• movie reviews

    Review: 9 to 5 (1980) *****

    What an absolute delight of working class rage. I can’t get over the elegance of the plot, nor how well the wish fulfillment is supported narratively and visually throughout the film. Total classic.

    From the beginning, our trio of heroines are characterized by smart costuming. I could never say enough about the self-assured beauty of our Boundaries-Loving Queen Dolly Parton, who knows a beautiful woman is going to Just Have to Deal With Some Crap, but won’t let it make her any less beautiful. Jane Fonda’s expressive professionalism gives us a quick sense of a woman who is pulling herself “in” to try to get along. Lily Tomlin begins wearing the most masculine suits, having long survived in a toxic environment.

    The environment itself begins costumed in brutalist gray-blue. Cramped desks allow no individuality. Schedules are micromanaged without concern for the workers’ needs. Mistakes are punished severely with verbal abuse.

    And the boss—oh boy, the boss. I hope you’ve never had to deal with a boss as openly misogynistic as this one, but most of us have probably known someone similar who hid it better. My first male boss tried to have me handle the department holiday cards because i had “nice handwriting” (I do not) (my job was computer tech). But this boss has every bad experience you could have, and then some, played to such comic levels that you want all the worst things to happen to him.

    Our heroines’ fantasies about various ways to kill and dominate the boss are a laugh riot. Would you expect any different from such enormous talents?

    As they scheme against their boss in the most hysterical ways (I too wish I could dangle Some People from my ceiling in BDSM gear when they’re jerks), the trio reform themselves and their workplace. Their joy is expressed in expressive, freeing costuming, while the office itself becomes gowned in warmer colors, an open floor design highlighting accessibility for a worker using a wheelchair, the opportunity to have family-friendly flexible schedules, and even a daycare.

    Of course the boss deserves the worst to happen to him, but poetic justice ensures something better than the worst happens: He is praised for turning the department’s productivity around and promoted to a job he doesn’t want in Brazil. Bye!

    If only these three characters could take charge of the United States for a few years.

    Image credit: 20th Century Fox

  • a french bulldog sitting at a laptop
    sara reads the feed

    Sara Reads the Feed #1

    Happy Wednesday. It’s a quiet week in the House of Reine. We put up the Christmas tree (this is late for us) and I’ve been enjoying my holiday turn toward romance- and comedy-themed movies. I watch a lot of the same movies every year, even if I hate them, which is how you end up with me developing an entire standup routine my family must endure whenever I watch Love Actually again.

    I try to have an RSS feed reader that keeps me scrolling through hundreds of articles a day across many sites – that way I get a broad look at things and don’t get bogged down on Reddit. It seems it might be fun to read the feed “together” and round up some snippets of my commentary on the articles as we go.

    ~

    Meta calls for legislation to require parental approval for teens’ app downloads.

    I don’t love anything that puts walls between youths and the potential support and information of the internet. Parents’ best interests are not always the kids’ best interests. Kids who are queer, abused, or otherwise reluctant to share everything with their parents deserve to be able to find community elsewhere. Sometimes the internet is the only place that can happen.

    It seems like Meta doesn’t want to engage with their audience-manipulating practices; they want to put the onus on safety elsewhere, even if that’s going to make youths more vulnerable whether they get on the site or not. It’s fine for Instagram to manipulate people as long as adults give the thumbs up, right?

    ~

    Workers Unionize at Drawn & Quarterly, Vaunted Literary Graphic Novel Publisher.

    It’s wonderful seeing how unions standing together are inspiring more unions to do the same. The labor movement historians called as a likely follow-up to this pandemic continues to gather momentum.

    While “working with the publishing team and D&Q authors is a joy,” one publishing assistant, commenting under condition of anonymity, said in a statement, “we often work long hours and engage with the comics industry outside of our jobs because we are passionate about bringing excellent comics to readers without additional compensation. While there are lots of opportunities to take on more responsibilities and learn more skills in the publishing office, there are rarely paths to promotion for assistants. It’s hard to see or commit to a future if there are not transparent conversations about what all our learning and acquired skills might lead to.”

    I hope the workers get what they’re asking for.

    ~

    Like Obamacare that way: Benefits from Biden’s infrastructure bill sinking in.

