This isn’t the first time I’ve given serious attention to nipples.  More than a year ago, in a post titled “The Nipple Exposed,” I wondered why our public morality has grown increasingly prurient in its fascination with open displays of nipples.  In extreme instances, an overzealous paternalism has led to the censorship of innocuous images.  See this Bell Canada ad for a good example.

Just when I think things are smoothing themselves over, the nipple issue pops up again.  The catalyst for this renewed attention is Carla Bruni, model and 3rd wife of French President, Nicolas Sarkozy.  Last week, the first lady hosted a state dinner wearing a tight Roland Mouret dress and no underwire.  The Times Online carried on a heated debate about the existence and nature of Bruni’s undergarments.  The problem, it seems, is that her nipples were on prominent display.  What could it possibly signify?  In a statement that should make feminists everywhere wince, Hannah Betts writes:

Our culture is obsessed with heaving, blancmangey cleavage, but the erect nipple is a far more potent yet insouciant sexual signifier. The pert pap winningly protrudes between the sluttish and the demure:  contained arousal, clothed incitement; an invitation more beguiling for being a whisper rather than a shout.

The nipple is an “insouciant sexual signifier”?  I’m inclined to agree with Kate Harding of Salon who suggests that Bruni probably had no intentions sexual or otherwise; she was merely caught in the unfortunate glare of strong camera flashes.  The public significance of Bruni’s nipples is dependent entirely upon whatever thoughts we onlookers allow to pass through our heads.  If we place Bruni somewhere between “the sluttish and the demure” then we are merely projecting onto a public figure our own mental garbage.  Harding neatly concludes with:

And as long as a woman wearing a boatneck, long-sleeved, full-length gown with sensible low heels can be cast as trampy and inappropriate because she got photographed in unfortunate lighting and/or a drafty room — as long as the line highly visible females are expected to walk is that freakin’ fine — I really don’t want to hear one more word about how sexism has nothing to do with the lack of women in positions of real power.

I have nothing to add to the debate.  I’ve had my say before.  I merely point out that some people (and some media outlets) think this is somehow worthy of comment.  It is that fact, and not the “insouciant sexual signifier,” which requires our critical attention.

March 10, 2010

Related posts:

1. The Nipple Exposed

The Buddha told the story of a merchant, a widower, who went away on a business trip and left his little boy at home.  While he was away, bandits came and burned down the whole village.  When the merchant returned, he didn’t find his house; it was just a heap of ash.  There was the charred body of a child close by.  He threw himself on the ground and cried and cried.  He beat his chest and pulled his hair.

The next day he had the little body cremated.  Because his beloved son was his only reason for existence, he sewed a beautiful little velvet bag and put the ashes inside.  Wherever he went, he took that bag of ashes with him.  Eating, sleeping, working, he always carried it with him.  In fact, his son had been kidnapped by the bandits; three months later, the boy escaped and returned home.  When he arrived, it was two o’clock in the morning.  He knocked on the door of the new house his father had built.  The poor father was lying on his bed crying, holding the bag of ashes, and he asked, “Who is there?”  “It’s me, Daddy, your son.”  The father answered, “That’s not possible.  My son is dead.  I’ve cremated his body and I carry his ashes with me.  You must be some naughty boy who’s trying to fool me.  Go away, don’t disturb me!”  He refused to open the door, and there was no way for the little boy to come in.  The boy had to go away, and the father lost his son forever.

After telling this story, the Buddha said, “If at some point in your life you adopt an idea or a perception as the absolute truth, you close the door of your mind.  This is the end of seeking the truth.  And not only do you no longer seek the truth, but even if the truth comes in person and knocks on your door, you refuse to open it.  Attachment to views, attachment to ideas, attachment to perceptions are the biggest obstacle to the truth.”

March 09, 2010

No related posts.

As the Hollywood juggernaut hurtled towards the Best Picture award, we witnessed the obscenity of five actors and five actresses standing upon a stage, addressing their nominated colleagues in the Best Actor and Best Actress categories, gushing their adulation to all the world:  “a true humanitarian,” “a wonderful human being,” “a great kisser?”  Why not just fellate one another and get it over with?

Although questionable, the results were not surprising.  The Hurt Locker won six Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow and Best Original Screenplay for Mark Boal.  For the official statement of results, go to the Oscar website.  Both Boal and Bigelow dedicated their wins to America’s troops in Iraq and the 4,000 dead.  In fact, more than 4,000 have died in Iraq, but only 4,000 real people have died there.

