Movienotes: Jaws, In Bruges & Silent Hill

In my apartment we have what we refer to as The List. It began as something Hanna and I put together to swap book and movie titles one of us hadn't seen and thought the other would like . . . over the past year it has morphed into a list of films and books which Hanna considers an essential part of my cultural literacy. I am industriously (and, I admit, quite pleasurably) making my way through The List -- a little more swiftly and purposefully at the moment, now that I don't have classes and homework with impending deadlines. This past week, I ticked no less than three films off the list: Jaws, In Bruges, and Silent Hill.

To begin with the least serious first, I realize I'm a good three decades late with a review of Jaws and one of a diminishingly small group of Americans who made it passed their twenty-fifth birthday without seeing the film -- but I did, so let me just say it was fun. Since I hate submarines, I'm glad there were no scenes with subs, and I thought Richard Dreyfuss was hilarious. It made me giggle a lot, but this was possibly because I was watching it with a stiff gin & tonic in hand, and also because being bitten in half by a shark has never been a particular fear of mine.



In Bruges was breathtaking: smart, hilarious, incredibly violent, and ferociously acted. When I told Hanna the bit about it being hilarious the next morning, her response was: "Isn't it just. Until it isn't. And then it really isn't." which I thought summed it up quite nicely." I actually think the less said about the actual plot of the film the better, since I went into it with only the vague sense it was about a group of hit men on a job gone horribly wrong. Why it's gone wrong and each individual's response to the situation is best left to unfold without a lot of advance preparation. If I had to pick a moment in which the entire film suddenly switched from violent comedy to comedic tragedy, I'd have to pick the final conversation between Brendon Gleeson's character, Ken, and Ralph Fienne's character, Harry, at the top of the sight-seeing tower, and the events that ensue. You'll know when you get there. In the meantime, enjoy the way Ken and Colin Farrell's character, Ray, bounce off each other. It's priceless.

This afternoon, I watched Silent Hill, a horror film about a stolen child, Sharon, and a haunted coal-mining town with dark secrets, in which her mother, Rose, must struggle against the forces of darkness to recover her. It is based, Hanna tells me, on a video game, and thus bounded by certain parameters -- virtually all of the action takes place in a circumscribed place, cut off from the outside world, and Rose in effect must go on a quest in order to solve the mystery of the town and (hopefully) set her daughter free. As I'm typing this, it actually strikes me that visually and narratively, it bears some resemblance to the exquisite Pan's Labyrinth, also on The List, which I watched with rapt attention shortly after the end of term. Silent Hill doesn't have the poetry of del Toro's film, but it is nevertheless operating on the same fantastical principles.

About three-quarters of the way through the film, I was struck by the absence of central male characters -- Sharon's father, sweetly played by Sean Bean, is stuck on the outside of the town with a officious police officer, also male, but other than that all of the men are unnamed extras. In a horror/action movie this seems striking to me, although I admit limited knowledge of both genres. The fact that it goes unremarked upon internally is also notable: the film doesn't seem to be consciously setting itself up as a film populated by women -- they are simply the characters who happen to populate the script.

At the same time, it is definitely a story about women -- there are gender dimensions to the narrative of horror and redemption that unfold. After all, the story begins with a mother (Rose) attempting to heal, and then rescue, her daughter (Sharon). As the plot unfolds, further pairings of mothers and daughters appear, and overlap, with the original pairings, and the relationships between these parents and their children are key to the drama that plays out. I'll definitely still be thinking about this one in the week ahead. (Though hopefully not dreaming about it tonight!)

In the week ahead? We have the original X-men movie coming, since seeing Wolverine prompted both Hanna and I to say, "oh, it would be fun to see that again!" and now that I've seen In Bruges Hanna has consented to watch The Station Agent (also starring Peter Dinklage). Beyond that, we've also been watching on DVD the television show Bones about a team of forensic anthropologists at the Smithsonian who consult with the FBI on criminal investigations. At one hour a pop, they keep themselves ticking through witty dialog and great interplay between the core of main characters. Oh, and then there's Carnivale to finish . . .

Booknotes: Girls on the Stand

As news was breaking about the murder of Dr. George Tiller, and abortion provider and pro-choice activist, I sat down to read Helena Silverstein's Girls On the Stand: How Courts Fail Pregnant Minors.

A professor of government and law, Silverstein details the real-world effects of parental notification and consent laws have on the ability of minors to exercise their rights to abortion access as currently granted under U.S. law. Specifically, Sliverstein is interested in the viability of the "judicial bypass" option that the U.S. Supreme Court requires such parental involvement laws to contain: that is, if a pregnant minor does not wish to inform her parents of her pregnancy, she must have the ability to petition, confidentially and with the help of court-appointed counsel, for an exception. Focusing on the practical workings of the judicial bypass procedure in three states, Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, Silverstein found that pregnant minors faced ignorance, bureaucracy and outright ideological obstruction in their pursuit of timely and medically-safe abortions.