    People generally like the impacts of Biden’s infrastructure bill.

    Still, some polls show Biden trailing Trump.

    Many Americans have always supported fascism. The ability to own, control, and destroy other humans is core to the foundation of the United States of America. Until we honestly reconcile this history and contemporary reality, we’re going to have plenty of enthusiastic grassroots support for getting fascist strongmen in charge.

    That’s why the popularity of Biden’s infrastructure bill isn’t necessarily salient to the election. The fascist right has an unchanging base. Meanwhile, other Americans can see our own history and know that the center-right incrementalism of the Democratic party is worse than treading water unless we have serious reform against corruption.

    I’m optimistic that the aforementioned labor movement could give rise to new leadership with a genuine eye for reform, but I don’t really have anything to back up that feeling except my dreamy wish it would happen.

    ~

    It’s been 10 years since Batkid. He’s now fifteen-years-old and healthy. That’s so nice.

    ~

    Who in the world wants this? Edith Piaf AI-Generated Biopic is in the works at Warner Music.

    The film will be narrated by an AI-generated facsimile of Piaf’s voice and promises to “uncover aspects of her life that were previously unknown.”

    “Animation will provide a modern take on her story, while the inclusion of archival footage, stage and TV performances, personal footage and TV interviews will provide audiences with an authentic look at the significant moments of Piaf’s life,” the music company said in announcing the project.

    It’s hard to imagine how artificial narrative would be superior to human narrator. Since the estate is involved, it’s not like anyone else has the right to tell them no, but I suppose audiences will determine whether they prefer a resurrected Piaf or La Vie en Rose.

  • a photo of a Cynopterus brachyotis specimen
    Diaries,  facebook

    I am in shape. Potato-on-stilts is a shape.

    I gained a lot of weight in the last 3.5 years, went from US size 4 to a size 16, and it’s funny how my internet now advertise ~plus size clothes~ to me aggressively. i feel incredibly normal sized at size 16 but the ads are like “Hey fatty! Want clothes for your FATNESS? You can still look hot EVEN IF YOU ARE A FAT FATTY” Also, diet products. SO MANY DIET PRODUCTS.

    It’s wild because at size 16, I feel incredibly normal and I’m within the average spectrum of sizes in my community. I am a 35 year old woman, mother of two, who does not leave her house right now; my body is very suitable for my circumstances. I am five foot ten and around two hundred pounds. Most men would not consider themselves overweight at these proportions, particularly when they do as much house work as I do. It is only women who must feel insufficient because we dared to stop counting calories.

    Capitalism hopes that changing in this way has completely flipped my identity around. I now need to identify as a PLUS SIZE GIRRRRL who wants to DRESS FOR MY CURRRVES (I support women who do this, you’re all really hot, marry me). Personally I dress so that I look like an eldritch witch-elf lurking in my house, like a trap spider, hoping to eat anyone who passes nearby. I do this at all dress sizes.

    And oh my god, the absurd diet/exercise products. I know more about diet & exercise than folks at my eating disorder hospitalization program did (you know how intense I am about crochet now? I was that intense about diet/fitness for 10 years) and I know exactly how ridiculous, injurious, and foolish these ads are. They seem so predatory, too. They are trying to bite at one of the most vulnerable places on my hide.

    Whether it’s “buy your way to pseudo-empowerment” or “fix yourself” nonsense, all I get out of this is that I might have grown in my relationship with body image, but society is still *really really* sick.

    Also I’m not always happy with my body’s aesthetics, but I’ve become a big fan of Body Neutrality. This is just me. I’m not going to hurt myself to change it. Ads aren’t going to talk me into hurting myself to change it. I’m fine.

    I kinda hate curvy fashion because none of it fits me. I’m an apple body type. If I didn’t mostly gain weight in my waist, I’d be two dress sizes smaller. They always think women will have big butts, big hips, big boobs, and then…any waist, whatsoever. I don’t have a waist! I’m not made that way! So I buy this stuff, and it cinches around my waist then looks like saggy diaper butt. Capitalism, if you want me to spend money on this stuff, you will have to make things that actually fit me. I’m going to keep wearing witchy muumuus.

