Patrick McEvoy-Halston's Open Salon Blog

Review: "What to Expect When You're Expecting"

Thu, 31 May 2012 12:05:47 -0400

Alison Willmore, in her review of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” aired her humble request to Hollywood that when it makes a film which features a young, precariously situated couple, with no obvious love-bond yet who have conceived a child, that it at least –- then -- bring up the possibility of abortion. Certainly seems reasonable, except since by expecting the film leads us to think of the late-term child rather than onset protoplasm, I thought the request actually out of place here. Yet I appreciate the attack in any case, for the film, if not as bad as critics have taken it as, is vile, very much advocating Willmore’s other concern with the film, that you haven’t known human fulfillment until you’ve had a kid.

You could be an Adonis, and be a rival -- for a moment. But as the film shows with the comparison of Chris Rock’s character, Vic, leader of the men with babies for being amply besot with them, against Davis, a single man of exceptional endowment -- muscles, good looks, the sexy job, and even if now just with but one, surely at his beck and call armfuls of ripe gorgeous babes spread out in conveniently-remote-from-one-another exotic locals -- it’s not to your advantage to be the Greek hero when the times are all Christ submission and community of grace. You’re allowed it -- rivalry -- for a moment, ’cause isn’t there even with Christ some admirable, some singular, standing up to God?; but if you don’t let up it’ll leave you seeming impressive solid granite the rest of us will nevertheless walk around, pleasantly more attendant to generous broad blue skies and relaxed human activity, the multiple other attractions available to us in the park. You’re the best we could imagine, before we became endowed with children and got with humanity’s overall central pattern; now you’re the gorgeous gladiator we admire, but which never shames us for registering more and more as being delimited to the arena of boyhood while we partake in the communal flow opened up by adult life. And that you finally did end up with kid, saved you. Getting in with the times has saved you the stress of having to keep your musculature proving it might never lapse to the point of acknowledging defeat – which, even if somehow successful, is counter-intuitive enough to draw our consideration, but never having us thinking that something central had now just been disproved: eternity is across generations, not in the distinction arisen in one: it's better to be average, but with a kid.

And this is probably best case. The next is that you’re in service to someone who is fecund, as the fat sales assistant is, bearing the worst of her master’s – store owner Wendy’s -- lapses, aping out the worst of her ridiculousness to pacify her effect, sitting on her hands when her personal possessions get smashed in error … but at least she isn’t abandoned.

But if you’re with kid, you’re part of the group which seems bent on mending any difficulties they have, surmounting any limitations that have been conceived -- the obtuse will become attendant when it matters. You’ll cross paths many times, and though you may never know one another, the possibility is ever possible – and if you do it’ll be to fortify one another, attaching into one greater complex macromolecule, interlocking and expanding, exhilaratingly, by divine right. This ex potencia, which still exists for the young couple for not talking abortion, for at least being oriented the same as the other far better economically situated couples, would have been denied them if they’d considered abortion. Their (even if playfully) at-war ocean-side food carts would never port into the safe and secure denizens of the affluent, in loyal vassalage, but also recognizably within the same family, as the full-sized margarita stand by the pool of the super rich race driver baits their income-makers with. They’d be the egregious wedding photo the adopting parents try to hide, but without any excuse. People can be goofy as they enthusiastically become part of the married fold – it’s odd commemoration, this Los Vegas-style, but the attitude is essentially right, and they’re in it all the same. What they don’t do is have an abortion, inflict willingly the worst possible out-0f-your-hands calamity. God’s ways might be unknowable, but it’s easy to spot the mechanisms of the Beast; they tear vicious gaping cuts through the fabric of reality we’ve all collaborated to knit, leaving all of us feeling shaken and sundered. Asocial kid killers, with knives -- slash, slash. It's obvious what we're at some point going to have to do with them.

