester Stallone (Creed)
No, that’s not a typo. Sylvester Stallone is nominated for an Oscar, 39 years after his first nom for Rocky. Another less-amusing surprise is the lack of Idris Elba for Beasts of No Nation, which contributed to this super duper white affair. Some also expected 9-year-old Jacob Tremblay from Room to be in the mix. Silver lining: Tom Hardy’s lips will be at the Oscars.
Best Actress:
Cate Blanchett (Carol)
Brie Larson (Room)
Jennifer Lawrence (Joy)
Charlotte Rampling (45 Years)
Saoirse Ronan (Brooklyn)
This makes 25-year-old Jennifer Lawrence the youngest actor to receive four nominations (Meryl didn’t reach #4 until she was 33). Despite her Golden Globe win a few days ago, most didn’t fully expect her to grab this nom because of the lukewarm feelings around Joy. This will probably contribute to the Anne Hathaway-ing Lawrence is experiencing right now, especially in the wake of that cringe-worthy press room incident.
Best Actor:
Bryan Cranston (Trumbo)
Matt Damon (The Martian)
Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant)
Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs)
Eddie Redmayne (The Danish Girl)
Matt Damon bumped out Creed‘s Michael B. Jordan and Black Mass‘ Johnny Depp. There goes my super involved fantasy of Depp announcing that he’s gotten back together with the love of his life, Winona Ryder, on the red carpet. And it’s looking like Leo is on track to finally (FINALLY!) get the Oscar he has been chasing so desperately.
Best Picture:
The Big Short Bridge of Spies Brooklyn Mad Max: Fury Road The Martian The Revenant Room Spotlight
For the second year in a row, the Academy only went with eight picks for best picture (they usually go for nine out of the possible ten), which doesn’t exactly send a positive message about the state of the film industry. No Straight Outta Compton because there are black people in that. No Carol, despite nomination-worthy performances from Blanchett and Mara. No Inside Out or Star Wars: The Force Awakens because I guess they don’t care if anyone watches the ceremony? Academy voters, when asked what goes into their decision making: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Best Director:
Adam McKay (The Big Short) George Miller (Mad Max: Fury Road) Alejandro González Iñárritu (The Revenant) Lenny Abrahamson (Room) Tom McCarthy (Spotlight)
Abrahamson’s inclusion is stunning some people this morning. Somewhere out there, in three separate mansions, Ridley Scott (The Martian), Steven Spielberg (Bridge of Spies) and Todd Haynes (Carol) are all shaking their fists.
Best Original Song:
“Earned It” (Fifty Shades of Grey) “Manta Ray” (Racing Extinction) Simple Song #3″ (Youth) “Til It Happens To You” (The Hunting Ground) “Writing’s On The Wall” (Spectre)
Many expected “See You Again” from Furious 7 to make this list. Apparently, we don’t yet deserve a world in which Wiz Khalifa wins an Oscar. Instead we get Sam Smith for his predictable Bond song, the Weeknd for a song from the Razzie-nominated Fifty Shades of Grey, and Lady Gaga? We are all Leo, the Academy is Gaga:
Okay, that’s enough outrage for one post. Check out the full list of nominees. And tune in to the Oscars on February 28, 2016.
There is no limit to my love of Clueless. I quote it incessantly. I watch it an average of four times a year. I think about Brittany Murphy way more than you. Etc. So I was stoked to see my beloved movie trending because W Magazine made Jake Gyllenhaal, Seth Rogan and Bradley Cooper reenact Cher’s “It was his 50th birthday!” speech.
Spoiler: they all suck at it. It’s clearly been a while since they’ve seen it because they fail to mispronounce Haitians, which counts for 80% of their grade. But no one fails harder than Jake, who sounds like he’s reading from an accounting manual. First, he breaks Taylor Swift’s heart into tiny little pieces and now this? One more strike left, bro.
Watch and gain even more appreciation for Alicia Silverstone’s acting prowess:
But the laughs dry up when the undercurrent that moves the movie along — divorce and its pernicious effects on young children — rears its ugly head. The movie did a great job of striking a balance between the sadness of that topic and high jinks. But things would have tipped heavily into This is too depressing to ever watch again territory, if these newly surfaced deleted scenes had been included in the final cut. All three have zero jokes and 100% sadness. And the added weight of Robin Williams’ death doesn’t help matters.
Trigger warning: If you’re a child of divorce, make sure you don’t mind the people around you seeing you cry.
It’s hardly breaking news that female writers and directors are sorely underrepresented in Hollywood, nor that — despite magazine covers like this one — complex, three-dimensional parts for leading ladies are still few and far between in the year 2016.
But if you need some help really internalizing just how crappy most of the roles written for women truly are, producer Ross Putman is here to help. Just yesterday the filmmaker started a Twitter account, @femscriptintros, from which to share excerpts of scripts he receives — specifically, the ways female characters are described as they’re introduced.
JANE (late 20s) sits hunched over a microscope. She’s attractive, but too much of a professional to care about her appearance.
The only thing altered in these tweets is the character’s name: Putnam has changed each one to Jane, both providing anonymity for the script in question and helping to underscore the laughable interchangeability of all these effortlessly beautiful — maybe also intelligent, hardworking, or funny, but beautiful first and foremost and don’t you forget it — female characters.
JANE, 28, athletic but sexy. A natural beauty. Most days she wears jeans, and she makes them look good.
After the account amassed more than 22,000 followers in less than 24 hours, Jezebel reached out to Putman to hear about the idea’s origins. What started as just a good old-fashioned way to let off steam about shoddy scripts — via Facebook rants, of course — apparently grew into something more pointed when the filmmaker started noticing patterns along gender lines.
But the more that I read, the more I started to recognize some pretty awful constants. For every confused “you’re” and “your,” there’s just as much latent misogyny and sexism in the scripts I read. Women are first and foremost described as “beautiful,” “attractive,” or—my personal blow-my-brains-out-favorite, “stunning.” They’re always “stunning” in a certain dress or “stunning” despite being covered in dirt because they’re a paleontologist—or whatever. I found myself posting to Facebook far too often “here comes another script with our 45 year-old male lead dating a 25 year-old woman,” and decided I was going to keep track of the female character introductions in scripts I read for a few weeks.
I went back and combed through past scripts too, and the patterns were pretty disconcerting. I plan on posting every one that I read, and there are plenty that aren’t offensive, but honestly, most of them have some element—subtle or overt—that plays into latent objectification.
Read more of the filmmaker’s thoughts on sexism in the industry and (lack of) diversity at the Oscars here. I especially like his description of how deeply the false “beautiful BUT ALSO intelligent!” dichotomy runs through the subtext in many of these introductions.
In any event: If you need a daily laugh/facepalm, it’s an account worth following. It certainly won’t be running low on material any time soon.
Anthony Lucero has too many trophies to carry at once. The writer-director’s first feature film, East Side Sushi, about a Latina woman who aspires to become a sushi chef, has been racking up awards since it first debuted on the festival circuit in 2014.