  • Image credit: Warner Bros.
    movie reviews

    Review: You’ve Got Mail (1998) **

    What if I took this dainty pair of embroidery scissors and trimmed around Tom Hanks’s character to remove him? We would end up with something that feels more like women’s fiction, and something I wouldn’t want to rip up with my teeth like my dog eating socks.

    The short summary is: A small businesswoman is trying to make her mother’s bookstore survive the opening of Barnes & Noble*. Not only does she fail and lose the bookstore, but she ends up with the guy responsible for the changing economic circumstances (literally, this guy is bourgeoisie, a boss, a wage-thief, the kind of guy whose whole family goes to the guillotine in the revolution) that spent the last few months actively lying to her gd face in an incredibly personal way.

    Thing is, I think the bitter ending is totally right for Meg Ryan as a creator. She’s obviously a Nerd For Story. Her new non-romcom with David Duchovny also doesn’t have an HEA. Ryan knows her career is shaped around the fantasy of love and hope healing, but she wants to know where the boundaries on that exist in reality.

    And the beauty of Meg Ryan’s performance is what keeps me coming back to this movie. She *is* overloaded with hope. She *hopes* she will give her mother’s gift to her own daughter, who doesn’t exist yet. She *hopes* people will continue coming to her bookstore because they care about children’s books the way Fox Books* doesn’t. She hopes to remain the center of a community. She hopes to do this the rest of her life.

    So this movie takes away all of Meg Ryan’s hopes and says, “What now?” Still, this woman picks herself up and says, “I have lost everything. It is time for something new.” She becomes an editor. The legacy of her mother turns out (subtextually) to be one of resilience.

    And that’s not how the story frames it.

    Rather, this movie is the story of capitalism bulldozing small business hopes, and it has *nothing* encouraging to say about it.

    Meg Ryan’s mom didn’t want to pass an empire of capital onto her daughter; she wanted to pass hope on. And the Fox family, who HAS built an empire of capital, stealing wages, destroying businesses and culture, gets everything they could possibly want. Including the son of the family getting the enchanting Meg Ryan.

    You can talk about how Joe Fox isn’t entirely happy with this situation. We see his discontent. To that, I would like to say, so fn what? He doesn’t lose anything. The rewards of plot and economy are showered on him no matter how badly he behaves so persistently. He even continues lying to and manipulating our heroine after her business has fallen. We’re supposed to think this is when they *really* fall in love.

    Nora Ephron, are you okay? Do you need a lesbian strike team to remove you from your life?

    ~

    FWIW, if I wanted this to work as a romcom, I’d tweak the script so that Meg Ryan’s character feels burdened by her mom’s legacy and *wants* something new, so that it’s an unexpected gift when capitalism-wearing-Tom-Hanks-face bulldozes her life. It wouldn’t be a massive change to take this ending from feeling like spit in her eye to being like “Ok, I guess she’s happier anyway.”

    Image credit: Warner Bros.

  • Image credit: Touchstone Pictures
    movie reviews

    Review: Runaway Bride (1999) **

    Giving Richard Gere more acting opportunities than he can successfully model, pout, and brood through, Runaway Bride is yet another romcom where heterosexual people argue a lot and we’re supposed to believe they fall in love in the middle of that. Some marketing genius brought Richard Gere and Julia Roberts together again hoping to remake their legendary freshman outing. It kinda works.

    But wait. Back up. Perhaps we can believe people fall in love while arguing (I also watched You’ve Got Mail in the same day and OH BOY are opinions incoming). But “belief” is something that Runaway Bride does not earn from me. It’s not even trying.

    The whole plot is inoffensively flimsy. A dude writes a hate-article about a woman he’s never met, and her letter to the editor in response gets him fired. This is what locks them into this enemies-to-lovers relationship; he vengefully seeks her out to prove he was right. When I type it out like that, it sounds a lot more believable to me than the actual execution of the movie, where it’s hard to believe Gere has so little power (even with his ex-wife in charge) that he’s got zero job security, that a single woman complaining would make him lose his entire job, and that somehow he has to prove she really does suck in order to redeem himself.

