“It’s always right now”: A Few Thoughts on “Boyhood”

Posted on January 27, 2015 by wellsdc

About three days into my college orientation, one of our advisors (a sophomore who had the perhaps unenviable task of shepherding about fifteen of us into university life) suggested we make a run to Target to get any supplies we might need for our dorm rooms. This event sticks out in my memory because it marked a “moment of realization” that might be common for college freshmen, and young adults in general. Or it might not—I’ve never asked anybody. I have now lived more years since that evening than I had lived up to that point, so the moment may seem sort of pithy now.

Kelly Martin (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Oh, the places we went! (Actual store we went to not pictured.)

As we piled into the advisor’s car at around 9 p.m., though, I had this sudden realization that I never could quite describe. It wasn’t freedom, exactly, even though part of the realization was that I hadn’t had to ask anyone’s permission to go to Target late in the evening, and that no one was monitoring my bedtime (aside from basic social conventions between roommates). A better word might be possibility. If nothing was stopping me from going to Target at 9 p.m.—aside from not having a car and living in an unfamiliar city with spotty public transportation—what else was possible for me? Like I said, it seems pithy from the perspective of being 40 years old, but to an 18 year old from the quasi-suburbs who had never been away from adult supervision, the possibilities seemed endless. This brings me to the movie Boyhood.

Via 365filmsbyauroranocte.tumblr.com

I saw Boyhood in the theater about six months ago, and like most people, I was astonished by the ambition of the project and the story that it told. As you probably know, director Richard Linklater shot the movie a few weeks at a time over the course of twelve years, from 2002 to 2014. The movie follows the life of Mason (Ellar Coltrane) from elementary school to his first moments of college. The final scene of the movie is what really stuck in my mind, because it captured that feeling of possibility better than I could ever describe it with words. Spoilers ahead… Continue reading →

Chandler in 2015

Posted on January 27, 2015 by wellsdc

Via BuzzFeed

Here’s an aspect of Chandler Bing’s character from Friends that I hadn’t considered, possibly because I really haven’t watched the show since the ’90s.

When it comes to women, Chandler turns out to be just as retrograde as Joey, but his lust comes with an undercurrent of the kind of bitter desperation that I now recognize as not only gross, but potentially menacing…If an actual friend behaved this way, I’d be tempted to slap him. After all, if we’ve learned anything in the last few years, it’s that nerds are not necessarily sweet and lovable; they can also be misogynist jerks, or worse.

Discuss.

Eight Short Rants about Foxcatcher

Posted on January 19, 2015 by wellsdc

I saw Foxcatcher this past weekend, and I would now like to present a few spoiler-filled rants about the film.

1. The accolades miss some incredible performances.

All the buzz is about Steve Carrell who portrays John du Pont as perhaps the quintessential “eccentric, lonely rich guy,” surrounded by toadies but devoid of any friends. We’ve already seen Carrell’s potential to play both a serious and villainous character in 2013’s underrated The Way Way Back, but here he is literally transformed into a sort of monster. He absolutely deserves the accolades.

Mark Ruffalo is incredible as wrestler Dave Schultz. I never would’ve thought of Ruffalo playing a world-class athlete. I don’t mean that as a slight, but rather that his roles, even as the Incredible Hulk, tend to be more cerebral than physical. Here, though, he adopts all of the physicality and mannerisms of a lifelong wrestler, while still showing incredible depth and complexity. The scene where he is asked to say into the camera, for a du Pont-funded documentary, that John du Pont is his “mentor,” is utterly brilliant. Both he and Carrell deserve the Oscar nominations and praise they have received.

I dare say, however, that Channing Tatum deserves more praise than he has received, but that the structure of the final act of the film did him no favors. The movie begins with him as the central character (something I’ll get to more in a moment), but by the end he has largely faded from view without much explanation (I’ll get to that, too.) Carrell or Ruffalo essentially played characters frozen in time, with Tatum’s character responding and adapting to his circumstances. Again, this is not to take anything away from those two phenomenal performances, but Tatum came closest to the archetypal “hero’s journey.” He offers an amazing display of the pressure that star athletes feel, much of which they put on themselves. He embodies the physicality of the sport even more than Ruffalo, although I don’t know if that was too much or not. Sometimes it seems like Hollywood wants to typecast him as the “handsome guy who can act,” but this movie allowed him to do more than that.

