On the one hand, I can understand that the reviews were a bit more muted than usual with Pixar: the film doesn’t have anything comparing to WALL-E watching HELLO, DOLLY, the silent montage at the beginning of UP or the toys facing their doom together in TOY STORY 3. Despite the fact that this story has actual magic in it, it doesn’t quite get to the magical level that some moments in previous Pixar films achieved. It does, unfortunately, suffer from the same flaw as most Pixars, devolving into a fairly generic action movie in the third act.

Still, it made me positively giddy. Merida, to start with, is a great character, rising above the tomboy stereotype: she looks down on girly stuff, but that’s mostly because its constraining her. It’s not so much that she wants to be a boy, but that she wants the freedom granted only to boys in her world. And in the end, her prowess with a bow isn’t what saves the day. Oh, and her hair is fantastic, a triumph of animation.

I also loved that the relationship between Merida and her mother Elinor is so central to the film. Elinor’s an interesting character too: you can tell she enjoys being good at being the queen/moderator/voice of reason, but that this is not necessarily a role she’s chosen for herself. Her husband is an immature, belligerent oaf, and after all, someone has to keep the realm together. It’s a very recognizable dynamic, but one we don’t usually see in fairy tale films: princesses tend to be motherless, after all.

Most of all, I love that the first female Pixar heroine was not saddled with a romantic storyline. I was already happy that SNOW WHITE didn’t end up with either Huntsman of Prince, but she still had to go through the whole kissing business. When Merida says she’ll compete for her own hand, though, she means it: it’s not so much that she doesn’t want these three suitors, it’s that she has little use for suitors in general. The words “I love you” are uttered, and are very very important in the story, but the love we see celebrated here isn’t romantic love, and that almost never happens in female-centric kid’s stories. 

The three little brothers made me laugh, especially toward the end of the film. That this kind of story finally gets told? That makes me happy. 

Note: a minor spoiler for The Dark Knight occurs further in the text. I’ll warn beforehand.

For me, the film illustrated how valuable film criticism can be. See, I liked, but didn’t love, the first two batman films, BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT. There was plenty to admire – many of the performances, with Heath Ledger’s joker as a stand-out; the fact that Gotham became a tangible place; the sheer scope of the thing, the epic scale. But I never really got into them, never really managed to lose myself in the films, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on the why. I knew that part of it was that the themes were stated over and over, and that the film mistook being dour and “dark” for being intellectual and deep, but that wasn’t everything.

Then I read many of Jim Emerson‘s many pieces about the films, and it clicked. The problem is not just that the subtext is text. It’s that the images have no subtext at all: they show exactly what they want to show, and nothing more. There’s never any interplay between foreground and background. Nothing ever comes into the frame in an interesting way. It’s flatfooted, unimaginative film-making. I felt the effect before, but having read his analyses, I finally understood why the movies didn’t get to me.

“But it’s just a comic book movie!”, you might say. But see, I’ve been reading a lot of comics lately – about 1/3 of the DC New 52, old She-Hulk comics, some original Spider-Man. And especially in the newer comics, the panels are very creative. The first new issue of Catwoman got a lot of criticism for showing Catwoman’s body, and not her face, for the first few pages. Sexist? Yup. Interestingly composed? Absolutely. The Batman: Year One comic, which goes over the origin yet again, has some stunning composition, far above anything in the Nolan films.

I have to admit: the movie also suffered because of the other three movies I saw in the week before. The first was SHALLOW GRAVE, new on Criterion blu, which is a bit show-offy but often gorgeous. The second was LE CERCLE ROUGE (on film!), and well, I don’t suppose I have to defend Melville. And the third? The third was MAGIC MIKE.

I’ll admit: I went for the strippers. Soderbergh having directed it was only a perk, raising the hope that there would be other nice things to look at besides abs and naked bums. But the film, light and forgettable as it is, shows how much a director can do. There’s a great sight gag, for instance, where you’re looking at a conversation in the background, through some shelves, and suddenly realize that the out-of-focus thing in the background is the dick belonging to the aptly named Big Dick Richie getting pumped. You could hear the realization (and associated laughter) ripple through the (all-female) audience. Then there’s the first scene with Mike, getting our of bed: you see his ass, then the camera movement reveals there’s also a naked lady there, and then the camera moves further to reveal a third bedpartner.