Take the kids to "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"

Fri, 18 May 2012 20:05:27 -0400

Alison Willmore, in her review of "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," argues that the film "is a precision instrument aimed directly at the heart of its intended underserved older audience," and one wonders if even if its intention was to serve only them, if the reality is that it could and should serve a swath more. The film, like the Harry Potter series, features both young and old, with key storylines for both, only with "Hotel" the focus is on the latter rather than the former. But one could never say of "Harry Potter" that it's principally for the young, that it serves its intended audience well -- and only them -- without expecting reproach for this being obvious nonsense, that "Harry" is, rather, clearly universal, with appeal to anyone who hasn't lost all touch with life. In fact, if you were to say that the films / books were only for the 7 to 12 set (or, as they move along, the adolescent), and that adults enjoying them probably are still in contact with their youth but only in a pathetic, sad way, as A.S. Byatt did ... well, take care, for here very swiftly follows the torrent to bash gravities of humiliation against your small dribble of bile. But as swift as so many are to defend books and films thought by some only for children, do we doubt how few would throw any disconcert Willmore's way for presiding "Hotel" as "for the aged only"?

What, though, is a 12 year old to make of adults, not in their last years acting like infants, but maturely trying to square their desire for renewal, for new life, new adventures, with their understanding that they are besot with already established life courses, by ruts of routine responses and resurfacing old tricks, worsening in their ability to catch some good game? It sure doesn't look much like a ride to entice fresh crowds into Disneyland. Yet in this age where we've gotten used to books and films being targeted to the emotional and intellectual capabilities of differing children's age groups, to their set-determined particular interests, there's still the reminder of lasting books written just a generation or two ago by the likes of Roald Dahl, Richard Adams, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine l'Engle, E.B. White, and Salinger, that don't sit so well with the idea that there isn't somehow something adult, already fathomed in the childish mind. Personally, I've never thought enough thought has gone into how it is an older writer is able to write for children at all; instead thinking the proof's on how anyone cannot but offer, regardless of whom they're intending to write for, mostly unabashed contact with their 30 -, 40-, 50, 60-ish or on writer selves. And if children go for it, it has to be that they're very fond of the adult in these writers, even as they still very much do appreciate the various considerations allotted them, the faeries, farm animals, and guardian wizards that assure them this is a world they can handle.

Even with "Harry Potter" we're already a bit keen to this possibility. As the series progressed there are encounters simply between adults that could challenge you to wonder, if all collected and left by themselves, how bogus it'd be to label them anything short of literature. I'm thinking in particular of Snape and Dumbledore, of Snape and Voldemort; with the challenge, subsequent Snape's reveal, being to determine if the Snape we've long known without fully knowing his past is fair measure of the key early experiences we are told have determined him. Yes -- we have to conclude to be satisfied with the reveal, in a blink sifting through forty or so years of another's developing -- this product, out of an already complex early person, could be begot from this; it plausibly fits. And if we're not similarly now boomer-aged, knowing ourselves how great spans of time's drift accord with great early pushes in a set direction, how on earth might we determine this? And yet I think it's possible that we may. Or if not, at least that we might sense that we've already experienced enough of life, of how things go, to make us one day feel capable of doing so. "I don't quite just now understand you -- but I did catch sight of you; you're not alien, and feel I'll one day see you straight," we, the 7 t0 12-year-old kid, even, might well feel the urge to communicate.

Of course, to say that small parts in children's books and films perhaps thought mostly for the adults are actually as much still for children, isn't to say that if "Up" was entirely about the life story of a loving married couple, or if "Fellowship of the Ring" somehow mostly about past-prime Bilbo settling into his own exotic hinterlands, kids couldn't get enough of it. As alluded to, no doubt not to feel overwhelmed or wretchedly bored it's got to feel about them, not their grandparents. But as true as this surely is, I'm tempted to argue the case anyway, perhaps through reminding people of just how literate people were a generation or two ago, of how many educators hoped to stuff as much classical literature into you, hoping you'll even oblige their skipping ahead past more-relatable "Romeo and Juliet" if "Hamlet" or "Lear" was judged the master work. And of how this meant early encounters with works we'd introduce college kids to, presuming the opposite of child-obtuse pedagogy and rather Mozart-in-the-womb zeroing in on what kids actually need for life.

