Life As We Know It - Film #14

So...apparently, the key to blogging success is to somehow incorporate the words "blue lagoon," "awakening," "pregnant," "sex scene" and "sand" into any blog post from here on out.

See what I did there?

I'll get more creative about that.

Maybe not palm frond and rustic tree branch creative, but definitely less overt.

In other news...today sort of sucked. By which I mean I learned exactly what noise a dragged muffler makes two small children in the backseat of your car make. 

Like a fisher cat on a rollercoaster. That's broken.

Anyways, I wasn't in the mood to be cheered. I was in the mood to feel condescended and pandered to by a female protagonist who wants us to think she's strong and independent but who really just needs a man to love her.

That's right, I worshiped at the altar of Katherine Heigl. 

In case you missed it, Katherine Heigl has one character. That character is:

1. always female

2. always a little too pretty to be the girl next door (but she tries hard to be anyways)

3. entitled, but in a down-to-earth, relatable sort of way. if you're in a high-powered, wealthy lifestyle.

4. part-bitch, part-emotional wreck

5. kind of an insufferable know-it-all

6. a bad drunk

Heigl is at her most convincing when she taps into her character's OCD. She is less convincing as a baker and homemaker.

I'm pretty sure her idea of "baker" was "Martha Stewart" here.

Pre-prison, more uptight Martha Stewart.

Then, there's Josh Duhamel, aka Fergie's husband. 

He looks like the love-child of Bill Hader and Timothy Olyphant.

Only with faker looking hair.

He is the yin to her yang, the acid to her base, the oil to her vinegar...

the penis to her vagina.

and what a penis he is.

First, I'm pretty sure he has an undiagnosed sex-disorder in this film. Second, he says wonderful things like "Hey, baby, at your age, you're not single, you're 'complicated!'"

It's almost like the filmmakers were unaware of the age and gender demographics of their target audience...

I mean, I don't know many under 25 year olds who clamor for the new Katherine Heigl flick.

You know?

The plot from here is pretty much the plot of Baby Boom, except they don't buy a money pit and learn to make organic applesauce (Heigl's character already knows how to do that!), and, instead of falling in love with the cute doctor, she ends up realizing her loins burn for the philandering television sports director guy. 

And Heigl is no Diane Keaton, although she certainly is trying!

Don't get me wrong, it had some cute moments here and there, but overall it was sort of a mixed bag over cliched whining as the two leads figure out how to change a poopy diaper and fall in love at the same time.

Duhamel's shit-eating grin is the best part of this scene which involves Heigl's uptight lady protag getting feces on her too-well-kempt to really "not be sleeping" face.

I did love Melissa McCarthy as one of the neighbors. And whoever the lady playing the caseworker was. She's got a gift.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie flounders hopelessly around the forced chemistry of its two leads. By the very end, I was sort of rooting for the hot doctor.

But even he gives up on Heigl in the end.

Not my favorite film to date and certainly no Blue Lagoon: The Awakening, but not a bad way to pass an afternoon if the earlier part of the day was spending listening to the dulcet tones of 150 dollars worth of automobile grinding along the 99 degree highway.

Plus the baby was wicked cute. 

Fifty Shades of Repulsion (for reading this book) "Book" 7

my inner goddess is jazz hands-ing (jazz fisting???)...or rather...my inner goddess (by which i mean feminist) is slightly appalled by the overt nature in which this book tackles the modern female's incarnation of the american dream.




yes, ladies, if we base our self-understanding solely on the mores and values espoused in the literature we clamor for, here's what we want:

1. a hot (HOT!), rich (SUPERRICH!), broody (PSYCHOTIC!) man who will tell us repeatedly we are not his whore but then lavish us with expensive finery (a car, a computer, clothes, a BlackBerry, etc.) when we make his manparts happy. because there should be a reward for certain sexual acts, let's all just face that fact right now. and we will maintain our cool independence and self-sufficiency by accepting those gifts on indefinite loan because we wouldn't want to hurt anyone's feelings now, would we???

2. a fundamentally, spiritually, and sexually broken man who we honestly believe will be fixed/changed/bettered by virtue of our all-consuming love for and adoration of him. plus the sweet, sweet healing power of our innate sexual prowess (because we were TOTALLY virgins before we met him), that'll also fix him up real good.