2. The film is interesting, but once you realize what it is actually about, it is frustrating and disappointing.

Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, January 6, 2015

Posted on January 6, 2015 by wellsdc

Hollywood’s Disability ‘Inspiration Porn’ Is Terrible, but Here’s How We Can Fix It, Holly Eagleson, TakePart, November 21, 2014

The general consensus is that American Horror Story: Freak Show is a gift. Sure, the story lines have been teetering on the rails for the last two episodes. But it’s one of a pathetically few places you’ll see a talent like Mat Fraser on television.

Fraser has phocomelia, a congenital disorder that causes malformed appendages. On AHS, he beautifully embodies Paul the Illustrated Seal, a tattooed member of a 1950s freak show under threat of nefarious forces. Unlike so many infantilizing roles for disabled actors, Paul isn’t stripped of his eroticism; he has affairs with two different female characters on the show. Play on, player!

It’s a breakout role for Fraser, a performer who’s well known on the cabaret and burlesque circuits and is also a drummer and playwright. Fraser is fierce by any measure, even more so for his perspective on his new-found fame. In an excellent interview with The Onion’s AV Club, he puts media eager to exploit his story directly in his crosshairs: “I’ve already turned down two offers from really mainstream people, too f—ing mainstream, to do a life-story interview, because I am not interested in ‘inspiration porn.’”

That term may not be familiar, but you know the concept. It’s that soft-focus prime-time sitdown about a “heroic” soldier who lost limbs in battle. The relentless memes of developmentally disabled people as Successories posters. The documentary about a person triumphing over a disfiguring disease to run a marathon and climb a mountain. It’s all to celebrate ability in many its forms, if you’re being generous. In reality, it’s a clarion call to the able-bodied: If these less-thans can do so much with so little, by God, you can do anything! (Cue “reach for the stars” graphic.)

Consent, Emma Holten, Hysteria #5 ‘Nonsense’ Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, January 5, 2015

Posted on January 5, 2015 by wellsdc

On Nerd Entitlement, Laurie Penny, New Statesman, December 29, 2014

These are curious times. Gender and privilege and power and technology are changing and changing each other. We’ve also had a major and specific reversal of social fortunes in the past 30 years. Two generations of boys who grew up at the lower end of the violent hierarchy of toxic masculinity – the losers, the nerds, the ones who were afraid of being creeps – have reached adulthood and found the polarity reversed. Suddenly they’re the ones with the power and the social status. Science is a way that shy, nerdy men pull themselves out of the horror of their teenage years. That is true. That is so. But shy, nerdy women have to try to pull themselves out of that same horror into a world that hates, fears and resents them because they are women, and to a certain otherwise very intelligent sub-set of nerdy men, the category “woman” is defined primarily as “person who might or might not deny me sex, love and affection”.

***

Heterosexuality is fucked up right now because whilst we’ve taken steps towards respecting women as autonomous agents, we can’t quite let the old rules go. We have an expectation for, a craving for of a sexual freedom that our rhetoric, our rituals and our sexual socialisation have not prepared us for. And unfortunately for men, they have largely been socialised – yes, even the feminist-identified ones – to see women as less than fully human. Men, particularly nerdy men, are socialised to blame women – usually their peers and/or the women they find sexually desirable for the trauma and shame they experienced growing up. If only women had given them a chance, if only women had taken pity, if only done the one thing they had spent their own formative years been shamed and harassed and tormented into not doing. If only they had said yes, or made an approach.

This, incidentally, is why we’re not living in a sexual utopia of freedom and enthusiastic consent yet despite having had the technological capacity to create such a utopia for at least 60 years. Men are shamed for not having sex; women are shamed for having it. Men are punished and made to feel bad for their desires, made to resent and fear women for having denied them the sex they crave and the intimacy they’re not allowed to get elsewhere. Meanwhile, women are punished and made to feel bad for their perfectly normal desires and taught to resist all advances, even Eventually, a significant minority of men learn that they can ‘get’ what they want by means of violence and manipulation, and a significant minority of women give in, because violence and manipulation can be rather effective. (Note: accepting the advances of an awful man does not make these people bad women who are conspiring to ‘make life hell for shy nerds’. I’ve heard that sort of thing come out of the mouths of my feminist-identified male nerd friends far too often.)

And so we arrive at an impasse: men must demand sex and women must refuse, except not too much because then we’re evil friendzoning bitches. The impasse continues until one or both parties grows up enough or plumps up the courage to state their desires honestly and openly, without pressure or resentment, respecting the consent and agency of one another.

Why Idris Elba Can’t Play James Bond, Phil Nobile Jr., Badass Digest, December 29, 2014 Continue reading →

Is This the Greatest Horror Movie of All Time?