Presuming something more, actually: that what kids actually most want is not to be catered to but rather to be introduced to humanity's show, the best that human heritage has begotten -- the good stuff. And they realize it not necessarily immediately, without, that is, some pushing, for garnering something from the great requires adjusting, at least temporary unsettlement and even repelling dis-ease; but rather sometime afterwards, after life has gone by some and the new and one-time perturbing has manifested more clearly as a facilitating component of you.

There, I moved quickly from being tempted to make the case in favor of the difficult, the non-pleasing, to actually more-or-less making it; and I realize I did so because, despite believing that what kids can't help but love about the literature they read is their contact with adult minds, and that kids are more perspicacious than we often judge, capable of encounters with the adult before "this is for kids aged --" categories look to communicate, it's never the less true that if you take your kids to "Hotel" they may well hate you for it. Unlike how the critic Stephanie Zacharek assessed another movie sure to be thought, as she puts it, "just a little nice movie for grannies and no one else" -- "Letters to Juliet" -- I cannot, that is, sincerely argue that kids will like it foremost for the youth they will find in these aging people. In "Letters," Zacharek found the 73-year-old Vanessa Redgrave "living assurance that the young people we once were can stay alive is us, no matter how much we grow and change," proclaiming, when Claire finally meets her long-ago love, that "it takes zero imagination to see the face of the young Guenevere in this older one." But though with Tom Wilkinson's plot-line in "Hotel" one can find the near equivalent of this particular moment, I declare "Hotel" worth a visit primarily because it makes you realize just how much better than you there is out there; it's appeal lies in its not being reassuring. It teaches you that all that youthful energy you possess is not something you should so much be concerned not to lose, but be concerned to use, to acquire the depth fully available to you only in growing older.

To be more fair to Zacharek's review, I'll note that though she singled out the moment of youthful presence in Claire as what in particular would reverberate with youth, it's clear she thinks they'll actually take to all they'll see of her. She actually follows proclaiming the film not just for grandmas by drawing attention to Redgrave's adult substance, of how she "puts all she's got into something other actors might cast off," how "[s]he's present every moment," as much as her youthful vitality. And she takes care to establish the moment immediately before Claire meets her long-ago love as a complex one, as something which to fully understand requires testing your acuity, some extension of yourself into behavior you may not quite be able to delineate for it possibly not yet being wholy part of your own resources. This moment's all about adult considerations, about being aware that however much the 15 year old he fell in love with is gone (a cowing realization that has her shelter herself, not so much out of self-pity but "as if [. . .] trying to hide from herself"), "she's not."

And -- now to be more fair to her as well -- Willmore's assessment of "Hotel" isn't just that it's pigeoned for old hearts not young ones, that it's simply "about growing old in a terribly British fashion," but about not-to-be-missed moments as well, presumably, with her herself being delighted by them, available to both young and old. She highlights some of the ones I'd be inclined to; but rather than list them in the exact fashion she does -- "Billy Nighy joking with Judi Dench about his inability to fix a telephone, Maggie Smith forcing down local food in order to be polite, Tom Wilkinson joining in a game of pickup cricket and Penelope Wilton looking terrified during a tuk-tuk ride" -- I'd have been tempted to italicize the great actors' names as well: for what we agree is so special is getting to see great living people interact smartly with one another, not our chance to see characters from a book so capably enfleshed. Or do what Stephanie did with Vanessa Redgrave in "Letters," and involve myself more fully with why Penelope Wilton making clear with Nighy that it's over between them, or her thanking Wilkinson for sparing her further humiliation -- both moments of self-account that reminded you how much one must have to be able to convey so much self-possession after catastrophic revelations have deflated you to wondering if you're a fraud -- is so special.

