PJ Media

Mean Girls: Why Are Women Turning Against Tina Fey?

New York magazine writer Ariel Levy’s 2005 cultural study Female Chauvinist Pigs described a new kind of misogyny perpetrated by women who curry favor by “Uncle Tomming” mainstream frat behavior in the guise of sexual empowerment. Chelsea Handler, whose raunchy essay collections My Horizontal Life and Are You There Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea sold 1.7 million copies and spawned a number of Chelsea Lites, is one offender. The so-called Fempire — the Hollywood woman-screenwriter foursome of Diablo Cody, Lorene Scafaria (now dating Ashton Kutcher), Dana Fox (writer of big-budget rom-coms What Happens in Vegas and The Wedding Date), and Elizabeth Meriwether — is another. A 2009 New York Times article brought most of the backlash on ringleader Cody, who taught us that there is such a thing as “stripping ironically,” for her smug attitude. There wasn’t an ounce of “everywoman” among them. They were a female Entourage without a chubby Turtle.

Such female chauvinist pigs are supposedly guilty of play, and Levy admonishes them: “If you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress.” But it’s less the Fempire and the Handlerites who need to heed this advice then the likes of Tina Fey, whose “nerdy” onscreen persona and adamant faux feminism masks a Thatcherite morality and tendency to slut-shame.

– Anna Breslaw, “The Unf*ckables” (The New Inquiry, May 2012)

Since I’m what’s apparently now known as a “comedy nerd,” someone sent me Anna Breslaw’s essay in The New Inquiry called “The Unf*ckables,” which is all about the new wave of raunchy post-modern female comedians, and feminism and sexual politics and conventional standards of beauty.

I think.

“The Unf*ckables” actually reminded me of Norman Mailer’s hugely influential 9000-word 1957 opus “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.”

That is: I read it a couple of times and I still didn’t get it.

See, I didn’t go to college, so stuff like this by Breslaw zooms right over my skull:

The only funny women who are free to cross over to mainstream audiences are the ones who are free from the beauty hang-ups that limit their jokes to female audiences. The game, then, is how effortlessly and subliminally someone like Fey can convey her exceptionalism using ironic male touches and the [sic?] feminism as an alibi for their looks advantage, reinforcing the patriarchal standards she often pretends to critique.

So I’m stupid. Sorry.

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Posted at 8:00 am on May 22nd, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

In the Future Will Everyone Really ‘Have To Become an Entrepreneur’?

Over at Forbes.com, Paul B. Brown explains “Why Everyone Will Have To Become An Entrepreneur”:

Think back 20 years. On a random Saturday morning, you slip on your American made polo shirt, and made in the U.S.A. blue jeans, and while walking downtown you wonder if that new hot CD you want—the one that has been sold out forever—is finally available. Spotting a pay phone, you get the number for a record store you know is near by. Yes, they have a copy they will put aside for you, if you can get there within the hour. Not quite certain where the store is, you pull out a map and double check.

As you think about this scenario, and countless others you could imagine, you realize that it’s easier to list the tiny handful of professions and industries that will remain unchanged in the next 20 years than it is to write down the ones that will be altered—radically. And all that upheaval is likely to throw you—and anyone else who is not prepared—out of a job.

I’m old enough for Brown’s time-machine scenario to ring all kinds of (rotary dial) bells.

(I’d add that, because it’s Saturday morning, the banks aren’t open, and ATMs don’t exist, so the money in your wallet is what you’re stuck with until 10 a.m. Monday.)

(On the plus side, you can still smoke in your neighborhood bar…)

To Brown’s larger point — about all encompassing obsolescence — I was just chatting to a professional journalist who remarked, matter of factly, that newspapers will cease to exist in ten years, tops. (Lucky for him, he’s in broadcasting.)

I feel the same way about the postal service.

Then again, I grew up in a steel town, and heard all my life that the factories would be closing down any year now.

Or taken over by the Japanese.

That was almost fifty years ago. Those factories are still smoking, and Canadian owned.

Those trendy Japanese manufacturing and managerial tricks they tried out in the 1970s are long forgotten.

Sure, I’m already an entrepreneur, and know all the beautifully patina-ed koans: “Nobody ever got rich working for somebody else” and so forth.

But I’m a contrarian, too. In this glorious sole-proprietorship future, won’t somebody still have to wear the name tags?

Are we planning for an era that — just like 99% of those “flying car” “futures” of the past — won’t ever materialize?

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Posted at 7:00 am on May 16th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

3 Reasons Higher Education Is Broken — and How To Fix It

“Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

Alas, I can’t accurately attribute that quotation because, appropriately enough, its authorship is disputed.

Another truism of contested paternity holds that the absurdity of the modern world long ago rendered satire impossible.

Conveniently enough, these two sayings go together like keggers and frats. Having cleverly avoided going to college myself, I have it on good authority from the less fortunate that fictional spoofs of academia (Moo, Lucky Jim) are more like grimly amusing documentaries.

Doesn’t Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) — about an African American professor passing for white who’s falsely accused of racism for calling ghosts “spooks” — sound more like a news story than a novel?

Especially this week.