For example, after systematically phoning courts in her three targeted states for information on how to initiate a judicial bypass, Silverstein and her research assistants faced a wide range of responses, from the adequate to the under-informed to the intentionally misleading. Whether malicious in intent, answers to an initial query that fail to clearly affirm the minor's right to confidentiality, a timely hearing, and most importantly free assistance in navigating the court system, "portray the bypass as a road the minor must travel alone and risk sacrificing the minor's right to her own vulnerability" (61). Even more egregiously, some anti-abortion judges, with the discretion granted to them under current law, have employed such intimidation tactics as requiring pro-life, Christian counseling for all minors seeking the bypass, or even appointing a guardian for the fetus who has the responsibility of challenging the petitioner at the hearing and attempting to persuade her against choosing an abortion.

"The argument of this book," Silverstein writes, "is directed at those who have made a good-faith compromise on the parental involvement issue," seeking to ensure that minors wishing to terminate pregnancies are given the information and support they need, both pre- and post-abortion, while still protecting their constitutional rights to privacy and bodily autonomy (157).

Those compromisers, a group to which I once belonged, have in mind a picture of what a world with such mandates would look like. Pregnant minors will be encouraged to seek guidance from parents, and courts will protect those who choose otherwise. We have seen, though [in this book], that many courts are not prepared to do their duty, whether due to ignorance, recalcitrance, or incompetence. We have seen judges who are willing to employ hardball tactics to get minors to bend to their will. Whatever the Supreme Court might decide about how much implementation failure is too much or what obstacles too burdensome, it is up to the good-faith compromiser to decide whether the reality of parental involvement mandates sufficiently approximates her picture [of reality] to warrant continued support. This is a personal decision. To my mind the case is clear. I invite the reader to be her own judge (157).

Sadly, Silverstein's book is not as narratively compelling as I would have hoped, even to someone like myself whose heart usually quickens a the prospect of a book or an article dealing with the intersection of feminism and the law. Her prose feels clunky, and the reporting of her research -- while providing the evidence necessary to make her case -- nonetheless caused me eyes to begin glazing over, even at a brief 180 pages (excepting endnotes and bibliography). Given its narrow scope, a meaningful reading likely requires a fair amount of background knowledge in recent abortion politics and law.

Still, I'm glad to add it to my repertoire of resources on reproductive health and rights. The struggle over women's right to bodily autonomy is not going to disappear any time soon, as Tiller's murder today dramatically and tragically illustrates -- and young women are among those particularly vulnerable to having their reproductive choices taken from them, given their relatively lack of experience and financial resources. Silverstein reminds us not to assume that what looks good on paper will likewise be sound in actual practice.

a few links: lengthy quotation edition

This Saturday, I bring you a few of the things from the week with some choice quotations rather than my own analysis, largely because I don't have the brain capacity to provide any. Although there's one story I'm so frustrated and weirded out by, I'm going to blog separately about it -- so watch for that in the next couple of days.

First up, student barrister and mother Clare Gould, blogging at the f-word, a UK-based feminist blog, offers a witty and incisive critique of a popular series of British books that offer advice on how to raise boys.

Every newspaper and news bulletin is full of the problems that the parent of a boy will encounter. Raised suicide rates, drug abuse, criminality, sexual violence, poor exam results - it’s hardly surprising that parents want a magic pill. The problem was now personal to me. A few short months before, as I lay in the ultrasound suite in the hospital looking at my squirming baby son inside my belly, I found myself wondering how I would manage with what suddenly looked like a complex conundrum rather than a child.

. . .

Perhaps such myths and gender tales are comforting. Long engrained and part of the fabric of many’s parenting and upbringing, they are a comfortable rock in a changing world. They play to a fear that equality has gone ‘too far’. My feminist nature revolts however. I can’t find the science. I certainly can’t find the smoking gun. I can’t stomach the stereotypical assumptions. I can’t bear to see my children caged in gender stereotypes that limit both sexes as human beings. I want change but I also want something revolutionary. For once I would like to hear someone say the (apparently) unsayable - that perhaps at the root of it, men and women really aren’t all that different at all.

Then, on her weekly podcast over at RhRealityCheck, Amanda Marcotte interviews Aspen Baker, a "pro-voice" abortion activist, about her views on how to change the discourse surrounding women's bodies and choices. I can't quote the text extensively, because the audio has not been transcribed, but I will say I am continually fascinated by the way the contemporary pro-choice movement is percieved as resistence to women's personal (and complicated) experiences of abortion when historically the campaign for meaningful access to abortion options has come directly out of women's lived experience of reproductive decisions. While Baker's work sounds spot-on in terms of giving women individual support, I think Amanda rightly pushes her to explain why she feels the need to separate herself from pro-choice activism.