Is it silly? Sure. It’s also really skillful. Maybe more instructive is a comparison between two scenes, one from Magic Mike and one from TDKR.

In Magic Mike, most of the dancing is presented as a bit silly. The customers hoot and giggle, and so does the audience. Then Mike gets a solo dance, and Soderbergh manages to turn the dancing sexy again in a very simple way: he cuts back and forth between Mike’s dancing and another stripper’s sister, Brooke, watching. The actress isn’t all that great, but simply by showing her be quiet, alternately entranced and embarrassed, we suddenly can’t giggle the hotness away any more. It’s a genuinely sexy moment, and it doesn’t require a single word.

Late in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES (and here’s where the minor spoiler happens), Commisioner Gordon finally finds out who Batman is. It goes like this: Batman tells him something about how someone will always be there to give their coat to a young boy whose world has just fallen apart. Then we flash back to a young Gordon giving kid Bruce Wayne his coat. Then Batman flies away, and Gordon mutters “Bruce Wayne”.

The moment plays like a joke. It’s so literal, and within the movie, it may even serve as a reminder that Gordon’s the last to know, since all other main characters do at that point. The moment lands flat, especially since it comes on the heels of a particularly clumsy death scene.

How could it have been done better? Simple. Just have Batman deliver the same line. Skip the flashback. Have the Batmobile take off, and just show Gordon look upwards, realization dawning on his face. I mean: Gary Oldman is a great actor, much better than Cody Horn, the girl in Magic Mike. He CAN, actually, convey things without verbalizing them. And the moment would have been much stronger, much more mythic.

But Nolan doesn’t trust his audience enough. And so the movie thuds when it should soar. MAGIC MIKE may be a trifle of a movie, with none of the complexities of Nolan’s Batman movies. But on a pure visual level, it’s much more interesting.

ETA: I was looking at my stats, and noticed that my post about THE DARK KNIGHT got a couple of hits, probably from people googling this movie. I re-read it, and it aligns with this one quite eerily (I even compared TDK unfavorable to a comic book!). Also, I used to get comments. Man, those were the days.

The main thing making me happy this week is not pop culture related: it’s that the good stress has finally kicked in for my dissertation. I’ve been stressed about it for a while, but it was mostly the diffuse, abstract kind of stress, the kind that makes everything feel overwhelming but doesn’t stop you from wasting time (the internet, especially, being both the best and the worst procrastinatory tool ever created by man). Now, however, it’s finally the focused, propulsive kind of stress, the kind that allows you to write 14 pages of introduction in a week. Granted, it’s a first draft at best, still missing some crucial elements, confused about its audience and with some structural issues that need to be worked out, but it sure feels great to see the page number creep upward.

I did still manage to consume some media, however. I finished the first season of THE WIRE, for instance, and it’s finally starting to click. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great show. I see that it’s a good show – I can appreciate its intricacy and fine character work and the diversity of its world. It just offers fewer moments or scenes that immediately make you go “awesome!” than, say, a show like Game of Thrones or Justified. It’s very precisely crafted storytelling, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but I have to admit I really have to tell myself to concentrate on it, my attention span weakened by thrill-a-minute TV. The occasional funny scene aside (there’s a great one where McNulty and Bunk investigate a crime scene and only say “motherfucker” and variations thereof), it’s TV you have to have patience for. But I do feel like I’ve started to get to know this world, and I’ll continue to watch along with Alyssa.

TV recaps, by the way, are making me happy pretty consistently. It started gaining steam only during THE WIRE’s original run (the A.V. Club, for instance, didn’t start covering it until the last season), but there’s no doubt that it’s a show enriched by reading more about it, and while I know David Simon himself is not a fan, reading the reviews as I go along is really an incentive to keep watching.

I’ve also been reading a lot lately: I finished A CLASH OF KINGS (I’m saving book 3 until my thesis is done) and RED SEAS UNDER READ SKIES (which I’d started before immersing myself in Game of Thrones, meaning I’d forgotten about some of the intricacies of the schemes), picked GIRL IN LANDSCAPE back up and started A.S. Byatt’s RAGNAROK.

