I’m so sorry to once again have a minority view of a popular film, but I found “Hugo” by Martin Scorsese boring and sentimental. It is slow-moving and enamored of itself. The Salon.com reviewer, among many other salivating fans of Scorsese, just about had a case of the vapors over the 3-D. “I have seen the future of 3-D moviemaking, and it belongs to Martin Scorsese,” he trembled, crowning it “the best movie anyone will make in the current post-“Avatar” 3-D wave.” I guess if you loved “Avatar” you may find this the next step up. Not me. I concede that the 3-D was an interesting gimmick, here and there – especially in the exciting chase scenes, done from a kid’s-eye-view waist-high, but mostly the “cute” Scorsese-style black-framed 3-D glasses were heavy on the nose and a strain to the eyes. I trust that those children who are able to stay awake during this ponderous brilliant-orphan-sticks-to-his-guns saga enjoy the effect.
I’m sorry too to observe that Asa Butterfield (who plays the lead orphan Hugo Cabret ) lacks the chops to hold up a film in which he appears in virtually every shot. He has the wide-eyed startled deer-in-the-headlights look down pat, but little else. Thankfully, his childhood partner, Isabelle (played by Chloe Moretz), is charming and sympathetic as she garners her first real life “adventure” by assisting poor little Hugo. Branded a thief - he really only takes what he needs: food and tools – until he gets caught going for the mechanical mouse from the stall of Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), Isabelle’s godfather.
When a film is made by someone called Scorsese, one expects that a few celebrities will drop into the production. Sacha Baron Cohen plays the evil station inspector; the lovely Helen McCrory plays Isabelle’s godmother; and Jude Law is Hugo’s prematurely-dead dad. Johnny Depp, a producer of the film, is a well-oiled band leader who turns up fleetingly in disconnected flashes.
One also expects Scorsese to weave in a plethora of artistic references and he doesn’t disappoint. In fact, he seems to have won over the film reviewers to such an astounding degree that the collective score by the two dozen reviewers (of them, one is a woman) blurbed on Rotten Tomatoes is a stratospheric 97%. I find this profoundly puzzling for a sappy film that takes place in a Paris train station where the characters have French names and English accents and where the emotions run from trying-to-be-poignant all the way to still-trying-to-be-poignant. The film is crying out for an editor willing to slice the flab from what is, under the razzle-dazzle, a very thin work.
Waiting in line outside the Harvard Square theater with the rest of the excited crowd before we could be seated, one matriarch told her family about an interview Jon Stewart conducted with Martin Scorsese in which the director explained that he wanted to make one film that his 12-year-old daughter could see. It is a modest goal and I congratulate him for reaching it.
Pedro Almodóvar has done it again. The Skin I Live In, full of eye candy and horror, blew my mind.
If you know the work of Pedro Almodóvar, you know to expect the unexpected. You know to expect gender elasticity, human transformation and sexual sleight of eye and hand. You know there will be a steaming cup of desire along with something to twist that desire. You’ll anticipate at least one heart-stoppingly gorgeous character. Almodovar never masks his queer sensibility, his outsider point of view, or his fascination with morphing – and I never miss his films.
The Skin I Live In, however, came as a shock to me. For added to all the usual elements was a dark, noir attitude that pounced on one’s imagination and patience. Transformation becomes the product of torturous revenge and there is no one to love.
As a matter of psychic self-defense, I avoid all movies that include rape. When I inadvertently see such a scene it haunts me and distorts the rest of my viewing experience. But there are (at least) two such moments in The Skin I Live In, one almost sickly comical and another disturbingly ambiguous. The plot consequences of these rapes are profound, although the rapes themselves are founded on mistaken identity, passionate illusion and emotional misreading – not on the use of sexual violence to establish power. I was not distressed, but I’m still unraveling it all in my mind.
If you want your eyes and thoughts to be tickled, see this thriller with a friend or two who feel the same way, who have some consciousness and comfort with gender and sexuality in motion, and who will sit with you afterwards to pick through this exciting, complicated film. I just loved it and was lucky to see it with three of my very favorite brains and bodies.
This is the comment I made on Facebook about Rick Perry's debate fumble: "This is the least of problems I have with Perry. It's not his abysmal presentation problem; it's the content of what he does and does not remember. It's his arrogance and profound wrongness."
Last night we had yet another Republican debate, in which these people seem to compete with each other for taking the most outlandish, repulsive positions. I only turned it on just minutes before Rick Perry couldn't remember the third of three agencies he promised to get rid of. It was excruciating, and his fellow campaigners even tried to help him out with suggestions. He stumbled for awhile and then had to say "oops" - that he didn't remember.