The evening’s only travesty was Sandra Bullock’s win as Best Actress for her role as Leigh Anne Tuohy in The Blind Side.  In fairness, she was most gracious in her win, dedicating her Oscar to white Christian moms throughout the world.  Bullock has the distinction of being the only Academy Award winner to have won a Razzie in the same year.  The Academy gave her the award because she managed a more believable accent than either Carey Mulligan or Helen Mirren.  Meryl Streep was not allowed to win because, as we were reminded on numerous occasions, she is simply too talented and it would be selfish of her to deny mediocrity its moment in the sunshine.

Scruples about Streep’s talent produce a strange phenomenon:  in the midst of such obscene wealth as we find in Hollywood, there is nevertheless an intuitive sense of distributive justice.  The Academy feels obliged to compensate for the fact that some people do indeed have more talent and intelligence than others.  Poor Sandra Bullock.  Now at least she’ll have something pretty to put on her night table.  Maybe she and Sarah Palin can go shopping together sometime.

March 08, 2010

Related posts:

1. Dissing the Oscars – An Education
2. Dissing the Oscars – Precious
3. Dissing the Oscars – Avatar & District 9

If there’s a single phrase which captures Up for me, its the phrase “passive-aggressive.”  Let me explain.  After I had watched Up, I thought to myself:  “There’s something disturbing about this film.”  Yet I didn’t dare share my views with anyone else who had seen the film with me because I was afraid of being called a curmudgeon, or worse, of being accused of harbouring anti-social tendencies.  How could I possibly find anything wrong with the film?  It’s a sweet story.  The message is life-affirming.  The animation is cute.  The score is, uh, buoyant.  It’s the sort of film that’s impossible to criticize because the minute you say anything negative, you find yourself swarmed by a roving pack of little old ladies who beat you to death with their umbrellas.  And yet.  And yet.

Up opens with a young Carl Fredricksen (the grown up Carl is voiced by Ed Asner) watching a black and white 1930’s Movietone Newsreel of the intrepid explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer) who has flown his dirigible, the Spirit of Adventure, to Paradise Falls, a South American land “lost in time.”  Muntz has been discredited and is off again to South America to prove once and for all the existence of an elusive species of bird.  After the movie, young Carl meets Ellie and the two agree that they will go on adventures together, just like Charles Muntz.  In a brilliant four-minute montage, we watch the pair grow up, get married, share dreams, move into a house, discover they cannot have children, grow old together, and discover in their autumn years that they have lived their lives together without living their dreams.  Ellie dies and Carl is left an elderly widower without much to account for the passage of so many years.

The montage is poignant, charming, heartfelt, and interrupted by a knock at the door.  Enter Russell (Jordan Nagai), a benign but dim-witted Asian American Junior Wilderness Explorer who desperately wants his assisting-the-elderly badge.  Before you know it, the house is aloft on the wings of a million helium-filled balloons and headed to South America.  Like it or not, Carl is going to get his adventure after all and Russell is going to get his badge.  Once they touch down, they encounter the famed Charles Muntz who proves to be less heroic (and more sinister) in real life.  Like a fascist dictator, Muntz has his blackshirt army – a pack of dogs fixed with special collars that translate their doggy thoughts into English.  After all these years, Muntz is still hunting for his exotic bird, which happens to have befriended Carl and Russell.  It’s clear that Muntz has nefarious intentions.  He will capture the bird and separate it from its young, killing Carl and Russell if necessary.

The movie concludes with Muntz dining on roast bird, Carl in a cage with bamboo shoved up his fingernails, and the pack of dogs licking its lips after picking Russell’s bones clean.  Okay, I’m kidding.  The ending is entirely Disney.  Charles Muntz gets his comeuppance, the bird is safe and goes back to its babies, and Carl and Russell fly home in the dirigible, The Spirit of Adventure.  And yet.  And yet.

For all its heartwarming heartwarminess, there is something unsettling about Up.  It’s chock full of assumptions that could easily be rationalized as storytelling conventions or innocuous plot devices but which, on closer examination, betray a Western colonial point of view.  Consider:

• the adventure takes us to a dark and uncharted Amazonian land;
• the adventurers transport an entire house with them so they won’t have to adapt to the new land; they assume they can simply plop themselves down and continue to lead their lives unaffected by their new surroundings;
• there are no people in the new land; or to the extent that there are intelligent beings, they’re less than human;
• rather than learn anything about the indigenous (sub-human) population, and rather than deal with it on its own terms, the adventurers from America enlist it as cheap labour and force it to speak English;
• the film’s conflict is between competing Americans; the local populace has no choice but to serve interests that don’t have anything to do with them.

