Film

Rewriting Paul Without the “No Homo” Jokes

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We saw Paul the other night. Buddy comedy: two best friends from England (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, of Shaun of the Dead fame) visit the U.S. for ComicCon, go on a road trip, and meet a chill, foul-mouthed space alien. Pretty good movie. Cute, funny, crass in a mostly good way, predictable in some places but very original in others. Lots of creative swearing. A good time.

Except for the “no homo” bullshit — the running jokes about how everyone thinks the main characters are gay and it freaks them the fuck out. The movie even used the F-word, more than once: no, not that F-word, the other one, the anti-gay slur. It was jarring, it was exhausting, it was totally unnecessary. So much of the movie was bro-y in a good-natured way, even loving and sweet, and it bugged me that their “nerd-bros don’t have to be reactive shitheads” message didn’t extend to queerness. It almost felt like they had to be heavy-handed with the “no homo” stuff to feel comfortable with the bro-y affection. (The thing came out in 2011, so there’s no excuse.)

And I started thinking: How could they have written this differently?

What if there was a running joke where everyone thinks the main characters are gay — and instead of freaking out, they’re totally used to it by now, and don’t care?

Continue reading “Rewriting Paul Without the “No Homo” Jokes” →

Rewriting Paul Without the “No Homo” Jokes
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Judging the Past

Greta Christina6 Comments

Thomas Jefferson Birth of a Nation Gone with the Wind

“You can’t judge the past by the standards of the present! It’s not fair. We’ve advanced so much since then. People back then didn’t know better!”

I see the point. But also — no.

Of course we can judge the past by the standards of the present. That’s how we move forward.

We look back, at history or old movies or whatever — and we say, “Wow. That was messed-up. Let’s not do that again.” We read history about slavery and colonization; we watch old movies depicting queers as pitiful and disgusting; we hear old songs that romanticize sexual assault; we see old cowboy shows where Native Americans are shown as savage enemies. We cringe. We cringe so hard it makes our faces turn inside out.

And we say, “That was some fucked-up garbage.” We learn. We pay attention to patterns. We learn how to see bad patterns, in ourselves and our society. We learn how to prevent, how to interrupt, how to intervene, how to resist.

Judging the past is how we move into the future.

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Judging the Past

Barbie, Humanism, and Death

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Mild-to-medium spoilers for Barbie.

I expected the Barbie movie to be enormously fun. It was.

I expected it to be gorgeous, art-directed within an inch of its life, with a look both explosively oversized and finely detailed. It was.

I expected it to be feminist, with a sharp and complex depiction of gender roles and gender expectations. It was.

I even expected it to be surprising, to the degree that you can ever expect to be surprised. And boy, was it surprising. It was a wild rollercoaster ride, an intense mashup of giddiness and sorrow, with unexpected emotional nuance and plot turns that came out of left field.

What I didn’t expect was a powerful humanist view of death.

Continue reading “Barbie, Humanism, and Death” →

Barbie, Humanism, and Death

Michael Corleone and Richard Nixon

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Michael Corleone and Richard Nixon

I’ll admit, this is pretty random. I’m doing some deep-dive writing about the Godfather movies, and I’m watching the White House Plumbers show on HBO (hilarious) and reading Watergate: A New History (excellent). My media brain is steeping in these worlds, and of course it’s finding shit to compare and contrast. It’s what my brain does.

So. Let’s compare and contrast. Michael Corleone and Richard Nixon. Like a freshman English paper.

Richard Nixon had a seriously brilliant mind. He had real skills with people, despite his obvious discomfort with them. He had powerful political abilities, with an extraordinary ability to bounce back from defeat. He inspired great loyalty in people who worked for him. And he had something vaguely resembling a genuine interest in public service. The EPA, Title IX, detente with Russia, diplomatic relations with China — that all happened under Nixon.

And he was a total shitbag of a human being. He saw political opponents as enemies, and he saw enemies everywhere. He equated his own selfish interests with the interests of the country, treating threats against himself as threats against the nation. He rationalized his most heinous acts by convincing himself that his enemies were all doing it, too.* He pursued a vile and pointless war, a war he knew was unwinnable, because he didn’t want to be a loser.** And let’s not forget: obstruction of justice, abuse of power, bribery (giving and receiving), tax fraud, election tampering, innumerable violations of his oath of office. His ethics, his concerns about the law and the Constitution, varied from corrupt to nonexistent.

He’s a tragic figure. But it’s the tragedy of wasted potential. I don’t feel sorry for him, except to the degree that I feel sorry for anyone in pain. His tragedy is that he used his power to inflict massive damage, on the people near him and the world at large.