All this, together with the comics I’ve been reading lately (post forthcoming) and two recent episodes of EXTRA CREDITS about Joseph Campbell have really made me think about story structure. Byatt says quite a bit about it, not just in Norse mythology but also in the Bible, remarking for instance that prohibitions are usually just there to be broken, and that attempts to change fate will always have a loophole or be otherwise incomplete. In another book (I won’t specify for spoilers), the death of a character surprised me but was obvious in retrospect: when couples start dreaming about the future, at least one of them’s usually not long for the world.

You’d think that being aware of the scaffolding or skeleton of a story would decrease its power, just like people often think that I analyse movies too much to be able to just enjoy them. It doesn’t, though. There’s a lot of pleasure to be had in seeing a story get to its pre-ordained conclusion – and you have to be aware of the rules to enjoy seeing them broken.

That’s why I’m also not mad about the Spider-Man re-boot: sure, it’s a story we’ve seen before, with only some cosmetic details changed. Sure, it would have been nice to start in medias res, for once, and bypass the origin story. But there’s power to that story, too, and there’s fun to be had in seeing the same story unfold with different shades and accents, to see how it works to have Spider-Man be a geek instead of a nerd/dork, to see how New York has changed in ten years, from 2002, when 9/11 was still fresh, to 2012’s less earnest, more bristly version. It’s too bad there’s nothing here quite like that upside-down kiss (when BF and I do the horizontal version of that one, we actually call it a “spider-man kiss”), and I wish they’d dared to tweak the story a bit more, but Spider-Man’s origin is a fundamentally good story, so why not play with it?

Next week, three cinema visits. Which movie will make me happiest: LE CERCLE ROUGE, MAGIC MIKE, or THE DARK KNIGHT RISES? Place your bets…

First of all, a disclaimer: I’m lucky enough never to have been raped. Some boob gropage aside, I’ve never even been sexually assaulted. This means I can’t speak as to how triggering jokes can be, and I won’t attempt to. I’ll stick to analyzing some jokes and the messages behind them. I also feel like I should place a TW here: I’ll describe a fairly violent visual rape joke from a movie later on, so adjust accordingly.

Thing is, I don’t think a blanket “rape jokes are never funny” is true. Nor do I think declaring rape jokes taboo is a good thing. I think rape jokes can be funny. In fact, just this weekend, a friend showed me Wanda Sykes’ “detachable vagina” bit:

Now, to me, that’s funny. And a big chunk of it falls under the qualifier “rape joke”. Likewise the “Here’s your rape!”-bit I came across recently – I’m not a big fan of the execution of that one, but the premise is good.

What distinguished both these examples is that instead of feeding back into rape culture, they expose it. For the jokes to work, you need to be aware of just how pervasive the idea of rape is in a girls education, in a woman’s life.  I’m stubborn enough that I don’t let it affect me much in my daily life – I often bike home alone late at night, for instance, and dress however the hell I please – but I’m aware that this means that if anything happens to me, people are likely to shake their heads and think I should have been more careful. And I’m aware it’s not so easy to shrug of for everyone: I have a friend who doesn’t want to come over to watch a movie if it means biking home alone after dark. These jokes acknowledge this reality, and manage to make it darkly funny.

Talking the issue over with BF, he mentioned another rape joke, in the Dutch movie NEW KIDS NITRO, that’s in a very different category.

Background about the New Kids thing (more here): originally a series of online sketches, it’s about a group of decidedly lower-class, none-too-bright guys from Brabant, speaking an exaggerated version of the local dialect, and swearing a lot, with “kut” as their preferred insult (guess what english word that’s etymologically related to…). I watched the first movie made from the show, NEW KIDS TURBO, and thought it was very funny: the makers have an impeccable of timing, and their strength lies in repetition and exaggeration, taking jokes to absurd extremes. As an example: remember the moment in MEAN GIRLS where Regina George is suddenly hit by a bus? Well, NEW KIDS NITRO has not one or two but four (4!) of those, with progressively bigger vehicles, and progressively bigger laughs, too.

According to BF, at a certain point in the sequel, in the middle of a battle, a lady from the (admittedly easy to ridicule) “bond tegen het vloeken” (“association against swearing”) shows up, and lectures them. Now, there’s a way to make this funny: the “do you have to use so many cuss words?” “The fuck you talking about?” exchange from THE BIG LEBOWSKI comes to mind. The “joke” in NKN, however, involves the woman getting bent over and raped with a pool cue.