But back in 2011, when the Oakland native was shopping his screenplay around to potential investors, it was a different story altogether.
Anthony Lucero
“There were multiple strikes working against it,” says the filmmaker, who was born and raised in the Fruitvale District. “I had a very strong sense that no one wanted to pay for a film with a woman lead. The second issue was she was Mexican. And the other lead was Japanese. And you just don’t see that in cinema.”
Think that sounds like an oversimplification? Think again. A recent report by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism has confirmed what many in the entertainment business say has been common knowledge for decades: Hollywood’s diversity problem goes far beyond the Academy Awards. Below the surface of the buzzy #OscarsSoWhite conversation that’s dominated social media the past few months lies an iceberg — it’s the industry itself, and it’s overwhelmingly comprised of straight, white men.
“Overall, the landscape of media content is still largely whitewashed,” reports the USC study. With an eye to gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, researchers analyzed roles in front of and behind the camera on 109 films released by major studios in 2014, as well 305 scripted television and digital/streaming series that aired across 31 different networks. Shows distributed by Disney, NBC, CBS, Hulu, Netflix, 21st Century Fox, Sony and more were included in the data.
At a time when the U.S. population is increasingly made up of minorities, the report casts a clear spotlight on the damning degree of disparity between what Americans look like and what we see on our TV screens. Asians, Latinos, and African-Americans are all vastly underrepresented, both onscreen and off. Only 2 percent of speaking characters on television were identified as LGBT. White directors outnumber those of color by nearly 7 to 1. Only two black women directors were identified in an entire year’s worth of major motion pictures.
Those numbers may seem shocking — but asked for their reactions, several local industry insiders responded with a resounding “duh.”
“Not surprising,” says Margaret Cho, a comic who — sometime in between doing impressions of her mother in small San Francisco nightclubs as a teenager and becoming a household name — had the distinction of being the first Asian-American to have her own primetime network TV show, with 1994’s ABC sitcom All-American Girl.
Margaret Cho on Fashion Police.
“I have often been the only person of color on set or involved in an entire production. It’s not unusual to me. For a long time, it was the norm, and it still is to some extent.”
Cho says she gravitated toward comedy in part because of its inclusiveness, which set it apart from film and television.
“I was told all the time, by many people, that I didn’t belong in show business — from my family to important agents and producers and managers and other actors,” says Cho. But “in comedy, there was no supervising entity limiting your participation in the medium. You just had to be good, that was all. You didn’t have to fit into anyone’s story; you didn’t have to wait until there was ‘Trouble in Chinatown.'”
“And then being a successful comic was like a backdoor entry into the rest of Hollywood,” says the comic, who’s currently juggling a guest-hosting job on E!’s Fashion Police with standup, songwriting, and activism. “I made a name for myself. I couldn’t have broken into TV from the other side. There were no significant roles for people of color at all.”
Natalie Wood in ‘West Side Story.’
Lucero notes that he, too, was far from shocked by the USC report’s numbers. “I’ve known [about the disparity] ever since I’ve known about film,” he says. “I mean, it goes back to Natalie Wood portraying a Puerto Rican in West Side Story. It’s not surprising, just sad.” (For a plethora of other facepalm-worthy instances of whitewashing, check out this week’s New York Times feature on being non-white in Hollywood.)
So: Considering this long-running legacy of underrepresentation — what the study refers to, in turns, as an “inclusion crisis” and an “epidemic of invisibility” — is the media’s current focus on the Oscars misguided?
In an interview with Variety this week, Mo’Nique, who in 2010 won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Precious, argues that the talk around “the trophy” is irrelevant and detracts from real issues — such as the pay gap faced by women of color. (The actress has said she was paid only $50,000 for her award-winning role.)
N’Jeri Eaton
Still, “I think it’s a conversation we should be having, in part because it’s a launching point to many other conversations about diversity,” says N’Jeri Eaton, an up-and-coming documentary filmmaker whose recent film First Friday examines a changing Oakland, with its accompanying race, class, and gentrification issues, via the focal point of its monthly Art Murmur.
“There are so many different aspects to this — say, for black women in particular, when black women do win [awards], what kind of roles is it for? It’s always women who are in peril, this tragic black woman narrative — because those are the opportunities we get as black women actors.”
Eaton says one of the best bets for moving beyond the online conversation involves hiring decisions: When it came time to select a crew for First Friday, she made it a point to seek out a team that reflected what Oakland actually looks like, and that comes through in the film.
But making change is multi-fold, she says: we must create opportunities, platforms and financial support for young people of color who are interested in filmmaking. (Her day job at San Francisco’s nonprofit media organization Independent Television Service provides grants of up to $15,000 to do just that.) And the movie-going public must also vote with their wallets.
“I’m a closet fan of the Fast and Furious series,” she says with a laugh. “And it might seem silly, but that series is incredibly diverse, and I think that’s part of the reason it’s so successful — it’s more reflective of our country, and people are dying for that. No one could say that [franchise] isn’t profitable.”
Ludacris, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez and Tyrese Gibson at the Hollywood premiere of ‘Furious 7’ (Carlos Piaggio/AKM-GSI**)
If the Oscars serve as a springboard for discussion, however, she’s all for it. “I mean, I’m black. I think about race every day of my life, maybe every hour of my life,” says Eaton. “But for some people, this might be their very first entry point to thinking about race.”
Cho echoes that statement. “I think it’s great,” she says of the Oscars conversation. “The only thing that seems to take down overt racism, invisibility, and cultural erasure is shame.”
But come Monday morning, when the Oscars are in the media’s rearview mirror, her focus will be back on paving her own way, making a space in entertainment outside of the studio-sanctioned blockbusters, and supporting others in the same boat.
“I think that we have to make our own movies — bring our own stories and do it any way we can, whether that’s making content for social media, making movies with our phones, making music on our laptops,” says Cho. “We need to do it on our own.”
Anthony Lucero adds that, for a young person of color who doesn’t have many high-profile role models in the industry she can relate to, putting that DIY ethic on display can be nothing short of powerful.
“A lot of it is education — filmmakers giving back. I’m doing a lot of tours at high schools and middle schools right now, to show kids that, yeah, I’m Chicano, I come from the Fruitvale District, and it’s possible to come from there and make films,” he says. “I do feel like it’s my duty to do that.”
Diana Elizabeth Torres on the poster for ‘East Side Sushi.’
As for East Side Sushi? Lucero wound up paying for it himself (with a little help from Kickstarter). And a couple months later, right after he took the top audience award at Cinequest, he got a call from the head of acquisitions at a major studio who was interested in distributing the film.
“They loved the film, their whole staff loved the film, but they wanted somebody famous in the lead,” says Lucero. “They weren’t comfortable putting a no-name Latina woman on an ad on the side of a bus.”
So when it came time to make marketing materials, Lucero went with a big, solo shot of his leading lady — who, yes, is Latina. Her name is Diana Elizabeth Torres.