The depressing saga of Naomi Schaefer Riley demonstrates how hard it’s become to distinguish fact from fiction — or in her case, The Onion from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The latter (supposedly more sober and reputable) publication fired Riley on May 7 merely for blogging about “some of the absurdities appearing in the field of black studies.”

Ron Radosh reported on what happened next:

Noting that there were legitimate problems to address about the plight facing the black community today, Riley argued that they were not being addressed in black studies departments. Instead, she argued, all they want to do is engage in arguments that blame everything on the white man.

The result of Riley’s article — again, her opinion — was an avalanche of protest to the Chronicle’s letters section. The editors told readers that they received “thousands” of protests.

Then, of course, Riley’s dismissal provoked another flurry of commentary, this time — like Radosh’s post — in her defense.

The narrative was irresistible, a veritable Tom Wolfe novel in miniature.

Everything about the story — from the ponderous, pretentious titles of the dissertations Riley mocked, to the unedifying spectacle of black scholars “lynching” a “racist” white writer (whose husband happens to be African American) – epitomized the stubborn root rot afflicting the groves of academe.

So now seemed like the perfect time to ask Riley – previously best known as the author of last year’s The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons You Won’t Get the College Education You Pay For — what she thinks are the biggest problems facing higher education today, and whether or not reform is even possible.

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Posted at 7:00 am on May 15th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

3 Rules for Handling the Online Trolls, Bullies, and Crackpots

“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”

It’s arguably the most famous opening line in 20th century fiction. The predicament in which Franz Kafka’s “Joseph K.” finds himself is even more chillingly relevant today than it was in 1920.

Not only was Kafka lucky enough to have died before the Holocaust he’d intuited was on the horizon, but he missed far, far lesser scourges, like internet trolls and slanderers.

If Kafka were alive and writing on the web today, he’d have dozens of online stalkers, making fun of him for living with his parents and having really big ears.

He might even be subject to “lawfare” for his “controversial” blogging.

A while back I wrote about the particular abuse women in general — and conservative women in particular — attract on the web. The good news is that there are ways to dial down this annoying din, and these methods work for everybody.

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Posted at 8:50 am on May 8th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

When Business Gets Personal: Is Blogging Any Job For a Woman?

At Forbes, Larissa Faw takes a frank look at the business side of the female blogosphere. What she discovers shouldn’t shock anyone familiar with the old “80/20 rule”:

“You can break it down like this,” says BSM Media’s Maria Bailey and author of Power Moms. “There’s the top 10% who make six figures, who write books, and have deals with the Food Network. Then there’s the bottom 20% who are only doing it for the love and not making anything.”

“This leaves 70% of women bloggers — some 13.2 million — who blog for some modicum of profit. While no two bloggers are alike, they all receive money from similar opportunities. And free merchandise in exchange for a blog review is often considered the gateway towards serious monetization.”

Since Faw’s column is primarily focused on business models and profit, she rightly sidesteps the non-monetary hazards women face when they blog: being insulted and threatened, for instance, or losing jobs for writing about stuff that’s either too personal or too political.

Of course, those hazards dog male bloggers, too. But in my experience, women get judged more harshly for stating their opinions.

Come on: Is Ann Coulter really more heartless and obnoxious than P.J. O’Rourke? Yet who gets attacked on campuses?

Does Glenn Reynolds get rape threats, or is that just Dana Loesch (and me)?

Another Forbes columnist, Susannah Breslin, argues that being frank and female doesn’t have to be a career-ender any longer.

Breslin, whose old sex blog was called “Reverse Cowgirl,” is now, well, writing for Forbes.

In the era of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, is Breslin onto something — or does writing about/participating in sex earn women the kind of “hall pass” that delving into politics never will?

Image courtesy shutterstock and Kletr

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Posted at 4:00 pm on May 2nd, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

Talent Isn’t Everything: 5 Secrets to Freelance Success

I’ve been a professional writer since I sold my first piece to Seventeen at age 21, on my first try.

(Take that, Sylvia Plath: she racked up about fifty rejection letters from the same magazine before breaking in.)

Since then, I’ve veered between being an on-site staff writer and a full-time freelancer, doing one or the other for about three or four years before getting bored/wanting more money/getting sick of winter commuting/spotting an ad for the full-time “dream job” I just HAD to have (for a while).

Right now, I’ve been freelancing full-time since 2008. Along with the politics and culture pieces I do for PJ Media and other online magazines, I write web copy for clients ranging from funeral homes to roofing contractors; edit and ghostwrite books, newsletters, and op-eds; and manage a few social media accounts as well.

Over the years, countless people have told me they want to be freelance writers, too. So here are some tips and home truths about the freelance writing (or freelance anything) life.

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Posted at 10:56 am on April 30th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

6 Reasons The Who Is Better Than That Stupid Band You Like

One of my most talked about pieces for PJ Media noted as an aside that I thought The Who were better than The Beatles.

Loads of people signed in to yell at me for writing that — almost as many as those taking issue with my slagging of George Carlin.

Now I’m finally getting around to explaining what I meant, in six “bits” arranged in no particular order.