Yeah. See, I get that one of their things it to push limits. The movie also involved zombies, which are put on a train to Germany as an “endlösing” – clearly,  shock is their objective. But aside from being tasteless, the pool cue thing is just… lazy. It’s not just an easy target, but it’s hit with the least amount of creativity possible.  Echoing “let’s teach that uptight bitch a lesson” – original thought, there. Worst of all, it’s simply not funny – unless you think upsetting/annoying women if funny in and of itself.

It’s not like it would have been difficult to think of something better, even. For instance, wouldn’t it have been unexpected to have one of the New Kids (or all) suddenly turn around, and lecture the woman in extremely posh and articulate Dutch about the importance of swearing for language? And then show a reaction shot of the woman looking shocked, and then saying, after just the right length of pauze “kut…”*?  It may not be comedy brilliance, but if I can come up with a funnier alternative in ten minutes as an amateur, professional comedians should have no trouble finding something better. Something that doesn’t depict rape as a deserved comeuppance for being a prude, preferably.

There is one obvious difference, of course, between these jokes: the first two were made by women, the latter by men. I don’t necessarily think that only women can make good rape jokes, or that they can never make an unfunny or unacceptable one. I just think the lived experience of men and women is very different, so it might require a bit more empathy from men – just like I’d really have to think before I ever made a joke about, say, what it’s like to be a black person. In fact, I’d probably just reconsider telling the joke. So guys: unless you’re willing to put yourself in women’s shoes, and I mean really make an effort, I’d probably just stay away from that particular topic.**

“It’s just a joke!”, you might say. Sure, just like “it’s just a movie!”, “it’s just a saying!”, “it’s just a word” etc. These things all reflect and shape society, and as such are worth examining. And the fact that the most “shock-jock” or “anti-PC” jokes tend to reinforce the status-quo, tend to uphold existing hierarchies? Well, that’s just very fascinating.

*while the New Kids (and, apparently, much of Brabant) uses the term as an equivalent of “cunt”, it can also be more of an exclamation in the same way as “shit” or “fuck”. It can also become a preposition: a “kutdag” is a shitty day. Versatile word, really, and one I kind of like despite its gendered nature. The hard “k” makes it very satisfying to say.

** for those tempted to invoke the first amendment, or call this “censorship”… please.

A friend of mine got his PhD this week – cum laude, even! And he’s such a cool guy, he had a party at a cinema, and showed John Carpenter’s THE THING. On the big screen. So yeah, that made me pretty happy – and jump, a few times. Especially during that re-animation: I’d managed to forget about that particular scare, somehow.

And then there’s a another thing, that’s not making me happy necessarily (it’s a bit callous to be happy about a relationship you don’t have real insight in) but that’s absolutely fascinating: the TomKat divorce. It’s not even so much the relationship I’m interested in: it’s the story. I’m always surprised about how certain “truths”  tend to circulate, without any tangible evidence. Like that Tom Cruise is gay. Like that there was a contract for Katie Holmed with a iron-clad non-disclosure clause. Like that Suri might not be Cruise’s. Like how so many people are cheering Katie’s “escape”.

I have no idea how these narratives are shaped. The Cruise=gay thing, for instance, I don’t think is in gossip mags much (disclaimed: my knowledge of gossip mags comes entirely from Jezebel’s Midweek Madness round-up), and unlike with Travolta, I don’t think there are a lot of concrete cases of men accusing him of, well, anything. He also doesn’t quite ping my gaydar (not the most efficient detection device, admittedly) as much as he seems somehow a-sexual – odd, really, that a leading man who’s never all that credible in romances  was at some point one of the biggest movie stars. It doesn’t help either that their professions of love, even outside of the legendary couch-jumping, feel forced. I don’t trust the “body language experts” one bit, but something always seemed a bit off… or maybe once you think something’s not right, nothing can seem natural.

Part of this is Scientology, of course: cults encourage conspiracy theories, and Scientology is particularly alluring, what with the stories of taped “confessions” and the creepy tell-alls of ex-members (and this whole story’s great publicity for THE MASTER). But even non-scientology celebs have these unconfirmed and unconfirmable “facts” swirling about them, whether it’s a nice guy image or rumors of strange sexual escapades. It reminds me, oddly enough, of Game of Thrones, where the populace repeats lurid and strange “facts” about the royals that have a varying relationship to reality.