“I said, okay, I’m gonna put her face front and center on this poster. That poster that you see is my defiance against Hollywood,” says Lucero with a laugh. “That’s just me. When there are obstacles, I go against them.”
Every year, I get excited about the Oscars. And, every year, about 7 minutes into the ceremony, a familiar realization comes flooding back: Oh, yeah! Award shows are super duper boring! The main culprit: the uninspired acceptance speeches that often are just a long list of random people’s names. So, in an attempt to make a better world, I’ve compiled a list of dos and don’ts for future award winners to make the most of their stage time:
Do show your endearing humanity by cackling uncontrollably à la Julia Roberts:
Do make sure you’re charming enough to pull off threatening to kidnap and have sex with everyone in the audience, like Roberto Benigni did:
Do use Maya Angelou as an excuse to go HAM on everyone, like Fiona Apple:
Do have a modicum of chill, unlike Sally Field’s infamous YOU LIKE ME, YOU REALLY LIKE ME!!! speech:
Do bring some ‘tude like when Taraji P. Henson refused to be rushed by the Golden Globe producers:
Do kill your haters with cuteness like Ruth Gordon:
Do not say something insufferable and follow it up by hooting like a drunken frat boy:
Do pull a Cuba Gooding Jr. and refuse to be played off by saying “I love you” a billion times:
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a gif must be worth at least a million (math!). With the advent of this bite-sized animated wonder, award shows have become less about who won what and more about who made what face. Here are the gifs from last night’s Oscar Awards that will be finding their way into your texts and gchats soon.
Chris Rock’s monologue quickly addressed #OscarsSoWhite, but he ramped things up a notch too far by introducing FOX News contributor / Miss Let’s-Abolish-the-BET-Awards Stacey Dash:
Chrissy Teigan (behind Saoirse Ronan) won the Oscar for Most Appropriate Facial Reaction to Stacey Dash’s Existence:
In a series of bits that integrated black actors into this year’s nominated films, Tracy Morgan put his own spin on The Danish Girl:
Meanwhile, with a single wink, Mark Ruffalo put his own spin on making me wish I had a uterus so I could have his baby:
The award for Cutest Duo Starring in a Selfie went to Brie Larson and 9-year-old Jacob Tremblay:
Speaking of cute-as-a-button Jacob, he was pretty jazzed about C3PO, R2D2 and BB8 crashing the party:
And still on the subject of adorable kids, a group of Girl Scouts sold Samoas, Thin Mints and the less tasty cookie varieties, proving that:
Celebrities Are Just Like Us!: They also can’t get enough of Girl Scout cookies:
2. Celebrities Are Not Just Like Us!: They share them:
Jennifer Garner let us know she’s doing just fine post-Affleck-divorce by taking a selfie with Common:
Proving that racism isn’t the only problem plaguing Hollywood’s elite, an entire line of men refused to clap for bad ass costume designer Jenny Beavan as she walked to accept her award:
Lady Gaga made everyone blubber with a moving performance featuring survivors of rape and sexual violence:
Brie Larson seemed like a nice person, when accepting her Best Actress trophy:
Her niceness was later confirmed without a doubt when she embraced every single rape survivor from Lady Gaga’s performance:
This was Leo’s night, but the bear from The Revenant kept him on his toes:
Alicia Vikander won Best Supporting Actress. She also won Most Envied Woman in the Land when she confirmed her relationship with Michael Fassbender with a kiss:
Spotlight, a.k.a. that movie about journalism you didn’t see, won the top prize. Michael Keaton couldn’t contain his excitement…or the F word:
And Leo won his long-sought-after Oscar so we can all finally stop feeling sorry for a super rich and privileged white dude not getting his due. Yay!:
Any joy I might feel about Leo’s win is eclipsed by the immense sadness over all the brilliant Leo-will-never-get-an-Oscar-despite-it-being-the-only-thing-he-truly-wants-in-this-world gifs becoming obsolete:
But, as the circle of life would have it, they had to die to make room for the next era of Leo memes:
Lots of people are fuming about Nina, an upcoming biopic about legendary singer Nina Simone. According to its critics, the filmmakers butcher important parts of Simone’s biography (in part, by attributing much of her success to the men in her life), but that their larger sin was casting actress Zoe Saldana, who plays the lead role with the help of skin-darkening makeup and a prosthetic nose.
Many argue that casting the lighter skinned Afro-Latina actress, rather than someone who better resembled Simone, was an attempt to make the film more marketable instead of staying true to the singer and the life that inspired her art. The makeup and prosthetic nose, they also charge, were sloppy and poorly executed. In one of the more gentle critiques, singer India.Arie called the casting move “tone deaf.” Others went with “disrespectful,” “deplorable,” and “embarrassing.”
In this composite image, a comparison has been made between Nina Simone and actress Zoe Saldana. (Photo: David Redfern/Frazer Harrison/Redferns/Getty Images for Relativity Media)
But more than any other, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recently published essay seems to capture the full emotional depth of all this frustration. He suggests this wasn’t just another questionable casting choice involving a person of color in a long line of such casting choices. To explain, Coates gets personal:
“When I was kid, I knew what the worst parts of me were—my hair and my mouth. My hair was nappy. My lips were big. Nearly every kid around me knew something similar of themselves because nearly every one of us had some sort of physical defect—dark skin, nappy hair, broad nose, full lips—that opened us up to ridicule from one another. That each of these “defects” were representative of all the Africa that ran through us was never lost on anyone. “Africa” was an insult—African bush-boogie, African bootie-scratcher etc. Ethiopian famine jokes were all the rage back then…
…[Nina] Simone was in possession of nearly every feature that we denigrated as children. And yet somehow she willed herself into a goddess.”
Coates goes on to explain how Simone’s appearance, as well as her music, helped him view his childhood musings on race in a larger context:
“Simone is something more than a female Bob Marley. It is not simply the voice: It is the world that made that voice, all the hurt and pain of denigration, forged into something otherworldly. That voice, inevitably, calls us to look at Nina Simone’s face, and for a brief moment, understand that the hate we felt, that the mockery we dispensed, was unnatural, was the fruit of conjurations and the shadow of plunder. We look at Nina Simone’s face and the lie is exposed and we are shamed. We look at Nina Simone’s face and a terrible truth comes into view—there was nothing wrong with her. But there is something deeply wrong with us.”
Finally, Coates takes us through what all of this means, both for the potential audience and Nina‘s creators:
“It’s here that the term ‘appropriation’ bears some usage. We’re not talking about someone inspired by the deeper lessons of Simone’s life and her music. We are talking about people who think it’s fine to profit off her music while heedlessly contributing to the kind of pain that brought that music into being. To acknowledge that pain, to consider it in casting, would be inconvenient—as anti-racist action always is. It would mean giving an opportunity to someone who’s actively experienced the kind of pain that plagued Simone. That would doubtlessly mean a diminished chance at garnering funds for such a film. And that, in turn, would court years of delays and the possibility of the film never coming into being. That would be unfortunate—but less so for Nina Simone than for the agents who feel themselves entitled to profit her story.”
