• movie reviews

    Lucy (2014) *

    Trigger warning for abuse.

    The director of Lucy, Luc Besson, is a disturbing man to google (The Daily Beast). Stories from the shoot of The Professional are potentially triggering in regards to abuse of children, and I won’t recite them here. Suffice it to say, push-back from a young Natalie Portman’s parents and Jean Reno (the actor playing the titular character) prevented Portman from being put into horribly exploitative positions.

    In real life, Besson met a 12-year-old girl and began dating her openly when she was fifteen. They married two years later. Although there are more allegations of abuse toward Besson from several women, a French court dismissed them, and I don’t think we need to open a conversation about those allegations when his grooming, assault, and marriage to a girl so young is fact. I mean, it’s enough. It’s way more than enough.

    In any case, if you look across his filmography, you’ll see a man who often features sexualized young heroines getting beaten to crap. The greater context of his life makes his films seem like visualizations of cruel fantasies.

    Lucy is another iteration of this theme with Scarlett Johansson at the front. She’s a Woody Allen supporter (Fandomwire), and I’m never quite sure what to make of people who seem to gravitate toward the more abusive directors. Here, ScarJo is the model upon which Besson’s love of wounded women is inflicted, and I’m mostly grateful she was almost thirty-years-old shooting the movie.

    To paraphrase the elevator pitch for Lucy, a young woman visiting Taiwan becomes a drug mule and then sorta turns into a superhero when the bag breaks open inside of her.

    From the beginning, Lucy is depicted as a trembling antelope about to be slaughtered by cheetahs. The plot is structured to have her writhing sexily in pain until she’s on enough drugs to simply become bruised and covered in blood and robotic, which is weirdly (from personal experience) also extremely attractive to men who enjoy sexy abused women.

    I once knew an author whose fetish was transparently abuse against women; he often spoke of how much he loved seeing their strength by how they prevailed. How their bodies could be liquefied by the abuse, yet they would keep going. Abusive men enjoy seeing hurt women prevail to keep getting hurt, as with Joss Whedon and his bevy of abused characters and colleagues.

    This kind of man is not good at storytelling. There isn’t enough empathy for whole characters or humility for feedback. And Lucy isn’t a good movie.

    I didn’t understand it when I originally watched it because it was 2014 and I hadn’t done that many drugs yet. I’ve done drugs now. So I can tell you that the fake-science handwavium of this flick is entirely to prop up a story about how awesome drugs are. Yes. The plot of Lucy is, “Oh my God, I feel awesome on drugs. I know everything. I’m so smart. Drugs are great. It’s gonna kill me, but what a way to die!”

    This is drenched in buckets of pseudointellectualism, using the voice of Morgan Freeman (link to overview of abuse allegations on Variety) to narrate stuff about nature and predators and prey. The movie arrives at the most drug-logic conclusion ever: It’s about “time.” None of us would exist if not for “time.” Yeah, okay, Besson.

    Lovers of psychedelics will be familiar with the train of thought surrounding unity with the universe, the smallness of the individual, etc. Whether or not those thoughts have any validity, the contribution of people like Luc Besson to this vision is sort of like this dark, nasty, caustic side. He’s a guy with crappy fantasies having a good (for him) trip and I don’t want him in my vibe zone, you know?

    Possibly he wrote this after a too-large dose of shrooms, and someone would have been doing us all a favor by putting the coke-covered screenplay in the trash with the empty sheet of LSD tabs.

    I genuinely enjoy the part of Lucy where most dialogue is non-English and not subtitled. I feel like I’m a bad reviewer if I don’t call out things someone did well, and Besson’s ability to storytell beyond language barriers is an impressive feat to this monolingual country-locked American. He’s very visual and the confluence of all the drug-visuals and drug-logic (the movie even looks more or less like an acid trip) works on that aesthetic level.

