The Parent Trap (1998) Dir. Nancy Meyers

That awkward moment when you and your twin both egregiously farted at the same time, but you've decided not to talk about it.

I think we can all agree that every Nancy Meyers movie is set in the alternate universe of White Nonsense Disneyland.  There is no such thing as class warfare in WND, because there is no such thing as class, because every person is ungodly rich and lives in the home of your sex dreams. There is no such thing as racism in WND; in fact Nancy Meyers characters' don't see race because there's literally never a single person of color in anything she does. We can profile the women of WND throughout the next two weeks as I watch the complete Nancy Meyers filmography, but if memory serves correctly, Meyers women rarely even manage to live up to the troubling standards of white feminism, though they're often confronted with what might be considered "white feminist" issues. So the women of WND always live on the precipice of "having it all," if only they could master work/life balance! or better assert themselves in their relationships! or realize they don't need just any relationship, but they absolutely need the right one! As for the men of WND, they're either children, womanizers, or white knights (the good kind-- not the KKK kind); all men in WND are essentially mascots, donning giant costume heads, working the shimmering park where everything brilliantly glows, even the reductive stereotypes.

I always have a mess of issues with Meyers films, and I leave the theater a little angered, a little charged, that the world is so narrowly portrayed and the women who run it are so broadly sketched. But I also leave charmed, tickled even, because Meyers knows what cinematic magic looks like. She makes impossibly-endearing movies where your heart melts while your mind rots. It's the Disneyland part of White Nonsense Disneyland, and if I'm in a forgiving mood, it makes the ride worth the trouble-laden waiting in line.

The Parent Trap is Nancy Meyers first film as a director, and the pairing makes perfect sense. At that time, she was an experienced and accomplished movie maker with writing credits dating back to Private Benjamin. She'd already proven her chops in adapting nostalgic family comedies to box office gold with the Father of the Bride remake and it's sequel. So after turning down a chance to direct some of the funniest females in comedy in The First Wives Club, she signed-on with Disney to direct and co-write with her then-husband and frequent collaborator Charles Shyer.

Meyers' remake makes no attempt to modernize The Parent Trap but instead fights to see it stitched with timelessness. It's apparent in the casting choices of Dennis Quaid, Natasha Richardson, and Elaine Henderson, with their romantic, old-Hollywood features. In the lavish, out-of-time estates where both families live. In the dreamy trans-Atlantic cruise that brings Quaid and Richardson together in the first place. In the film's laughably dated score and musical cues, especially the saxxy femme fatale music that plays any second Henderson's Meredith Blake is on screen. In the pranks the girls pull on each other, which are nearly identical to and no more advanced that what Haley Mills pulled on herself in the 1961 original. In fact, the banter and hijinx leading up to Lindsay Lohan's realization that she is her own twin are full of zippy "ha-cha-cha!" dialogue and Charlie Chaplin/Looney Tunes levels of comic violence. The film's lust for timelessness is perhaps most apparent in the cinematography and lighting; Meyers wanted to out-classic even the original The Parent Trap, infusing it with some 1930s/1940s romantic screwball comedy glamour. If critics and audiences scorned her 1994 love letter to Tracy-Hepburn movies with I Love Trouble, they were going to thank her for this.

Having seen her attempt at recreating or hearkening back to The Philadelphia Story and others of the era, I'm more curious than ever to watch her remaining filmography. Is Meyer's White Nonsense Disneyland actually just her trying to recreate Old Hollywood? Is it more nostalgic than it is mind-numbingly out-of-touch? It'll be fun to see, though no less problematic: 21st century romantic escapism can't look the same as Depression-Era and WWII escapist fare. It's too tone-deaf and too hurtful to suggest that today's rose-tinged utopia would be a world without black people, without day laborers, where people in need have either evaporated or been eviscerated.

But for now, a short list of the good/bad/and DUMB of Nancy Meyer's The Parent Trap:

1) The 90s were a different time for children's movies, you guys. All of the adults have a wicked alcohol dependency. Lindsay Lohan straight-up prison pierces her own ears. Natasha Richardson smokes when she's nervous, and her father smokes whenever the fuck he wants. Lohan knowingly talks to her father's fiancee about how she knows her dad is only marrying her so they can keep-on-fuckin'. We're also led to believe that as an 11-year-old, Lohan's Hallie regularly drinks wine, and in fact, has an advanced palette. Perhaps this movie was the birthplace of Lindsay's troubles and the deathbed of her refinement.

2) You guys, EVERYONE dips Oreos in Peanut Butter. That's not some freaky twin thing. It's called being a human being who isn't terrible.

3) It's hard not to feel bad for Meredith Blake. The kids straight up torture her and "affectionately" joke about pushing her off a cliff. She may be a single-minded gold-digger, but she's also someone who knows what she wants, and she works hard for the money. We're clearly supposed to think of her as some "greedy bitch," but Dennis Quaid was entering the arrangement pretty knowingly, aware that as someone half his age, he was getting sex and she was getting money. People enter these sorts of arrangements all the time; I don't think the answer is to celebrate the wealthy man and humiliate and torture the savvy woman.

4) What type of terrible human being separates twin sisters at birth, ignores and neglects their other daughter, and agrees to never tell their daughters about each other? How do they get their family members, friends, and servants to be complicit in the lie, and why is everyone so cool with it and never lets it slip? Why are the children not brimming with anger and bitterness when they realize this is what happened? And even after the twins are re-united, the parents proposed solution is still to keep the children separate from each other, except for holidays, without consulting their daughters.

5) The movie provides a pretty good primer for how not to talk to your daughter about your decision to remarry. She had literally been home for one day and only met her would-be mother-in-law once. Kind of setting yourself up for failure there, Dennis.

5) Natasha Richardson's character is the beta prototype of the Nancy Meyers woman.  She's still a wealthy, driven, fabulously accomplished, confident woman who is effortlessly unraveled when faced by a man, but her unraveling is less dramatic than in later models, and she very quickly regains control and poise. We ultimately see her clever, manipulative hand guiding her daughters in their conspiracy to get her back with her husband.

6) The women in this film are fabulous. Linsday Lohan is impossibly charming. Natasha Richardson is a melt-worthy vision of grace, beauty, confidence, and subtle humor. And Lisa Ann Walter as Chessy steals every scene, even in German.

7) Real missed opportunity for a cute musical number in here; DAMN IT, NANCY!

8) I have never had a maid, butler, chef, or nanny, but in reality, are they treated like part of the family? Are they smiley-and-happy to cater to your every need, including espousing life advice and entertaining your children, while being permanently separated from their own families? And when Natasha Richardson asks her butler to come along to the United States but "not as her Butler," was she actually treating him to an all-expenses paid vacation, or was she just clarifying she wasn't going to be paying him for his time?

9) How does NOBODY notice that these girls are identical looking until they fence each other like a week into camp? Why does nobody say "whoa, it's freaky, you're like twin sisters?" Also, are we supposed to believe that in the dramatic fury in which Natasha Richardson ran out on her marriage, she tore the photo of the night they met, neatly preserved her soon-to-be-ex-husband's face in her scrapbook, and made sure the half with her face was tucked away in some place where it would be well-preserved for her abandoned daughter?

10) Let's all agree to leave the pleather dresses and spaghetti straps in the 90s.

