Movies

Condescension


So a while ago now moms blogging in the great ‘sphere were offended by an ad that Motrin put out there that – really – wasn’t all that far off the mark if one has spent even the tiniest amount of their lives reading blogs written by mothers who deal primarily in motherhood.

This weekend Uma Thurman gears up to sell her new comedy called Motherhood which topically is about the totally hot ole “profession” of mommy blogging.

Will the fact that Uma is beautiful and sexy in spite of make up and wardrobe’s best attempts to frump her up by darkening her hair and making her wear really big clothing appease the fearsome lot who took on, and k.o’d Motrin ? Or will it feel like the condescension it sorta looks like? Because it looks like a rather cutesy dismissive pat on the fanny to me. You know, unappreciative of the gift of SAHMommyhood  Mom tries to boost her flagging self-esteem by creating a  precious little writing “career” via blogging, gets too wrapped up in the “business” of it all and comes crashing back to thanks to the epiphany laden grounding realization that motherhood is all – and that passion really does flow up from, and out of, one’s uterus.

Okay, now I am a bit offended.

It looks a bit Erma Bombeck to me. Erma Who? The mother of all mommy blogging. My mother had a copy of her book, The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Septic Tank. She’s to blame for this. Her and Dave Barry milking his family exploits via a column and then a sitcom. Pre-net one had to write on paper and run it past a publisher. Not like today when any woman looking to reclaim what motherhood has stolen from her show the world what mommies are made of can publish themselves. Which is why mommy blogging and this movie feel dated.

Dee watched the trailer with me and said,

“She’s a writer (Thurman) and you’re a writer. Is that just a movie?”

Think. Think. Think. So much wrong with this picture. Yes, it’s just a movie. I don’t write because of Dee. Writing, the actuality and the need, predates her by decades.

My guess is that mommy bloggers will not see the put down in this film but embrace it as some kind of homage. Comedy is not about paying homage. It’s purpose is to expose.

Saddle up, Motrin Moms? Probably not.

The Widow of Saint-Pierre


Rob and I haven’t had time for movie watching lately, but he grabbed a couple of dvd’s from the book mobile on Wednesday after returning books. Normally book mobile duty is mine. I take Dee, return whatever, retrieve anything we’ve ordered via the county library’s online catalog and check out the dvd shelf for new or interesting offerings. I think the story has been told, by Rob on his blog or by me here, that he wasn’t allowed to go to the video store by himself anymore after returning one time with spectacularly poor choices. Well, The Widow of Saint-Pierre doesn’t quite merit such a prohibition, but it does beg the question of what was he thinking?

Based, supposedly, on the true tale which took place on the east coast islands new Newfoundland that are still a part of France today, it endeavors to tell the story of Madame La and her husband Jean. The year is 1849 and Jean is a captain of the French forces stationed on the island to keep the peace. A senseless murder of a local by two drunken fishermen has taken place and Jean is charged with warehousing them until a guiotine can be shipped to the island for the execution of the man who wielded the knife, Neel Auguste. His accomplice is killed by a mob as they are being transported to the army compound. The island people regard the remaining murderer as a barbarian for whom redemption is not possible.

It’s never made entirely clear why Jean is stationed at Saint-Pierre. He is clearly a cut and a half above his men and even the men who make up the local ruling class including the Governor and his councilmen. There are hints that his being there is a punishment and that perhaps it has something to do with his wife. Madame La is clearly ahead of her time. She believes that not only can Neel be rehabilitated but that the local population can be re-educated towards him and the idea of executions as a way to maintain law and order.

The movie begins at the end with Madame La in widow weeds, but it’s misleading because in that time the guillotine itself was also know as “the widow” and the island of Saint-Pierre is rife with widowed women due to the hazards the local occupation of fishing poses to the male population.

Madame La is drawn to Neel for reasons that don’t always seem altruistic but she and Jean are very much in love and quite lusty.

“Maybe this is porn,” Rob suggested as the film wore on.