So prepare to spar with me, and each other, in the comments below, as I try to convince you that The Who is better than [insert name of that stupid band you like, here].

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Posted at 10:30 am on April 25th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

4 Ways My Moviegoing Habits Changed After I Grew Up

I’ve been a movie buff all my life, but the way I consume movies (as the kids put it these days) has evolved.

Sure, the technology has changed. Good thing I didn’t “follow my dream” and become a film projectionist, because I’d be on the unemployment line. And I finally dumped my last box of old VHS tapes on the sidewalk the last time I moved.

But I’ve changed, too.

I’ve written about these changes here before, like how fogeyish it made me feel when I realized I no longer automatically identified with the teenagers in movies.

Sometimes I miss the old me: the weird girl who scanned the new TV Guide with a red pen, hoping All About Eve was coming on, and who practically lived at our city’s only “rep” cinema…

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Posted at 11:09 am on April 16th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

Why Skipping College Was One of the Smartest Decisions of My Life

“I didn’t.”

That’s my answer when someone asks me where I went to college. Thirty years after I made that fateful decision, the words still stick in my throat sometimes.

Why didn’t I — a naturally bright, unnaturally well-read kid in my high school’s “advanced” stream — go to university (as we call “college” up here in Canada) and get a BA?

For one thing, it was the Reagan era. Every night on the news (not to mention talk shows and comedy programs), we were assured that Ronald Reagan was about to start World War 3. Roll your eyes if you like, but plenty of people older and supposedly smarter than I purported to believe that.

Next: Never mind that wailing Zuni doll from Trilogy of Terror, or any of the other scary stuff readers share at Kindertrauma.com. What horrified me on TV when I was a kid? The Paper Chase (1973). The middlebrow saga of a guy’s struggle to get through law school — hell, his struggle to get from one end of his vast Ivy League campus to the next without being late for his next class and getting insulted by John Houseman at his withering best (or is that worst?) — genuinely terrified me.

Probably because — reason #3 — no one in my family had gone to college. In fact, I was the first one to finish high school. Filling out applications, applying for grants, moving into a dorm — you might as well have been talking about a voyage to the moon.

OK, so those reasons sound pretty stupid. But not going to university was one of the smartest decisions of my life.

Instead, I graduated from a two-year media program at a community college, armed with an award-winning writing and production portfolio. In an era of double-digit unemployment and interest rates, I got my first “real” job at a Toronto communications firm pretty easily, and paid off my relatively puny student loans in short order (unlike some of my friends, who got BAs — then declared bankruptcy). I’d say 90% of the jobs I’ve ever held have been in my field.

When it comes to college, Aaron Clarey and I agree about a lot. He blogs as “Captain Capitalism” and just wrote the book Worthless: The Young Person’s Indispensable Guide to Choosing the Right Major.

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Posted at 12:00 pm on April 12th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

Arlen Specter: a Sty in the Public Eye

Screenshot/Philadelphia Inquirer

King George III asked an American painter what the victorious George Washington would do now that independence had been won.

The painter knew that, just like his patron, millions of people at home and abroad simply assumed — and even hoped — that the general would allow himself to be crowned the first king of America. ‘Twas ever thus, no?

However, this painter also knew of Washington’s actual plans, and so he told King George, “They say he will return to his farm” — in the classical spirit personified by Cincinnatus, the Roman emperor whose example of reluctant (and temporary) harkening to the call of duty was greatly admired by the Founders.

“Why, if he does that,” George III famously replied, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”

No one will ever exclaim such a thing about Arlen Specter.

Whereas Cincinnatus and Washington wanted to shrug off the heavy burden of public service and humbly return to something resembling private life as soon as they could, Specter is clinging to fame for as long as possible, like a sty in the public eye.

Other supposedly retired politicos have written memoirs (does anyone actually read these, by the way?) and undertake book tours to promote them. However, Arlen Specter is the first of these I’m aware of who is flogging his tome at comedy open mics.

You think I’m kidding.

In other words:

The closest Arlen Specter will ever get to emulating the father of your country will be if somebody opens a comedy club in Cincinnati and calls it “The Farm.”

As various scholars have demonstrated, the distinguished signers of the Declaration of Independence had very different ideas about “fame” than we do.

To quote Adam Carolla: “If the Founding Fathers came back today, they would never stop killing themselves.”

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Posted at 12:57 pm on April 4th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

Why David Letterman Has (Almost) Always Creeped Me Out

By now, my lack of affection for certain pop culture institutions and icons — Star Wars, George Carlin — is well known to regular PJ Media readers.

“David Letterman” is another name on my lengthy roster.

My preference for uncool Arsenio Hall and Jay Leno over hipster favorites like Conan and Letterman slots me into the “untouchable” caste of Generation X’ers.

But the simple truth is: David Letterman has (almost) always creeped me out.

I say “almost” because I started out as a loyal Letterman fan, back in 1980, when he hosted a live network morning show.

Yep, you read that right.

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Posted at 12:00 am on April 2nd, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

Yeah, That Russell Brand vs. Peter Hitchens ‘Debate’ Went About as Well as You’d Expect

“Thank” isn’t quite the word, so let’s just say I want to “credit” Canadian author and broadcaster Michael Coren for bringing the video below to my attention.