11) Would love to see this re-imagined as a horror film where one daughter is blatantly lying about how good her life is, takes advantage of finding her twin to build a new family and new identity for herself, and essentially throws her newfound sister into the uncertain pits of hell. "The Parent Trap" would literally be the name of cage her parent uses to confine her. Just saying, this could have just as likely been the scenario, so if you meet your twin, don't agree to let her take over your life because you could end up in an abusive household, and the more you screamed about it, the more likely it would be that you were committed.

12) OMIGOD TYPING ALL OF THAT NONSENSE IN THOUGHT 11 JUST MADE ME REALIZE THAT "I KNOW WHO KILLED ME" IS ESSENTIALLY THE THEMATIC SEQUEL TO THE PARENT TRAP.

As for your hot dude of the movie, Dennis Quaid and the butler don't really do it for me. So, I leave you with this smoldering picture of the late, tremendously talented, deeply beautiful, Natasha Richardson who stirs in me something so genuine that I have to wonder if I am, in fact, pansexual.

She doesn't even need a smokey eye to serve you smokey eye.

Dogfight (1991) Dir. Nancy Savoca

"Let me tell you something about bullshit. It's everywhere. You hit me with a little, I buy it. I hit you with a little, you buy it. It doesn't make us idiots. That's what makes us buddies... and that's what makes us Americans."- Berzin (Richard Panebianco)

There's less than 15 minutes left in Dogfight. Eddie Birdlace (River Phoenix) has just caught his Marine-buddy Berzin in a lie, and Berzin has in turn caught Eddie right back. Eddie knows that Berzin cheated in last night's dogfight, that he hired a prostitute to stand in as his date so that he could win the lucrative award of having brought the ugliest woman to the party. And Berzin knows that Eddie wasn't hooking up with an officer's sexy wife but that he spent the night with the painstakingly-plain Rose (Lili Taylor), his own date to the dogfight. Berzin delivers his diatribe on the unity and universalism of bullshit, and afterwards, Eddie and Berzin agree to not narc on each other but to instead perpetuate each other's fabrications. They're invested in that game-- in the appearance of things, in ignoring ugly realities--and they'll knowingly keep playing. 

We're led to believe that this is a type of innocence, or that appears to be the message in context. The story is set on the eve of the Vietnam War, a period held as an American loss of innocence/fall from grace in both the public and academic conscious. This contemporary historical narrative (problematically) reads that because we refused to see the world a certain way before the 1960s, that we were somehow a less jaded (and less accountable) nation, but as turmoil, upheaval, and change bred awareness and maturity, we uncovered blood on our hands that we can't seem to wash off. A similar setup is true for the young characters in the film. The players are all newly-legal adults, fresh to and scared of the world and arguably just now hitting an age of legal and moral culpability. Not to mention, don't we expect a certain wild, reckless cockiness of youth that somehow exempts young men from control; isn't that why "boys will be boys" exists, because we nurture the idea that being young and penis-wielding makes you incensurable for the harm you cause? Eddie especially is faced, perhaps for the first time, with his own wrongdoings, his own shortcomings, his own consciousness, his own mortality, and it is (is it?) as if he's responsible for himself and his place in the world for the first time. So is it so wrong, the film asks, to ignore the very real world going on around you in favor of the youthful perspective we've laid out for ourselves? Can young men maintain innocence by ignoring or denying the reasons we have to feel guilty?

Eddie somehow, admittedly, amazingly, doesn't seem to know any better at the time. He is angry, out-to-prove-something, out-to-be-someone, and he feels entitled to take what he wants because the Marine Corps told him if he became a Marine, he could do that. In truth, he's likely not entitled to much out of life; Birdlace is generally unskilled, ungraced, and charmless. Rose is the 4th or 5th girl he's taken to a dogfight, but this instance genuinely appears to be the first time he realized that women are human, that they have real and valid feelings, that the entire concept of the dogfight was unconscionable. And throughout the night they spend together, as she challenges and questions him, it truly seems as though no had ever told him that there was a rich, deserving world outside of making a show of dominating communists and women with his buddies. He is so blinded by traditions, by history, by power structures, by 19 years of his vision being unchallenged. Still, ultimately, it's hard to accept that any of this makes his actions excusable. Ignorance of the world, especially willful ignorance, doesn't hold water in the court of audience opinion. I can't say I sympathized, though much of, or felt much for Eddie Birdlace, a man who doesn't even have the swagger to be a he's-endearing-but-I-hate-him presence on screen.

As for Rose, we feel for her in all the ways she is wrongd and hope for her in all the ways she wants the world righted. Lili Taylor paradoxically plays a woman whose body seems so broken by the world when she walks, who has been victimized so much by society that she can't manage a brief gaze into a person's eyes, but who ultimately remains outspoken, courageous, and at least, by her own account, driven and ready to make a difference. When Rose learns about the dogfight, that she was selected for her plain appearance as a joke, we're heartbroken not only to see her feisty-and-earnest spirit broken but because Taylor so successfully pulls off the timeless embodiment of any of us let down when we were teenagers-- a surrender to bed, to Joan Baez, to making sure your mother never has to hear you cry. Her pain is palpable and relatable and her hope is moving and sweet. Yet it remains  difficult to not also hold her responsible for her own lack of groundedness and her own willful ignorance. Rose's purity is a naivety and an idealism that the only action required to fix the world is a great song she may write some day. While art is fundamental, playing folk records in your bedroom is not the same as action, and she, in her own ways, is a girl distancing herself from her responsibility to the world through action-less romance.  She sees that the world needs healing but denies that she should play a role of action in healing it, recluding to the lyrics of Bob Dylan instead. Whereas Eddie may be guilty of denying the problems of the world, Rose is, in some small way, guilty of denying herself an active role in the solutions.

While I hesitate to call remake on a 24-year-old film, great power potentially lies in a reimagining of the film in a contemporary context. The sense of entitlement & dehumanization of the dogfight is something we see in a lot of today's young male spaces--the military, the fraternity, the high school football team-- and one can easily assume that similar misogynist traditions continue in some of these environments today. But those men aren't innocent, right? Ignorant, sure, but are we willing to say those"boys will be boys" and these particular ones just have yet to learn their lesson? And in the world of that film, how would their lesson even be learned? What horrific event would simultaneously expose them to the unshakable ugliness of the world as well as thrust them into an oppressed social identity (i.e. a Vietnam War Vet) so that they realize they can't live in the smoke and mirrors, in the bullshit any longer? That's the roadblock I keep hitting. Angry, entitled young men are invested in Berzin's bullshit and they benefit from it, tangibly-- it propels their entitlement and power, distances them from harshness,  allows the "boys to be boys" unchecked. Which makes me wonder to what degree the Vietnam War  era should be a watershed for American revisionists if so many American men won't see the blood on our hands, won't accept the truths that "women and minorities are people" and "violence is trauma," won't see both the harm and the emptiness of "hitting each other with bullshit" in a world where terrible things are happening and no one is doing anything about it.

I know that Dogfight has often been discussed as a story of the power of love and goodness to heal and to overcome shitfuckery. But for me the story most powerfully communicates these questions of interpersonal and historical culpability. When and how are we as people and we as a nation no longer guiltless but answerable to the harm we cause? Why do we willfully ignore the ugly or hard things of the world, who benefits from the ignoring, and is it morally conscionable ? And for me, personally, why do we pretend like there was a "better era" before we were responsible for our actions socially, not just individually, and when the fuck are we going to claim accountability for the pain we cause when we deny that pain and that accountability in the first place?