The whole piece is worth reading and thinking about. You can check it out over at The Atlantic.
Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
The comediennes of the modern era certainly have a lot to thank Jane Austen for. While her humor is much milder than the Schumers and Dunhams of this modern era, Austen was witty before women showing off their funny bone was socially acceptable. Her undeniable mark on popular culture has inspired a slew of adaptations, from everyone’s favorite ’90s teen flick, Clueless, to the deplorably tasteless Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. With the offensiveness of the latter still lingering on our palettes, the latest Austen film adaptation, Love and Friendship, could not have arrived at a better time.
Based on one of Austen’s lesser-known works, the early epistolary novella, Lady Susan, tells the tale of an unscrupulous, newly widowed woman and her quest to marry off her lackluster daughter to a wealthy man and to bag an even richer husband for herself. Written as a series of letters, some have argued that this is perhaps Austen’s wittiest work, which would explain why audiences and critics have been so pleased with the film adaptation.
Directed by Whit Stillman, Love and Friendship finds Kate Beckinsale portraying the beguiling Lady Susan Vernon with her confidante, Alicia Johnson, played by Chloë Sevigny (for those who may have forgotten, Chloë and Kate were also paired up in Stillman’s 1998 cult classic The Last Days of Disco). Without delving too much into the plot, Beckinsale delivers an exquisite performance that captures the charmingly appalling nature of Lady Susan, serving up memorable line after memorable line – my personal favorite being Susan’s description of Alicia’s husband as “too old to be governed and too young to die.” It is this wit that takes center stage in the film and will leave theater-goers with an appreciation of the subtlety of Austen’s humor that is rarely found in modern times.
For Austen aficionados, the film is obviously a must see and will probably spit them out of the theater wishing they could find the essence of Austen in the real world. To figure out how to do that best, we caught up with the Coordinator of the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Northern California Region, Danine Cozzens, for her insights into the latest film and beyond.
KQED Pop: What characteristics of Jane Austen’s writing do you think give it such timeless appeal for the young and old alike?
Danine Cozzens: Jane Austen saw into the truth of the human heart. What truly drives character, and causes us to make decisions that may not have the best outcome? You can read the novels over and over and see this happen anew each time. The characters, their motivations, all the fine points the narrator’s voice was telling you point blank were there all along, even while you were captivated by the unfolding plot line.
As the English countryside and its estates are several thousand miles in distance from our beloved Bay Area, which locales and establishments would you recommend for an Austen-inspired sojourn?
We are fortunate to have some grand estates in the Bay Area that are open to the public, with the scale and elegance of a Georgian manor house. You can’t stay there, but do take a day trip to Filoli (near Woodside). Although built in 1915, it was modeled on a Georgian estate in Ireland, and has the grand expanse of gardens and woodlands of an English estate. If you can get into Carolands, which has very limited hours, it is more French but Mr. Darcy would have felt quite at home there.
Villa Montalvo (near Saratoga) is Mediterranean in style, but has an excellent Regency-style “folly” — a charming wedding cake of a pavilion — at the bottom of the great lawn. The Pelican Inn in Muir Beach replicates an English coaching inn. The Berkeley City Club provided a gracious site for an afternoon ball. All worth a visit.
Each fall, our friends in Oregon take over the Oregon Caves Chateau, a small rustic lodge from the 1930s, for a “great house” weekend. We dress in Regency era attire and enjoy various period activities. Another memorable experience has been sailing on the tall ships (Lady Washington and Hawaiian Chieftain) on their semi-annual tour, with everyone — passengers and crew — in costume. And of course teas, balls, and picnics are held in many places. The Los Angeles Jane Austen Evening sells out every year.
Though a fantastic piece of literature, Lady Susan is one of Jane’s lesser-known works. Out of her novels that haven’t received a worthy film adaptation, which would you be most excited to see produced (or reproduced) and why?
Personally, I’d vote for MansfieldPark, because the anachronisms and plot alterations set my teeth on edge. I’m fine with adaptations like Clueless or Bride and Prejudice, but when you are playing it straight, please do not introduce nonsensical plot changes and impossible things which make no sense, like tiered wedding cakes in a world where baking powder had not yet been invented. Don’t turn Fanny’s ball into a picnic.
What scene in Love and Friendship are you most excited for viewers to watch brought to the screen?
This may sound odd, but what blew me away was the attention to detail in all the costumes. No skimping on horses and carriages, either. The costumes on the servants — the starched caps and fichus on the maids, the livery and wigs on the footmen — just as much care was taken with them as with the principal actors. And the working people underfoot, laying paving stones in their filthy smocks — it was transporting to see the entire screen come alive.
I loved the scene in which Sir Reginald De Courcy is reading a letter aloud to Lady De Courcy. Letter writing was such a key part of life for the leisured class; it was the social media of the day. I thought that scene, with the handwriting projected over the screen, conveyed how intense letters were at the time. Quite fitting, since Lady Susan was constructed as a series of letters.
Love and Friendship is out now in select theaters. If you would like more information on the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Northern California Region, please visit jasnanorcal.org.
“Specificity is the soul of narrative” is a thing John Hodgman likes to say when he’s hearing cases on the smart and funny Judge John Hodgman podcast, and it’s applicable to documentary film, too. Documentaries devoted to a topic with heft do better if they can find a particular angle, a particular way into the question. It’s generality — “Let’s just talk about this kind of person and what this kind of person’s life is like” — that leads to documentaries that feel well-meaning but flat and toothless.
HBO’s new documentary Suited, directed by Jason Benjamin, is about gender identity and transgender people. But it meets their stories at a specific place: Bindle & Keep, a Brooklyn custom suiting shop that caters to people who are transgender or gender-nonconforming or nonbinary — people who, for reasons related to gender identity, have trouble finding suits that fit their bodies and feel congruent with how they want to look. (A note: If you heard the shop Saint Harridan profiled on Startup recently, that’s a different store with some similar elements in its mission.)
Bindle & Keep is run by Daniel Friedman and Rae Tutera. Tutera grew up with the name Rachel and later had gender confirmation surgery resulting in a certificate Tutera reads aloud declaring a male gender, but who also says that of “she” and “he” and “they” as pronouns, none really feels like misgendering. As for Friedman, he says he never really anticipated this path — he saw himself making suits for Wall Street dudes — but he got to it through Tutera and has clearly committed fully.
Suited follows several Bindle & Keep clients from their first appointments. There’s Derek, who needs a suit for his wedding; Everett, who’s just started law school in Georgia and has been warned that being trans will present problems in his field; Mel, a gender-nonconforming cab driver who needs a suit for a 40th birthday party; Aidan, a transgender teenager whose grandma brings him in to get a suit for his bar mitzvah; Grace, who wants a suit to “run around in”; and Jillian, a trans woman attorney who’s about to argue an important transgender rights case and needs a suit for court.
There’s something very clever about the construction of the documentary, simply because of the close connection between the way gender identity functions in the film and the way fashion does. Gender expression, for most of the documentary’s subjects, involves protecting what’s specific and personal in their gender identities against easy classifications that have been constructed from the broad outlines of other people’s experiences.