You see, earlier this month, columnist Peter Hitchens, comedian Russell Brand, and, from what I can gather, a cast of thousands took part in “a very strange encounter,” as Hitchens put it later, “presented as a debate but in fact not really one, more a sort of combative colloquy, streamed live by Google and Intelligence Squared (…) from a large hole in the ground near King’s Cross Station in London, underneath the offices of the The Guardian.”

There’s an “old Indian burial ground” joke in their somewhere. Surely the locale alone put the curse on the event before it even began?

As the video shows, there were also far too many participants on the roster, all clamoring to be heard on the topic of drug legalization.

Hitchens managed to get a few words in, expressing his skepticism about the disease model of alcoholism (a skepticism I don’t share, for personal reasons, but understand completely, also for personal reasons — AA having been hijacked over 20 years ago by “drum circle,” “inner child” whiners fixated on faddish phobias and neuroses).

Hitchens added — and here Bill W. and Dr. Bob would have agreed, in fact — that addiction has a moral component.

Need I tell you what happened next? Hitchens continues:

These are perfectly arguable propositions and I think I made the case for them clearly and rationally. The response I received was not rational. It was a form of rage, mingled with incredulity. They thought everyone like me was dead already. How dare I still be alive? (…)

[Russell Brand] responded to my point about selfish rich kids with a tirade of personal abuse and the standard all-purpose false accusation of racial prejudice that is the universal sign of a person who has no good argument, and knows he has no good argument.

As his voice rose to a whine similar to the sound of an ill-tuned hand-dryer, he railed at me for daring to work for a newspaper he didn’t agree with (and which caught him out in a piece of behaviour which doesn’t exactly redound to his credit). It is amusing to be accused of bigotry by someone who fulfils its characteristics himself.

Behold, and brace yourself against cringing:

I discovered this video at Michael Coren’s blog. (Yes, he blogs, along with writing books – distinguished biographies of literary greats, along with popular Catholic apologetics — and penning a weekly syndicated column and hosting a nightly national TV show.)

Above the video, Coren added his own tantalizing remarks:

I grew up quite close to the fraud [Russell] Brand. Believe me, his accent, his views, his claim to be a football fan, are all part of a carefully contrived persona. Most awful of all, he’s not funny. Here he is being ripped apart by Peter Hitchens, and responding to an intelligent set of criticisms by accusing Hitchens of being personal – he does this by being personal!

Oooooh! Chippy, chippy, chippy! I had to hear more (and express my confusion about Brand’s apparent popularity).

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Posted at 9:51 pm on March 22nd, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

The Porn You Will Always Have With You: California’s Condom Cops

Rule 34 is bunk.

You know that rule of the internet: “If it exists, there is porn of it”?

Wrong.

One, because if there were “cellulite porn,” I might very well be typing this beside my infinity pool in a double gated community somewhere south of the 49th parallel.

(Who am I kidding? I wouldn’t be typing this at all…)

Two: last year I asked my blog readers if they’d ever heard tell of “Mountie porn,” and got one measly link to a low-rent “sexy Halloween costume” vendor.

Which seems bizarre, and not just because all those chicks dug Due South.

After all, uniforms have been a porn staple forever. As P.J. O’Rourke famously said:

I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don’t let it bother me. I don’t let it bother me for one simple reason. No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.

Yep, that Hugo Boss guy has a LOT to answer for:

It was one of Israel’s dirty little secrets. In the early 1960s, as Israelis were being exposed for the first time to the shocking testimonies of Holocaust survivors at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a series of pornographic pocket books called Stalags, based on Nazi themes, became best sellers throughout the land.

Now while I wouldn’t call them fascists, our RCMP has burned a few barns in their day.

(And tasered a guy to death for having a nicotine fit at the airport. Then there was the time they stole all that dynamite…)

So: pretty badass. But still (almost) no Mountie porn. Hmmm.

All this to say:

My attitude about pornography is as subjectively personal as anyone else’s.

In my case, it reflects my experiences as a Canadian female of a certain age, steeped in the anti- and pro-porn “wars” that preoccupied feminists in the 1980s.

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Posted at 12:05 am on March 13th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

‘This Would Be Heaven For Me’: An Evening with Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla

Dennis Prager, Adam Carolla (photo by Robert Werner)

I’ve been fortunate enough to see both Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla when they’ve appeared live in Toronto. When I heard they’d be taking the stage together for one night in California, I could only envy the folks who’d get to attend.

For the rest of us who couldn’t make it, Carolla’s team has put out an audio recording of their February 25 shows. (After the initial 8pm event sold out, they added a second for 10:30.)

Pairing up these two broadcasters for a “between two ferns” evening of “wit and wisdom” seems counterintuitive only if you’ve never listened to either of them at great length.

Superficially, Carolla and Prager couldn’t be more different.