For now, I leave you with the film's closest thing to a dreamboat, River Phoenix. Not that I don't think River has a gorgeous, sensual, earthy face--the "high and tight" haircut just did him no favors.

I can dig it.

BONUS ROUND:

1) The role of Rose was originally written as an overweight girl, but Lili Taylor so brilliantly articulated a plain, self-conscious, frightened-but-filled-with-dreams woman that Dir. Savoca had the role slightly altered.

2) Brendan Fraser's first film role. He's a navy guy who gets in a brawl with a few of the marines. So we have Nancy Savoca to thank for The Mummy and to blame for literally everything else.

3) Literally every detailed synopsis or extensive review of the film I've read makes a point of mentioning that that River Phoenix over time realizes that Lili Taylor isn't physically ugly, just plain-looking. I found this phenomenon so strange, which isn't to say that I think Lili Taylor looks terrible. I just don't remember the film ever directly articulating Eddie deciding Rose wasn't ugly or wasn't ugly enough. So the synopsis writers and reviewers focus on Rose really not being all that ugly seems to suggest that's a prerequisite to their night of romance and to Eddie realizing he shouldn't be subjecting Rose to the dogfight. That pokes a lot of holes in people's righteous indignation about the dogfight if they're suggesting that one of the reason's Rose is "worthy" is that she's actually not that ugly. Surely Eddie could be faced with the inhumanity of it, even if Rose was frightfully hideous? Perhaps he could even make himself vulnerable enough to see Rose's earnest and powerful spirit and still want to kiss and sleep with her? Gosh, we hope so.

The Wolfpack (2015) Dir. Crystal Moselle

The Wolfpack could have been so many movies that it wasn't, and that seems to have pissed off a number of critics. Given the stirring potential of a documentary that principally follows six male siblings effectively imprisoned in a Manhattan apartment throughout their childhood, you sometimes find yourself frustrated that director Crystal Moselle doesn't sink her teeth into the sinister abuse or mental-scarring narrative the scenario clearly lends to-- where's the Law and Order: SVU of it all? Or as we learn the boys have a penchant for recreating iconic films frame-by-frame, you might hope that Moselle compels the boys to re-enact their experience growing up with no social outlet or window to the world but Quentin Tarantino's filmography. At the very least, you presume Moselle will take command of the narrative and squarely tell us "this is a story of survival," or "this is a story of redemption," or "this is a story of love." You expect her to tell you how to feel about the whole tragic? inspiring? unlikeliness of it all.

Moselle never does any of that. And for my money, it is not because she is naive or inexperienced, as some reviewers have suggested. She's simply not interested in being a didactic or a dictatorial filmmaker; she has too much respect for her subjects and too much faith in her audience. She instead wants us to form a relationship with The Wolfpack, like the one that she has cultivated over the past 5 years. It's a well-nourished friendship that respects boundaries, that does not permit speaking over or speaking for friends, that does not wish to see a friend disgraced, that is more interested in getting to know a friend than in making decisions about him. Journalisticly, it's problematic, but as an audience member, it's refreshing to see something so naturalistic and so respectful of its subject matter that you know nothing is revealed that wasn't graciously and enthusiastically shared.

I will concede that there's a certain amount of "dumb luck" in Moselle's approach, but I insist it's a dumb luck only accessible to a director who is caring, compassionate, attentive, and patient. While it was serendipity that first-time filmmaker Moselle encountered these boys on one of their first ever independent outings in the city, it takes a great deal of kindness, courage, and persistence to turn that serendipity into a 5-year relationship and the opportunity to freely film a distrusting family. And perhaps its happenstance that the boys are so insightful and reflective, so forthcoming, so bursting-at-the-seams to tell a story and finally be in their own film. But people don't share and people don't trust if you don't give them reason to. The only true impossible kismet of the movie, the spark that would set the film ablaze for even the most inept director, is the boys' passion and talent for film-making. It's the organic answer to this summer's forced, over-polished Me and Earl and The Dying Girl: a movie for film lovers, by film lovers, about the transformative force of cinema and the highs-and-lows of seeing the world as a movie. It radiates so desperately from the boys that you can't help but see it.

There's much to respond to in the film, much to feel. As someone who, in a less literal sense, relied on movies to discover the world and still sees things through lenses cinematic and poetic, I saw myself in these boys. I know what it means to see each person you encounter as both an archetype and a rich, realized universe, as a narrative you could never reduce to "good" or "bad" or to anything, really. And there's the conflicted joy and unexpected jealousy that creeps up in seeing these boys so free of self-consciousness. They are afraid of a lot of things, but never of being embarrassed, of reading foolish or melodramatic, of making an ass of themselves-- when they're remaking The Dark Knight they're uninhibited hams and when they're meeting other people for the first time they're spirited, inquisitive, and forthright. Then there's the powerful reminder that the forces that literally controlled us as children can continue to bind us, even when the visible threat of them is gone. Some of the boys remain confined to their home into their legal adulthood, beyond the time their father directly forbids them, beyond the time when their father would, physically, be a barrier to their freedom. There is an ingrained fear, an ingrained understanding, and a lingering sense of impossibility that life beyond the apartment could or should exist any time soon. But once it happens, once the fear of their father and the fear of the world is faced and conquered, a whole new world exists for these boys where they can be free of their father's constraint and abuse.

But the emotional epicenter of the film, for me, is the un-unique wildfire of love the boys share with their mother. They worry about her freedom, her safety, her sense of self-worth, and she worries she's forever harmed them by staying in a relationship she clearly feels trapped in. When they're able to experience un-caged moments together, in an endless apple orchard outside of the watch of their paranoid, controlling father, there's a rapturous joy in watching them celebrate the freedom and chance for discovery in each other. The boys especially need to know that their mom can still experience the world and that she can build something for herself outside of her sad, abusive, drunk of a father. It's a delight to see the boys (and presumably Moselle) create spaces for this freedom for her, but it's ultimately painful to realize she seemingly has no intention-- or feels she has no right or agency-- to truly begin a life without their father.

Moselle's film is never as structured, complete, or compelling as it could be. The questions she asks, while significant, are asked quietly, and she never demands an answer to any of them. We never know the extent of the patriarch's abuse or have our morbid curiosities indulged about the cost of the boys' social isolation. Nor do we leave the film with a comprehensive sense of what it means to be raised by Quentin Tarantino (though the answer seems to be that it's less violent or reality-distorting than you might expect). Instead, we just get to know these boys and their family for 88 minutes. Never really as individuals, but a cohesive, creative unit that is smart, brave, supportive, curious, and full of spirit and love. We care for them, we worry for them, and we're inspired by their earnestness, perspective, and talent. As with all our good friends, we see in them a potential for amazing things. But unlike most of our friends,  the boys seems to see it in themselves, too, as if they've never imagined a world where people who put their mind to it don't achieve greatness. And in letting us see that, rather than pulling out any of a number of documentary framing tropes she could have wielded, Moselle has given us a real gift.

And, no disrespect, but there were no men in the film who I experienced as especially hot. So, instead, here's my apropos first childhood crush: Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf.

McFarland, USA (2015) Dir. Niki Caro

McFarland, USA is the type of movie where you have to watch dozens of non-singers perform the entirety of the national anthem, and you're made to feel guilty if you're annoyed by it. It's also a movie that asks you to plain-face accept that Mexican immigrants are built for long-distance running because "they carbo-load on rice and beans." So let's be clear: the only reason I watched McFarland is that every year, I try to see all of the well-reviewed films directed by women. I did not come to this one with a lot of enthusiasm or a lot of love.