    Besson truly has aesthetic skill in abundance. The Fifth Element coasts primarily on his ability to cast attractive, charismatic actors and draw upon (genuinely brilliant) French retrofuturism, even when the story is sloppy nonsense that also mostly serves to get us to the moments where Milla Jovovich whimpers in a bloodied ball.

    But god, Lucy is kinda embarrassing. Because doing that many drugs isn’t awesome; it only feels awesome because you are a chemical creature and you’re punching the button that gives you the good chemicals. Dying young and sexy like Lucy isn’t cool. You’re not really a genius when you’re drooling on your bathroom floor, talking about how the key is time, and it doesn’t gain any real potency when you put a forty million dollar budget behind it.

    There are so many other drug-related movies I’d prefer watching to this one. Lucy can go in the bin with Requiem for a Dream.

  • sara reads the feed

    The headache persists, the bad mood persists, I’m just Astarion’s boyfriend now

    As I mentioned yesterday, I’m pulling back on visits with my bffs caffeine and weed so my mood is sourer than hag testicles.

    I think I’d been eating food that had gone a little funny. My sense of taste has honestly never been the same since I got covid in 2022 – although it did mostly return – and I’m never sure if food Actually Tastes Bad or if I just Think Food Tastes Bad. So I was eating bad carton eggs for a couple days.

    I’ve discovered my digestion is tied to everything else in my body – basically if my digestion goes bad for any reason, *everything else* will go bad in a dramatic way. I had a *really* bad night two nights ago, and dodgy eggs would account for some of the issues. I am on lowkey gastric rest and reducing digestive stressors (like caffeine) so I will be okay.

    I hope you’re in the mood for me to be grumpy about the news because I sure am.

    ~

    Literally right now I am just kinda playing BGIII because existing is exhausting and I can barely move. Video games are the ideal distraction for a shitty Sara.

    I made one of my book characters as a cleric, and we hooked up with Astarion, and I’m good now. I feel like life is good.

    ~

    I’ve been haunted by this New Yorker article about so-called self-driving cabs ever since I read it. Did you know that those self-driving cabs without anyone visibly behind the wheel may (probably) still have a human worker actually hidden in a compartment inside the car?

    ~

    According to Netflix’s streaming data, JLo’s about as much the star of 2023 as Margo Robbie.

    It’s fun seeing Netflix release these numbers. Amazon would never do it for their book authors, but for…gosh, I was gonna say years, but it’s honestly at least a decade now…self-published and ebook-first titles have been vastly outpacing their traditional publishing brethren in audience. Indies could sprint circles around new releases from major household name authors sometimes, and nobody would ever report on it because those ephemeral numbers simply don’t count.

    Efforts from various publishing forces have kneecapped this to a degree, but there are still indies that the greater world had never heard of making 6+ figures *each month*, completely dominating entertainment in many households, just like JLo.

    And I bet JLo doesn’t compare to the viewerships of some independent youtubers or TikTokers.

    Will there ever be a cultural reconciliation of this media environment, or is the money and power traditional media companies hold total enough to keep this shit second-tier forever?

    I don’t actually have to care anymore, lol. I bounce off of everything popular no matter the distribution lines. The “entertainment media as social bonding” part of my brain is utterly broken. And since I’m only trying to serve my own creations to an audience of roughly 10 reliable buds, I’ve got zero horses in the game. Neigh? Nay.

    ~

    Twitch walked back their thing about nudity a little bit.

    My prediction is that it’s like Tumblr, where they got rid of nudity long enough to drive away all the interesting, disabled, queer adult creators, but they’ll let the porn bots back.

    ~

    Trains in Poland were designed with ransomware and got bricked by the creator. (Ars Technica)

    ~

    Since we learned the government has been spying on Apple’s push notifications without warrants, Apple now has the same policy as Google: law enforcement needs a warrant. (Engadget)

    ~

    Variety asks, where are the major nominations for Ava DuVernay’s movie?

     

  • sara reads the feed

    I’m in a dreadful mood, say grumpy things about movies, and kick rocks

    I’m working on a couple reviews right now that feel a little too big for my normal review format. Plus, they aren’t romcoms, so it doesn’t feel urgent.