“French period piece, sub-titled porn?” I asked.

I puzzled over it quite a bit the next day. I wasn’t sure what the message was supposed to be. Essentially in trying to save Neel, Madame La sacrifices both him and her husband without realizing until too late what she has done when it becomes clear that her husband has been shielding her from the displeasure of the Governor and his men who appeal to France to remove and court-martial Jean.

Jean loved his wife so much that he could not ask her to be anything other than who she was – even though her actions put them both in danger and cost him his life. Madame La, though she loves her husband, does not really take notice of the depth of Jean’s love for her nor does she return it in kind really. She takes Jean’s devotion and protection for granted.

I can’t say that I liked the film, but I didn’t dislike it. It gave me one of my new favorite lines however.

The rich and powerful of the town gather on Sundays for brunch and entertainment at the Governor’s home every Sunday. Jean and his wife do not regularly attend but on one occasion Madame La overhears the men in the smoking room discussing Neel and she enters to challenge them. Naturally she offends them and Jean comes to her rescue, verbally boxing one man and forcing him to admit he was wrong and apologize to Madame La for all those gathered – men, women and children – to hear. After Jean and his wife leave, the Governor’s wife remarks to the other women – loudly enough for the men to hear as well,

“Le Capitaine doesn’t even have to fuck us to make cuckolds of our husbands.”

Classic.

A Dirty Dancing Angel


Fear must be gripping Hollywood as the rich and famous wait on the Angel of Death’s next two celebrity recruits now that he has Patrick Swayze in hand. Unless two famous people have already died that I am unaware of, the rule of three* is once again in play.

I saw the news flash about Swayze on Monday on one of the news sites but passed over it without a second thought. It wasn’t a surprise given the tabloid photos of his gaunt haunted face which have adorned the checkouts at the grocery for months now. He had pancreatic cancer. You don’t beat that. You simply hold it at bay for a while.

On Tuesday at yoga, Swayze was the topic of conversation among the women before class began.

“It’s so sad,” one remarked, “because he was only 57.”

Fifty-seven is actually not all that young, and over the course of those years, he was an Olympic contending gymnast and a dancer who rehearsed with the likes of Barishnakov. He married his high school sweetheart and despite the difficulties his alcoholism caused, they were married for 30 years during which time he  built a solid acting career. It’s not as if he couldn’t look back and see a life lived. It’s not like everyone has that rearview moment at the end.

There was much discussion of the movies that touched them at different points and in different ways.

Dirty Dancing came up – of course. I have yet to see that movie all the way through. What I have caught, here and there, hasn’t compelled me to carve out the time to do so. The acting is pretty bad. And one person mentioned having pulled out her dvd of North and South for a marathon after she heard the news.

Ghost never came up. Which surprised me. But then again, it was an awful movie. A friend of mine dragged me to it when it was first out. We sat in a shoulder to shoulder cineplex where I could hear people all around me sucking air and/or panting as Swayze and Moore did that … thing … with the clay. Had those around me not been audibly aroused by this, I would have laughed because it is probably one of the cheesiest foreplay scenes ever filmed. But the “romance” of Ghost escaped me as much then as it does now.

“What is so romantic about a dead husband?” I asked Rob who shrugged as he chuckled a bit.

I remember Swayze most from Red Dawn and The Outsiders and Roadhouse. The first because I have always been a sucker for a good “end of life as we know it” flick. The second because it’s a fairly faithful adaptation of a wonderful book. The last because it is cheesey in it’s goodness. What’s not to love about a Zen bouncer who just wants to do his job? And have sex standing up.

R.I.P Patrick.

“That was the most sensual love scene I have ever witnessed,” my friend gushed afterward. She was a drama teacher with a flair for it herself, so perhaps that’s why she didn’t recognize pottery porn when she saw it. The things that rendered some of my gender wet to the knees escapes me sometimes.

*And the second is Mary, of Peter, Paul and Mary. Three? Anyone? Anyone?