I was interested, though, to see the director of Whale Rider and North Country take on a very male-centric sports drama peripherally (too peripherally) about Mexican immigrants. Not only do studios rarely choose female directors for predominantly male genres, but presumably there aren't a lot of Mexicans in Director Niki Caro's homeland of New Zealand; she's certainly not the most-savvy option as it relates to Anglo-Mexican relations in the US. 

But upon viewing, the choice made sense. Caro does have a knack for taking tired narratives and lazy tropes, recontextualizing them, and making them powerful again. And then there's her perspective as a meta-outsider. She's experienced in telling stories about communities she isn't part of, as she did with the Maori in Whale Rider. Here we see her, an outsider to the United States and to Mexican-Americans, telling a story that's about an outsider to a Mexican-American community, with tremendous intimacy...and an empathy that can grow patronizing. I suppose if we can suspend our anger about Disney's decision to a) not really make the story about the immigrant teens who actually won California's first cross-country title and b) not hire a Mexican director, then Caro is the closest thing to the right fit.

She's certainly a worthy filmmaker, especially when it comes to crafting powerful visual narrative. She sees human drama and human beauty in small, natural moments, and she knows you can take in a complete, lush story using only your eyes. As such, the movie's most successful narrative scenes are the cross-country team's wordless runs; here we see a 15-year-struggle for self-worth and a hundreds year struggle for racial and economic inequality play out in these boys without any dialogue and minimal preceding exposition. Even in that lingering moment in the second act, when they see and touch the ocean for the first time in their lives, the audience knows through Caro's visual direction that suddenly a whole knew way of being has become possible for these kids.

For someone who is looking for a familiar sports drama, especially of the race-relations variety, I'd say the film works. You'll cry when you're told to cry. You'll be charmed when you're told to be charmed. You'll decide that the fact you always root for the underdog means you're not a racist, and the films seems pretty content to let you off the hook with that. But as someone who thinks too much, I had a lot of questions and a lot of problems.

Overdone and problematic as it is, one expects to see growth in Kevin Costner's Coach White during the film as it relates to racism. We assume he'll start off apprehensive, insensitive, a tinge cagey and offensive, and by the end of the movie make some overreaching comment about how we're all the same. That's there, and fine, I'll live with it. But what about this problematic narrative where Coach White is an abusive asshole with anger issues and he's grateful he finally found a population who has suffered enough abuse to take it? White has been fired from several jobs before being "relegated" to McFarland because he gets in fights with parents and teachers, he intimidates his players, and at the beginning of the film, he throws a cleat at an insolent student's face and cuts him. Not only is the audience pushed to laugh it off and side with White, but the film becomes a forum for him to celebrate having found a community that has faced so much adversity that they aren't shaken when he can't slow down or stop his anger or his demands.

And for a movie that has decided Kevin Costner, not his team, is the protagonist, he consistently remains an unlikeable bully throughout the film. He's largely inattentive to his family and indifferent about how inattentive he is. He's invested in success but not very invested in his students and teammates. He "adorably" builds his track team by blackmailing, manipulating, and stalking all of his students. And in what is perhaps intended to be one of his redeeming moments, we're supposed to decide that Kevin Costner is an alright guy because he insists a student with a concussion shouldn't keeping playing football. Not only is that a very low threshold for human decency, but he doesn't even send the concussed student to the doctor-- he just tells him to go sit down.

And when it comes to those issues of race and ethnicity, the film's politics remain uneven, but perhaps still less problematic than white teacher savior narratives like Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds. Caro does generally do a respectable job with a difficult balancing act; she needs to show tremendous respect for the community and the value of the work that they do--all community members in McFarland are day laborers--while also showing the community as a place a person would want out of, would want to "graduate" from. Those dual moments of respect but limitation are powerful. In one scene, Costner has the students practicing hills by running them up and down covered mounds of almonds that the Mexican laborers have farmed. One of his students beautifully flips out on Costner, not only shaken by how insulting and thoughtless the exercise was, but aware of the poetry in it, that the students are paving their way to a better life by stomping all over the work of their parents.

But there are many more problematic, less sensitive moments. The high school English teacher, after delivering an unprompted tirade on the school-to-prison pipeline in the community, praises Coach White for the change he has made in his students. Her evidence is a poem one of his athletes has written in which he highlights how, when running, he is no longer a "stupid Mexican" or a "dirty immigrant" but free like a bird. "Good job, Coach!" she tells him, when the moment isn't--or at least isn't exclusively--laudatory. Anyone who has ever been part of a stigmatized and oppressed population can tell you about the self-hatred that comes with it. I know it's something I've experienced as a gay man, and many friends of color have shared stories of more dramatic struggles to love their own identities and find beauty in their own skin in such a racist world. It's beautiful to know Coach White's students have discovered new opportunities for themselves and can imagine being a person they could love, but why share a poem that suggests this self-love comes at the expensive of renouncing or hating your heritage? I don't take issue with a film that identifies the struggle for self-love in the colonized mind, but I do take issue with a film that oversimplifies it and demands we celebrate it.

And then there's Coach White's final pep talk. In an effort to affirm his athletes, convince them that they're strong, disciplined, hard-working, and worthy, he goes a step too far. He literally says that Mexicans are "superhuman" and possess a strength and a work ethic that white people don't, and that they accomplish things as day laborers that no gringo could. And while it's important to celebrate the athletes and their parents' sacrifice and work, it starts playing into longstanding "noble savage" narratives when you use the words Costner chooses. It's as if he suggests that Mexicans are uniquely suited for day labor, that it's beyond anything white people are suited for, and in doing so, affirms the way the US labor force is structured with white people open to endless opportunity and "superhuman" Mexicans happily working away in the grape vineyards of California because it's the most appropriate work for them.

There were moments that I loved, many of them in fact. As someone who cries at any underdog story, I cried four-fold at this one. Not only were the running scenes moving, but there's a gorgeous equity in cross-country running because the person on your team who finishes 5th is just as important as the person who finishes 1st; it allows for multiple underdogs, multiple heroes, and tremendous unity. And all of the student-athletes in the film are charming, charismatic, earnest, and easy to love. Particularly charming is Coach White's eldest daughter, Julie, played by Morgan Saylor with innocence, sincerity, curiosity, and kindergarten romance chemistry with star athlete Carlos Pratts. There were even brief shining moments of gratitude and empathy with Kevin Costner's racist, ready-to-Hulk-out Coach White that touched me. In one such moving scene, he affirms and verbally "celebrates" his daughter's womanhood with a humble, respect-filled toast; of course, it just so happens to be the scene where they've culturally-appropriated the quinceañera, directly preceding the scene where he alienates himself from the entire community by deciding his daughter's skinned knee is a greater atrocity than the near-fatal stabbing of neighborhood Mexican teenage boys. Such is the world of McFarland, USA.

And here's your hot dude of the film: 

Carlos Pratts: Moody, Adorable, Approachable.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) Dir. Marielle Heller

There is a lot of sex in The Diary of a Teenage Girl. In fact, it's the most frankly sexual teen film I've ever seen, though unlike a standard teen sex comedy or indie erotic drama. For one, the sex never views as exploitive and the main character, Minnie, is never dangled in front of us to dominate, possess, or objectify. The gaze here is clearly female, perhaps even grown-up Minnie looking back on her 15th year with empathy, enthusiasm, and love. Director Marielle Heller cares about Minnie and wants her to love herself and own her sexuality; for the most part, Heller accomplishes this without moralizing or judgement, allowing a sexually curious and bold teenage girl to be a just-so reality and one worthy of its own narrative and of our attention.