West coast atheist Carolla grew up in an atmosphere of semi-benign neglect by a welfare mom and a passel of “step” relatives; he cared more about football & partying than grades, and barely finished high school; and at the age of thirty, he muscled his way into showbiz (The Man Show, Loveline and now the world’s most downloaded podcast) via the unlikely route of boxing and construction work. (Carolla relates the long, familiar and still entertaining tale during the show, prompting Prager to remark, “After hearing that story, if anybody should not be an atheist, it should be you.”)

Prager, a native New Yorker, intellectual, 0ne-time yeshiva student who has traveled the world, speaks a dozen languages, hails from an intact and loving Jewish family — and, as Carolla likes to say, “is practically a rabbi.”

Prager famously hosts somber weekly advice segments called “The Happiness Hour” and the “Male/Female Hour,” whereas Carolla is better known for his tips on strip club etiquette and home improvement.

Yet as Prager realized when they first chatted together on each other’s shows last year, these two men share many of the same values: patriotism, family, capitalism, and freedom.

Proving that great minds think alike, they teamed up for an “evening with” event on February 25.

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Posted at 12:00 am on March 7th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

Talk Sixties, Act Fifties: The Ice Storm

“All that Swinging Sixties. It didn’t do anyone any good, did it? Easy sex and the Pill. Marriages were ruined. I never did approve. I never really enjoyed the sex.”

– Christine Keeler

***
I suspect I’d have been more impressed by The Ice Storm had I seen it in a theater the year it came out (1997) instead of on DVD this week.

The film, set in 1973 suburban Connecticut on Thanksgiving weekend, is undeniably stylish and even coldly haunting in parts, like the best work of Alex Colville.

However, Ang Lee’s “Asian” appreciation of social pecking orders (he is a great admirer of Ozu), which were on display in his previous film, Sense and Sensibility (1995) was underused in The Ice Storm, because everyone belongs to the same affluent class.

As well, too many bits of business that might have seemed fresh in 1997 – like the stoned girl’s head flopping onto one boy’s crotch; another boy’s death echoed in a Fantastic Four panel – now seem corny.

The Ice Storm is best remembered fifteen years later for its “key party” sequence.

(See this “controversial” 2003 parody ad for the Toyota Corolla):

These “key party” scenes in The Ice Storm aren’t particularly thrilling, or even salacious. We remember them because we wonder: did suburban 1970s squares really try to get in on the younger generation’s “free love” hijinks a few years after the fact?

A survivor of London’s “Swinging Sixties” told me he’d participated in one of these “spin the bottle for grown ups” get-togethers, but he’s my only primary source. It’s possible these suburban wife swapping “affairs” are an urban legend, like “rainbow parties” or “bra burning,” which only became “real” after someone invented them and spawned a moral panic.

I’m not spoiling much when I tell you that nobody at the “key party” in The Ice Storm has a great “swinging” experience. Almost everyone involved is bitter or reluctant beforehand, or miserable later.

You might think this is because the movie was made in 1997, twenty five years after the fact, and reflects society’s reluctant acknowledgement that the freewheeling 1960s and 1970s were a long, loud, colorful multi-generational social disaster of the first order. (Albeit with a decent soundtrack.)

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Posted at 12:03 am on March 1st, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

God Bless America? Remembering 1993′s Falling Down

Foster: I’m the bad guy?

Prendergast: Yeah.

Foster: How did that happen? I did everything they told me to. Did you know I build missiles? I help to protect America. You should be rewarded for that. Instead, they give it to the plastic surgeon. They lied to me.

– Falling Down (1993, screenplay by Ebbe Roe Smith)

***

The red band trailer of Bobcat Goldthwait’s next movie, God Bless America, is now making its way across the net, as the film itself tools around the festival circuit on its way to a May 11 wide-opening.

Judging solely by its trailer, God Bless America looks like a mutation of Kick-Ass, Heathers, Taxi Driver, Paper Moon, Serial Mom and The End (1978).

Diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, the film’s pathetic protagonist (played by Joel Murray) embarks on a killing spree. He and his teenaged sidekick (Tara Lynne Barr) knock off individuals they’ve deemed deserving of death: a bratty reality TV star, talent show contestants, moviegoers who won’t turn off their cell phones, a bunch of Fred Phelps’ followers:

Based on the trailer alone, I’m not impressed – unlike the folks at certain pop culture sites. (The writer at ScreenJunkies enthused, “The trailer for God Bless America looks like my dream journal!”)

The movie looks awfully derivative (see “mutation” above). Look: I’m 47 years old, I’ve already seen a lot of movies and I can’t undo that. Most new films are either remakes and franchise sequels surfing on stunt-casting fumes, CGI and catchy soundtracks, or Tarantinoesque “homages” to far superior movies I saw when I was 17.

I’m not averse to filmmakers making cinematic references; the movie I’m about to discuss “quotes” Fellini’s 8 ½ in its opening sequence. But quotes are a long way from plagiarism and lazy, sterile regurgitation.

Because every movie today seems to be simply a collection of winking “homages” to other ones, expect to hear God Bless America compared to Falling Down (1993). A lot. I remember when that Joel Schumacher movie was condemned as a sign of the end times, and for better or worse, most of us are still alive. God Bless America will no doubt be condemned too, for its “glorification” of violence (and, I suspect, the weird friendship between a middle-aged man and an adolescent girl).

