Let's let Chicks on Speed's radiance illuminate the following lexical l'il links, shall we?
First off, a public service announcement. Former cinetrix prof J. Hoberman and ongoing Pullquote pal A. S. Hamrah read TONIGHT at KGB Bar. You should go!
Please join us next Tuesday, March 22 as we host two film critics who examine films that reflect America's political and cultural moments, both historically and surprisingly--unsettlingly--current. Senior Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman will read from his new book AN ARMY OF PHANTOMS: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, and n+1 film critic A. S. Hamrah will read from his recent Baffler piece, "A Cottage for Sale," about a film based on a painting by Thomas Kinkade, "painter of light."
In ARMY OF PHANTOMS, Hoberman sees politics "filtered through the prism of Hollywood movies—their scenarios, back stories and reception." Hoberman covers witch hunts, House Committee on Un-American Activities tactics, racial dramas such as Pinky, message movies, the blacklist, protests, propaganda, HUAC humiliations, and the "Cold War's key fictional text," Orwell's 1984, all capped by a trenchant analysis of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The centerpiece of A. S. Hamrah's "A Cottage for Sale" is the Thomas Kinkade-themed homes outside of Vallejo, which are in various states of foreclosure and squatters' temporariness. Hamrah writes, "Whatever his value as an artist, he has used his own experience to create a business that predicted and in some ways replicates the current mortgage crisis. His paintings of quaint houses with burning interiors substitute nostalgia for values and hope for community.... Kinkade is a living testament to how the triumph of kitsch values has repercussions in the marketplace, outside the world of taste."
Am I blue? The Guardian's Stuart Heritage sure as Smurf is. He generates a Smurfy thesaurus based on its trailer:
5) So, The Smurfs looks quite good. Now we come to the part of the trailer where the word "Smurf" reveals some of its many hidden meanings. Here, for example, after witnessing Gutsy Smurf getting his bum out in front of Smurfette, Generic Smurf says: "I think I just smurfed in my mouth." It would appear that, as well as being the name of their own species, "smurf" also means "vomit".
6) And here one of the Smurfs says: "Where the smurf are we?" From this, we can assume that, as well as meaning "vomit", the word "smurf" can also mean either "hell" or "fuck".
7) Here, one of the Smurfs says "Let's smurf this joint". So it turns out that "smurf" might also mean "ditch" or "blow". Admittedly neither of these examples are quite as extreme as some of the other synonyms we've discussed, but they're hardly very pleasant nonetheless.
8) This is the final image of the trailer. While it's being displayed, an off-screen voice shouts: "All right, who smurfed?", which would imply that "smurf" can also be a substitute for "fart". And notice the address of the official Smurf website? It's SmurfHappens.com. So – and this is by no means an exhaustive list – the word "smurf" can mean "vomit" or "hell" or "fuck" or "ditch" or "blow" or "fart" or "shit". This is obviously problematic, not least because it warrants a complete recontextualising of the hit 1996 album The Smurfs Go Pop, in particular the songs Noisy Smurf, Our Smurfing Party and Don't Stop Smurfing. I take it all back. The Smurfs movie is a disgrace.
Tom Sutpen is the cinetrix's hero for this post, which I quote in its entirety:
A Confession
I like movies that have nothing for everyone.
And Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe's Movie Nation blog ain't too shabby, either. Check this felicitous post:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Culture and Value"
(His favorite actress, in case you were wondering, was Betty Hutton. Truly, that of which we cannot speak we must pass over in silence.)
Hence Nina’s madness. All the doubling swirls miasmatically around her: Odette/Odile, her and her mother, her and Beth, her and Lily. Both those latter pairs are distorted versions of what should properly be named the “All About Eve doubling,” wherein a younger, more vital female performer threatens to take over the role and the life of the older and more fragile one. As an aside, the revelation of this device is the retroactive recognition not that Aronofsky’s film is actually a melodrama along the lines of All About Eve (or Stella Dallas or Sunset Blvd.), but rather that those were body-horror movies like Black Swan. The real of body horror is aging itself, decay, redundancy, replacement. That women, within the diegesis of each of these films, are not just the victims but the agents of this terror, is an exact measure of Hollywood’s gender trouble.
One would suspect that Country Strong, a gently appealing genre flick, is distant from the Grand Guignol of Black Swan. But it has its own doubling urge, albeit more schematic. It offers four main characters, representing the four quadrants of Hollywood’s stunted demographic model: older female, younger female, younger male, older male. The first three are country singers; the only character who isn’t is played by an actual country singer, just to keep the doubling channels open. That’s Tim McGraw, in the role of James, husband–manager to a country superstar, Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow, an older woman at thirty-eight). McGraw is doubled by Beau (Garrett Hedlund), a true soul who is nonetheless (unlike James, which is to say, in his place) sleeping with Kelly. But Beau is doubled as well by the young female siren Chiles Stanton, also a rising talent: they both open for Kelly. Chiles is ascending swiftly on beauty-pageant looks and doey naiveté—thus she is in turn also the older star’s All About Eve double, and begins to receive the acclaim and hit songs once due Kelly. She is played by Leighton Meester, shortly appearing in The Roommate, a dorm-room remake of doubling’n’dementia classic, Single White Female. It’s enough to make your head spin.
But it doesn’t, which is a token of the film’s surefootedness, its easygoing locomotion—formally cognate to the Grand Ol’ Opry pop it proffers, and affectively distant from Black Swan’s propulsive panic. And yet, finally, they are the same movie, and not just because they are backstage dramas: Kelly, coming away from a mental breakdown and in danger of relapse, pushed by a younger and sexier replacement, cripplingly unable to confront the stage performance that every-body desperately needs from her (most of all herself), is nonetheless compelled to give it a go. She botches a couple of preparatory attempts, acts self-destructively, gets high, fools around, misses a rehearsal gig, visits a hospital, freaks out about her competition. All of which happens in Black Swan, as does the remainder: she eventually takes the stage on the big night, gives a bravura, transformative show including magical costume changes, the crowd goes wild, she kills herself, exeunt omnes. Along the way, as if for emphasis, there are doubled sequences of Kelly breaking down: her country-strong mascara so smeared around her eyes it can’t help but resemble the already iconic black-swanface of Nina’s maquillage. It’s the Grand Guignol Opry, and Kelly is Country Swan.
Snarfle. COUNTRY SWAN. Exeunt omnes.