Sex for Minnie begins to take on so many meanings and intentions that I found myself wanting to take issue, initially. Minnie sees herself as too fat to be beautiful, too ugly for a boyfriend, too awkward to ever find someone who would love her, who would stay; sex becomes a quest for self-esteem and validation. The need for validation from men becomes so extreme that she goes great lengths to objectify and demean herself to catch the attention of other men, including pretending to be a prostitute and later engaging in a threesome she has no desire to be a part of; both acts leave her feeling nervous and ill. Minnie is also a 15-year-old girl on a mission to find and know herself, who is caught in the middle of her pre-teen Disney wardrobe (an on-the-nose Minnie Mouse shirt) and whatever stable label adulthood holds. So, sex briefly becomes her identity and being a sexual person serves as an avenue for her to at least be a someone, a grownup someone. Her mother, played wounded, reckless and cagey by an understated Kristen Wiig, even encourages her to discover sex as power, but primarily as a commodifiable weapon or bargaining tool with men rather than an empowering practice for pleasure and agency. Wiig's character models a life for her daughter where relationships with men are necessary for meaning and where sex-- or being sexually desirable to men-- is necessary for self-love and personal fulfillment.  I found these interpretations of sex heartbreaking. I really wanted sex for Minnie to be about pleasure; or I wanted it to be about love. But I had to come to terms with the honesty and humanness of it, that sex is or can be all of these things for all of us. That we all have sex for the "wrong" reasons (insecurity, boredom, momentary connection) that aren't necessarily wrong at all. It's variations can be but are not necessarily problematic; often, they just are, and there's no sense in moralizing them. That realization helped me really appreciate the film's portrayal of Minnie as a woman with sexuality, just as complicated as anyone else's.

And Minnie does have moments where sex seems to be about pleasure and she's able to articulate her own needs in sex. In one unexpectedly endearing scene, Minnie goes home with a classmate and they proceed to have sex in a backyard playhouse after skinny-dipping together. His thrusts are short, frantic, and desperate, and Minnie looks like someone has attached cooked pasta to a high-speed fan and just kept whipping the outskirts of her vagina with it. Fed up and disappointed she tells him she wants to be on top, and she straddles him with slow, sensual, deliberate movements, bringing her to orgasm. It's a visual representation of her owning her sexuality and serving her needs; it is--and I'm not being facetious--the kind of sex we want our friends, our loved ones, our daughters to be having.

But otherwise, Heller seemingly operates between a neutral-but-compassionate stance on Minnie's articulations of sexuality and a quiet-but-paternalizing concern, perhaps in hopes of siding with her audience. Not only are we led to see Minnie's growing sexual pursuits as destructive compulsions, but the audience has to decide how to process statutory rape through the eyes of a 15-year-old girl who (like me, like you) desperately wants to be beautiful, important, and loved. The bulk of the story is Minnie's secret sexual (and romantic?) relationship with Monroe, her mother's boyfriend. Heller shows some affirmation, respect, and compassion for Minnie by largely showing the affair through Minnie's eyes. From her chaotic, youthful, exploratory, love-craving vantage point, we see real chemistry between Monroe and Minnie. Their flirtatious games shape dynamics that are all at once fatherly, brotherly, and movie-love romantic with noogies and tickle fights and relentless teasing. Early on, as an audience member, I had to remind myself that she was 15 and he was 30 and this was not a romance and this was not okay. But you simultaneously empathized with Minnie and wanted her to find a way to make love and sex work for her, and honestly, in time, when I did find myself wanting their affair to end, it was less because of issues of age-difference, manipulation, legality, and true consent, and mostly because Monroe reveals himself to be a sad, lonely asshole without much of a future. Just as I may have determined were she dating some boy in her class, I felt like Minnie could do better.

(Monroe, played brilliantly by a loses-himself-in-the-role Alexander Skarsgard,  leads me to believe this is our intended journey with the character. Skarsgard is relaxed and charming, and he enters the relationship seemingly more curious and confused than predatory... again, we keep having to remind ourselves that their relationship is not legally or ethically okay. But Monroe's mid-film drunken ramblings and his pitiful, childish, drug-induced declarations effectively reveal his character and disarm his charms. Skargard makes us want to, conflictedly, breathe Monroe in and then enthusiastically spit him out)

But if the director's point-of-view and the film's tone don't seem to directly condemn Minnie's eventually compulsive sexuality or illegal and unethical sexual relationship with Monroe, she certainly finds ways to work in a moral commentary. Firstly, there are the absurd and negative consequences of Minnie's sexuality. In one of the film's few ingenuine, far-reaching moments, Minnie's wounded and jealous mother learns of Minnie's relationship with her boyfriend and she tries to compel them to marry one another. This prompts Minnie to escape on a weeks-long drug binge with her short-lived lesbian lover who tries to SELL MINNIE AS A SEX SLAVE FOR DRUGS WITHOUT HER KNOWLEDGE OR PERMISSION. I'm not saying these things never happen, but when you take on one of the few moderately-visible films where a teenage girl gets to own and explore her sexuality through a largely affirming and earnest lens, it seems like an antiquated and thoughtless-to-cruel cautionary tale twist to suggest the extreme consequences of sex trafficking or forced marriage.Why can't her consequences be the same as they are for the rest of us when we're engaging with others sexually while not loving and respecting ourselves?

So that's Heller's more extreme tool for judgement/control of Minnie's sexuality. The more subtle motif is the recurring specter of Patty Hearst. Hearst comes up much too frequently to just be a device for placing the film in time, and besides, there would be more timely references to make to situate the film in San Fran 1976 (the Bicentennial, or more visually appealing and narratively compelling, the rare 1976 SF Blizzard). Our three main characters all provide telling perspectives on Hearst.  Minnie is incredulous that anyone could let such a thing-- kidnapping, manipulation, sexual exploitation, and possible Stockholm syndrome-- happen to themselves. Minnie's mother is outraged and sympathetic of Patty, convinced she's a victim. Monroe remains unconvinced that Patty Hearst was victimized at all, arguing she's complicit and responsible for all of her actions. It's an effective, though perhaps too esoteric of a device for showcasing each character's perspective of Minnie and Monroe's sexual relationship, but it also permits Heller to articulate a moral stance on the issue: that Patty Heart's abduction and Minnie's sexual awakening and statutory rape are comparable, that it was, indeed, an act of manipulation, that it may have compelled Minnie to permit crimes-- engage in escapist sexual pursuits-- that were not in her nature or best interest.

Minnie shows tremendous growth at the end of the film. She has ended her relationship with Monroe, rejected her mother's views of sex and romance that led her to seek touch or male approval for identity and self-esteem, and discovered and embraced her identity as an artist. Through brilliant cinematography and charming, surreal moments of animation, the audience has already come to know Minnie as a talented and fresh-eyed illustrator, so it's very fulfilling to see her make that discovery for herself. However, it would have been a more powerful and enjoyable message to know that Minnie was able to healthfully intergrate sex into her life, that she found ways to experience sex and articulate herself sexually beyond her art. Instead, I felt led to believe that Minnie momentarily abandoned sex in pursuit of her future and her artistic identity. While it's great to see her respecting, discovering, and knowing herself, I would have preferred knowing that those were also realities for her sexually and romantically as well.