Anyone who has done public speaking knows that such a thing can happen. Anyone whose memory isn't all they'd like has experienced a similar embarrassment. Anyone can blank. It really isn't the end of the world and in of itself does not disqualify a candidate.
Here is a man who has done his best to ruin Texas, who has nasty positions on women's health, on gay rights, on social programs, on education, a guy who is anti-Union and, probably at the bottom of it all, wants to establish this country as a Christian state run by his sense of fundamentalist rules.
But what are the pundits and columnists pointing to as his downfall? The fact that he couldn't remember a fact. He "stumbled badly" and it's the "end of his campaign." It's all about meltdown and gaffe. Forbes.com goes so far as to declare: "Why Rick Perry's Debate Flub/Fail Will End His Campaign."
For gawd's sake, this guy wants to end three important departments: Commerce, Education, and (the one he couldn't remember but which is especially dear to his Texan oil heart) Energy. Why aren't we upset about that?!
I went to see my seamstress to get a zipper fixed. I’ve known her for about a decade, seen her and her partner struggle to hang onto their house and raise their son. She works several part-time low-wage jobs while he has been out of work. When I told her I was meeting some friends down at Occupy Boston later, she asked me, “What’s that?” She had no clue.
She and her partner are so heads-down trying to survive that they are taking the economic collapse personally. They think it is their own bad luck and he’s starting to feel that he’s being punished for his sins. They have run into bureaucratic obstacles but it didn’t occur to her to turn to her State Representative for help; she didn’t know there are non-profit groups who will guide people in their attempts to modify their mortgages; a drunken neighbor has become threatening; her talented son’s after-school art classes are starting to cost more than she can scrape together. She has only the vaguest sense that something global is going on and she seems to have picked up that sense from the Fox News ether. Their isolation jarred me.
I did make it down to Occupy Boston yesterday to see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a long-time activist and scholar, who was giving the Occupy Boston "Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture." This is something organized by academics who are involved with Occupy Boston and attracts other academics and students and visitors to the camp. The folks who actually live in the camp aren’t generally interested in such things – they’re just busy keeping the camp livable. There were about 30 of us standing around, most of whom came quite specifically for Roxanne.
Back in the day, Roxanne started the first women's liberation group in Boston and organized me into it. It was feeling its way into an analysis and gathered together perhaps the most disparate group ever contained in one collective. When I say disparate, I’m talking about Betsy Warrior on one hand, the first woman to talk openly about being a “welfare mother” and a battered woman; and on the other hand, Abby Rockefeller, as in Abby Rockefeller.
Although I haven't seen her for many decades, we’ve been Facebook friends so I feel reconnected. After her speech I went up to her and said, “Sue Katz.” She looked into my mid 60s face – last seen in its mid 20s incarnation – and I watched her suddenly find “Sue Katz” in it. Hugs and hand-holdings followed and then we both parted for our next obligation.
But something very weird happened while I listened to her speech about activism and history. I was bit on the ass. Not once, but several times. I could feel it when it happened, me in jeans and a bulky down coat, and it was disconcerting to realize that something was in my pants uninvited. By the time I got home I had a red hot inflamed swelling that made my ass cheek look like it had sprouted an ass cheek.
I barely had time to gobble down something before I switched to a nice pink jacket and made my way to Lesley University for a showing of “Left on Pearl,” the amazing documentary-in-the-making of the 10-day occupation of a Harvard building in 1971 that resulted in the Cambridge Women’s Center. Lesley University was sponsoring a conference of college women’s centers’ staff, so it was a perfect audience. We had a small panel afterwards including Susan and Rochelle (from the film collective) and my fellow occupiers from those days, Sara and Eleanor, and me (shifting uncomfortably on my painful butt).
If there’s one thing that the Occupy movement has made clear, the young people do not know the history of revolt, even of modern revolt – like the anti-war or Panther or women’s movements. Not even of contemporary struggles like the long, persistent, creative work in Wisconsin against foul attacks on unions and state workers. These young women at the film showing identified as feminist but had never heard of this action. The film is rather brilliant, as I have written here many times, and once it is completed (it needs a music score), it is going to be mind-blowing. It is so different to see it today than it was say prior to two months ago, when Occupy Wall Street began. Times have changed – a bit at least. And this from a woman who grew a third ass cheek.
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