Princesses, Post-feminism, and Hollywood

A recent New York Times article about Nancy Meyers praised the director for rising to the top of the romantic comedy genre. Its an achievement to be sure, for any female director (in a Hollywood system in which women comprise 9% of all directors) to rise to the top of the heap. Yet the article has many up in arms. Some say that praising the director for her accomplishments loses sight of the struggle women are still going through in Hollywood, while still others take issue with calling her success an achievement at all.

Essential 5: Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock is, quite simply, my favorite director. Vertigo was a revelatory experience for me, and after seeing it I recognized movies for the first time as an art form. I began what has been a strange and wonderful journey into an unknown, beautiful world. Since that initial experience I've seen many worthwhile films, and all of them seen through the filter that is Hitchcock. It isn't that I don't think that other directors have matched any one of his films but no director can claim the sheer number of masterpieces that Hitchcock produced. The breadth and depth of his work is awe inspiring. So, in case my word orgasm didn't give it away, take this with a grain of salt, I am extremely biased and not going to pretend otherwise.

Essential 5: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Essential 5 will be a semi-frequent feature here on The Crooked Frame. The idea is that there are best of lists for pretty much everything, but very little in the way of a guide for what are the most important films/episodes in any given genre, TV show, movement, etc. I want to create a starting point for people who are interested in watching something, but don't know where to start. For example, as of a few years ago I had never seen a western, so when I decided to tackle the genre I looked all over for some sort of starting point. This didn't work out so well because some of the films which are most important to understanding the genre aren't among the greatest films. Consequently, I skipped over essential viewing like Stagecoach (1939) and The Great Train Robbery (1903) and missed a lot of what later westerns were responding to. I will present the films/episodes in the order I think they should be watched (usually chronologically) and give a little commentary (no spoilers). 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is often derided for its cheesy dialogue, melodramatic plots, and ridiculous bad guys but that's missing the point. Buffy embraces everything inherent in being a genre, horror, vampire, teen, romance, gothic, feminist show. It explores so many different serious things in such lighthearted yet truthful ways that it's impossible to dismiss it once you give it a chance. The show is, on one level, incredibly satisfying with its simple monster of the week plots and harlequin romance arcs, but underneath has a lot to say about modern feminism and genre among other things.

The 15 Best of 2009 (And Some Other Loose Ends)

The year in film can only be seen in relation to the global economic crisis that seems to define it. Much like the films of the early 30's this year was about escapism, yet it was escapism tempered by allegorical overtones. As if suggesting that instead of closing our eyes to whats going on around us we are merely squinting. A good friend of mine after enthusiastically gushing about Avatar suggested that he wished he could be an Avatar on some distant world. That might be a pitch perfect summation of the escapist feeling of the movie-going public in a year dominated by Transformers and Avatar. As A.O. Scott said "our movie avatars can travel freely through time and space, skipping over metaphysical borders with digitally enabled ease." Movie technology has never been better equipped to provide the mass therapy the world so desperately needs. Yet the question arises: did the movies succeed? The most successful films of the year were aimed at teenagers, those least in need of escapist fun in a world where joblessness is reaching ever greater heights. There has been a significant number of words devoted to the lack of adult films being given wide release and those accusations seem even more spot on when one looks at what some of the most popular "auteurist" releases this year (Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox, Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, and James Cameron's Avatar). Yet it has been a good year for the movies, a sort of defiant hoorah in the face of an ever more depressing reality.