    Birds of Prey: The Fabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn was the last movie I saw in the theaters before the 2020 pandemic shutdowns, and for that reason alone, I hadn’t revisited it in ages. There was just a big flip in my life shortly after it came out. Now I feel like I can’t review it without talking about Suicide Squad, The Suicide Squad, and Barbie, because the four movies are all part of Margo Robbie’s search for a big IP girlboss feminism outlet.

    Lucy (2014) is another movie I saw in theaters. This one comes from the days where I would watch anything in the theater, and I didn’t know Luc Besson married a fucking child, so I thought seeing another action movie from the guy who made The Fifth Element would be interesting. Lucy completely baffled me in 2014. Even knowing I would hate it, I wanted to know what I missed, so I watched again.

    I’ve now taken enough drugs and encountered enough rapist abusers to parse the movie, and I have a *real* angry review to write about it. I just don’t know where to start when I’m this disgusted.

    Anyhoo those reviews will be coming at *some* point.

    ~

    My mood is really negative today because I’m having health problems. I need to take time to reorient myself in love and peace because I’m also deciding to withdraw on Substances (namely mood-boosters cannabis and caffeine) so it’s going to be a lotta feeling real crappy for a minute. Right now, you’re getting the crabbiest read of the news possible.

    ~

    Balloon Juice has a current covid news roundup. The tl;dr is that you should be masking again if you stopped.

    ~

    Variety rounds up tributes to Andre Braugher from Brooklyn 99 cast members. My heart hurts, so I’m glad I got to laugh at this story.

    “Insecure” showrunner Prentice Penny, who also wrote for “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” recalled an on-set memory between himself, Crews and Braugher: “He was so warm with us and then when a white person would walk by, he’d look serious again. He then leaned in and said ‘Gotta keep ‘em on they toes.’”

    ~

    Brian Cox reads a poem by Palestinian teacher Refaat Alareer. Sorry for the twt link.

    ~

    Guttation is one of my favorite things my plants do, and I don’t actually love this art. (Colossal) It feels meant to evoke gross-out feelings with the drippy look of the statues, and the amount of guttation depicted.

    To me, guttation is a graceful thing, a happy thing my plants do when I’m tending them well. I have occasionally reached out my tongue to take a tiny drop of guttation off a philodendron leaf. I don’t poison my plants with pesticides or anything, and a tiny drop has a lot of flavors from something inedible, and it feels precious to be able to taste it. Or I will take the guttation on my finger and see how it streaks like a tear. Guttation feels sweet and intimate to me, but these sculptures feel loud, gross, and visceral–something I’d enjoy, probably, if framed by anything besides guttation.

    ~

    Extremely rich man James Cameron is talking about his jerk-off project to people who just can’t wait to hear what extremely rich man is doing to waste money next. (Variety) Apparently Avatar 3 is going to be more complex. I assume that means he’s going to double down on being racist and tell an even worse story about it.

    If you’d like to hear about how he wasted money in the past, there’s also an article about hiring short people to make his Titanic set look bigger. I feel like there’s a dirty joke waiting to happen here. I’ll get back to you later.

    ~

    This article about ChatGPT getting “lazy” (Ars Technical) is thought-provoking to me, because marketing really, really wants us to attribute humanlike qualities to ChatGPT and it’s succeeding. We talk about large language models hallucinating, we conveniently like to pretend it isn’t stealing from everyone, and people keep acting like these things learn.

    It’s similar to the fallacies that lead us to compare human brains to computers, when they don’t work similarly even a little bit. Psychological pareidolia is natural to us; we humanize everything instinctively. It’s adorable. Marketing is taking advantage of it, and we’re just letting them do it.