However, God Bless America’s apparent differences from its revenge-fantasy predecessor demonstrate the distance Hollywood (and society) has traveled in the last 20 years. Not necessarily in the right direction, of course.

“Filmed during the L.A. riots and released on the same day as the World Trade Center bombing and two days before the siege at the Branch Davidian compound (which ended badly), [Falling Down] could be said to be a record of fear and loathing extant in the real world of early ’90s America.”

– Bee Tee Dee, Unwinnable.com

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Posted at 10:00 pm on February 21st, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

Five Reasons Star Wars Actually Sucks

In a previous column, I noted in passing that I fell asleep during Star Wars.

I have this dim (repressed?) memory of getting dragged to see it by a high school boyfriend. (So it must have been during a theatrical re-release — I’m not that old.)

I remember:

a) Harrison Ford = hot
b) remarking loudly that we shouldn’t be able to hear those rocket ships or whatever they were because, as everyone knows, space is a vacuum and you can’t hear explosions or anything else.

Then I gathered my jacket around my head until the house lights came up.

I figured I was free and clear. Little did I know that, well into the next century, Star Wars detritus would be washing up onto the shores of my life each and every damn day.

I’m talking about stuff like this:

And this:

And whateverthehell this is:

Seriously: isn’t there some cancer you could be curing?

If you’re trying to make adults with refined tastes and a real religion hate your favorite movie even more, congratulations, Star Wars fans: mission accomplished.

Star Wars actually sucks. Here’s why.

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Posted at 8:11 pm on February 1st, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

Art, Lust, and Doing the Dishes: The Controversy of Scarlet Street

“Scarlet Street’ has so many beautifully subtle touches in it that it really has to be seen several times in order to be fully appreciated: the parallel between Kitty and Chris’s flower (his ‘problems with perspective’); the expression that flashes over Kitty’s face when Chris ‘confesses’ that he’s a married man; the brief reference at the beginning to Chris’s superstition, which will eventually bring about his psychological downfall. Like many Lang films, it deals with the concept of criminal justice, and is a clever, cruel and fascinating film — a little dated technically, but far ahead of its time, and one of the greatest and blackest film noirs from the forties. The climax is still one of the most chilling in film history — more frightening than most of the great horror films.”

In my latest edition of “Movies for Grown Ups,” I’m introducing you to another film without robots, car chases or “cool” special effects.

Scarlet Street is a film noir, but not one of those detective centered ones like The Maltese Falcon or Kiss Me Deadly.

Because it was directed by a refugee from Hitler’s Germany – Fritz Lang – this movie features the kinky backstreet misanthropy – a kind of doomed, sadistic stoicism — that’s standard issue with Teutonic filmmakers. Think of Billy Wilder’s dingy, (un)romantic comedy The Apartment or von Sternberg’s grotty The Blue Angel.

Those two movies deal with erotic obsession — never thought of Jack Lemmon as a stalker before, had you? — and so does Scarlet Street. Yet it is so much more.

Here’s the plot:

Chris Cross (played by Edward G. Robinson) is an aging, lowly clerk whose miserable marriage and tedious job are only made bearable by his hobby. He’s a painter whose expressionistic canvases are painted in the bathroom — when his shrewish wife permits it. (Note: the video below was ripped from a public domain copy of the film. Keep reading to find out how to view a superior print.)

Mostly he’s shown wearing an apron and cleaning up the apartment, while she nags him in the background.

One evening, fate brings Cross into the path of a lazy, slovenly “actress” named Kitty (who’s really a prostitute, but the Hays Code forbade Lang from spelling that out.) To his own amazement, the timid clerk rescues Kitty (played by Joan Bennett) from a brutal attacker. She repays the favor by pretending to befriend him.

“Pretending” because Cross doesn’t know that Kitty’s attacker was really her boyfriend/pimp Johnny. (Actor Dan Duryea specialized in skinny, snake-like wife-beaters on the make; he’ll remind modern viewers of an unsavory mutation of Richard Widmark and William H. Macy.)

Flattered by her attention, Cross lets Kitty mistake him for a famous artist – a fib that inspires the vulgar pair to take the old guy for all he’s worth.

Kitty talks Cross into renting a studio apartment in Greenwich Village so he can paint in peace (in fact, she just wants a fancy new place to live.) He duly sets up an easel, and moves his finished canvases out of his own home before his wife makes good on her cruel threat to throw them away.

A series of twists and misunderstandings leads a renowned art critic to mistake Kitty as the artist responsible for these unusual paintings. She can’t very well deny it, and Johnny won’t let her, now that “her” paintings are commanding high prices in upper crust galleries.

When Cross finds out what’s happened…

I’ll leave it there.

It pains me to do so, because Scarlet Street’s intricately plotted, edge-of-your-seat twists are among its greatest achievements, and I’d get a little frisson of excitement retelling them to you right now. However, it wouldn’t be fair.

Let’s just say that “following your dreams” can sometimes become a nightmare, especially when three people decide to blithely believe what they want to believe, with tragic consequences.