By making the story so sweet, it becomes unassailable.  By suckering us with its sentimentality, we become complicit in the colonial assumptions that drive it.  By the time we realize what’s happened, it’s too late.  We’ve bought into the story; it’s become our story once again even though we tried to cast it off years ago.

After I finished watching Up, I felt dirtier than if I had watched hardcore.  It’s time for new storytelling conventions and new plot devices.

March 07, 2010

Related posts:

1. Dissing the Oscars – Up In The Air
2. Dissing the Oscars – Precious
3. Dissing the Oscars – Avatar & District 9

The Winter Olympic Games Are Over

Environment Canada noted the sudden appearance of a warm air mass late Sunday afternoon when 35 million Canadians crapped themselves after Zach Parise of the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team scored the tying goal which sent the U.S./Canada gold medal hockey game into overtime.  This was followed by a second warm air mass – a huge sigh of relief when Sid the Kid Crosby scored the winning goal, giving Canada a gold medal for men’s hockey and giving Canada a record-setting 14 gold medals for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.  As soon as he scored, Crosby threw his gloves and stick in the air.  Hockey Hall of Fame tried to retrieve the holy relics to store in its crypt, but the blessed articles mysteriously disappeared, perhaps ascending into hockey heaven on one of the four zambonis of the apocalypse.

The Holiday Is Over

After proroguing Parliament for more than two months, our esteemed leaders reconvened on March 3rd, opening the party with a throne speech delivered by our beloved toady-general, Michaëlle Jean.  If you’re having trouble getting to sleep at night, you can read the text of the speech here.  The focus of the speech was financial concerns.  After spending itself into a $56 billion deficit, the Conservative government needs to think of ways to save money.  That’s why it announced that it will double funding for the “Own The Podium” program so that Canada’s elite athletes will perform even better at the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London.  As everybody knows, giving more money to the country’s elites is a well-tested recipe for solving financial problems.  Harper has also announced a revision of Canada’s national anthem to a more gender neutral version.  As everybody knows from his support of REAL women, our prime minister is deeply concerned about equality for women – especially white Christian women.  When asked about the change, Industry Minister Tony Clement said: “The Prime Minister has heard from some Canadians on this.”  Some?  He’s heard from some Canadians?  Which Canadians?  The Canadians in his Cabinet?  And what have the national anthem’s lyrics got to do with the Industry Minister’s portfolio?  You can read the proposed revisions here.

It’s No-Homo For Immigration Study Guide

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney struck any reference to gay rights from a new study guide for immigrants applying for Canadian citizenship.  According to Helen Kennedy, executive director of gay-rights group, Egale Canada, Kenney had told her the omission was an oversight and promised to fix it.  Now, Kenney denies everything.  The guide was getting too long, says an aide.  It’s not meant to be encyclopaedic, so certain thing get included and certain things don’t.  Important stuff stays in.  For example, we learn that

• “French-Canadian militiamen helped defend Canada in the War of 1812.”
• Sir Leonard Tilley was inspired by the Bible’s Psalm 72 to describe this country as the Dominion of Canada.
• “More than 3,000 nurses, nicknamed “Bluebirds,” served in the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps.”
• Canadian football is different from American football.

Want to learn more about this wonderful, generic, sexually nondescript country called Canada?  Download a pdf copy of the new immigration guide, Discover.

Niqab Xenophobia Finally Reaches Canada

After years of feeling left out, Canada finally gets its own racist controversy around the Niqab, a traditional veil worn by some Moslem women as a sign of modesty.  On Tuesday, CBC news posted the following headline:  Niqab-wearing woman pursues Quebec college.  Unfortunately, with all her clothing, she couldn’t run very fast and the college got away.  This has become the rallying point for Canadian rednecks everywhere to scamper out into the light of day like rats squeezing up from the floorboards.  The comment section of virtually every Canadian news agency website has been overrun with them.  Typical comments suggest that if the woman can’t integrate with our way of life, then she should get the hell out.  Uh … Integrate?  This happened in Quebec, a province which stands as a reminder that anyone on Canadian soil has the constitutionally protected right NOT to integrate.  Even if you choose to wear something as outlandish as lumberjack shirts, you are still allowed to stay in this country.  Isn’t it ironic (as that annoying Canadian named Alanis Morisette would say) that all these beavertail eating, maple syrup slurping rednecks express their views while hiding behind the veil of anonymity which news websites provide to them.  Maybe they’re all just modest.