    ~

    Variety again: Anne Hathaway is right to say that she couldn’t have done Barbie instead of Margot Robbie, though I think Hathaway does have the look/charm. She’s simply not on the girlboss feminist arc Margot Robbie has been. Literally only Margot Robbie, coming out of her experiences with WB as Harley Quinn, could have made Barbie the way it turned out, and people seem really happy with its level of engagement with gender issues.

    They also note that Hathaway would have been Black Cat in Raimi’s Spider-Man 4, which means there’s no universe where we don’t get subjected to an extremely shallow portrayal of a feline-themed comic book character by extremely flat Hathaway, who is much more Barbie Comics than DC Comics. (No insult.)

    ~

    Chain pharmacies are bootlickers who will give cops anything they want without a warrant. (Engadget)

    ~

    “Ew, animal sacrifice from ancient cultures!” says the title of a blog published within a culture that lives off meaningless mass death. (Ars Technica)

    It’s a good read after the title, though.

    Ancient writings describe equid sacrifices in the Mediterranean, sometimes involving hundreds of animals, but there had previously not been much evidence to back this up. There were far fewer than a hundred at Casas del Turuñuelo, although most were equids. The ages of all sacrifices at their time of death were estimated by signs of wear on their teeth. Most were found to have been male working animals in the prime of life, and eight of them had wear caused by iron bits found in their mouths. This provides further evidence for them having been used for war, transportation, or agricultural work.

    Something that stood out in Phase 1 was that the equids in that phase had evidently been sacrificed in pairs or at least positioned that way postmortem. The archaeologists suggest they might have pulled carts together before death. There was also an instance in Phase 2 where the necks of two skeletons were crossed in the center of what was once a courtyard. Whether this was part of a ritual associated with either a deity or the afterlife of a deceased owner is unknown.

    Why horses, in particular, were sacrificed remains an open question. The researchers think there is a possibility that they were used in a funerary sacrifice so the deceased could enter the afterlife alongside their loyal companions. This has been evidenced in other ancient cultures, such as the Scythians of what is now Russia and Ukraine, who would sacrifice horses at a funeral. Whether this was the case for at least some of the equids at Casas del Turuñuelo is still a mystery.

    ~

    The New Yorker spends more time reviewing Wonka than I would bother, and it sounds like what it looked like in the trailers.

    ~

    My absolute favorite read of the week was this article about a mother helping her local addict community with harm reduction. It’s wonderful, meaningful work, and NPR handled it with great sensitivity.

    Renae occasionally monitors illegal drug use at her home for Christina and a few dozen other people she’s grown close to over the years. It’s an informal, rarely discussed version of the controversial overdose prevention centers, also known as supervised consumption sites, where trained staff supervise people using drugs. Those clinics are endorsed by the American Medical Association and other leading medical groups but condemned by critics who say they sanction, even endorse, drug use.

    Heavy but good read. Very human. Very loving.

    ~

    Fun photos over here on Al Jazeera English: A new kind of quinceañera celebration — for Mexico’s elderly

  • source: Miramax films
    movie reviews

    She’s All That (1999) *****

    Does any movie get more nineties than this one? Saying “after losing his girl to a Real World star, Freddie Prinze Junior does hackey-sack on stage at a slam poetry event” makes me feel so nineties, I just exploded in neon abstracts and skateboarded away listening to ska music.

    She’s All That is one of those cultural touchstones for for a generation that I missed out on. I was just a little too young for the movie, and my older sibling didn’t care for it either, so I wasn’t exposed until I spotted it on Netflix. Back in the 00s, the fake-bet-relationship movie we loved was Shakespearean 10 Things I Hate About You.

    (Interestingly, 10 Things came out of the same year as She’s All That, sort of like when Antz and A Bug’s Life came out in the same year, or Repo Men and Repo! The Genetic Opera, or Dante’s Peak and Volcano.)

    10 Things was an adaptation of Taming of the Shrew, but She’s All That considers itself a Pygmalion story. It cares more about the disparate classes of the heroine and hero than the heroine’s difficult personality. Freddie Prinze Jr’s character is both prince and fairy godmother; his belief in Laney helps make her transform into the princess version of herself. In the end, Laney remarks that she feels like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (but not a sex worker), which means she’s talking about the Pygmalion elements.

