A Small Victory

I give the Disney princesses a lot of grief. Whenever I want an example of how movies affect people I usually list a movie like "Sleeping Beauty" or "Snow" White" and talk about how they encourage passivity in little girls. With the exception of "Beauty and the Beast" I can't think of a single princess film that supports feminism (I would count "Enchanted" but Disney refuses to put Giselle in the category of other princesses because they don't want to pay royalties to Amy Adams for using her likeness). So, my curiosity was piqued when "The Princess and the Frog" was released in all of its hand-drawn glory. I wanted to know if this was a princess movie that would break the pattern of passivity. 

In short, the answer is yes. There was never a time where she slept waiting for somebody to rescue her, nor was there ever a time where her voice was taken away so that she could be seen as human. She was an active, determined, strong-minded woman throughout the film. 

The story of Tiana is as follows (there'll probably be spoilers). When she was a little girl growing up in New Orleans, she and her father had a dream of opening a restaurant together. However, he was called into duty for WWI and never made it back. Tiana kept the dream alive, though, and worked two jobs and sacrificed her personal life in order to save the money necessary to start her business. When she first meets the prince, she doesn't even care about him. 

But due to the direction of the plot, she and the prince wind up in a mess together when they're transformed into frogs. They go on a journey together to the one person who could change them back while helping each other out on the way. There are times when the prince rescues Tiana, but there are times when Tiana rescues the prince. You have to keep in mind that feminism isn't women having power over men; it's about equality between the sexes. This movie showed that.

And when Tiana and the prince fall in love, it doesn't revolve around the prince choosing her a la "Cinderella." In fact, they almost don't get together. The prince was going to propose to Tiana, but she seemingly only cared about her restaurant. So, the prince was going to marry another woman to get the money Tiana needed. Tiana realized how much she actually cared for the prince, so even though it meant sacrificing her restaurant and staying as frogs, Tiana choose to be with the prince instead. Of course, though, everything ends happily ever after with them both becoming human again and Tiana getting her restaurant.

But while I feel as though I can appreciate this movie for its feminist qualities, it's less than stellar in other fields. There wasn't a single memorable song throughout the film, although there were many songs. Too many songs, in fact. I was so interested in the story that whenever a mediocre song began I got frustrated. Actually I began to sing more memorable songs in my head just to liven things up. And, more importantly, it lacked any kind of meaningful commentary on race or culture. Sure, it showed that Tiana grew up poor and that she was treated differently at times, but it failed to create any kind of argument. Still, I suppose it's better than previous Disney films.

And I'd be remiss if I left out the best part of the movie: the art direction. In one scene, the art work transforms from the classical Disney style to that of an expressionistic poster without flaw. And the vibrant neon colors used throughout helped to capture a magical ambiance. The side characters were all likable enough with my favorite being the trumpet playing alligator Louie. And the villain, voiced by Keith David, was intimidating although less so than other Disney villains. The fact he was voiced by Keith David was 80 percent of the character's scare factor.

So, there you have it. A Disney princess movie that had an active woman lead for the first time since 1991. I am happy about that, but I'd be lying if I wasn't let down by it's failures. In the world of race relations, Disney has a lot to make up for.  

Right to Power

For those of you who aren't in the know, there was a clandestine superhero group in Marvel comics called the Illuminati that banded together to make decisions regarding the world's future. This group was made up of Reed Richards, Namor, Tony Stark, Professor X, Black Bolt and Dr. Strange. Together they felt as though they had a representative of each of Earth's main demographics. For example, Dr. Strange represented the world of magic, Namor the people of the oceans, Professor X mutantkind, etc. Nobody on the planet knew they created this team, not even their other teammates. 


The group only came together when there was a massive threat looming in Earth's near future. In one adventure Reed Richards had the team assemble so they could gather the Infinity Gems. When placed in the Infinity Gauntlet, these gems have the power to destroy time, space, reality and consciousness. There have been several universe-wide adventures in Marvel's history where all of the heroes on Earth would try to defeat anybody who gathered the gems. But the Illuminati felt as though it was a good idea to bring the gems together to make them easier to protect. And as a result they almost destroyed time, space, reality and consciousness.



Beside the arrogance of their plan, it just felt dirty to me. Who were they to decide the fate of the planet and, at times, the universe? I have enough of a problem trusting regular superheroes let alone superheroes who are keeping their comrades in the dark. The Civil War saga showed us the extent to which superheroes can make mistakes, so where is my incentive to entrust them?  The general answer is typically something to the effect that they know what's best for us, but that isn't exactly satisfying.