I'll end with a random postscript on the strange and unfavorable use of black male sexuality in the film. Black men are absent from the film-- sadly not all that uncommon even in progressive indies-- except for in the form of stories meant to scandalize white girls and incite jealousy and anger in white men. Minnie's best friend, perhaps not wanting to be outshone by Minnie's juicy affair with her mom's boyfriend, tells Minnie that she has been sucking the "big black cock" of the guy she's babysitting for. The taboo of interracial sex seems to be put in the same arena as the taboo of statutory rape and infidelity, and in a film that was not otherwise that concerned with contextualizing sexual values within the film's setting, it felt like a distracting-to-shocking-to-offensive inclusion. The only other time a black man, or rather a "big black cock" is mentioned, is when Minnie is trying to make Monroe jealous enough to fuck her again. She fabricates a story about hooking up with a black guy with a painfully large dick in the back of his car, and the fact alone is enough to make Monroe feel like he has something to prove or regain ownership of. Because the film never addresses black sexuality or interacial sex elsewhere, one gets the impression that Heller is contributing to, or at least employing, centuries old narratives of protecting white women (and white masculinity) from black bodies rather than commenting on them, and certainly rather than challenging them. I found the inclusion of these narratives puzzling in a movie that otherwise seemed genuinely invested in validating people as sexual subjects with their own agency and right to pleasure.

PPS: Since I've established a precedent of ending the blog with the picture of a beautiful man:

You're welcome.

Lemonade Mouth (2011) Dir: Patricia Riggen

By most people's standards, a Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) is a strange, unceremonious, and--I don't know--maybe insulting? way to begin a project highlighting female directors. For me, that's decidedly not the case. Despite my love of all things Sundance-savvy, Cannes-ready, and Oscar-baity, media targeted at preteens remain more savory feast than guilty indulgence. The tastiness is myriad:

1) These are the messages shaping realities and possibilities for young people tomorrow. This is a forum with the dramatic potentiality to inspire a future world that is empathetic, socially conscious, prepared to navigate the world relationally, and armed with a toolbelt for self-love. It matters.

2) It's nostalgic, bringing me back to a time of intense self-discovery and exciting possibility. Movies were how I discovered realities beyond what my small-town had to offer: worlds where I could be gay, could have none-white friends, could find alternative expressions of masculinity, could find value in myself. My local rental store not only introduced me to the world outside my town--a window to an existing world--but it created a world within my town that didn't exist before. It brought the outside in and it redefined what the inside was.

3) I love it, and it totally does it for me. Especially as someone who feels deeply but struggles to show that, I respond well to melodrama and broad strokes. I soak up the pulpiness and revel in simple, plain approaches to getting at complex truths. Teen and pre-teen media communicate to me in a way that's fun, accessible, powerful, and meaningful. I'm all about it.

Now post-High School Musical DCOMs are often very similar beasts. A musical-component to maximize merchandising and franchise potential. A cast that's racially diverse, but ethnically ambiguous, and that operates in a world where race doesn't matter and is essentially invisible (which is, you know, problematic). A minor character or cameo role who is either overweight or visibly disabled, and one can assume that this is something that a genuine and caring producer fought hard for to ensure the casting was as diverse as possible and that every child watching could find someone to identify with. And, as always, a central message of being fiercely yourself, or sometimes less successfully, being "an individual" (which is more archetype than authenticity). 

Lemonade Mouth is rockin' all this necessary accoutrement, but it goes several steps further. On the assumption that most of you haven't seen and won't be seeing this, I'll provide a brief synopsis, then get into all the ways the movies goes right.

LM starts out as The Breakfast Club with 5 very different high school students, all struggling in some capacity to find a place or use their voice, meeting in detention and changing each other's lives. 

There's Stella, the rebel-rouser and Hot Topic anarchist who feels out of place in her family of scientific geniuses.

Wen, a doofy-yet-brooding Anthony Michael Hall, who can't even about the fact his father is preparing to marry a 28-year-old woman. He gets to rap with respectable flow.

Olivia, shy and invisible and cutoff from social interaction because her mother has passed and her father (we learn in an inconsequential third act reveal) is in prison. Guess what, guys? She finds her voice! And, honestly, it's one of the better voices to be churned out of the Disney Channel Machine. I'd listen to Bridgit Mendler, Disney darling who plays Olivia, cover Avril Lavigne songs any day of the week. It is worth mentioning that Olivia gets detention because she's discovered sitting alone in the janitor's closet reading "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" by Emily Dickinson. Disney just picked up the eating-your-lunch-in-the-bathroom-stall-because-no-one-would-sit-with-you-in-the-cafeteria mic and dropped the fuck out of it.

We also have Mo, beautiful daughter of Indian immigrants, who just wants to be a teenage girl, but her father expects a model of woman that won't allow it.

And Charlie, who feels trapped and unnoticed in the shadow of his soccer-prodigy brother. Charlie is also REALLY hot. I'm pretty sure he was not 18 when this movie was made, but he is now, so I think we have to talk about it. Look at Charlie smolder. Look at Charlie smile! He can even charmingly pull off the lipbite thing.Less successful at having a popcorn kernel lodged in his throat but staying pretty serene about. Least appealing as the dead offspring of a Criss Angel, Jack White, The Crow threesome.

Anyway, the kids meet in detention where they organically transition into performing music together through environmental noises like jangling keys, spray bottles, and dripping water a la Cell Block Tango. They form a band to compete in a competition where the winner gets a record deal because that's the plot of any movie worth watching. Of course, there's a rival band who presents obstacles and shenanigans. Of course the bandmates experience a journey of self-discovery and encounter struggles they are now prepared to weather thanks to friendship and the power of being voiced. More unexpectedly, the band creates a social movement that exists well beyond themselves and sort of orchestrates a baby revolt against capitalism that, like most revolts against capitalism, is resolved through a well-intentioned and immediately beneficial compromise with capitalism.

So, let's discuss the things:

1) Guys, like I said, there is coded class warfare and coded class revolution going on here. In Disney movies, everyone's rich, even the people who are poor (unless they're an orphan? I think that's the formula). So visible, literal class warfare is out of the question. Instead, the school is divided into haves and have-nots along fairly conventional high school lines. The jocks and cheerleaders are in power; the arts kids and nerds are literally all relegated to the basement and identify as "the subterranean." The jocks/cheerleaders have the ear and the heart of the school principal/dictator, and the backing of corporate sponsor "Turbo Blast," Disney's douchey gatorade. The subterranean wave a different banner, the totes East German Mel's Lemonade, a dingy vending machine that the school plans to remove from their basement-ghetto. Lemonade--and the band's music--becomes a stand in for all things counterculture, bohemian, and queer. The LM kids stage a revolt against the status quo and the powers that be both through their music-- calling for all people to stand up, be heard, and fight against their oppressors--in an act of civil disobedience where they protest the removal of the Lemonade vending machine and are ARRESTED-- and by rallying their fans to their cause. The Lemonade Revolution is resolved Deus Ex Machina style when Stella meets Mel (of Mel's Lemonade) at a wedding and convinces him to build a top-dollar arts wing for the school. Money saves the day! And the revolution and the fight against the man lives on only in song, just as it does for most of us lazy socialists. 