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Posted at 2:01 am on January 24th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

‘Long Story Short’: Colin Quinn’s 75-Minute History of the World

Comedian Colin Quinn has been around a long time.

How long?

This long:

Yikes.

Quinn has come a long way since 1990, but unlike some of the comedians he came up with, like Jon Stewart and Ben Stiller, his career has been a series of, shall we say, lateral moves.

Sure, he was the “Weekend Update” guy on Saturday Night Live for five years, but his movie career never quite took off (A Night at the Roxbury, anyone?).

He took up stand-up comedy after he quit drinking and needed something to take up his sudden surfeit of sober free time. Nearly thirty years on, Quinn remains a workhorse, and is sometimes called “the comedian’s comedian” (which some comics and fans consider a dubious designation, a backhanded compliment that’s synonymous with “too brilliant to ever make it big”).

It’s the Colin Quinn of Tough Crowd (2002-2004) I’m most familiar with: the fast-talking, working-class Brooklyn autodidact whose dry quips sometimes flew over the heads of the audience, not to mention the fellow comics who debated current affairs with him in the midnight hour.

Come on: if Lincoln could opine to Douglas and those assembled that “there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together,” then surely we can use the elevated word “debate” here, too (EXTREME language and content warning):

So I brought a lot of enthusiasm to Quinn’s latest production,”Long Story Short.” He’d workshopped the material for a long time in clubs, then took the 75-minute one-man show about the history of the world off-Broadway. It seems stupid to talk about a performer who started out in 1984 as “getting his big break” in 2010, but that’s sort of what happened when Jerry Seinfeld signed on as producer/director: with that big name attached to the production, “Long Story Short” made it to Broadway.

HBO turned “Long Story Short” into a special, which was nominated for an Emmy. When it came out on DVD a few weeks ago, it topped my to-watch list.

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Posted at 1:00 am on January 10th, 2012 by Kathy Shaidle

George Carlin Wasn’t Funny: The Top Five Most Overrated Comedians

Yeah, I’m a heretic. I also fell asleep during Star Wars.

Bruce Springsteen? Pompous blowhard.

The Godfather? Long stretches of beige nothingness.

And The Who are better than The Beatles.

(Hell, I prefer The Monkees to The Beatles…)

But here’s the first “pop culture” contrarianism I’m a teensy bit afraid to confess in public:

George Carlin never made me laugh.

I started thinking about overrated liberal comedians this week, when news broke that a fawning, big budget Smothers Brothers biopic is in development. Great: we’re now facing months of witless hagiography about these two “daring, transgressive, brave” performers, and the rest of the progressive comedy pantheon of heroic martyrs.

Who weren’t funny.

OK, so you think they’re funny. Maybe you’ll be driven to call me lots of mostly unimaginative names in the comments below. But the people I’m about to discuss rarely, if ever, made me laugh. Personally. That’s my definition of “funny.”

Your mileage will vary.

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Posted at 1:13 am on December 31st, 2011 by Kathy Shaidle

Movies for Grown Ups: Seconds (1966)

Rebirth. Life again. Begin again all new, all different. The way you always wanted it. You got another chance. Heck, nobody’s going to miss you, are they?

– Will Geer in Seconds (1966).

The term “midlife crisis” was coined in 1965. Somehow, the English language got by without that phrase for the previous six hundred years, but today we probably couldn’t get along without it.

No one in the Middle Ages lived long enough to have a middle age, at least as we understand it. In 1930, American male life expectancy was 59. In 1960, it was 67. That’s almost an additional decade of existence — thousands more hours of time to fret about how your time is running out.

In this as in so many instances, art preceded (social) science. Before the expression “midlife crisis” came into existence, the phenomenon was explored through farce — The Seven Year Itch (1955) — and high-brow drama — John Cheever’s 1964 story “The Swimmer.”

The first movie made in the wake of psychologist Elliott Jaques’ “discovery” was Seconds (1966).

I first saw this film on Canadian public television in the 1990s, and thought it was “cool” because it was “weird” and grimly satirical, and because it was directed by John Frankenheimer. His Manchurian Candidate (1962) was and is a personal favorite, and Seconds displayed a similar sensibility: jarring forced perspectives and camera angles, and a plot revolving around a sinister, secret cabal. Although is was made two years after I was born, Seconds compared favorably to the movies of Terry Gilliam and David Lynch, both of whom were highly in vogue when TVOntario broadcast this rarely seen 1960s “paranoid thriller.”

Along with Frankenheimer as director, the film boasts a perfect score by Jerry Goldsmith, opening credits by Saul Bass, and most of all, mind blowing cinematography from the master of black & white, James Wong Howe (Seconds makes the “top ten” of many cinematographers’ “best-of” lists).

My Seconds “initiation” was similar to that of “keelsetter,” who blogs at TCM’s MovieMorlocks.com and has written the best essay I’ve read on this film:

I’ll confess that when I first saw Seconds what really blew me away was the virtuoso cinematography. But repeat viewings have always rewarded me with even deeper meanings that suddenly seem to bubble up to the surface and take center-stage (not coincidentally, my getting older and going into mid-life certainly helps).