The "Watchmen" graphic novel also dealt with this problem. Ozymandias, a superhero, killed millions of people in order to save billions. To do this, he gave the world a common enemy to band together against, and as a result there was a feeling of unity across the globe. But again, what gives him the right to do that? Rorschach's answer was that nothing gave him the right, and that's why he was going to tell the press. And that's why he got exploded by Dr. Manhattan. But while Rorschach may be in pieces, the question he represented still remains.


I think I have finally found the answer I was looking for. Thomas Hobbes argued that without a government controlling its people, the lives of men and women would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." That's why he argued for a powerful, Leviathan-like monarchy. And in the world of Watchmen, and even present day real life, the planet is a world community. The geographic distances that separate us are now meaningless. MacLuhan's global village is almost upon us. So, without a powerful world government controlling its people, it was just a matter of time until chaos broke out (a nuclear holocaust was the likely outcome in Watchmen). So, who better to become the Leviathan than superheroes? 


Anybody who believes in utilitarianism (the ends justify the means) would agree that the actions taken by Ozymandias and his co-conspirators was the right thing to do. After all, a billion lives are more valuable than a million lives. And in order to do what they did, the heroes had to make some ethical decisions. Whether their choices were moral or not doesn't matter because they are the ruling class. They are the monarchy. Rorschach was a rebel who questioned their power, so he had to be done away with.


And, essentially, I believe this argument works for the Illuminati in the Marvel universe. They only flex their Leviathan power when the entire world is at stake, not just when the U.S. or New York city is in trouble. And most every other superhero from Spider-man to Luke Cage can be seen as the Leviathan of a microcosm in the world. 



Sometimes I wonder if humans are as bad as Hobbes believed. Rousseau didn't think so. His entire belief in the social contract depended on it. But when I look at the daily news and see what goes on in the world, I join Hobbes. People, generally, are terrible. Maybe we need a Leviathan to rule us.

Top Five Favorite Films of 2009

If you were to gauge the quality of a year's movies by their financial success, I would say that 2009 did pretty good. During the summer there were blockbusters like "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "The Hangover" (those two movies together grossed nearly $1.3 billion). And the winter yielded "The Twilight Saga: New Moon" which has earned well over half of a billion dollars since its release less than a month ago. However, I'm not the type of guy to judge the year's movies that way. I take overall quality as the most important factor. I'm kind of weird that way.


Like most years, I did not get to see every movie I wanted to. I missed Sam Rockwell's "Moon" as well as "The Men Who Stare at Goats" to name a couple. And, of course, there are still movies coming out later this year such as "Sherlock Holmes" that I am eagerly awaiting. But one movie isn't worth postponing my list. So, here is the list of my top five favorite movies of 2009 (of the ones I got to see, anyway):

5. "The Hurt Locker" I typically don't like war movies. The genre seems stale to me, and most of the time it's just a way for Americans to relieve their glory days from WWII. However, "Hurt Locker" is not an ordinary war movie. This film follows the deployment of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq with the focus being on Jeremy Renner's character, William James. Not only does the movie concentrate on a team that is often overlooked in times of war, but James is a different type of war hero. He doesn't rush into danger to save the day, and he doesn't give eloquent speeches. What he does is disarm bombs, and he does it because it's the only thing he knows he loves (or is it the adrenaline fix that he loves?). Now, I don't agree with all of the ideologies present in the film, but I can't deny good acting when I see it, and Renner's performance was better than most actors' who take home Oscars.


4. "Coraline" I'm tired of children's movies handling their audience with kid gloves. Kids can take a lot more than we usually give them credit for, and filling their brains with nauseating princess stories just works to dumb them down. With that said, "Coraline" is the type of children's movie that children actually deserve. It deals with dark subject matter (I'll remain vague to not spoil anything) but manages to keep a child-like feeling over the entire film. It's like a true, present-day Grimm's Fairy Tale. So, match the emotional maturity with the unique stop-motion and 3D design, and you have what I would consider a fantastic film for both kids and adults alike. 


3. "Inglourious Basterds" Tarantino, the sponge that he is, has the ability to absorb film techniques and style throughout film history and squeeze them out into a style his own. I fell in love with "Reservoir Dogs" for that reason, and he hasn't given me any great disappointments yet. "Inglourious Basterds," though, may just be his best film to date. Aside from New Wave elements throughout the movie and the great performances from Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent and Christoph Waltz, what's most important about "Inglourious Basterds" is that it gave us the ending to WWII that we all wanted (or perhaps it's the ending we all imagine considering how much we celebrate the damned war).