    The movie is telling us what it means to be about, and I think that’s interesting because it’s not really the impact. The actual impact on culture for She’s All That was becoming iconic for the ugly-girl-turns-hot trope. You know, when we pretend a normal- or hot-looking woman is ugly/unattractive/undesirable because of her hair and glasses.

    I hadn’t seen this movie before, but I saw the parody in Not Another Teen Movie. So I was surprised that She’s All That *wasn’t* the worst iteration of the trope. Laney has been struggling with low self-esteem, congested creativity, and sometimes insults herself out loud. Darling young Anna Paquin acknowledges that post-makeover Laney isn’t really improved, just different.

    The actual change isn’t a haircut, contact lenses, and higher contrast makeup. It’s Laney deciding to participate in the world.

    In fact, it’s a lot like the execution of the same trope with Toula in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It’s not that Toula wasn’t hot before. She just believed her family calling her some dowdy old woman and put herself out to pasture. Laney has put herself out to pasture because of grief.

    The heartfelt element of Laney’s journey is probably why She’s All That originally resonated with audiences. Freddie Prinze Junior is a pitch-perfect pining hero, too.

    Including a dance scene from Matthew Lillard and prom choreography echoing West Side Story adds just enough camp to keep disbelief suspended. This was really a nice mix of sincere and silly, plus some 90s gross-out humor I couldn’t handle in the era and still kinda don’t love.

    Don’t look away when they’re in the cafeteria. This movie was shot at Torrance High School, the same school used in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Sarah Michelle Gellar makes an appearance in costume as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. SMG doesn’t just share fictional high schools with the movie, either. She’s still married to Freddie Prinze Junior. Awww. That means Buffy gets pining love eyes from Zack Siler to this day. <3

    (image source: Miramax Films)

  • sara reads the feed

    Migraine, labor history and present, cool use for sisal

    A migraine has set in right behind my left eye. This looks to be the third day with the migraine in residence. I am grumpy, I don’t like anything, if you touch me I might bite you.

    ~

    People are mad, but Sophie Coppola claims she tried not to make Elvis the villain in Priscilla. (Variety)

    Well, if Elvis didn’t want a legacy as an abuser, maybe he shouldn’t have groomed and abused an underaged woman.

    Maybe folks should be mad that culture has put us in a place to lionize abusers so that we feel compelled to take up defense of abusers when we learn they are abusers, instead of turning to embrace the survivors.

    ~

    This day in labor history… (Lawyers, Guns, & Money)

    ~

    Captive in a chicken coop: The plight of debt bondage workers (NPR)

    Note that bonded labor is illegal in India, but persists.

    Although the Indian parliament banned bonded labor in 1976 for infringing on human rights, it was never fully eliminated. Bodies like the International Labour Organization documented a reduction in the prevalence of bonded labor but found that it continued in various forms in rural areas, often targeting people from communities that were marginalized by India’s caste system.

    …Earth’s changing climate forced more people to seek these “debt bondage” jobs, researchers say. When local harvests fail due to drought, workers on these farms may feel they have no option other than to travel to places where they can earn a living, even if that means they must agree to forced labor conditions.

    And paying back the contractors is more difficult now as well. Record levels of heat may mean the bonded laborers can’t put in as many outdoor hours or may have to work at a slower pace… The sugar industry – India was the leading global sugar producer until last year – has been hit by an increasing number of droughts that have taken a toll on a crop that consumes a lot of water.

    ~

    A Sinhala family drama called “Tentigo” is getting a Tamil remake in India, and the concept sounds amazing. You had me at dead guy penis family shenanigans. (Variety)

    ~

    Verizon fell for a fake search warrant and gave a woman’s stalker her info. He traveled several states to get arrested outside her home with a knife.