RBC Posts 1st Quarter Profit

Canada’s largest bank and official sponsor of the 2010 Winter Olympics, the Royal Bank of Canada, reported first quarter earnings of $1.5 billion.  Even so, this was lower than predicted and so share prices fell – shit, who am I kidding?  I could care less about performance in the financial services sector.  What I do care about is HOW the RBC earned its money.  CBC News reports that RBC earned $132 million in fees raising capital for companies that operate in the Alberta Tar Sands.  In fact, RBC has $16.9 billion in outstanding loans to those companies.  So … Canada has one of the most stable banking systems in the world.  Nevertheless, it maintains that stability on the back of the whole world.  And the Olympic sponsorship?  That was some of the dirtiest money the world has ever seen.

Related posts:

1. This Week In Canada
2. Canadian Voter Apathy
3. Supreme Court of Canada Affirms Basic Human Rights

Unlike any of the other nominees, An Education seems to have gotten by without attracting any reviews which could qualify as a true diss.  Part of the reason is that reviewers are universally smitten by Carey Mulligan, whose performance suggests the intelligence of Alexis Bledel and the beauty of Audrey Hepburn.  She carries the film and appears in almost every scene.  Even those reviews which complain that the film is too light or the resolution too neat nevertheless acknowledge Mulligan’s brilliance.  And with her dominant role throughout, that brilliance goes a long way to assuaging those complaints.

An Education tells the story of 16-year-old Jenny, an intelligent middle-class girl bound for Oxford.  Her anxiety-ridden father (Alfred Molina) spends a good deal of his time thinking of reasons why Jenny should not do things.  For him, his daughter’s education is purely instrumental:  it’s value will be measured by the opportunities it yields, and if those opportunities can be had through a husband rather than through a school, so much the better.  For her part, Jenny is growing bored of Latin and Shakespeare and the local youth orchestra.  So when a man named David (Peter Sarsgaard) who is twice her age offers her a lift home and subsequently asks her to a concert and dinner, she finds the invitations irresistible.  David also works his charms on Jenny’s parents, persuading them to grant liberties that Jenny would have thought impossible, including a weekend trip to Paris.  Although it is becoming apparent that David funds his cultural escapades by questionable means, Jenny is sufficiently taken by his charms that she accepts a proposal of marriage and quits school, reasoning that she can substitute one form of education for another.  After all, David claims to be a graduate from the school of life and he seems to have done well for himself.  As for bookish learning, what’s the point?  Sounding much like her father, Jenny wonders aloud to the school’s headmistress (Emma Thompson) what it will get her.

As soon as Jenny chooses to quit school, everything unravels.  David isn’t at all what he seems and this forces a hard lesson on Jenny.  I suppose the reviewers are right when they suggest that the film is predictable, but this is only because the reviewers – and all adults watching the film – already have an education in one form or another complete with its loss of innocence.  Nevertheless, as the father of a daughter the same age as Jenny who is waiting for word of acceptance to university, I can understand how a teen aged girl could find herself swept up in the moment, then receive the inevitable fall as something utterly unexpected and bewildering.  I suppose naivete looks naive only to the jaded.  And we grown-ups are all jaded.

One of the film’s lessons is the importance of forgiveness in education.  Another way of stating the matter is that a good education incorporates mistakes since we learn at least as much from our mistakes as from our correct choices.  And a good educator is someone who protects us from the full impact of our mistakes so we can go on learning.  When Jenny discovers her mistake she returns to her school, apologizing to the headmistress and requesting a spot in the next year’s class so she can finish her A levels.  The headmistress refuses, effectively denying a superior student the opportunity to continue formal learning.  Jenny seeks out her mentor, Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams), who takes a different view of things.  Miss Stubbs is willing to overlook the rather personal, almost insulting, remarks Jenny has made in suggesting that Miss Stubbs wasn’t really alive.  Jenny is forced to re-evaluate her initial assessment of Miss Stubbs.  It seems Jenny isn’t smart at all when it comes to reading people.  But at least she has that insight.  Now her education can begin in earnest.

March 05, 2010

Related posts:

1. Dissing the Oscars – Precious
2. Dissing the Oscars – The Blind Side
3. Dissing the Oscars – Up In The Air

No related posts.