And with suits, too, part of what brings these clients to Bindle & Keep is that they want to assert something specific and personal through their appearance, and they don’t want to be limited by tailors who confuse an individual style decision with something inherent to women or men or people with particular bodies. A tailor might expect a suit-wearing body to be shaped a certain way or may not understand why not everyone who has breasts, for instance, wants them to look the same way in a suit.
Caring about the way you present to people visually doesn’t always get a lot of respect — beauty’s only skin-deep, don’t be shallow, it’s what’s inside that counts. But those are very often platitudes aimed at defending the merits of people who don’t fit traditional beauty norms. That’s a different question from whole industries not adequately providing people with services everyone else can access that afford social and professional advantages. Everett, for instance, needs a suit for job interviews in the legal field; he didn’t make that rule. And he has trouble finding one that both fits correctly and feels like it reads consistently with his gender identity. Finding a way to accommodate the right to individuality and the right to conformity — to use fashion as both personal expression and common cultural language if you choose — is powerful if you want to have the same options everybody else has.
It would be really easy in a post-Transparent, post-Caitlyn-Jenner era to feel like Suited — which is produced by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, both of the Girls team — is a documentary designed to tell its natural audience a series of things that audience probably already believes. It would feel less valuable if, for instance, its only function were to assert that being transgender is real and difficult — not because those things aren’t still often challenged and threatened in the society these folks live in, but because if you’re choosing to tune in for this film (about transgender people, on HBO, produced by Lena Dunham), you probably don’t consciously greet those ideas as new. Most people who sit down to watch Suited will be people who at least think they know that part already.
But Suited doesn’t just challenge narratives that don’t acknowledge trans people; it challenges limitations on which narratives about trans and gender-nonconforming people have been most prominent on television and in film in the last few years. It tells the story of Derek, who transitioned a number of years back with the help of very supportive parents, and of Jillian, who says that when she decided to transition and come out as a woman, it was like getting out of prison. But it also tells stories about Rae and Mel and Grace, who find gender identity complex enough that there’s no single transition or coming-out, as between two completely separate genders, that feels neatly right to them; they all repeat that it’s a matter of figuring out how to live comfortably as themselves.
All these stories are different in their particulars: some people change their names, others don’t. Some have surgery, others don’t. Some have supportive families of origin, others don’t. Some care profoundly what pronoun is used to describe them, others don’t. But they all want to look good in a suit. And the specificity of that common desire protects the film against any tendency toward the generic. Instead, it’s as personal and intimate as being measured by a stranger — which is pretty intimate indeed.
Suited premieres on HBO at 9 p.m. on Monday, June 20.
Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
On the morning of December 14, 2012, I was getting ready to head off to my job as a kindergarten art aide when I first heard the news of the Sandy Hook tragedy. I cried all the way to school, as I listened to the reports roll in about the teachers sacrificing themselves, the scared young students, and the commentary on living in a world where even innocent children are targets.
Since the principal asked us not to discuss the news, I kept wondering how I would manage to keep it together in the midst of this horrible day. Just outside the classroom, I took a deep breath, wiped my mascara off my cheeks, and remembered the “Just keep swimming” scene from Finding Nemo:
And, you know what? It worked. My students made lovely glitter snowflakes that day.
Sadly, Sandy Hook isn’t the last time it’s been necessary to overcome a tragedy. When faced with news of last week’s Orlando shooting, at first I was at a loss, but then I remembered my Finding Nemo moment. And I realized that there were far more pop culture touchstones that have given me hope in times of tragedy. Here are a few ways I renew my faith in humanity during hard times:
FICTION
Christy by Catherine Marshall, on the other hand, is a sentimental favorite I’ve read so many times I’ve practically memorized it. The semi-true story of a young, naïve society girl who teaches and falls in love with a remote Appalachian community is sure to inspire the most cynical among us about the power of caring and dedication to others.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is not just a favorite of mine but also my undergraduate university’s president. He often quoted some of the final lines from the book: “My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” This collection of six nested stories really drives home the point that every single life matters.
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells was the first “adult” book I read as a child. And the story of four lifelong friends — the ya-yas — who support their member’s daughter as she discovers how to love and forgive, is one that has resonated with me and millions of other readers.
POETRY
Sure, you’re thinking to yourself, all I need is a good Shel Silverstein or Dr. Seuss poem. But, thanks to my MFA program, I’d actually suggest reading more widely.
“Horses at Midnight Without a Moon” by Jack Gilbert is a recent find. There’s just something about that final sentence that fills me with unwavering optimism – “Our spirit persists like a man struggling / through the frozen valley / who suddenly smells flowers / and realizes the snow is melting / out of sight on top of the mountain, / knows that spring has begun.”
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – Say what you will about the preachy nature of Frank Capra films, but with a nod to last week’s filibuster, isn’t it inspiring to see a Congressman standing up for what’s right?
Legally Blonde – No one should ever underestimate Elle Woods. She’s a good role model for how to recover from personal tragedy with poise…and a whole lot of pink.
My best friend is a Gone with the Wind fan, so I often recall Scarlett O’Hara returning to Tara and vowing to get Rhett back and start her life anew. “After all, tomorrow is another day.” Gets me every time!
The LEGO Movie — As the song goes, “Everything is awesome when you’re part of a team.” It’s heartening to remember we’re all in this together.
TELEVISION
Northern Exposure’s “Cicely” tells the story of the quirky town’s founding. The episode won so many awards, partly because of this emphasis: “One person can have a profound effect on another. And two people…well, two people can work miracles. They can change a whole town. They can change the world.”
M*A*S*H’s “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen” was the final episode and represented the end of the Korean War. While it was a sad farewell, there was also so much love and friendship shared between the characters in what were some of the worst of times. The feelings were best summed up by Colonel Potter: “Well, I can’t call what we went through fun. But I’m sure glad we went through it together.”
In Ed‘s “Youth Bandits”, where the main characters reunite to celebrate the life of an old high school friend, the song they sing sums up the theme of this show — sometimes, returning home reminds us to keep exploring for what we truly want out of our one life.
MUSICALS
To find an inspiring song, all you need to do is attend the nearest graduation. Apart from the empowering songs du jour you’ll find there, the one song I keep in my playlists to make me feel better is Ben Harper’s (with the Blind Boys of Alabama) “There Will Be A Light.”
Musicals are also great resources for songs that can lift even the heaviest of hearts. Here are three favorites:
If you can’t fulfill the tall order of “Forgiveness” from Jane Eyre,
…there’s always the more realistic vision of the world from Spamalot’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”…
…or the inspirational crowd-stopper, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” from The Sound of Music.
What bits of pop culture help you during hard times? Share in the comments!
It was a few weeks ago now that I became vaguely aware, in that glazed-over internet osmosis way, of a new Ghostbusters theme that had a 100 percent chance of upsetting me. Some stray “trending” story on Facebook, I believe, included the words “Fall Out Boy and Missy Elliott to record Ghostbusters theme song.”