2. "Funny People" I can't put anything about this movie better than Roger Ebert did, so I'll use his words. "The thing about 'Funny People' is that it's a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances -- and it's about something. It could have easily been a formula film, and the trailer shamelessly tries to misrepresent it as one, but George Simmons learns and changes during his ordeal, and we empathize." Oh wait, one more thing, this movie has one of the best cameos I have ever seen in a film. Perhaps even better than "Zombieland's."
 

1. "Crank: High Voltage" This was the most fun I've had in a theatre ever. "Iron Man" was full of nostalgic joy that made me feel like a kid on Christmas morning, but "Crank: High Voltage" was something else. It was visual speed. It was like a video game, a movie, a music video and a junkie all rolled up into one. And, honestly, I don't think I understand it yet. The cinematic style is too out of the norm for me to figure out. The only other movies to give me this kind of puzzle is Godard's work. And, frankly, I like the brain food.

Dreams and Ideals

“The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam...” - J. G. Ballard

           

The idea of the American Dream, reasonably, has been ingrained in this country since its genesis. The Declaration of Independence says it all by saying that all men are born with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The term “American Dream” didn’t exist until 1931 when James Truslow Adams used it in his book “The Epic of America” where he described it as each man and woman having the ability to make what they want of their own lives. Since then the idea of the dream has been reshaped by those who are doing the dreaming. As a result, authors like Truman Capote and F. Scot Fitzgerald and musicians like John Cougar Mellencamp and Les Claypool have put their own twist on the idea, many of which are dark and cynical. John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy is another morose interpretation of the American Dream as evidenced in the film’s cinematography.

To put it succinctly, the film is about Joe Buck, a naïve and attractive cowboy from Texas who is on his way to New York to become a male prostitute. However, his plan to please rich, lonely women gets derailed quickly by the harsh reality of the Big Apple. After spending all of his money, Joe takes shelter with the greasy swindler Ratso Rizzo and continues to try and live his own American Dream. The only hitch is that Joe doesn’t seem to be operating in the actual world but an artificial one.

The Greek philosopher Plato put it best in his allegory of the cave. In the cave were inhabitants chained to a wall so they could not move or turn their heads. And behind the prisoners was a great fire which cast shadows of themselves on the wall. The shadows were the only things they could see, so to them the shadows were real people. This situation perfectly sums up how Joe Buck was created.

The first shot of the film is a close-up of a drive-in theater screen with the non-diagetic soundtrack of a Western playing complete with galloping horses and gun fire. The shot of the screen is so close, in fact, that it’s difficult to decipher what it is until the camera steps back. And when it does, what is revealed is a child in a cowboy costume riding on a toy horse in the theater’s playground with an actual horse in a corral behind him. The young Joe Buck contently plays on his fake horse paying no attention to the creature within a few yards of him.

The setting of the bare theater screen serves as Joe’s cave wall, as does the television screen that acted as his parent when he was a child, which we see during numerous flashbacks. On these screens Joe watches images that represent reality without being real. However, being strapped in his own cave, Joe mistakes what he sees as being real and tries to replicate it. This means that Joe’s idea of a cowboy is a flashy Hollywood costume as opposed to actual ranch hands. And on top of that, his entire life view is something suitable for a raunchy soap opera.

Of course, his trip to the East Coast is not entirely based on misrepresented images. He also wants to run away from himself. Multiple flashbacks throughout the movie show that Joe once had a decent life with a beautiful woman until one night they were both raped by the local town boys. The event pushed Joe’s girl over the edge and she mistakenly blamed Joe for what happened. This type of tragedy would be enough for anybody to pick up and move across the country. As Claudia Rankine puts it in her essay Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, “…We should all change our names when we don’t like what we see in the mirror. It’s an easy way to distance the self from the self….” Sometimes changing your life is the best way to forget what it once was.

             When the time comes for Joe to take the trip to New York, he still attempts to focus on his cave wall by listening to his transistor radio. He has no TV or movie screen with which to put his attention, but he cannot yet let himself get acclimated to reality. The radio works as a good replacement and during the course of the film it begins to represent both Joe’s last shred of optimism and the last shackle holding him in his cave.

            During the last bus ride of the film where Joe is attempting to take a dying Ratso to Miami before he dies, Joe has a very different experience. Here he is without any kind of artifice to take him out of reality and is anchored down to the real world due to Ratso’s grim presence. It’s here that Joe redefines his American Dream to suit the real world. Instead of becoming a big-time, cowboy hustler in New York he comes to the decision of being a physical laborer in Miami. And he’s happy with that prospect.

