Fun with Art: Oscar Edition
Posted on | February 2, 2010 | 1 Comment
I recently went on a tear of seeing movies and I’m going to do a quick roundup of partial reviews of the films I’ve seen: But as an homage to my favorite feminist author, Elizabeth Grosz, I’m only going to talk about the parts of each film that I liked. Grosz argues in the beginning of Time Travels that too many scholarly works are a series of criticisms and complaints about the work of previous authors, whereas she’d rather take the best ideas that an author has to offer and use that solid wood to build something new of her own. I like this attitude, so will use it to talk about what I liked in Julie and Julia, The Last Station, Nine and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.
Julie and Julia:
The depiction of Julia Child’s and her husband Paul’s sex life was amazing. The brilliant part of those scenes is that the sex was just a thread in the fabric of their lives. (This is emphasized in a short scene where she pulls a cannolli out of some boiling water and comments, that it’s “hot, like a stiff cock.” It isn’t a big deal that she says it. It isn’t even a come on. It’s just that sex is part of the loving energy that informs their life.) And they didn’t just show them having “meaningful” sex like makeup sex or I’m happy your book got published sex. That’s where storytelling usually gets sex so wrong: Sex isn’t a plot point in life. It’s just how we love each other, day in, day out. It’s like a meal. Meals are important, vitally important, but that doesn’t mean that each meal is loaded with some specific meaning.
It was such a tall glass of water to watch two fifty-somethings wanting each other like that. Stanley Tucci’s Paul adored Meryl Streep’s Julia so much that you feel like they could have sex in any scene. And beyond the sex, their relationship was a model of caring supportiveness. In our pride of progress, we often make the mistake of thinking that no man before 1975 ever properly respected or admired a woman and, while we have indeed come a very long way, the relationship between Julia and Paul reminds us that, with love, we can overcome the limitations of our age, whether those limitations are sexism or racism or another ism that we don’t know about yet because we’re living it and will have to wait for the next generation to tag us with it.
The Last Station
This movie tells two love stories, Leo Tolstoy and his wife are at the end of their story and Tolstoy’s secretary and a woman worker on the Tolstoy estate are at the beginning. Both loves struggle to survive in the shadow of the rigid idealism embodied by Paul Giamatti, the head of the Tolstoyan cult, an idealism which ominously foreshadows the inhumanity of the Bolsheviks on the horizon. Despite the cult’s prohibition on physical sex, sex and love wins out in the end. Very much a movie worth seeing.
Nine
I included this movie in the roundup for one single shot: Guido (Daniel Day-Lewis) sees his mistress Carla (Penelope Cruz) for a long weekend fling. As he leaves, Carla lays back against the headboard and says, “I’ll be waiting here with my legs open.” Heart-stopping.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
I very much liked this movie. The story was fresh, the whole cast was amazing. Robin Wright Penn was wonderful. Could be the best thing Winona Ryder has ever done. Seriously. She was electric.
But what most excited me about the film is that, in one brief scene, it held out hope that maybe we’re leaving the Jack Valenti era of sexual censorship in movies. Valenti was the founder and (until 2004) head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). That’s the body that doles out the ratings (G, PG, R) and, by virtue of being able to X-rate movies, actively censors filmmakers who depended on getting a rating of R or less to make a picture that could obtain mainstream distribution. (I can’t recommend highly enough the documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, an expose of the ratings system.)
Valenti believed that to sustain morality, Americans should only be allowed to see brief episodes of penile vaginal intercourse. Any other kind of sex was right out. In particular, the depiction of female pleasure outside the context of penile-vaginal intercourse was not allowed on screen. I have reason to hope that change is afoot because in Pippa Lee, there is a relatively long shot of Pippa’s face while she is getting a hand-job from a man. We hang on her face until she has an orgasm and on top of that, the hand-job is all the sex that happens. His penis doesn’t come out for an encore. The hand-job is the sex. And her orgasm isn’t some porn/Hollywood orgasm either. She looks halfway like she’s in pain and doesn’t make a sound. That’s how some ladies do it. If you love ladies, let them do it like they do it. Don’t make them feel like they have to scream or sound like a wounded bird or look like they’ve just seen Jesus to make you feel like you’re doing a good job.
As a sex educator, I also have to point out that this is the kind of sex that I encourage teens to consider before stampeding to vaginal intercourse: hand-jobs are safe sex. Brilliant.
Finally, I have to say that this is why we need women to make movies. The writer and director, Rebecca Miller, brings a refreshing attitude towards sex that I don’t know we would have gotten from a man. Loved it.
Tags: censorship > Elizabeth Grosz > Jack Valenti > Julia Child > Julie and Julia > Leo Tolstoy > Meryl Streep > MPAA > Nine > Oscars > Paul Giamatti > Pippa Lee > Rebecca Miller > Robin Wright Penn > Stanley Tucci > The Last Station > The Private Lives of Pippa Lee > This Film is Not Yet Rated > Winona Ryder
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My Book
February 3rd, 2010 @ 7:41 pm
“Sex isn’t a plot point in life. It’s just how we love each other, day in, day out.”
Brilliant!