Posted on January 5, 2015 by wellsdc

I have remarked before that I love the “horror” genre in film but think about 99% of actual horror movies are complete and utter crap. (Yes, I know that violates Sturgeon’s Law. Shut up.)

For me, the ability of film to evoke particular emotions is fascinating, and that includes feelings of fear or dread. It’s just that very few movies do it effectively, and a few might do it too well in one way or another. To give an example, I find movies like Hostel and Wolf Creek to be terrifying, not because they actually evoke a feeling of fear in me personally, but because it scares me that people actually made those movies and that others found them entertaining enough to warrant sequels.

I am mostly talking about the “slasher” genre here, which may have started with 1974’s Black Christmas, a genuinely creepy movie. The genre has a few highlights, at least in an iconic sense, such as Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street, but they mostly fall into the old, tired tropes that were parodied (not very effectively, in my opinion) in the Scream movies. The one truly great slasher film is almost never even considered to be part of the genre at all: Alien, in which a killer picks off the crew members of a ship one by one until only one woman is left (as it happens, in her underwear.) It’s just that the movie is phenomenal, with a good story, well-written characters, and superb actors; the killer is an alien creature; and it all happens in outer space. Plus, if you pretend the ending hasn’t been spoiled for the entire universe, it’s not at all clear throughout the film who’s going to make it. Continue reading →

The Greatest Year in Film History

Posted on December 31, 2014 by wellsdc

2014 is almost at an end, and I still haven’t gotten around to writing anything about the 30th anniversary of the greatest year of movies in the history of the medium. (That I was around 10 years old in 1984, and that it was therefore perhaps one of the first years for which I might have clear and relatively unfiltered memories, is surely coincidental.) It’s not like I can’t finally get around to posing about certain 1984 movies in 2015, when they’ll be 31 years old, but I do feel like I should at least say something about the excellent, historic, iconic, or just plain memorable films of 1984, as I see them. Continue reading →

“Love, Actually,” Actually

Posted on December 28, 2014 by wellsdc

I saw Love, Actually for the first time a few years ago, under the guidance/compulsion of my then-girlfriend-now-wife. I didn’t dislike the movie so much as I found it enjoyable (if somewhat creepy) and, ultimately, rather forgettable.

There are certain actors whom I will watch in anything they do, and this list includes Bill Nighy.

I therefore found myself agreeing with Mary Elizabeth Williams’ assessment of the film: Continue reading →

“Long Live the Riders of Roosevelt!”

Posted on December 27, 2014 by wellsdc

This is why teddy bears are awesome:

Big GIF = slow loading

(h/t pokoshoko on Imgur)

I couldn’t find the video this comes from, but I found an animated short about a teddy bear who fights monsters, and a short about a boy with a monster under his bed (based on perhaps the scariest two-sentence short story ever.) (Videos are embedded below.) Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, December 26, 2014

Posted on December 26, 2014 by wellsdc

Hip-Hop’s Huge Problem With Iggy Azalea Just Blew Up — And She Completely Deserves It, Tom Barnes, Mic, December 22, 2014

It turns out many people in the hip-hop community feel that Azalea is actively working against black interests because she appropriates traditionally black styles and totally divorces them from their political content. That’s why rapper Tyler, The Creator, A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip and R&B singer Solange Knowles all came to [Azealia] Banks’ defense, thanking her for speaking openly and passionately about the issue of cultural appropriation. Kreayshawn also stepped up to the plate, accusing Azalea of ignoring racism in her home country as well as in America.

But it was New York-raised hip-hop legend Q-Tip who had the most inspiring response — he gave Azalea a full hip-hop history lesson in 40 tweets.

***

Hip-hop is always political. Q-Tip took the Twitterverse all the way back to hip-hop’s very beginnings. He described the conditions black people were living under in 1970s New York, which hip-hop sought to address. He cited Vietnam, the rampant drug trade in New York’s ghettos and their crumbling school systems. These factors, crippled children’s support structures, “emasculated” their parents and forced children to turn to the streets and gangs for support.

But thankfully, hip-hop was born. With it, youth found a direction, and a way to channel their energies in a positive direction.

***

It may seem mean, but she completely deserves it. Azalea has been manipulating hip-hop culture for her own gain, and she cares not at all for the broader hip-hop community or the music’s place in our culture.

[Emphasis in original.]

The propagandists have won: What Fox News and the pornography revolution have in common, Janine R. Wedel, Salon, December 21, 2014 Continue reading →

Cryptic Philosopher

What was Sundered and Undone

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