    I’m sure Verizon will respond with new bureaucracy and red tape, but none of that will matter. Cops are domestic abusers too, and everyone has an agenda of their own. Nobody should have access to this information. Privacy is critical.

    ~

    Julia Roberts turned down “You’ve Got Mail.” She thinks that “My Best Friend’s Wedding” deserves a sequel. (Variety)

    I don’t know that Roberts could have done YGM. She’s so charismatic and charming, but in a different way than Meg Ryan. I’d rather watch Meg Ryan performing mostly alone. She’s got this powerful physicality. Roberts is better when she’s opposite someone, imo.

    MBFW could have a sequel that is an actual romcom, sure. Because MBFW was a black comedy taking a perspective on a villainous female archetype, not a romcom.

    ~

    The FDA approved a CRISPR treatment for sickle cell, which is soooo cool. (Ars Technica)

    ~

    Digby’s Hullabaloo brings very important news to our feed readers with the birth of this new baby monkey.

    ~

    This Malaysian Oscar submission sounds rad. Puberty body horror? Gimme. (Variety)

    ~

    Sorry for the link to Twitter, but having one’s funeral with people dancing in the aisles and Nick Cave performing is the only church funeral aesthetic I’ll accept.

    ~

    Forced to become British: How Brexit created a new European diaspora (AJE)

    The traditional view of naturalisation, the process by which an immigrant becomes a full citizen, is that it’s the final step in the journey to integration. “But in the case of Brexit and Europeans in the UK, the opposite happened,” says Nando Sigona, co-lead of the Rebordering Britain & Britons after Brexit (MIGZEN) research project. “People hadn’t felt the need to naturalise because they felt safe and comfortable as Europeans in Britain. Now they were forced to naturalise to defend themselves.”

    The act of naturalisation, therefore, made people feel less “British” – or at least less “included” in the UK – rather than more.

    Instead of citizenship being a celebration of belonging, many Europeans have naturalised in a state of resentment and have felt even like they’re doing it under duress. “[Our interviews with Europeans] have found a complete lack of trust in the British state,” Sigona says.

    ~

    China is turning COVID quarantine centers into apartments for workers. (NPR) Even though China’s got a lot of *serious* issues as a state, I’m jealous of how they pull together massive public works and then have *something* to work with afterward. These flawed but tangible creations. It doesn’t feel like my government is even capable.

    ~

    Ars Technica talks using sisal as a fiber for homemade menstrual products. You know sisal rope: we wrap it around the cat trees because kitties love to claw it. I imagine it’s not as scrapey when repurposed for application to the cooterial region.

    Plus sisal is an invasive plant, so this is a good use.

    ~

    Alas, Chuck E. Cheese is eliminating the animatronic team in all but 1-2 locations. (NPR) It makes sense, but it’s weird how they didn’t even mention FNAF in the article. There’s just a huge chunk of culture that explicitly associates the animatronics with horror now, and there seems to be zero engagement with that. I guess they don’t have to consider it a part of their brand identity if they don’t want to, but kids’ horror is huge, and I think they’re missing out by not tucking away the robot mouse for use in the Halloween season.

  • credit: 20th Century Studios
    movie reviews

    Die Hard (1988) ****

    Dear Rory,

    I finally came up with a pitch for reviewing our favorite Christmas movie, Die Hard.

    Like I totally agree, there’s no point trying to give a traditional review to Die Hard. I don’t think I can come up with a better way to explain it than you did. Whatever interesting 1980s class commentary might happen irt blue collar figures versus the globalist corporate entity is super-numbed by the fact that cops don’t belong in the labor movement ever, at all, period. And I don’t think we’re at the point where we’re ready to tackle The Die Hard Problem (movies and TV making Black actors the face of the justice system to avoid engaging with the racial dynamics of our carceral system). That takes away a whole lotta more-substantial commentary on the flick. Maybe when I start watching 80s action movies?

    Anyhoodles, yes, the copaganda is way beyond the scope of this review, so I was thinking I should just treat it like it’s any other holiday romcom.