Still, you have to wonder if Disney temporarily wielded a soft-spot for sticking it to the capitalist machine. Lemonade Mouth was cable's No. 1 original movie in 2011 with 6 million viewers of it's premiere (7 million with DVR) and had all the necessary elements for a franchise. But Disney ultimately decided against making a sequel because they felt the story was complete and didn't see the point of shooting a second film just to make a little money. That's such a Mel's Lemonade thing to do!

2) I'm all about the yin and yang of Lemonade Mouth and their also beverage-named rival, Mudslide Crush. On the surface, the two bands have oppositional messages. Lemonade Mouth sings songs of self-love and self-celebration, friendship, and standing for what you believe in. Mudslide Crush serves up a lot of douchebag swagger songs about having hot girlfriends, nice cars, and making everyone jealous of their superiority. But it's easy to see Mudslide Crush's message as the insecure brother of Lemonade Mouth's... both bands promote self-celebration, but MC cynically assumes self-worth must be proven and it must come at the expense of others. What's interesting about the tone of the piece is we're not supposed to hate Mudslide Crush; they're meant to be musically impressive and their swagger is mad sexy, has great appeal. The director seems to trust her audience will ultimately be drawn to the more authentic and more loving expression, without forcing them in that direction.

3) Mo's story line should be shared and discussed with any pre-teen or teenager you know. It's empowering and it's important. She is in a relationship with a potentially controlling partner but she never acquiesces to him or silences herself around him. She maintains and insists upon her identity within the relationship, negotiates power, and stands up for herself against her partner. As she navigates relationship challenges, including potential infidelity, she puts herself first, asks for what she wants, and through the power of communication is able to make her relationship work. You do not see this happen in depictions of high school girl's relationships in children's movies, especially on the Disney Chanel.

4) More enthralling about Mo's story line is her not-relationship with Charlie. Charlie has a crush on Mo. He is sweet to her. He listens to her when she needs it, fights for her when she needs it, and shows remarkable respect for her boundaries as she navigates a confusing, and briefly failing, relationship. In any of a number of different movies, Charlie-- sweet, loving, right-in-front-of-her-eyes Charlie-- would have gotten the girl because of his patience and friendliness. One can imagine a scenario where Charlie feels entitled to her after all he's been through for her. But ultimately, he professes his crush, she tells him she only sees him as a friend, and Charlie manages to move on and maintain his friendship with Mo. Guys, THIS DOESN'T HAPPEN EVEN IN GROWN-UP FILMS. Men still bitch about being friend-zoned and assume being nice to a girl entitles them to romance and sex. What an awesome message to send to boys and girls alike. That you might have a crush on someone, and they might not like you back, and you have to move on. That being a good friend should be about being a good friend, not about you trying to get something out of the other person. That you don't owe anyone anything just because they're kind to you. MIND BLOWN, Y'ALL.

5) The movie just hits me in a sweet spot with all its simple truths and complicated lessons. Do you remember how friends were everything in high school? How they were your 3rd and 8th arms, how they spent their hours protecting and warming your heart? That's in the Lemonade Mouth recipe. Or remember what it feels like when you think you've just miserably failed and your mom tells you she loves you and she's proud of you? TEARS FOR DAYS. And do you remember how scary it was to stand up to dad? Or to your best friend? Or to your boyfriend? Or to your past? The kids here develop the capacity to face those closest to them, a skill we're all still trying to hone. And I'm glad there's a movie out there that tells kids to love themselves, to speak their minds, to fight for what they believe in, but to be kind along the way. All things I'm still learning, too.

6) The film was an adaptation of a young-adult novel by Mark Peter Hughes that seems to have contained more reality and grittiness. Hughes characters' struggle with body image, death, sex, and abandonment, and in more visceral ways than the film's characters navigate their problems. A more literal adaptation by a different company might have packed a greater, more honest, more relevant punch. Still, there is something moving about the Disneyization of life, not so much in its erasure of social problems and structural barriers, but in its earnest insistence that if you put your mind to it, you and your 4 closest friends might be playing at Madison Square Garden in the near future. Isn't that something we all need to believe?

And, for good measure, one last look at Charlie (Blake Michael):

SWOOOOOOOOOON!

Why I Listen on the Night Before

Tomorrow, I turn 28, and this project officially begins. I'm spending the evening straightening the house, experimenting with bourbon and chocolate milk, and contemplating why I'm setting out to do this in the first place. More specifically, why women in film? Why not something else?

The answer is selfish, but I think it's honest, too.

I'm gay. I won't take this time to explore whether or not I was 'born this way," but I was certainly born different and with a sense that I'd inherited a different script from everyone else around me. I observed stories and "stories" of how to be a middle-class white boy in Missouri, and they mostly suggested there was a particular way I was to exist in the world, but none of those ways of existing worked for me. (I imagine they work for very few people). So I sought out different stories about different ways of being, and I learned about possibility, and about others, and about myself. And I discovered pathways to take in this world that read very true to me, and I discovered pathways that seemed six dimensions away from me, but I still recognized them as human and as valid. It was a real blessing, not seeing myself in the most accessible story, and having to reach out to find others.

Which is all a flowery way of saying I've sought out female (and other) subjectivities since I was a child because the prescribed worldview of most male protagonists was not my story and could not capture the world as I experienced it. I learned how to identify with and appreciate a small handful of the 8 billion ways you see the world, which is sadly a lot more ways than most people bother to try. I grew comfortable in accepting that some people experienced existence in a way so contradictory to my own vantage point, but that there's was just as much the reality of life as mine was. I felt safe, cuddled, hand-held, when someone countries or chromosomes away from me seemed to share a thought or feeling, and I was invigorated and challenged when a would-be neighbor seemed to occupy a different universe.

That is, I strapped myself into the empathy machine, and a lot of the operators were women, and a lot of the women helped me feel less alone, helped me feel better understood and helped me better understand.

And I think, ultimately, women in film because gender fails us all. It's an arbitrary and harmful way of dividing the world, and I refuse to limit myself to male cultural products when genes and experience both indicate I'm just as likely to identify with and learn from a woman's keyhole to the world as a man's. In fact, more so-- as a population who has long been forcibly removed from their voices and their subjectivities, women have seen and felt and known a world so much different from the one laid out in more dominant, prevailing narratives. It's a chance to be liberated from the narrow story we're given of how the world is. It's a chance to see the world differently, perhaps more truthfully, at least more completely. And if we keep expanding access to who gets to tell stories, and if we keep demanding stories from diverse points of view, maybe one day we'll see the world so completely that we'll know what it is to be ourselves and to be alive.

That's the itch; that's the dream. Gertrude Stein had it. I've got it. Here's hoping you do, too. 

Introduction III: The What Of It

And, briefly, a boring post to  introduce the logistics:

My original hope was to watch 128 movies directed by women between my 28th and 29th birthday. I loved the silly poetics of it, but when I realized I'd have to faithfully commit to blogging on 2.5 movies a week, even on those weeks of vacation or working late hours or random depression, I felt like I was setting myself up for certain favor. I considered trimming it down to a digestible 100, but the more I weeded, the more it bloomed, and soon the promiscuity of movie magic had flicks busting out all over.

So my official goal is 150 movies directed by women between now (my 28th birthday) and the end of 2016, averaging 9-10 per month. In reality, I hope to keep watching, to keep watching regularly, and to be moved enough to talk about the movies as I do.

There's no hidden logic to my list. It's a blend of suggestions from friends, essentials I've missed, favorites of mine, things that I hate--- anything I believed might illicit a response in me. I've avoided several presumably wonderful scholarly films if they looked difficult to get my hands on or amounted to too many slow burns to wade through. If I'm going to be in this for the long haul, I might as well focus on movies that are stimulating to watch.