    The execution of throwing these two together really feels like “let’s get Gere and Roberts back in the same room, STAT,” and I half blame the script, half blame Gere for not attempting to rise to meet the material. *He* sure knows that his inclusion in this movie is a marketing thing, and that he doesn’t have to act *well* to secure his job. Gere is not actually in any risk. I don’t believe his character’s heart is at risk either, which makes me shrug at most everything they go through.

    Things start turning from harassment to ~love~ when he’s the only person who doesn’t mock her at a wedding rehearsal. Previously he was actually kinda stalking her and I was wondering where this Cozy Small Town’s obligatory police force is because I think there’s a cuddly fatherly cop trope that could have removed Gere at any moment. Anyway, five seconds of respect from the one male human being in Roberts’s vicinity makes her fall in love with Gere.

    Then Roberts makes out with Gere in front of her husband-to-be, hardcore, and she’s like, “Actually, I’m not going to marry my fourth fiance. I’m going to marry the man who came to town to harass me!”

    Did I mention that Julia Roberts’s character flaw is being an extremely ADHD woman who stims in front of fans to try to emotionally regulate before a wedding, has poor social boundaries around men that make them think she’s flirting, and is generally the neurodivergence-coded manic pixie dream girl who actually probably needs adderall and therapy instead of another sudden marriage to a donghole? Elopement is literally a symptom.

    So this turns into another movie where I’m kinda worried about the safety of the Quirky Heroine.

    The thing with Runaway Bride is that I can see this movie tapdancing on *someone’s* buttons so much that they love it despite everything I said above. Because if you don’t care about the plot, watching them bicker playfully is cute. The hijinks are slapstick. Of course it ends up with them trying to get married; how else are we going to have Gere chasing Roberts in a wedding dress onto a Fedex truck? Roberts is *gorgeous* and I have done everyone a favor by not typing out the number of disgusting thoughts I have about my wife. Things are really cute, light, and funny in tone. There are wedding dresses! Multiple!

    But this one manages to artfully dodge every single one of my buttons (I do love enemies-to-lovers at other times) so I personally found it didn’t work for me *at all*. When it ended, I turned to my sibling and said, “That was inoffensively flimsy. They just tacked stuff together to make those two interact.” And so those are the two words I leave with you: inoffensively flimsy.

    Image credit: Touchstone Pictures

  • image credit: Sony Pictures
    movie reviews

    Review: The Holiday (2006) ****

    Now this is a movie that feels like the Christmas season. Better still, The Holiday knows the value of a chemistry test, and a four-lead ensemble with sorta surprising casting turns out to work marvelously.

    I say surprising because the four, collectively, feel disparate to me at a first glance. Jude Law is someone I associate with pained twinks, sure, but pairing him up with the mob girlfriend from The Mask / one of Charlie’s Angels? Yet their romance is my favorite part. Likewise, Kate Winslet understands an *incredibly* charming Jack Black is going to make a woman in love giggle helplessly, buoyed on the joy he brings to her, and his fist pump when they kiss is representative of how we would all react to kissing Kate Winslet. But I wouldn’t have ever thought of the two together.

    The latter relationship feels the less intimate of them; Winslet’s character is on a different journey, which splits her time between that guy from Gladiator and her new 90yo best friend. The balance works great. Winslet’s performance is so relatable to me, she almost vanishes, and I know that I’d be smooching on Jack Black by the end of the movie. He’s so cute. And he communicates pretty well.

    Usually I don’t connect with Cameron Diaz’s performances, and this is no different. She’s adorable to watch, though. And Law manages to meet Diaz on exactly her level. He brings warmth that makes her amelodically bright delivery feel *right.* This is a miracle performed by the casting director: Law and Diaz sparkle together.

    Everyone does a great job bringing energy to dialogue that meanders, and whatever complaints I started to collect in the first couple acts were forgotten by the gorgeous ending that lets us imagine our own happy ending. Will these couples be together forever? Nobody establishes that. But they’re all together on New Year’s Eve, which we linger upon through a window, seeing them like we just got the back story on why our neighbors are smiling so much. It’s realistic enough that their joy is visceral.

    Predictably, I did let out a supersonic/lesbionic scream when Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz made physical contact and didn’t immediately elope.

    image credit: Sony Pictures