Then there are all the gossipy details, the “metadata”, if you will, that’s assiduously examined. That she filed for divorce, for instance. That she did it in New York, supposedly to increase her chance to get custody. Most intriguingly: that he’s nowhere to be found, suggesting that the “Tom was blind-sided” narrative might be true.Most of all, I really can’t wait to see what Anne Helen Petersen will make of it.

Oh, and I also watched THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, but charming as Garfield might be, and fun as the spider-cam is, this was as forgettable as it was unnecessary. Ok, the first kiss was cute. But even that can’t rival the upside-down-in-the-rain kiss from the Raimi version.

Two geeky things were making me happy last week, a sci-fi show and a fantasy book: DOCTOR WHO and A Game of Thrones.

Doctor Who because I watched the last three episodes of the first season (of New Who) this week, and can’t wait to see the rest, even if it’s too bad Eccleston will not be returning. I love the lightness of the show, and the corniness of the effects that turned me off when I first caught an episode a few years back has grown on me.

That episode was the eighth of this season, “Father’s Day”, and I skipped it this time around. The reason is makes for a lousy introduction is that it’s one of the few (of this season) that grapples with time-travelling paradoxes head-on, and well… it’s not (again, so far) one of the things the show does best. Many of the plots of other episodes could have been solved if the TARDIS just went back to some earlier time with the information gathered later, and the show is better off when it’s simply ignoring those options, instead of finding weak explanations of why they are forbidden. And I like the show better if I don’t spend time worrying about those things.

I do think it’s a bit disappointing that despite the Tardis’ time-and-SPACE capabilities, most episodes take place on Earth, most of them even in England, most of those in London. I loved the introduction of the huge period-garb wardrobe in the Dickens episode, but it hasn’t been brought up since. I’m hoping later seasons play with this a bit more.

Last week was also the week I finally tackled the first book of A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE, and while I’d intended to stretch it out, reading a few chapters at a time before bed, that plan went out the window pretty quickly: a long wait to get a haircut got me to page 150 or so, and I spent Saturday interrupting my reading only for exercise and dinner. This despite the fact that the first season of the show follows the book rather closely, meaning that I already knew most of the story beats: somehow it was hugely satisfying (not to mention addictive) to immerse myself in that world, hearing its characters talk, with many more details getting filled in and a tighter weave to the fabric of Westeros. I’ve now started book two, and again I intend to pace myself, but we’ll see.

I’m still debating whether to read on. So far, I’ve enjoyed seeing the show first and reading the more in-depth version later, with the visuals of the show in the back of my mind, helping me ‘see’ what happens more clearly. Still, I also really want to know what happens next, and I’ve already run into a few book spoilers, so I might just forge ahead … only, of course, to be frustrated by the wait until the next book instead of the one for the next season.

Soon: what made me happy this week.

What’s making me happy this week? Well, the TRUE BLOOD theme song, for one. I wish I could say the return of the show is making me happy, but it shows no signs of improvement, and looked especially poor compared to the great shows we’ve been getting lately. And yet? I still watch, and maybe that’s partly because the theme song is so perfect, putting you in the exact right mood for a large dose of campy fun – whether the fun actually follows or not. Jonathan Coulton played it on NPR’s fun new quiz, Ask Me Another, this week, and it made me feel like today’s episode despite the fact that there’s little to look forward to – except perhaps some Jason shenanigans.

Yup, that’s two NPR mentions above. It feels so obvious – of course someone like me would like public radio – but I don’t care: I love many of their shows, and quizzes with answers like “CinnaBonfire of the Vanities” definitely fall in the category of “things that make me happy”.

Also making me happy? Two genre novels I’m reading: RED SEAS UNDER RED SKIES (the second Locke Lamora novel) by Scott Lynch on the e-book reader, and Jonathan Lethem’s GIRL IN LANDSCAPE in print. I’m only halfway through both, but the former continues and expands a fun fantasy universe with a STING-like plot, and the latter creates a sci-fi world that’s completely out there, but with a central character that keeps it grounded. Continuing a theme that’s been re-occuring lately (with Sansa in GoT and Sally in Man Men), the main character gets her period, and it’s described kind of perfectly.