Now. Michael Corleone.

Do I need to spell it out?

Continue reading “Michael Corleone and Richard Nixon” →

Michael Corleone and Richard Nixon

“By the way…” Gilda, and a Neat Bit of Exposition

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Gilda movie poster

Mild spoilers for Gilda.

I just saw a neat bit of narrative exposition, and I wanted to mention it.

I was watching Gilda, a noir film set in a fancy underground casino in Buenos Aires in the 40s. I was just starting to wonder when exactly in the 40s it took place — when the main character/narrator, Johnny, says, quickly and offhandedly, “By the way, about that time, the war ended.” And there’s a quick shot of a newspaper headline saying, “GERMANY SURRENDERS,” before the story moves on.

“By the way, about that time, the war ended.”

I love it.

It doesn’t just establish the time. It establishes Johnny’s relationship to the time, and to the world. We don’t simply get the cliche of the spinning newspaper headline. We get “By the way,” and, “About that time.” Which tells us something about Johnny. (Or possibly the culture of rich people in Argentina gambling in fancy illegal casinos. Or both.) It tells us that World War II was only of incidental interest, and his attention was on other things. It tells of deep detachment and self-involvement.

And it tells of a certain cynical pleasure in that detached self-involvement. Of course Johnny knows that, for most people, the end of World War II wouldn’t have happened “by the way.” The moment they learned of it would be burned in their brain — not something that happened “around that time.” Even now in 2023, 78 years after the war ended and 77 years after the movie came out, I hear this bit of narration, and I’m startled and pissed off.

It’s even more noteworthy because, a bit later, he recounts the first time he saw Gilda in Buenos Aires — and makes a point of telling us he remembers the exact day it happened. The contrast is jarring. Johnny knows that most people are pretty damned invested in World War II. He knows his offhanded attitude will be deeply off-putting to anyone listening. And he doesn’t care. This tiny bit of dialog demonstrates his detachment, not only from the world around him, but from us.

All in nine words.

The movie overall is a bit uneven: strong start, iffy finish, with both strong and iffy bits in between. But this? Chef’s kiss. Nicely done.

“By the way…” Gilda, and a Neat Bit of Exposition

Batman and Robin Hood: Franchises and Folk Tales

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Banner ad for The Lego Batman Movie
(Mild spoilers for The Lego Batman Movie, which btw is freaking brilliant)

Yes, I’m starting to get tired of movie franchises. It’s getting a little old. The sheer bulk of canon in the Marvel Cinematic Universe offers little room for new storytelling: for a while they were weaving a web, spinning new strands in the gaps, but that web is becoming a dense, impenetrable clump, with almost no space for even the best imagination to work. And I’m not sure how another reboot/recast of Batman will add much to the world. I think my friend Chip said it best: “In the future, everyone will play Batman for fifteen minutes.” Do we really need that?

But I don’t hate the very idea of franchises and reboots. I don’t find them inherently repetitive or formulaic (although they sometimes are). I often find them deeply resonant. And I’m finding it useful to reframe them as folktales. Continue reading “Batman and Robin Hood: Franchises and Folk Tales” →

Batman and Robin Hood: Franchises and Folk Tales

Bernie Madoff’s 17th Floor, and the Office of Vito Corleone

Greta Christina2 Comments

I’ve been watching the Bernie Madoff documentary on Netflix, Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street. (I suppose I could twit the creators for the unimaginative title, but I’m the one who named my blog Greta Christina’s Blog, so.) And there’s something that keeps jumping out at me, maybe because it’s such a strong visual image in a story full of paper and numbers: the 17th floor.

Madoff had a sleek, fancy office on the 19th floor of a sleek, fancy office building. But he had another office in the same building — the 17th floor. That’s where the machinery of the Ponzi scheme was happening: falsifying documents, cooking the books, flat-out forgery. Very few people saw the 17th floor. But the ones who did all commented on how strikingly different it looked. It wasn’t sleek and modern and classy. It was run-down, badly organized, with old computers and crappy furniture and boxes piled all over the place.

But this was the real office. This is where the real work was done.* The classy offices on the 19th floor created the illusion of brilliant financial minds managing the complex world of finance that we puny peasants can’t even comprehend. The actual work happened on the 17th floor — the work of fraud and deception and theft.

And I started thinking about The Godfather. Continue reading “Bernie Madoff’s 17th Floor, and the Office of Vito Corleone” →

Bernie Madoff’s 17th Floor, and the Office of Vito Corleone

The Queer Version Of Get Out?