    I know what you’re thinking. People are bored of arguing about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie.

    But are they bored of talking about Die Hard as a Christmas Romcom?

    The argument here isn’t, “Is it a Christmas romcom?” but rather, “Who’s the romantic pairing?” Right? I think that’s the argument for our review.

    Let me take a whack the pros and cons of each potential romantic hero for our central heroine, John McClane. (Obv he’d be the heroine; he’s kind of a manic pixie copboy who likes to frolic barefoot through the park broken glass.)

    Holly Gennaro: This is the second most obvious romantic hero for John. Holly’s his ex, and a lot of people love ex reunion stories. There are cute kids involved. Bringing a family back together is such a nice hopeful visual for the ending. Plus, Holly has to realize that John being a *massive* pain in the ass is endearing when it’s aimed at a villain, which is romantic character growth if I’ve ever heard it. Also, Bonnie Bedelia is sooo smokin.

    Sgt. Al Powell: The physically distant but emotionally intimate relationship between Al and John is reminiscent of classics like You’ve Got Mail, Serendipity, Your Place Or Mine, and The Holiday. They love each other long before they’ve ever locked eyes. John and Al are smooching atop the thin blue line. It’s romantic?

    Hans Gruber: My personal favorite and the most obvious pairing. As with Rock Hudson and Doris Day, we love seeing a couple with spicy chemistry. Entire romcoms are built on a couple arguing with each other. Nobody argues like Hans and John. The way they lob quips back and forth between each other is basically foreplay. Their playful banter once they finally meet blows the top off the building. Plus, dreamy Alan Rickman has a history being Austen heroes, so he’s got the chops to sweep a giggling John off his bloody feet.

    What do you think? People are going to love it if I write a review like this, right? I really think I’ve stumbled onto something genius here.

    Hope you’re having a great time six feet away from me, which I could know if I spoke to you instead of sending this email.

    Love, Sara

    (image credit: 20th Century Studios)

  • movie reviews

    The Proposal (2009) *

    I go into movies daring myself to like them, at least when I’m on a themed watch. I think it’s more work and more interesting to find reasons to like something that you ordinarily might not. The Proposal came out in 2009, a year when I was going to see basically every movie in the theater out of boredom, so I already watched and disliked this one. But 2009 was “early days” and my story literacy was much lower.

    If you asked me for a review of The Proposal in 2009, I would have said something like, “Everything is super sexist surrounding Sandra Bullock’s character and the end doesn’t resolve stuff right.”

    I expected to have a much more complicated reaction to this movie now. And my review is certainly wordier and more-informed.

    But basically, everything is super sexist and the end doesn’t resolve stuff right.

    In The Proposal, Sandra Bullock is a Canadian about to get deported from the United States despite her work visa because she fucked around and found out. She insists Canadians aren’t the type we’re trying to get out of the country. I think she actually said that immigration enforcement is only there for terrorists, which is the way women like Sandra Bullock in 2009 says “not white people.” ICE is a monstrosity that terrorizes loads of people and Bullock’s character is fine with that but it’s not supposed to terrorize her. She dismisses all the people out in the immigration waiting room as like gardeners and stuff. Sandra Bullock’s character is massively racist.

    Anyway, Bullock isn’t disliked at work because of her racism, but because she’s cold and work-driven and doesn’t fuck around with the feelings of people around her. This is another autism-coded Sandra Bullock character, like in Miss Congeniality, and yeah it all comes across super sexist. Her assistant, Ryan Reynolds, extremely insecure and defensive in his masculinity, runs around saying absurdly sexist things about this woman, and fostering an environment where everyone at work hates the powerful boss-lady.

    I think we’re supposed to feel bad for him that this racist woman involves a sexist guy for fraud. Bullock leverages her power bribe Reynolds into faking an immigration marriage with her. And now we’re off to the cute part of the movie? Where they fall in love? Presumably? I want them to both kill each other.