Not making me so happy? The Dutch soccer team. But I might have to keep thoughts about that for another post… and at least I have a good excuse not to have to watch the probably-excruciating match tonight: i’m going to see ORFEO  ED EURIDICE, which apparently is quite the spectacle.

What I really want to talk about, however, is the final two episodes of this season of GAME OF THRONES. This afternoon, I listened to an interview with the director of episode 2.9, Neil Marshall*, and was disappointed but not particularly surprised to find out he’d been urged by an executive producer to up the pointless nudity. “You can do full frontal, you know!”, the man apparently said, adding that he represented the “pervert” side of the audience.

Look – I have nothing against nudity. The main reason HBO goes so over the top with it (and with swearing, too) is because the rest of American TV is so ridiculously prudish. I don’t even necessarily see a problem with people finding the nudity an incentive to watch something (the reason I’m going to see MAGIC MIKE in the cinema has little to do with plot or characterization), or with producers adding nudity with the express purpose of appealing to the “pervert side”. But GAME OF THRONES is taking it to a rather ridiculous level, and the nudity in that specific episode felt even more tacked on that usual, especially since the girl was a non-entity, never seen before and probably never to be seen again.

Still, I can’t help but wonder: maybe there’s a sneakier plan at work here. I’m probably being too optimistic, but maybe the nudity functions as a Trojan horse, a way to get the men who would watch a show just for the boobs and nothing else** to care about and empathize with some great female characters.

Note: of course it’s ridiculous that men can just discard stories about women as “not for them” while woman are routinely expected to identify with male protagonists. I definitely don’t advocate just accepting that as a reality – but meanwhile, navigating around that fact might not be a bad idea.

GAME OF THRONES isn’t flawless, of course, and not just because of the nudity: the show has a tendency of taking agency away from female characters, even when the books (apparently) didn’t. But it’s notable for the sheer number of female characters, especially in this second season, and it’s not afraid at all to delve into how difficult it is to be a woman in this society.

Take that episode, for instance: Blackwater, which is focused on a siege, and  – unusually for the show – takes place in only one location. Since there are only men fighting, and only men on the battlements, it would have been very easy to restrict the episode further, ignoring all the female characters. Instead, we spend a big chunk of the episode in the bunker-like structure where the women stay, seeing how Cersei, Sansa and Shae (+ a number of noblewomen) navigate this situation. Not only that, but a progressively drunker and drunker Cersei tells Sansa that when she was little, she looked exactly like her brother Jaime and couldn’t understand why they were treated differently, why he was taught to fight and she was taught to curtsy. She talks about what will happen to the women if the city falls. And she tells Sansa*** her most powerful weapon is between her legs – while we know that it is not (her wits and perseverance have served her well, until now), we can see how embittered Cersei is due to being reduced to just a body.

The show is guilty of objectification, sure. And there’s definitely a big imbalance between male and female nudity. However, it shows us how damaging objectification can be, too, and not in a particularly subtle way. It’s hard to imagine anyone not noticing that these women – and the many others in the show – are fully-rounded characters, clearly damaged and limited by the fact that their role is meant to be purely decorative. If anything, the fact that there is an exec representing the “pervert side” shows that while we’ve come far, there’s still a ways to go.

*CENTURION, THE DESCENT

**Though you can wonder if those really exist, what with the abundance of boobs on the web.

*** I am, at some point, going to write the post I’ve been thinking about for weeks about how Sansa is the more interesting character from a feminist perspective than Arya, I swear.

Updating fairy-tales is all the rage these days, with not just two Snow White movies but even a Jack & the Beanstalk one, but they’ve really never left the public consciousness. It can be safely assumed that like vampires and Frankenstein’s, they will never truly disappear, since the bare bones of the stories can so easily be adapted to the times, the core elements familiar but the subtext fluid. The stories of princesses might all look the same, and seem to embody only the most antiquated of gender roles, but their messages and lessons still ring strong.