3. to be controlled by a more dominating man who will constantly assure us that our role as the submissive is clearly where the real power is at, and, through our total surrender to him, we will become some mega-powerful sex goddess who does pirouettes on a bed of ecstatic pain. 

4. to be tied up. and flogged. but not in a kinky loveless way. in a way that reveals the true "bonds" of our relationship through the deep exploration of our mutual trust for one another. think of it like a "sexual ropes course for trust building" instead of "S&M" and you'll be just fine.

yes, folks, this is some real cult of domesticity level shit, here.

and, yeah, ladies, that thought? well, it kind of makes me want to vomit up my breakfast in my mouth-hole.


i'mma gonna go off on this shit, so consider this your warning. also, i'm probably going spoil things because that's how i be. sorry in advance.


christian grey is edward cullen if you remove the vampirism and replace it with "dominant sexual fetishism" instead. not that eddie boy doesn't suffer from his own need to control his ladylove; it just doesn't give him an erection to tie her up and keep her from harm.

or, if it does, stephenie meyer is polite enough not to tell us.

and, yes, anastasia steele is some screwed up combination of every 19th century british ingenue and bella swan. only with clear split personality issues. think jane eyre, if bertha rochester was her subconscious and blanche ingram her inner goddess. 



look, i get the great literary romantic conventions. i do. medieval literature proffered the dominating relationship between lover and beloved. 19th century gothic imagines this relationship similarly with a dark brooding and largely unseen masculine force dominating the will of the virginal female. and in both of these instances, the profane love relationship, of course, is used to heighten, illuminate, or refocus a larger, more sacred one with god. i GET that. (of course, this is why we have harlequin romances where men give pretty young things punishing glances before they give them mindblowing, punishing orgasms, but, i digress). so, in some ways, FSOG is just the natural extension of this progression - bruised glances get a little bit more literal but the dynamic that has always fostered female literature has not really altered.

again, i get that.

but this is just profane.

what fostered the dominant-submissive relationship in the past was this remote interest in using love as a means to a spiritual end with god (perhaps via marriage or perhaps via something else). what chafes me here, aside from the overt embracing of the graphic nature of punishment and sex here, is that it's all so deliciously low, so horribly dirty.

and, what really bothers me most here isn't the smut factor (which is so high, it's laughable) but the pervasive feeling of shame. christian grey introduces anastasia steele to the world of sexual intrigue via his interpretation of "vanilla sex". my interpretation of "vanilla sex" does not include the phrase "he slammed into her" in any way, shape, or form, but that is probably semantics. for christian, deflowering the divine ms. steele in this manner is probably about as gently caressing as he gets. but then he introduces her to his "red room of pain" - which is not unlike jane eyre's red room of pain in color schematics but vastly different in purpose and construction. i'm pretty sure even jane's evil aunt didn't have a cat-o-nine-tails in there. when christian punishes ana by spanking her bottom like an insolent child who he then wants to "empty himself inside of", she gets upset. not necessarily because he debased or degraded her so violently. not because he hit her. but because she kind of liked some of it and she's confused.

i was ashamed for her.

look, if you're into that thing, own it. whatever. but the whole "i'm so confused, i don't know what i want, i need space, please stalk me so i can't have it" thing is just plain repulsive. and the novel's conclusion which has anastasia asking to be punished to see if it is a hard limit for her (spoiler alert, it is!) is so unpleasant that i couldn't even be proud of her for leaving because she had continually compromised herself so compliantly. 

but enough philosophizing. let's get down to brass tacks...or ben wa balls, whatever floats your sexy time boat.

soft limits:
1. james's writing is not good, but she writes with gusto, you gotta give her that! and i'm sort of impressed that a piece of fanfiction could produce this much hype and success gives hope to the rest of us who understand syntax, plot, indirect characterization, subtlety, foreshadowing, etc.
2. in the same vein, i respect that james has created a safe outlet for this type of erotica (you say smut, i'll say erotica). i feel bad for her children who have to go to school and get mocked that their mother is into some weird shit but i like that she's made a taboo subject safer for some people. 
3. i finished it - i mean, at any point, i could have stopped. yelled out my literary safe word and left. but i didn't. i stayed. i took my beating. i'm dealing with my shame. i'm moving on.