Like most trending Facebook stories — let’s see, mine currently include “Cheetos: Frito-Lay Holds Contest To Find Uniquely-Shaped Snack Foods” and “Shaquille O’Neal: Ex-NBA Player Shares Image With His Face Edited Onto Dwayne Wade’s Nude Body” — my eyes glossed over it, unable or unwilling to fully digest the information it contained.
But even if I had fully internalized those words, there’s just no way they could have prepared me for this.
Okay, so some context: The Ghostbusters remake, out July 15 and starring four very funny women in the place of the original’s four funny men, has seemingly been plagued by controversy from the get-go. Some of this controversy is extremely stupid: A real contingent of men are super mad that the main characters are no longer men.
Some of it is less stupid: After the first trailer was released, it was difficult to ignore the fact that, out of the four Ghostbuster characters, the three white ones are apparently scientists — whereas the character played by Leslie Jones, the only black Ghostbuster, is a “sassy” working-class woman with a job at the MTA.
With three weeks left before the movie hits theaters, however, Ghostbusters has since outdone itself. “Ghostbusters (I’m Not Afraid)” is now officially The Worst Thing About Ghostbusters. It might even be the worst thing about official motion picture soundtracks, which is really saying something, considering. Gone are the simple, cheesy, Huey Lewis-shaped synth notes of our youth, and in their place is something that sounds a bit like robots trying to recreate ’80s music in a stark underground torture chamber. Even if the schlocky, over-the-top guitar and distorted vocals are supposed to be a nod to the decade from whence the original tune came, calling this cheap-sounding remake an homage to Ray Parker Jr.’s Academy Award-nominated original is like calling Snapchat’s 4/20 blackfacefilter a touching and well-executed tribute to Bob Marley.
Of course, I expected as much from Fall Out Boy. We all expected as much from Fall Out Boy! The best thing Fall Out Boy has ever done is an 11-year-old chewed-up Laffy Taffy gob of a song that should only ever be consumed alongside this YouTube video.
But Missy? Missy. Missy Elliott, if you’re a member of the unlucky quadrant of society who only learned about Missy Elliott when she handily upstaged Katy Perry during the latter’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, is more than a legend. She’s a queen, and she can do whatever she wants. She’s been sick in recent years, so she was out of the spotlight for a bit, but she also gave a presentation with Michelle Obama and Queen Latifah at this year’s SXSW, in a great example of shine theory at work. She’s still among the most innovative and talented rappers alive, and — you know what? I’m getting too emotional. MISSY BREAK.
Here’s the thing: The studio executives tasked with selling a movie whose driving premise is bankable nostalgia know exactly how I feel about Missy Elliott. They did their research. Combining Missy Elliott and Fall Out Boy with Ghostbusters as a branding strategy is essentially jolting a BuzzFeed listicle of Things Only Kids Born In the ’80s Will Understand with a taser until it springs to cinematic life, a lumbering, self-aware marketing Frankenstein that feeds on the dollars of #Millennials and reeks of summertime sadness. So it makes sense that calling this track “forced” is perhaps the understatement of the year. None of the parties involved sound even remotely like they want to be here — and who can blame them?
All of which is to say, Missy: You’re better than this. Making a terrible song with Fall Out Boy for a soundtrack for the remake of a blockbuster is a demonstration of the opposite of shine theory. You now have the scent of Fall Out Boy all over you, and I’ll get past that, but it’s going to be a slow and difficult process. Which hurts, because Missy: You didn’t have to do this. You don’t have to do this. Please don’t do it again.
But since you did, I hope you did it for a really nice paycheck.
[Ed. note: I could not actually make it all the way through “Ghostbusters (I’m Not Afraid),” and chose instead just to watch more old-school Missy Elliott videos (see below). If the last 45 seconds of said theme song somehow redeem the entire thing, someone please let me know.]
Even if you are a serious person with adult responsibilities, you are likely aware that a new incarnation of Ghostbusters arrives in theaters this week. It stars four funny women and was co-written by a fifth, and at least some proportion of its intended audience has found these staffing decisions alarming. While I haven’t seen it yet, Ghostbusters ’16 is by most accounts neither a feminist battle cry nor a cynically made disaster, but a light midsummer amusement. “Too risk-averse,” wrote the Village Voice’s Melissa Anderson. “It never strays far from the anodyne, generic humor that pervades the Ivan Reitman-directed 1984 original.”
Those words — anodyne, generic — are comedy anti-matter. But they perfectly capture how weird it is that Ghostbusters has become a subject of controversy. If you were at all cognizant of pop culture in 1984, as I was just starting to be, the idea that 32 years later Prince — the artist formerly known as the guy who almost single-handedly prompted Tipper Gore to found the Parents Music Resource Counsel — would find himself near-universally beloved, while Ghostbusters has become a divisive topic, is a tough thing to get your head around.
There was something going on that year, 1984. More than three decades before it arrived, George Orwell had pegged it as a year in which fresh ideas would be violently suppressed. No one knew it at the time, but 1984’s box-office charts foretold the originality-averse multiplex dystopia that awaited us on the other side of the millennium. In The Terminator, the year’s 21st(!)-highest grossing film we learned that the early 21st century would find the shivering, starving, war-thinned human herd hunted to extinction by machines. Emotionless. Data-driven. They do not feel pity, or remorse, or fear. In that respect they’er a lot like the beings who decide, in this nightmare year of Two Thousand Sixteen, which movies get greenlit.
Okay, that’s an overstatement. This isn’t: In box office terms, 1984 resembled 2014 a lot more closely than it did 1983 or 1985. Because, for the first time in history, every single one of its Top Ten grossing films spawned a sequel or a remake or both … except for the Daryl Hannah-Tom Hanks mermaid romance Splash.
(Wait, no, sorry, I’m getting something in my earpiece. It’s seems there was a made-for-TV Splash Too, featuring none of Splash‘s principal players, in 1988.)
(Movies are only real if they’re released in theaters, agreed?)
Anyway: producer Brian Grazer announced last month that he’s working on a big-screen Splash remake.
Of course he is.
1984: The Year We Made Contact
The Top 10 Films of 1984, as reported by Box Office Mojo.
Beverly Hills Cop (Sequels in ’87, ’94, unsuccessful TV pilot in 2014)
Ghostbusters (Sequeled in ’89, rebooted 2016)
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Sequels in ’89 & ’08; reboot threatened)
Gremlins* (Sequeled in 1990)
The Karate Kid (Sequels ’86, ’89, ’94, remade 2010)
Police Academy (Sequels ’85, ’86, ’87, ’88, ’89, ’94)
Footloose (remade 2011)
Romancing the Stone (Sequeled 1985)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Sequels ’86, ’89, ’91, ’94, rebooted 2009)
Splash*
*Numbers 11 and 12 were Purple Rain and Amadeus, respectively. Their principal creators, Prince and the playwright Peter Shaffer, both died just this year. Number 15 was Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, another property we’re still monkeying around with.