You get enough of great people here I'd be tempted to compare it to the Louvre, a storehouse one's never to early to start familiarizing oneself with; but to flatter it now surely a bit too unjustly, here you get the artist him/herself, as well as his/her oeuvre: a doubling down of greatness. "Midnight in Paris" reminded Armond White of how far these actors were from the greats they portrayed; please don't underestimate who I wouldn't put these actors toe-to-toe with.

So I think the kids should go to this "Hotel" for the elderly. Don't be spooked by the specter of death; we're told it's of course going to lurk everywhere but it proves delineated and contained within a single source: Tom, the only one not to be sparked to new purpose for his chasing down of an old one. If kids never-the-less resist, I'll accord one legitimate reason why it might still be possible that if they flee your grasp and escape for, say, one more viewing of The Avengers, they might be wise to. For this is a time when youth may be less about vitality than about constantly taking it -- the world does right now seem to have it out for them, with some now declaring it none other than a period of child / youth sacrifice, to beget a Generation Occupy. They may, that is, simply have known just too much of it to garner treasures from a film where youth are shown denied yet once again. They could be at the point of psychic toppling, with the trigger -- who knows exactly what? And the key youth in the film, the young owner of the hotel, is here mostly denied. Cover is of course provided, for no older person wants to think themselves intentionally presiding forever over the young; but there is a sense that the film is intentionally pitting aggressive youthfulness against elder wisdom/knowledge of people/canyness and patience, with the latter lot clearly triumphant. The young owner ostensibly comes out with his dreams realized, his hotel afloat, and the resplendent wife he's fought for at his side; but the feel is mostly that he's gone from sole owner of a hotel to its bell hop, enthusiastically presenting himself to the ring of a bell. This is good therapy for Maggie Smith's character, who's been head servant but never inexctricable to the family she served, but unfair to him.

Still, the last time a generation turned whole-hog on a preceding generation it judged self-indulgent, the result was some vitality -- they felt they got their own era -- but, in my judgment, also a criminal curtailing of depth. It was the '30s, with artists who thrived then sometimes being the ones unable to thrive in '20s Paris, for all the great but also incredibly daunting personalities they mixed with there; but were able to once self-sacrifice and common purpose, not self-indulgence and individual enrichment, became king. Personally, I'd prefer not to think youth have had it so bad they'll take the barren ramshackle over the opulent for it at least being theirs, but the film does argue a case for this as well. So, yes, at the finish, I'll admit there is still some valid last minute weighing to do ... but please do decide to take your kids to "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel."

Making "The Avengers" -- Men Only!

Tue, 15 May 2012 12:05:27 -0400

Recently, Andrew O'Hehir had this to say concerning The Avengers and its (ostensibly) all-male demographic:

I don't think I'm breaking any news if I tell you that "The Avengers," Joss Whedon's ensemble action-adventure that unites an entire posse of Marvel Comics superhoes, will be far and away this weekend's No. ! film at the box office. [. . .] Or that a large majority of those ticket buyers will be teenage boys and young men. Like most summer "tentpole" productions -- those designed to support franchises, and ensure the financial future of major studioes -- "The Avengers" is aimed squarely at guys under 35, long the demographic, psychological and economic bulwark of the movie industry.

All this is standard operating procedure in 21st-century Hollywood, where the industry is dominated by post-boomer males reared on the comic books, TV shows and blockbuster movies of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and the audience is understood in almost Pavlovian terms as a slavering horde of permanent adolescents. Audience familiarity and “pre-awareness” are greatly prized, so nearly all these guy-oriented movies derive from superhero comics or video games or other decades-old pop franchises. (It is, of course, possible to go too far into the pop-culture past. Let’s observe a moment of silence, once again, for“John Carter.”) We can certainly argue about which of these movies create an interesting twist on existing formula and which are cynical crap, but I don’t think we can argue that it makes much difference to the bottom line. “The Avengers” will make a kazillion dollars, and so did “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” The differences between the two are mostly a matter of fine-grained detail; they’ve both got cartoonish male bonding, a lot of stuff blowing up, and hot-chick eye candy.