And thirdly, the (disturbingly titled) Happy Days blog on the New York Times website, Simon Critchley offers a post on the usefulness of thinking that reminded me of Alain de Botton's meditations on status anxiety.

An issue that came up in many of the comments was the relation between contemplation and action and the privilege that I seem to give to the former over the latter. Firstly, I would respond that contemplation is action (there is nothing passive about thinking) and action is sometimes contemplative (where I do not simply lose myself in thoughtless action, but think along with the act I undertake). But I concede that where Rousseau, Beckett or Melville might find this feeling for existence in bodily stillness, others might find it in vigorous physical activity. Nietzsche once said that all truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.

Hope you're all having a restful weekend. The weather here in Boston the past couple of days has (despite dire predictions) been gorgeous.

Friday Photos: North End & Market

This morning, I rode the T into Boston with Hanna on her way to work, and went down to Government Center to shop at the weekend produce market and snag some coffee in the North End. It was a gloomy day, which actually made for some dramatic photos of the skyline. Check them out on the slideshow above (or full-screen at picasa, with captions).

Booknotes: Decline and Fall of the British Empire

The stuff you learn when you spend your weekends hanging out with another bookworm.

This isn't strictly speaking a "booknote" in that I haven't actually read the book in question. But this weekend, while I was reading Graceling, Hanna was reading (among other things), Piers Brendon's Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997. And along the way, via her viva voce renderings of the text, I learned a few valuable pieces of British Imperialism trivia.

• While, from the standpoint of Western imperialism, I realize there are many things wrong with this concept, I was nevertheless quietly charmed by learning of the term sleeping dictionary which was slang for (according to the OED) "a foreign woman with whom a man has a sexual relationship and from whom he learns her language." Perhaps it is my love of dictionaries that gives it an endearing feel; I also like the possibility, at least, that if a sexual relationship was sustained and mutual enough for one lover to learn the language of the other than it might in some ways defy the violence of imperial domination.
  

• In a passage that begs for an illustration, Brendon writes that Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of India from 1773-1785, "was particularly indulgent towards his acquisitive and much-loved second wife Marian who dressed like 'an Indian princess,' braided her auburn ringlets with gems, and amused herself by throwing kittens into a bowl full of enormous pearls which slid under their paws when they tried to stand up" (36).
  

• And finally, in a fashion moment one wishes the fug girls had been around to see, apparently British women of the late-nineteenth century could purchase bustles that, when sat upon, played "God Save the Queen" . . . a sort of patriotic whoopie cushion!
  

Long live the British Empire . . . at least in entertaining history books.

Booknotes: Graceling

Back in October, I had a very enthusiastic bookseller at Curious George Books in Harvard Square put a copy of Graceling, a debut fantasy novel by Kristin Cashore. She had seen me fondling a copy of Inkdeath and correctly presumed I'd be interested in expanding my young adult fantasy repertoire.

Of course, graduate school happened, and I never got around to reading it. Until this weekend, when I finally picked up a copy at the BPL and sat down to enjoy the luxury of reading a novel somewhere other than my morning commute.

It wasn't a startlingly good read -- I feel more deeply and instantly in love with, for example, Wicked Lovely and War for the Oaks than I did with Graceling -- but I enjoyed it very much as a weekend read. In the spirit of Tamora Pierce's Alanna adventures, Graceling is the story of a young noblewoman, Katsa, who is born "graced" with a particular talent and trained by her uncle, the king, as an assassin. When on a mission for her uncle, Katsa stumbles into another graceling, a young man named Po, from a rival kingdom, who challenges her re-imagine her future out from under the will of her tyrannical uncle. Soon, Po and Katsa are off on a quest to rescue one of Po's relatives, a child named Bitterblue, from her father whose penchant for torture and particular grace for mind-manipulation makes him a formidable enemy. On the whole, Cashore maintains the delicate line of telling a story about a "strong female protagonist" without subsuming the story itself, and the particular characters she has created, beneath that aim. If you're looking for fun fantasy reading for a summer afternoon, put this on your list -- and enjoy the fact that the epilogue has "sequel" written all over it.

Quick Hit: Feminism, YA booklists, and troublesome authors

MK blogged about creating booklists for her school library, and how she ran into trouble when it came time to categorize Meg Cabot. I promised is she blogged it, I'd link it, so here's the post. Check it out and leave her booklist category suggestions in the comments!