            In his essay on Blue Velvet, Richard Schickel said, “It could be argued that Lynch’s most basic business is to deny us the falsifying nostalgia that exposure to the cultural artifacts of the past so genially evoke, to deny us false comforts of falsified history, in the process denying us that ‘Golden Age’ we so often use to measure - and deplore - contemporary reality.” Essentially, Schlesinger aimed to do the same thing in Midnight Cowboy, except instead of denying us a perfect past he is shooting down an impossible future the American Dream seems to promise.  The grittiness the camera took so often accompanied by its bleak subjects caused a powerful message. Film critic Roger Ebert, however, disagrees about the quality of the film’s photography. In his 1994 revisit of the 1969 film he said, “He took those two magnificent (Jon Voight’s Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo) performances and dropped them into a trendy, gimmick-ridden exercise in fashionable cinema. The ghost of the Swinging Sixties haunts ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ and robs it of the timelessness it should possess.”

Of course, one man’s gimmick is another’s treasure as evidenced in Desson Howe’s review for the Washington Post of the same year, “But the fact is, in these unsentimental '90s, the movie's unrelenting grimness holds up very nicely. Beyond the toils and troubles of Joe Buck and Ratso (that's Enrico Salvatore Rizzo), the world itself is lost in hopeless isolation, wallowing in a poverty of money, morality and love.” Elsewhere in the article Howe compliments the film on the very same scenes for which Ebert attacked it. Specifically, what they refer to as the Warhol-esque party. Ebert felt as though the party had little narrative value, was already a trite scene at that point in time and was unrealistic in regards to Joe and Ratso even getting invited. Howe considers the surrealistic scene as cutely quaint.

While I tend to appreciate Ebert’s opinion more than Howe’s, if only for the reason it’s more fleshed out, I think both critics miss the mark. The setting of the party served as platform to give Joe the kind of attention that propelled him to New York in the first place. The documentary style footage present in the scene put Joe in the middle of his own shows. Instead of being a real person, he became yet another representation of reality, much like most of the other guests at the party. Joe enjoyed the taste of the artificial world and even got his first real gigolo job there. However, Ratso’s decreasing health brings Joe back to reality.

Ebert also said, “They exist apart from the movie, outside of it. Their lives have nothing to do with Andy Warhol parties, or escort services, or hard Park Avenue dames. And who can really believe they would ever find themselves on that bus to Florida?” What would Ebert have said if the story had taken an even more surreal approach, such as in 8 ½? Instead of one scene of a hallucinatory party, what if it had been as erratic as Fellini’s film? As Dwight MacDonald said in his essay on the film, “There are three kinds of reality in 8 ½, and the film proceeds with a constant shifting of gear between them. There is Guido’s real present….There are his memories of his boyhood and of his dead parents. And there are his Walter Mitty daydreams of a harmonious realm of luxe, calme, et volupte in which all his problems are magically solved: the artist’s world of creative fantasy.” Midnight Cowboy already reaches the first two in relation to Joe Buck. As for that last one, the closest we come to is Ratso’s fantasy about owning his own resort in Miami. Granted, there is a difference between supplying numerous fantasy scenes and creating ridiculous places of reality, but it isn’t a big one. In Fellini’s film, reality and fantasy were separated and the film transitioned from one to other and back again. In Schlesinger’s film, reality and fantasy were blended together, and considering Joe’s journey that seems like the perfect residence. He is a man that can’t distinguish the two, so the film can’t either. It works to complicate our understanding of reality along with the underlying theme of the American Dream. 

But in the end we are left without the unreal world and are placed on a bus with Joe and Ratso heading to Florida. Here we see the evolution of both characters. In the beginning the difference between Joe and Ratso was big and small at the same time. They both had dreams and they both lived a harsh reality. The difference being that Joe was chained is his cave for most of the film whereas Ratso was embedded in reality. He fantasized about going to Miami, sure, but his day to day routine was focused on survival. The two are similar to the sisters in Donal Mosher’s essay Desiree, Daneal and the Devil. In it, both sisters have gone through a rough life, but deal with it differently. The older sister, Daneal, who was molested by her father, is embittered towards men and speaks openly about the harshness of reality. “Desiree however is not made of the same tough fiber. She bounds her world with cartoons, video games, and all the dense, sparkling décor of young girlhood.” But that last bus ride has Ratso attempting to live in the fake world for the remainder of his life and has Joe face reality. This means Joe has to give up his great dream and find something more realistic, which he does. He’s gone from a fragile Desiree to the toughened Daneal, finally punctuated by the death of Ratso on the bus.

 The road to the American Dream is a dangerous one for many people. And for Joe Buck that path was even more hazardous due to him not living in the real world. However, he survived his journey and while he may not have reached his dream at the end of it, he did accomplish something better. He woke up to reality. Let’s just hope that Joe didn’t wake up from his dream to find himself in a nightmare.