Greta Christina

What would a queer version of Get Out be like? How would you turn the everyday horrors of queer lives into a literal horror show?

When I first saw Get Out, I almost immediately started thinking about what the queer equivalent would be. The women’s equivalent is often seen as Rosemary’s Baby, but Roman Polanski can go straight to hell and he sure as shit doesn’t get to tell our story. There are way better examples: my favorite is probably Season 1 of Jessica Jones, which had me crawling out of my skin, fascinated and repelled, both wanting to turn away and feeling compelled to keep watching. (Yes, that’s a rave review. It’s so good!)

So what would a queer equivalent be? It would probably focus on body horror and bodily control, like Get Out and Jessica Jones and other horror shows about oppression. But what, specifically, would make it queer?

Invisibility and visibility. These keep grabbing my mind, and won’t let go. Continue reading “The Queer Version Of Get Out?“ →

The Queer Version Of Get Out?

“Showgirls,” and Some History of Sex in Cinema

Greta Christina

Elizabeth Berkley playing Nomi in "Showgirls"

We saw You Don’t Nomi the other day, a thoughtful, well-made, wildly entertaining documentary about the movie Showgirls; its flamingly negative critical reception; and its later reclamation by fans as high camp. It got me thinking about the movie in some new ways — and it got me thinking about the history of explicit sex in movies.

Showgirls was released in 1995, at a cultural moment when it seemed to pie-eyed optimists* that maybe — just maybe — sexually explicit movies might become mainstream, or at least mainstream-ish. The NC-17 rating was created in 1990 to distinguish explicit art films from X-rated smut (a questionable distinction, but whatever). But many theaters wouldn’t show NC-17 movies; many newspapers wouldn’t run ads for them; and Blockbuster Video wouldn’t carry them. So an NC-17 rating wound up killing any movie’s chances at commercial success.

Showgirls was the first big-budget movie to test this. Director Paul Verhoeven and writer Joe Eszterhas set out to make it an NC-17 movie, with serious (no, really) intent to make a drama/social satire. So even though Verhoeven and Eszterhas (Basic Instinct) were something of a nightmare team, there was some hope** that Showgirls might successfully break this ground and open those doors for other filmmakers.

Showgirls of course, was a monumental failure. Critics heaped it with all the venom we had, and then ran to our venom vaults to get more. Audiences stayed away in droves. (Note: If you’re producing a cinematic exploration of female sexual power and the corruption of that power, maybe don’t have it written and directed by a couple of straight guys. Especially straight guys with Issues.) And with the movie’s failure, the door slammed shut on the NC-17 experiment.

There have been other attempts to make high-quality sexually-explicit cinema, both before Showgirls and since: Last Tango in Paris in 1972, Caligula in 1979, Crash (the Cronenberg one) in 1996; Secretary in 2002, Nine Songs in 2004, Shortbus in 2006, The Girlfriend Experience in 2009. These movies had varying degrees of critical and commercial success, but none of them broke the latex ceiling and made way for a Golden Age of Serious, Sexually Explicit Film.

But here’s the thing. Continue reading ““Showgirls,” and Some History of Sex in Cinema” →

“Showgirls,” and Some History of Sex in Cinema

Rogue One, and Collective Action

Greta Christina

rogue-one

Content note: spoilers for “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.”

There are things I liked about Rogue One, and things I didn’t. I mostly didn’t like the ratio of “Pew! Pew! BOOM!” action to dialog and plot. I like “Pew! Pew! BOOM!” as much as the next geek, but there was too much of it here: it got exhausting and overwhelming and boring, and it took time that could have been spent clarifying the sometimes confusing plot. But there were a lot of things I liked (gotta love a sarcastic robot who’s a bad liar), and one thing I liked a hell of a lot:

I liked how Rogue One was about collective action.

I liked that the movie wasn’t another goddamn Hero’s Journey. I liked that it wasn’t about another Destined One Who Will Save Us All. It was about ordinary people stepping up, not because they’re some powerful Jedi’s long-lost son, but because someone has to. It was about the difficulties of collective action, people arguing and splintering and deciding for themselves who to follow — because the alternative is the exact rigid authoritarianism they’re fighting against. It was about a team who all have their crucial part to play, who figure out on the fly how to work together.

In fact, Rogue One completely undercuts the whole Hero’s Journey thing in Star Wars 4-6. Continue reading “Rogue One, and Collective Action” →

Rogue One, and Collective Action