    It turns out Reynolds is ALSO RICH. We only care about rich people in this movie. I note this because class is a major element in romcoms! You often see cross-class romances because the fantasy of economic security gets a lot of people real horny, understandably. Bullock’s “While You Were Sleeping” is notable for being about people who feel like they could be your neighbors. Here, the wealth of Bullock and Reynolds’s characters is not part of a fantasy, but simply a fact that relieves Bullock’s character because she won’t have to bother putting up with poor people stuff, like a studio apartment.

    I will resist a full synopsis. I don’t think The Proposal is worth my effort.

    However, you should know that it turns out Ryan Reynolds is a “Kennedy of Alaska,” and his character actually has Tlingit descent via his grandmother, Betty White, who spends a while chanting and doing drums in the forest wearing regalia reminiscent of First Nations. This provides an opportunity for the racist character played by Sandra Bullock to have a “charming” dance scene and butt-shake to Lil John and the East Side Boyz. This movie is the whitest thing I’ve seen in a while.

    Bear in mind when I say “the whitest thing,” I’m talking about the structures of whiteness, the things that Whiteness as a Caste in America loves. The power plays. The wealth. Colonization. Dismissal of nonwhite people as human beings.  The movie itself holds narrative approval for racist attitudes without challenging them, which is enough.

    There’s also a character played by Oscar Nuñez, who seems to be a family employee? of the Alaskan Kennedys. He’s named Ramone and stands in dubious positions of subservience. He’s a waiter at one point and a stripper at another. One nonwhite guy to serve them all? That’s not weird. His presence reminds me of the way Mickey Rooney was called upon to play a racist caricature for “comic relief” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s almost like Bullock’s remarks being dismissive of nonwhite people is held by the person who wrote the screenplay and is thus incapable of writing a nonwhite character who is fully human rather than a leering caricature of servitude.

    Regardless, I don’t think cutting the racist remarks from Bullock’s character, the Tlingit art used without context, etc would have saved the screenplay.

    This screenplay is just kind of crap.

    It’s barely a romcom, for one thing. It’s a romcom the way people who don’t understand romances write romance. It’s a movie where two attractive people realize the other person is actually a human, and because straight people don’t really need to know their partners in a meaningful way, they decide to be together at that point. They show us enough interaction between Reynolds and Bullock to justify a physical attraction, and even a friendlier work environment, but they barely have enough involvement for me to believe they’ll be long-term friends.

    Neither of them markedly changes over the course of the movie. The plot changes *only* how they view one another, which takes us from bickering and drenched in toxicity to…respecting one another to do less sexual harassment (he likes grabbing her ass while she tells him not to do that).

    Bullock arrives at the “grand gesture” from Reynolds and neither of them have changed! At all! Love didn’t change anything. Nothing healed.

    This movie shallowly touches upon the beats of a romcom without understanding why the machinery works. Even tropes I ordinarily enjoy, like the heroine falling in love with the hero’s family, and the mere presence of Betty White, did not stop me from hating The Proposal all over again.

    Romance should feel seismic and inevitable, and this just felt cynical, horrible, and shallow. Also racist.

    So of course I looked up the writer. In addition to Kurtzman and Orci making their era-appropriate uncredited contributions, this is mostly written by Peter Chiarelli, “a former creative executive at MGM who decided to use his downtime after the company was bought by Sony to do some writing.”

    That is exactly the kind of person who seems like they’d have written this movie. Full insult. I’d hate to see what was in his screenplay before Kurtzman and Orci got to it.

    ~

    Turns out my 2009 impression of The Proposal was more than adequate. Including this movie in a watch of greater romcoms is a waste of time, and I walked away hating everything a little more instead of feeling hope.

    (It’s a little funny revisiting this because I’ve hated Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock since the late 00s and I couldn’t remember why. Now I remember. They suit the project well. Full insult.)

    (I didn’t post a banner image on this article because I looked it up and Disney owns The Proposal, and I’m not going to argue fair use for editorial purposes on a negative review with Disney.)