While nine of these films would spawn theatrically-released sequels — hell, Police Academy and Romancing the Stone had quickie follow-ups out the following year — only two of them were sequels. (Temple of Doom was technically a prequel to 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, but whatever.) Four of the top five were original concepts.
That wasn’t unusual at the time. 1983’s Top 10 contained four sequels/franchise installments: The Return of the Jedi at Number 1; the Roger-Moore-in-clown-makeup James Bond flick Octopussy at Number 6; Sudden Impact, the third sequel to Dirty Harry, at Number 7; and Staying Alive, a follow-up to Saturday Night Fever written and directed by Sylvester Stallone because sure, at Number 8.
The remainder of the lushly exploitable IP in 1983’s Top Ten has been left alone, mostly. 1983’s No. 2 movie, the Best Picture-winning Terms of Endearment, got an unlikely sequel. It was called The Evening Star, and it was one of the most bruising belly-flops of 1996, failing to crack that year’s Top 100. Like Terms of Endearment, The Evening Star was adapted from a Larry McMurty novel.
But there was no follow-up to 1983’s far likelier candidates for the Electric Boogalo treatment: not Flashdance, the year’s Number 3 hit, nor Trading Places (Number 4) nor WarGames (Number 5) nor Risky Business (Number 10). Compared to ’83, 1984’s biggest hits were simply easier to franchise.
(Wait, sorry, I’m receiving new information that a direct-to-DVD sequel entitled WarGames: The Dead Code, directed by and starring no one you’ve ever heard of, sought to capitalize on WarGames’ massive Reagan-era cache in… 2008. What did we say about DTV releases? They don’t count. Moving on.)
Johnny ’85 Is Alive
But enough of 1984’s past, let’s get back… to the future! 1985’s box office champ, Back to the Future, towered over its closest competition by a cool $60 million. In the Number 2 and 3 positions we get Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rocky IV, respectively. Clearly, Sly did not let the poor reviews of Staying Alive get him down — “It’s not even as good as Flashdance,” Roger Ebert wrote — because ’85 was indisputably his year.
Well, his and Phil Collins’.
But after those three, 1985’s Top Ten opened up to accommodate plenty of serious, and as yet, un-remade, fare: The Color Purple (adapted from Alice Walker’s novel, and now the basis for a Broadway musical that could well become a movie); Out of Africa (adapted from Karen Blixen’s memoir); and Witness, which actually won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
It also included The Goonies and Spies Like Us, both of which seem eminently remakeable, but for whatever reason have not been.
The 80s ran themselves out in similar fashion. In each year, sequels or adaptations of preexisting material were the exceptions in the Top Ten rather than the rule. Until, that is, 1989, when the top earners included the long-in-development Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, and Back to the Future Part II. Oh, and one other sequel, less inspired than any of those: Ghostbusters II.
But 1989 was an anomaly. Five years later, the ratio of new material to old in the Top Ten was far smaller than it had been a decade earlier, but still healthier than today. The biggest hit of 1994’s was a Best Picture-winning adaptation of Winston Groom’s novel Forrest Gump. Number 2 was The Lion King — Hamlet for kids, but we’ll still count it as an original. Number 3, the action comedy True Lies, was in fact a pumped-up remake of a French farce called La Totale!, but this was probably not one of the key factors that persuaded millions of patriotic Americans to buy a ticket for a James Cameron-directed Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
Also in the Top 10: Clear and Present Danger (based on a Tom Clancy novel,), The Flintstones (based on a Hanna-Barbera cartoon), and The Mask (based on a comic book). Squeaking in at Number 10 was a wildly energetic and unpredictable crime picture, one that exuded originality from every pore –despite taking its title from a genre where formulaic plots and stock characters are celebrated. It was called Pulp Fiction.
Millennium Approaches: Sequels, Adaptations, Passion Plays
On the other side of the millennium, innovation waned. The biggest hits of 2004 were Shrek 2 and Spider-Man 2, followed by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which was, you know, based on preexisting material, if not exactly in the same way that Meet the Fockers was.
There were still a few “originals,” however derivative, in the Top Ten: The Roland Emmerich bad-weather thriller The Day After Tomorrow. National Treasure. Brad Bird’s wonderful Pixar superhero movie The Incredibles. And when the franchise entries were as strong as Spider-Man 2 (Number 2), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Number 4), and The Bourne Supremacy (Number 8), who was going to complain?
By 2014, there was nothing not extrapolated from a preexisting movie or comic book or Navy SEAL’s memoir in the Top Ten. (American Sniper became the first R-rated movie to win its year since Saving Private Ryan 16 years earlier.) Unless of course you want to count Maleficent, a reframing of Sleeping Beauty, or The Lego Movie, which was of course adapted from a set of molded plastic blocks that hurt when you step on them barefoot.
We got our first glimpse of this state of affairs 32 years ago now, in that year Orwell warned us about. We weren’t afraid of no ghosts, but maybe we should have been. These days, they’re pretty much all all we get.
I saw Ghostbusters this weekend with one adult and two children: people born in 1983, 2007 and 2009, respectively. The under-10 set loved it — the silly jokes, the exploding ghosts, Thor playing a dumb-as-a-brick receptionist, the running gags about slime. But for those of us who had seen the original Ghostbusters more times than we can count on two hands, it was a far more complex experience.
Let’s just get this out of the way: the Ghostbusters reboot is funny. Rapid-fire jokes issue forth from Melissa McCarthy in the style of a Tina Fey sitcom, Kate McKinnon’s cadence is weird and wonderful and never serious, Wiig plays the exasperated straight (wo)man, and Leslie Jones gets some of the best one-liners of the bunch. Jokes and ghosts aside, it’s ostensibly a film about female friendship, and a satisfying one at that. Then again, I’m a human of the female persuasion, so what do I know?
The real reason I’m writing this today is to parse out the strangeness of my moviegoing experience. The theater was jam packed (we watched the entire film from an awkward left-side-of-the-second-row angle), seemingly full of people not there to see a new movie, but people psyched to see a movie they already knew and loved.
As my colleague Emma Silvers wrote just a few weeks ago, the driving premise of Ghostbusters is “bankable nostalgia.” But instead of just translating into ticket sales, this sense of nostalgia actually facilitated some kind of time travel, making the assembled crowd act like they’d seen the 2016 incarnation of Ghostbusters more times than they could count on two hands. On opening weekend.
I’ve experienced this before. Way back in 2013 I watched The Canyons at that ill-fated film’s opening night at San Francisco’s Roxie. Don’t remember this one? All you need to know is that it was the subject of a New York Times Magazine piece titled “Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie.” (Spoiler alert: not great things.)
After an impassioned introduction about the specialness of the evening, the specialness of the audience and the specialness of the Roxie itself, the assembled crowd of thirty or so people felt pretty good about themselves and the movie they were about to see. (Live! Not on a computer screen! Because we really love the moviegoing experience! Because we’re not philistines! Three cheers for us!)