hard limits:
1. the writing (#sorrynotsorry) - it's bad. and not just because of the sexual stuff (although christian grey telling ms. steele that he wanted to, and i quote, "claim her ass" made me laugh for a good two minutes). she introduces static characters with compelling dialogue like "this is jose. jose has been my friend for the last two years. jose is a photographer. i like jose, but i don't like-like him!" it's just bad. also, she's clearly british imagining the american experience. "laters, baby"??? no one on this coast says "laters", sorry. we think it's wicked cute when benedict cumberbatch does it but do it we do not. oh, and don't even get me started on how poorly she writes men (particularly in email form). blech.
2. ALL the references to the inner goddess or ana's subconscious. i said it before, i'll say it again - it reads like she has multiple personalities. "my inner goddess was doing the dance of seven veils, the macarena, the chicken dance, and the hula while my subconscious scowled at her critically like bela karoli watching mary lou retton at the 1984 olympics." dude, no wonder you're confused, you're three different people!
3. christian - look, these things sink or swim on the strength of the leading male (by which i do not mean physical prowess). and christian is a d-bag. yes, james attempts to give him a sordid, troubled past that smacks of that ephemeral hope that somewhere deep down underneath the marbled, whips and chains, domineering exterior is a soft, nougatty center. i don't really think there is. and to imagine a future including potential offspring with a man who gets off so completely on the act of discipline is just so very, very, very wrong, indeed.
4. the belt - WTF. i'm sorry, this did so nothing for me except make me hate the whole lot of them.


more.


i'm giving one star mostly for the level of discomfort i felt at the end of the "novel". but the saddest realization for me is that i am curious as to how this story ends (thank you, mistress, may i have another?) - and this is perhaps the greatest source of female shame there is. that these relationships have a thrall over us, even though we know that they are terrible, unhealthy, and wrong, we want more. will christian ever concede the need for punishment? will ana ever say "screw it! let's get the whip!"?

yeah, i know, i sicken myself.

A Berry Blue Valentine (movie #2)

you know what's worse than a dead dog on the side of the road?


when that dead dog is a metaphor for your failed marriage.


derek cianfrance's blue valentine is exactly the movie you should see if the perceived love of your life stomps on your heart and crushes your independent, romantic spirit with her frigid good looks and her no-nonsense approach to bill paying and personal responsibility.

i have to admit, i'll pretty much see ryan gosling in anything. and i mean that. if there is even the remotest chance that the viewer gets a glimpse of any part of his anatomy, i'm game. but "older dean" with his emerging comb-over and stilted working class hipster vibe just felt too pathetic to be attractive.

of course, that's the point.

the reviews of this film seemed predominantly bleak but excellent, with words like "compelling," "layered," and "raw" primarily being the most-quoted adjectives used to describe the performances of the two leads (the aforementioned male god gosling and that chick from dawson's creek who didn't marry tom cruise).

of course, whenever the word "raw" gets attached to a person's performance, i immediately think of STDs, so there's that unfortunate connotation for ya. turns out, with the "seamy" sex here, i wasn't far off the mark; this film apparently merited a NC-17 rating, mostly for one scene where gosling performs a very special act on a very special part of michelle williams.

but here's the thing - graphic, sure, but gratuitous, no.

still, i didn't love this film. it was excellently acted and the performances were gritty and nuanced, to be sure, but the story felt inherently biased in favor of daydream believer dean who was so clearly a model for the director that it hurt. i felt like i was watching him rationalize the dissolution of one (or all) of his breakups - here he is, a man who sacrificed everything for a woman and child of questionable paternity, and he is met by a woman more focused on potential and drive than her aging beloved. don't get me wrong, michelle williams gives a stellar performance - and sometimes the expressions on her face seem so exquisitely pained that it makes you want to be mad at your spouse/boyfriend just on her behalf - but cianfrance gives her little in the ways of soul. we get brief glimpses into a mildly tortured home life, a bad example of love from her parents, a yearning for something more cut off prematurely by an unplanned pregnancy, and a knight in shining pleather that promises to be the family she so desperately thinks she is longing for.

but she's not. not really, anyways. she's overworked, overtired, and so totally over dean's apathetic approach to job security.

the bit with the seedy hotel has to be the saddest, most uncomfortable bit of cinema that i've seen in a long, long time.

and that's sayin' something.

here are the couple in sort of happier times:


4.5 stars - the acting really carries this one. plus, you know, ryan gosling.