Snow White, of course, has always been about beauty and youth. “Who is the fairest of them all?”, the queen asks, eager to hear her own name, and furious when it turns out she is fairest no longer, surpassed by a raven-haired pale beauty with crimson lips. In the fairy tale and in the new action-movie adaptation SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN, Snow White “wins” the contest because she has inner as well as outer beauty. But the movie makes implicit that the queen’s desperate desire to retain her youth and beauty is not vanity alone – she fiercely defends herself because her beauty is the source of her power, perhaps even the only power she has. She’s a monster, but a monster made by the system, and this explains why Snow White can’t help but feel sorry for her. Charlize Theron clearly relishes playing such a grandiose, evil part, but she never forgets that her queen Ravenna is at heart a pitiful creature.

It’s too bad they haven’t found a Snow White to match her. Just to clarify: I’m no Kristen Stewart hater. The Twilight movies are easy targets, but she managed to give Bella something completely absent in the books: a personality. I can understand why she was cast: she projects a certain authenticity – carefully cultivated in her public image, too – that helps her play wide-eyed wonder and innocence without it going into maudlin territory. But this Snow White is a warrior too, and when called upon to give a St. Crispin’s day speech, she can’t quite pull it off. She shouts, and her chest heaves with labored breathing, but she lacks the authority Theron has no problem summoning.

Overall, though, I thought this adaptation was both visually stunning and thematically interesting. And what really sold me on it, the thing that made sure I left the cinema not just satisfied but elated, was the ending (and here be spoilers)

In the end, Snow White is crowned Queen. Who is crowned King? Who does she choose, the Duke’s son or the troubled Huntsman?

Nobody. Snow White sits on her throne, and seems in no hurry to share her hard-earned power. And the men? Far from squabbling or fighting over her, they respect her and obey her. It even gets left in the middle if it is the Huntsman’s kiss that waked her, or maybe both their kisses, or maybe neither: this Snow White stands on her own.  Don’t get me wrong, I definitely have pantsfeelings* for the deliciously scruffy Chris Hemsworth, and the other dude’s not hard to look at either. But there’s something profoundly satisfying to see a “happily ever after” that doesn’t involve a coupling – and it’s quite a bit more subversive than just turning Snow into a warrior princess.

Finally, on a completely tangent, the film made me think of Mad Men, specifically of Betty and Sally’s plot in the most recent episode. Betty actually comes off pretty well compared to Ravenna. In the early season’s, Betty was the most conventionally beautiful of the female characters, and traded on those looks. This season, she’s been struggling with weight gain, and with the reality of having been replaced by a younger, slimmer, hipper woman. The previous episode was the first time we’ve seen her happy, comforting Sally after she got her first period. It has been uncharitably been ascribed just to a sense of triumph that Sally ran to her and not to Megan. But I think it might also just be because she finally accepted the loss of her youth (and the beauty society associates with it), and passed the baton. Even Snow White will get wrinkles some day – but if your value derives from something more than just your looks, that’s not such a tragedy.

*hat-tip Captain Awkward

PROMETHEUS (Scott, 2012) – I was planning to unleash some snark about how inconsistent and poorly thought-through the science in PROMETHEUS was, but someone’s already done that for me (warning: VERY spoilery). I was going to refer to one of the actors as “a poor man’s Tom Hardy”, but that’s apparently not very original either.

Instead, I’ll talk about why despite being disappointed and frustrated by PROMETHEUS, I did enjoy many aspects of it. Ridley Scott’s direction, for instance, is truly refreshing, with carefully composed, steady shots, and old-fashioned suspense-building. It’s not a horror film though – the ALIEN franchise is kind of unique in its genre-hopping, from the true haunted-house horror of the original to the pure action of the first sequel and the (unfortunately not very thought through) science-fiction of ideas of this one*.

The second great thing is the acting. Michael Fassbender is wonderfully “off” as David, and his coldness is balanced out by the warm humanity of Noomi Rapace’s Elisabeth Shaw and Idris Elba’s Captain Janek. The rest of the cast is less memorable, alas, and aside from one impressive moment Charlize Theron gets very little to do, though she can certainly pull of the space-suit look.

It’s difficult to say more without getting into spoiler territory. Overall, it seems the film is a bit too beholden to ALIEN, too set on offering some kind of explanation (with a handy embedded lesson) about what happened in that film, while at the same time not connecting precisely enough to that film to satisfy sticklers. It’s not a miss – but it can’t be called a hit, either. However, I’m certainly happy they at least aimed high.

*Disclaimer: I have not seen the third and fourth film, or any of the ALIENS vs. PREDATOR movies