The Roxie crowd was rowdy, itching for a new cult classic to spring off the screen. They seemed to think they could turn The Canyons into The Rocky Horror Picture Show by sheer force of will. By heckling the projection, yelling at the characters, repeating lines in funny voices — maybe, just maybe — the audience could create a faux patina and quickly induct The Canyons into campy cinema history. Unfortunately for all of us present that night, it doesn’t work that way.
Fast-forward to 2016 and the audience for Ghostbusters, much more positive in their reactions, responded to the film in a similarly desperate way. When every star of the original two films (save for Harold Ramis, who died in 2014, and Rick Moranis, who stopped acting after 1997’s Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves) appeared on the screen, the entire theater burst into applause and cheers. The cacophony rendered all the zingers in those few-second cameos completely inaudible.
Scenes that we’d already seen because they appeared in the film’s trailer were met with equally raucous applause. When Jones’ character slapped a possessed McCarthy across the face, screaming “The power of pain compels you!” (itself an Exorcist reference) the theater erupted. When the first notes of Ray Parker, Jr.’s old theme song played, the theater erupted. When the post-movie credits showed still frames of the characters in action, the theater erupted again and again (though McKinnon was the clear winner in this applause-o-meter).
The same kind of thing happened at Star Wars: The Force Awakens last year. Cheers and applause for Leia, Han, Chewbacca and the rest of that fun-loving gang. There were wolf-whistles and fist pumping.
Why are films we’re watching for the very first time getting the midnight movie treatment? Partly, it’s because these offerings — Ghostbusters and Star Wars in particular — follow almost exactly the same narrative arc as their predecessors, simply shifting the familiar faces into cameo roles to make space for new stars. We are seeing Ghostbusters for the zillionth time; it just has a new cast.
But here’s another theory, just for fun: It’s because we, as an audience, don’t trust ourselves to identify new, high-quality objects of our moviegoing affection. It takes more mental energy. Which then creates a chicken-and-egg situation, because then studio executives don’t think we deserve anything better. So much of contemporary life is steeped in nostalgia — drenched in a retro veneer of whatever Kodachrome tint Instagram is pushing that week — that we’ve become obsessed with the comfortable and familiar. So obsessed that we cheer at movies, willing them to becoming something they’re not.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want the cheering to end; I’m all for the communal movie-going experience. There’s something wonderful about feeding off of each other’s emotional response to images flickering across a screen. It wasn’t until I saw The Shining in a sold-out Castro Theatre that Kubrick’s masterpiece truly terrified me. But I want us to have wholehearted, enthusiastic reactions to new movies as well. You can’t rush a classic, just like I can never unhear the new Ghostbusters theme song. We’ll never escape this vortex of sequels, reboots and franchises — so long as we keep accepting sameness as something exceptional.
Robin Williams, beloved actor, comedian, philanthropist, and Bay Area resident, would have been 65 years old today.
And if for some reason you’re not able to take the whole day off to watch a film festival made up of his greatest hits, then drive back and forth through the tunnel that now bears his name — what, you have a job, or something? — the next-best thing might just be this YouTube video explaining the history of (and some lesser-known drama about) Williams’ unforgettable turn as the Genie in Disney’s Aladdin.
Though it’s technically a kids’ movie, it’s hard to disagree with our narrator that Aladdin is the most Robin Williams-like role Robin Williams ever played. Genie captured Williams’ mania, his lightning-quick mind, his unbelievable gift for impressions — but also his tenderness and compassion. Who wouldn’t want a friend like him?
All of which makes it that much more fascinating to learn how contentious the part became for Williams. He apparently took a pay cut to voice the role in order to thank Disney for Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society, and then wound up locked in a bitter, years-long standoff with the company over how the character was used to market the film. All things considered, it’s good to know he made peace with the role (and maybe the people behind it) before he died.
Oh, and if you are putting together that film festival: Toys is underrated. Do with that what you will.
A little over a year ago, comic book-loving women all over the country sat down to watch the first trailers for CBS’s brand-new Supergirl series, only to find themselves filled with what can only be described as Hulk-levels of rage. Here was Kara Zor-El, a character easily as strong as her cousin Superman, reduced to a nervous, giggling office underling consumed with thoughts of cute guys and wardrobe dilemmas, instead of, oh, you know, flying and saving people and setting fire to things using her goddamn EYES.
It was a huge disappointment that came just a couple of weeks after Saturday Night Live and Scarlett Johansson had brilliantly skewered sexist double standards for female comic book heroes in Hollywood, via a skit that stuck Black Widow in a rom-com. The skit was so on point, one can’t help but wonder if someone at NBC got access to the Supergirl trailer before it was released and copied it almost shot for shot.
Compare and contrast:
At the time it felt like confirmation that women in comic books were simply never going to get their due on screen — whether in movies or on TV. Then last week, a couple of truly amazing things emerged from this year’s San Diego Comic Con. The first was this little slice of character-faithful, Amazonian baddassery:
(It’s okay. Take a moment to catch your breath. We know. It’s awesome.)
The second was the news that the rather magnificent Brie Larson is going to be playing Captain Marvel. That’s right, folks: the same comic book giant that has steadfastly refused to give Black Widow (or any other woman) her own movie just decided that the Captain Marvel of their new project would be female.
For context, in the Marvel Universe, four out of the six Captain Marvel incarnations have been male, and the Carol Danvers character only graduated to the title of Captain Marvel three years ago, having spent the preceding 40 years with the moniker Ms. Marvel. Sure, we have to wait until 2019 to see this thing, but knowing it’s happening at all is comforting for everyone who’s been desperate to see Marvel do right by its female fans — and characters — for literally years now.
Marvel has apparently, finally, taken notice. The giant has been making several overdue efforts to level the playing field recently. After announcing the great feminist writer Roxane Gay had been brought on to pen a new book for the Black Panther series, they closed last week’s Comic Con in San Diego with the now-annual “Women of Marvel” panel, which shines a light on all Marvel women — be they characters or behind the scenes — while also seeking to empower women in the audience to work in the industry. This is, frankly, huge.
It seems that, finally, just when we’d all but given up hope, comic book giants are at last making an effort to tap into the section of their audience that has existed forever, but been woefully underrepresented on the big screen. One theory: It’s possible that the success of Star Wars: The Force Awakens has made comic bigwigs realize that sci-fi and fantasy movies don’t necessarily lose money by putting a penis-less human in the lead role.
Teen markets have been ahead of the equality curve for years now. The Hunger Games and Divergent series proved that female leads — teenage ones, no less! — can kick ass all the way to a multi-billion dollar franchise while appealing to all genders. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Well, yeah. But just as the toy industry assumes no one wants to play with a girl action figure — even when she’s the star of the movie (#WhereIsRey, anyone?) — so has the comic book industry persisted with the assumption that women don’t “get” superheroes, or even like them.
If Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel are big enough hits, it could change the face of movie superheroes forever — which is more important than you might think. Because if women aren’t given the space to be big and brave and bold, even in a fantasy world on a screen, what hope is there for the rest of us?
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