You can view my forever-flexible list of potential films here. Taste the random.

Lastly: check out and give all praise to a women a a thousand times more hardcore than I am. Marya Gates is spending 2015 exclusively watching movies directed by women that she's never seen before. Her project is gorgeous, brave, time-consuming, and perspective-changing. You can follow what she's viewing here.

Introduction II: Talking About Her Speak

Jill Soloway, creative force behind Transparent and all around badass,  has said and will say everything I'd ever want this blog to broadly communicate, and much better than I will. She's a brilliant filmmaker, a brave artist, and she has the felicitous habit of delivering beautiful, impassioned speeches that make you want to go outside and throw lawnchairs at patriarchy.

Check out this sumptuous morsel about women in film:

"Obviously, besides trying to bring other women into your work, when you pick up the camera and share your voice, it heals the world. It’s not funny anymore what’s going on with us. It’s immoral, the way that we are kept from our voices. It’s not just a matter of our numbers. There is a real all-out attack on us having subjectivity, so I just beg everybody to be relentless in their pursuit of their voice."

Sharing your voice HEALS THE WORLD. Women must relentlessly pursue their own voice. She is enveloping us in these gorgeous calls to action.

Or munch on this tasty nugget about women's power as directors:

"I came into most of my power as a filmmaker when I realized that all I needed to do was make a safe space for people to have feelings. And that’s feminine energy. That’s mommy energy. That’s OUR birthright. Our wombs, our space-making, crucible containing bodies...What I’m talking about is no more imitating men’s style or competing with them on their terms, instead reinvent at every turn."

And she continues on this theme that the feminine is a gift to filmmaking with this priceless advice:

It was shockingly, frighteningly easy for me to realize that I could invite actors into their risk spaces by leading with receiving, gathering, feminine, space-creation energy.

New rules. You CAN cry at work, in fact, you must cry at work, in fact if you’re going to make a movie, do me a favor and think of it “as bring your tears to work day”, hell while you’re at it, “ hashtag #bringyourpussytoworkday”, every day. You’re gonna need it."

BRING YOUR PUSSY TO WORK EVERY DAY. I would get that as a face tattoo if I could guarantee it would only be interpreted in context. I mean, that's fucking awesome.

Soloway literally calls for a "matriarchal revolution," an overthrow of the male gaze and of Hollywood's insistence on exclusively-male subjectivities. All it takes is brave, awesome women to create characters in their own images and stories in their own voices.

It's clear why Soloway thinks the revolution is possible, and it's clear why she think it's necessary. The past year, on some fronts, has been awesome for women in media. The box office prowess of female-directed projects Pitch Perfect 2 and Fifty Shades of Gray. The critical and commercial success of female-centered films like Trainwreck and Mad Max: Fury Road. Rich, thoughtful, celebratory depictions of women on TV in Parks and Recreation, The Honorable Woman, Transparent, and countless others. If we assume that Hollywood is an industry invested in its own survival, we can hope that 2015 is a turning point for women in film as executives finally realize that female-oriented films are financially-viable and considerably delicious. No better time to stage a revolution than on the wings of these recent triumphs.

But in general, despite the wealth of offerings out there, we're not watching female-directed films and major studios aren't meaningfully hiring women behind (or often in front of) the camera. In 2014, only 2 of the top 100 films were directed by women, and consequently, less than 20 percent featured a female protagonist.  We know that women have made and can make awesome cinema; we've seen it. But year-in and year-out, Hollywood seems to regularly forget or ignore the successes of female directors, and audiences never seem to question who is behind the story being told. If this blog accomplishes anything for those who read it, I hope it's a reminder to pay attention to the creators of the stories you absorb, a call to seek out diversity in subjectivities and perspectives, and a chance to discover and rediscover a lot of awesome movies crafted by women.

And maybe you'll remember to bring your pussy to work tomorrow. Maybe you'll celebrate the feminine and the gift of power, leadership, and direction that's based in sharing, empathy, and creation.Maybe we'll both cry-or-not-cry like a girl. Maybe you'll turn your money into activism by seeing one of these 2015 films directed by women.

Or maybe you'll just think more about the stories we tell and who should have access to telling them.

Introduction I: Talking About Hearing

Guys, I'm the worst. All I wanted to do in preparation for my 28th birthday was start a moderately-to-severely kickass blog about female directors. Between now and the end of 2016, I watch (at least) 150 movies directed by women and then blog my reactions to them. No reviews or film scholar pretense, minimal "did you know's!?", just feelings and thoughts and an experiential account of what it meant for me to hear a woman's voice from behind the camera.

I wanted to write again because I love writing. I wanted to write about movies because I love movies. I wanted to write about movies by women because I think that it matters. I think that sharing and experiencing female subjectivities is the best tool against patriarchy, and that film shaped by the feminine can be the warmest, bravest, most welcoming, most honest, and most liberating to engage. That's the simple math of all of this.

But everything we do is complicated because we are complicated. And today's web I'm spinning is a tangle of self-doubt, humility, fears of failure, good intentions, and a sort of allyship whose merit is yet to be determined.

I'm scared to write because everything might be terrible. I used to believe so much in my writing, in my own voice, that I would stay up past midnight in high school, turning simple class assignments into a 15-year-old's magnum opus. My justification was that I was a writer, and we writers just had to write because it was in our blood and on our tongues. I loved sharing what I could do with words back then; I loved showing people how I saw the world and how I talked about how I saw the world. But something has died since then or at least crawled into its sickbed. I'm weak of words, even though I still believe I have them, somewhere. I'm afraid to speak, even though there's some part of me who believes I am worth hearing. I want this blog to be a chance to start speaking again, and for me to grow stronger in my own voice; it's a lot to ask of a Blogger account, and somehow, a lot to ask of me. There's an irrational fear that if I can't discover through this blog how to talk about the world I see, that it will just confirm that I can't write anymore. That writing can't be something I identify with, or that I'm proud of, or that might help build a future for me. The stakes are high (even though they're not).

And then there's the part of me that feels some moral trepidation about the whole setup. What does it mean that I (a man) intend to dedicate a blog to how I experience the voice of female artists? Women creating art is a revolutionary act. Men talking about art is not. Women's narratives deconstruct and can slowly de-struct male authority simply by asserting the stupidly radical notion that women are people, are subjects in the world, and not something less. What can I do to make sure my own narrative contributes to that, rather than acting as its own unwelcome authority, speaking on a topic for women that no woman ever asked me to speak for? The point of female filmmaking, besides the fact that some women just have the desire to tell stories and make movies, is to challenge the male gaze and the male monopoly on protagonism. A narrative of my perspective, in which I am my own hero in my film-watching experience, feels like a slap in the face to everything female directors seek to accomplish.

But, as someone who overthinks, it's safe to assume I'm overthinking this. Despite all the amazing possibilities of female filmmaking, the intention of most artists (male, female, otherwise) is to tell a story that makes you think or feel something. Sharing what I think or feel might be a bit elementary, but it's not necessarily some problematic contribution to male privilege. I can't deny the systems in which the audience, the story, and the storyteller are embedded, but I also can and should celebrate my reactions to the story; that's what art is about.

What I think I need are some ground rules:

1) Listen to the movie
2) Be honest; and let yourself feel something
3) As always, try to be the best person you can be.

*Breathes*-- Now things feel simpler again.