If you’re female and you’re interested in any or all of the above pictures, by the way, I apologize for making it sound as if you don’t exist. But in marketing terms, you don’t.

[. . .]

All of this reflects deeply ingrained social and cultural ideas about gender, which are present in people of both sexes. Maybe men’s preference for violent action yarns and women’s preference for sappy love stories — and our tendency to understand one as more “serious” than the other — are hard-wired in some biological way, although that falls a long way short of scientific truth. But despite the torrent of male-centric franchise flicks we’ll see this summer, and next summer, and for all the summers into the foreseeable future, the tide in the Hollywood gender wars has begun to shift, slightly but perceptibly.

I personally wonder if what we will see this year, next year, and further beyond are periodic interruptions by liberals of their basic enjoying of life to float out mouthy j'accuses at still-male-centric society, allowing some smaller bite, to come off themselves. And I wonder if it was time for one such interruption to come from Andrew, and this is what actually explains why it is only in the comment section of this article that we learn why Joss Whedon's Avengers apparently wasn't permeated by Whedon's ostensibly natural female orientation, rather than for the film being in the end, mostly all Marvel.

What I am drawing upon here is not right-wing concerns, but rather that of some leftish occupiers -- Chris Hedges, specifically, as well as some of truthdig. In "Death of the Liberal Class," Hedges challenged readers to imagine liberals as mostly being uninterested in what happens to most Americans, in actually finding them disgusting, and as having since the late '70s spent their time essentially walling themselves from them. He contends they've actually become courtiers, a class distinct from "fellow Americans," and use "boutique" issues of race and gender to justify their privileges and relevancy while keeping the rest of America feeling suspect, probably owed their inferior place. And so thereby life goes along comfortably, even if significant changes to American life -- the kind of stuff Hedges contends liberals once defined themselves by -- are intentionally forestalled, and democratic America comes to be increasingly pyramidic -- in accord with liberal preference. If you're on my end, you might just indicate how much you agree with Andrew, but unless this becomes your one and only comment ever on a comment section, a brief passing by conveying no sense that you live on the web but rather are for the most part out and about on other things, though your heart will be deemed in the right place, the whole otherwise anthropology of you will keep you a jumble more than a bit comically less kept-together than he.

We are told that this essentially is Marvel's picture, not Joss Whedon's. Personally, I wonder how someone supposedly so infused with female respect could ever not effuse his affectional ethos all over a film of his make. If this film does indeed feel all-male, I'd encourage people to look back on his earlier works for signs of significant female discomfort that would lead him -- when such could be excused -- to ultimately seek to sublimate himself into projects where women end up shoved to the side while male concerns predominate. A lot of men who champion women are trying to be good boys, showing their mothers their allegiance to them through their annhilating misbehaving boy-men -- their own bad boy selves. These types always find some way to guilt-free revenge themselves for this ongoing maternal domination, though. For Whedon, it might have been this opportunity to do damage through the excuse of following Marvel heritage. Perhaps if this psychology holds true with Andrew, look for signs of it in the kinds of art movies he can preference which others blanche at -- ones that contain significant examples of female humiliation and torture, for example; for with art films, you could always convince yourself it was the other things that tintilated, or that the manner of the portrayal conveyed unmistakable criticism, or some such.

Stephanie Zacharek, and the news of Avatar 2, 3 and 4

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:05:14 -0400

Stephanie Zacharek's review of the film, we note, was very harsh. It's always great to have her take, but it'd be nice if she'd accord some of her assertions, particularly this one -- "But if you're out to change the face of filmmaking, you have to work much harder at a lot of the thigs Cameron just shrugs off" -- and perhaps also this one -- "In Avatar, the technology is everything" -- and also this one -- "'Avatar isn't about actors or characters or even about story; it's about special effects, which is fine as far as it goes" -- with what actually ended up happening. Cameron didn't leapfrog off this project; the world, the people in it, mattered to him -- and do we doubt that audiences haven't either? And this, his sticking to the Avatar universe, isn't because he's old, or because Avatar is ideal ground for his special effects fetish, or because the aquatic's hold on its lifeforms doubles nicely its recent long hold on him; but rather because despite his early errancy -- i.e., Titanic's "Goodbye, mother!" - he means to spend the rest of his life in the lap of his mother deity, Eywa; it really does come down to that.