When Seconds begins, we meet Arthur Hamilton (played by John Randolph), an aging banker living the stereotypical mid-century American suburban life: comfortable, well appointed house, proper but distant wife, well-adjusted daughter, most likely a job for life, or until he retires with the proverbial gold watch and a handshake.

It’s the kind of safe, successful existence millions of people around the world would give almost anything to have, but for Hamilton, it’s not enough. Something’s missing.

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Posted at 12:18 am on December 16th, 2011 by Kathy Shaidle

Movies for Grown-Ups: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

“My idea of perfection is Roger Livesey (my favorite actor) in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (my favorite film) about to fight Anton Walbrook (my other favorite actor).”
– David Mamet, 2003

“Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”
– T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (1922)

For a bunch supposedly dedicated to “peace,” the cadre of anti-war anarchists who met once a week in my first apartment fought furiously about everything. The one thing we all agreed on was that meetings were to conclude (with a chorus of “shhhh!”) just before the latest episode of Twin Peaks (1990-91) began.

Now, I experienced two profound (for me) revelations while watching TV in that old apartment. I wrote about one of them here.

The other happened during one of the earliest Twin Peaks episodes, when characters were still being introduced.

Bad boy Bobby Briggs, his mom, and his father Major Garland Briggs (an Air Force office) are gathered for a meal. In heightened, formal language that sounds almost like the ponderous narration of a “mental hygiene” short like Reefer Madness, the major — a stocky, balding, pasty fellow, looking particularly stiff in his uniform (at the dinner table?) — tells Bobby he wants to have a serious talk with him.

Conditioned by M*A*S*H and Dr. Strangelove to view U.S. military officers as stupid, pompous, lunatic hypocrites, my friends and I dutifully snickered while the major spoke. Bobby rolled his eyes, and so did we.

Until we stopped.

One by one, it dawned on us that, come to think of it, the major was kind of sort of being reasonable and sensible. And Bobby (the young “rebel” we’d normally sympathize with) was being a brat and a creep.

My anarchist pals and I found ourselves seduced into obsessing over a TV show in which the heroes (a sheriff, an FBI agent, and an Air Force officer) were the very people we hated in real life. Major Briggs in particular turned out to be an intelligent, sensitive, and noble character, who just happened to look like a human cartoon.

Twin Peaks prepared me to stick with, and appreciate, the 1943 Powell & Pressburger film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which I only discovered a few years ago.

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Posted at 12:30 am on December 8th, 2011 by Kathy Shaidle

Movies for Grown-Ups, Part 2: Dodsworth and the Shame of Age

True story! My personal copy of Dodsworth was bought from a local video store (remember them!?) that went out of business. When I arrived at the sale, the ‘Classics’ shelf had been picked clean. I mean, every single film was gone — except for Dodsworth.

– film blogger “Mildred Fierce”

In the first installment of “Movies for Grown-ups,” I beseached you to watch Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), a movie about two old people nobody cares about.

If you read a typical TV Guide-type description of Dodsworth (1936), I doubt you’d find it any more enticing:

“Two rich Midwestern Americans go to Europe for the first time.”

Great. Who wants to endure two hours of archaic, sarcastic Continental snide about “ugly Americans” and “innocents abroad”? Don’t tell me: the Yankee hicks wonder why somebody doesn’t “fix” Venice, then order hot dogs at Maxim’s.

Actually, no.

That’s what I thought on the rare occasions Dodsworth (heralded by some equally off-putting synopsis) popped up on the small screen. I was all for watching “a fearlessly mature drama” about a disintegrating marriage as long as it was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or something similarly “daring” and drunken, with plenty of shattering glass.

But a homely middle-aged couple in stiff evening clothes — on a steamship? I’d stick with yet another broadcast of Die Hard.

Yet as I explained in the first installment of this series, my tastes in movies evolved once I hit middle age. Many “boring” movies suddenly made sense. Dodsworth became one of those films for me when Turner Classic Movies aired it as one of their “Essentials” about three years ago.

Theories abound as to why this movie remains “unjustly neglected” decades after cinephiles first started calling it a masterpiece. TCM’s main article about the film speculates:

It may have been simply too serious, too subtle, and too sophisticated for the taste of the general public.

Certainly, it flopped at the box office. (“I lost my goddam shirt” on Dodsworth said producer Sam Goldwyn. “I’m not saying it wasn’t a fine picture. It was a great picture, but nobody wanted to see it. In droves.”)

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Posted at 12:01 am on December 1st, 2011 by Kathy Shaidle

Mike Tyson imitates Herman Cain, Life imitates ‘The Ring,’ and Ratner imitates Rizzo,

1. Worst of all: now we won’t get to hear Eddie Murphy’s joke about this

Just to review:

BRETT RATNER is no longer producing the next Oscar telecast because he:

a) more or less quoted a line from a movie that, er won “Best Picture” in 1970

b) said he’d had LINDSAY LOHAN checked for STDs before he slept with her

In other words, one of the last men in Hollywood who’s seen a movie older than Star Wars and demonstrates a modicum of common sense is now out of a job.

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Posted at 4:30 pm on November 10th, 2011 by Kathy Shaidle