by Bradley Iverson-Long and Kay Nguyen
Bradley: Welcome back from Thanksgiving. SGA films are just as you left them, with just two movies, both starring mainly women. I’ll continue my white-male-hetero persona of the past couple weeks and recommend that you watch the men’s basketball game tomorrow afternoon rather than these movies. Heck, I’ll be gender neutral and recommend the girl’s game, too.
Kay: Brad: that’s okay, you should be proud of it; not every male chauvinist is brave enough to profess their sexism. Everyone else: nooooo, the (movie) show must go on! Here’s why.
Thirteen (R)
B: Don’t you just love movies that the protagonists themselves can’t watch in theatres? This movie, which could’ve aptly been titled Girls Gone Wild, follows the descent of 13-year-old Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) from seventh grade sainthood into the peer pressure-induced realm of sex, drugs and bodily mutilation, thanks to her new best friend Evie (co-writer Nikki Reed). Meanwhile, her poor single mother (Holly Hunter) recoils in horror. This looks like it could be a bad D.A.R.E. movie, but first-time director Catherine Hardwicke’s artistic camerawork keeps it edgy.
K: I first heard about Hardwicke as production designer for Three Kings, a stylish adventure starring George Clooney as a US soldier searching for Saddam’s gold. She stopped scouring Iraqi desert for materials, looked around her neighborhood instead and found no stranger, since Nikki Reed, her ex-boyfriend’s 14-year-old daughter, was willing to recount a heart-rending autobiography about how an angel can fall. The two hit it off right away and Hardwicke decided to take the camera herself and invited Reed to star as the devil under the “best-friend” disguise. The result is a100-minute pseudo-documentary with gritty hand-held camerawork and shockingly graphic shots that strip bare the adolescence pathology. One may lament the American moral fiber, but this movie is definitely not a requiem for anyone or anything because Tracy is lost and found, and in real life, she still continues her artistic vocation for letters. Don’t look at this movie as a sermon on sin and repentance; it’d rather be seen as a mirror that reflects a symptom and allow society decide the cure.
Apart from some pointless rambling, I must say I’m impressed by Reed’s character, given that she’s a total amateur. Holly Hunter is as amazing as ever, making us feel the pains and the struggles of a mother already frustrated financially and emotionally by her own problems.
B: Cool. Oh, and make sure to get to Darby early for a good spot to stand …
Brad’s Fun Swedish Fact: Everything is better in metric: Here I’m 181 tall, weigh just 75, and my shoe size is a 43. Of course, all the women here are size 12’s at least, and it’s only two degrees outside.
La Città Delle Donne
City of Women (R)
B: Italian writer/director Federico Fellini had a passionate love for women, which shows up repeatedly in his fanciful films. City of Women, one of Fellini’s later and less distinguished films, is based on a dream he had, which could excuse it from having a sensible plot. In this dream, Fellini’s recurrent protagonist Marcello Mastroianni follows a female he meets on a train to a hotel hosting a feminist conference. In this city of women he does things that, well, most men only dream of. I’m obligated to warn you that this movie is really long (140 minutes), but urge you not to miss your chance to see something by this foreign film master.
K: City of Women was not written by a St. Augustine-crazed feminist—it even got that dirty look from feminists who didn’t appreciate how they were portrayed. However, the movie is a bold interpretation of men’s psyche from the perspective of a man who claims to love and know women intimately, with a psychoanalytic approach that involves you know what. Fellini portrays each woman at the conference representing each feminist issue, like objectification or motherhood. It turns out he’s not entirely ignorant or irreverent of feminism after all. The stylized masturbation ritual scene is very revealing, if Fellini is being descriptive rather than imaginative about male fantasy.
B: We really want you to see this movie. We started out with the intellectual reasons, but when it all comes down to it, we know the revealing, stylized masturbation ritual scene is the hook that’ll get you into the South Lounge. I mean, you have to do something after the basketball games, right?
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