Stephanie was astray from the life in this film as she was from the life in Avengers. This line from her review of Avatar, "It's a remote-control movie experience, a high-tech 'wish you were here' scribbled on a very expensive postcard," just like this one from her review of the Avengers, "all a filmmaker really needs to do is put them all into a big stock pot filled with elaborate set pieces and some knowing dialogue and he's golden," shows she's been sending up movies that it turned out audiences have bought into -- and brother, have they!

Or, audiences these days are such that they fall head over heels for movies that really are all about special effects and already-cultivated prejudices, with tedious characters, no meaningful story development, and removed directors (Armond White thinks so). It'd be nice to see her take a momentary break from movie reviews and write an account of what it's like to draw back from an appraisal of a film to situate oneself amongst what-turn-out-to-be zombies, who clearly accepted as hearty feasts what you had established as cold film corpses.

Iron Man vs. Captain America

Sun, 13 May 2012 11:05:21 -0400

Note: this is a reply to Maria Aspan's discussion of the four key things that worked about the Avengers (at movieline.com).

Re: The Avengers doesn't try to give equal time to each of the heroes; it might as well be called Iron Man 2.5. Thor is there to swing his hammer and drop off the villain from his movie, Hawkeye gets brainwashed before we even know him, and Captain America fades into Tony Stark's straight man. And you know what? Those are good things. The movie's already over two hours. And by choosing a few Avengers to focus on, Whedon made me more invested in what happened to Stark and Black Widow and the Hulk during the course of the movie.

Stephanie Zacharek, you'll note, saw it different. She argued that Iron Man's pronouncement, his "self-important wisecracks, begin to wear a rut in the movie" -- that he wore on us, leaving the hero who all along didn't try to hard -- Captain America -- as the stand-out Avenger. She said it was the hero who remained most human that you remember; and it is true that the ground fight involving the least powerful Avengers -- Hawk Eye, Captain America, Black Widow -- left together enough human precariousness and human uplift to make them seem for a moment the human core and the rest as external battle armaments. I wrote awhile ago, in a comment that may, alas, have gotten lost in the woods, that we might see in this film a transitioning away from the super-hero types we've gotten used to wanting to associate with -- the wise-cracking Wolverine or Iron Man types -- towards actually wanting the patriotic, the square, the straight-man types redeemed for our appreciation, even our identification. I thought the old preference would have to be allayed, played to, to make the transition possible while keeping our self-respect. I think we're all still more here with Iron Man than we are with Captain America, as you argue, but that comment in the film about America actually being in the mood for old school, and the scene where Captain America garners the respect of the police force, began to clear a path, I think, for Captain America to more take over in the next film -- with his perhaps even being accorded a knock-out win in an argument with Stark, with average intelligence but solid virtue stearing wit and snark clear to the side. How this will happen while engaging an inter-galactic villain, I don't know, but I still expect to see it.

A final note on this: there was a sense when Iron Man brandied wits and, well, brandy with Loki, of these two actually being co-sympathetic, fundamentally akin -- with both being conniving, smart-as-sin, full-of-themselves court wits, who'll ultimately need to oblige themselves to more straight-laced kings. You're right -- Iron Man's sacrifice didn't register (note: I'm referring here to another of Aspan's comments; specifically that she "believed in Coulson's death much more than the movie ever made [her] believe that Iron Man would actually have to sacrifice himself to save Manhattan); and, we noted, it was the best that he had. Penny is going to need to absolve him, and perhaps with this, absorb him -- already she wasn't seeming so second-fiddle; instead as if already reeling in the stray dog wanting his being reigned in.