• they like their comedy dark;
• they aren’t afraid to make stark juxtapositions of light and heavy themes;
• they both have elicited hammy over-the-top performances from Brad Pitt (see Burn After Reading);
• this year both address Jewish concerns;
• both structure their films with chapter headings
• critical response tends to be more polarized than with other film makers; either you like them or your don’t; there’s no middle ground.

I have to confess that I like the films of both Tarantino and the Coen brothers.  I like their sensibilities.  I like their ability to make good fun out of the absurd.

Inglorious Basterds

With Inglorious Basterds, we have a Jewish revenge fantasy in which three different groups converge on a Paris Cinema during World War II and torch the place, but not before pumping Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Bormann full of lead.  The Inglorious Basterds is a crack unit of Jewish American soldiers whose mission is to wreak havoc throughout occupied France and to deliver 100 Nazi scalps each to their commanding officer, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), who is known as The Apache.  They become the contact for a British spy, Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), posing as a German film critic.  The meeting has been facilitated by German starlet, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), who has secured tickets for the premiere of Goebbels’ latest propaganda masterpiece, “Nation’s Pride.”  The cinema is owned by Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) who, unaware of the assassination plot descending upon her venue, hatches a plot of her own.  We saw a younger Shosanna at the outset of the film fleeing from Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) who had slain Shosanna’s family.  As The Jew Hunter, Waltz’s portrayal of efficient bureaucratic evil is among the most satisfying performances of the year and I expect it will garner him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Among the Basterd dissers is Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun who writes that it is “so hollow and protracted that it transforms mayhem into monotony.”  Of course, this is the same critic who wrote about the “tingle of authenticity” he got from The Blind Side, so it’s hard to take him seriously.  David Denby of The New Yorker says it ”is not boring, but it’s ridiculous and appallingly insensitive.”  Tarantino’s “virtuosity as a maker of images has been overwhelmed by his inanity as an idiot de la cinémathèque.”  It seems a little pretentious resorting to French when all you really want to say is “Quentin, you’re an idiot.”

Both reviewers have difficulty with the fact that the film is about historical events that never happened.  Somehow, it’s inappropriate to use a fictional backdrop for the telling of a fictional yarn.  Apparently, it’s insulting or politically incorrect, or juvenile, or something – especially if that fictional backdrop too closely resembles troubling events in the real world.  And yet, whether the reviewers have noticed or not, storytellers have been doing just that for as long as people have been telling stories.  And it’s fair to suppose that writers and film makers will be using Nazis as stock villains for centuries to come.  We’ve seen this in the Indiana Jones franchise and in The Boys From Brazil.  While these assume the historical backdrop of Nazi Germany and the rise and ultimate fall of Hitler, other works imagine alternate histories.  Notable among these latter works is Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which assumes the defeat of the allied forces and imagines a world carved up between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  It could well be that the Book of Exodus is also such a work, imagining the toils of the Jewish people against the backdrop of a fictionalized Egypt and its despotic leader, Ramses II, but I leave that speculation to another post.  I mention these blends of fiction and history merely to suggest that Srargow and Denby are being a bit supercilious in their concerns.

A Serious Man

A Serious Man tells the story of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish physics professor who lives in a Minneapolis suburb.  Set in the 1960’s, the “new freedoms” have become Gopnik’s nightmare.  There’s the weed-smoking neighbour (Amy Landecker) who sunbathes nude in her back yard.  There’s his son Danny (Aaron Wolff) who attends his own bar mitzvah stoned, listens to Jefferson airplane, and whines about how he can’t get “F Troop” because the TV aerial keeps needing adjustment.  There’s the daughter (Jessica McManus) who steals money from his wallet because she’s saving for a nose job.  There’s the wife (Sari Lennick) who wants him out of the house because she’s in love with Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed), a slimy passive-aggressive who quotes classic lines from Eric Berne’s Games People Play.  There’s the helpless brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), who spends a good deal of his time locked in the bathroom draining a sebaceous cyst and working on a something he calls the Mentaculus which is probably the product of a psychosis.  Add to this a Korean student who is trying to bribe him for better grades, a redneck neighbour who’s encroaching on his property line, a pesky collection agent from a record club, a real estate lawyer who drops dead during their interview, and anonymous allegations of moral turpitude delivered to the tenure committee.  With all this chaos whirling around him, it isn’t surprising that Gopnik wants desperately to know what it all means.  What is Hashem trying to tell him?

At this point, the parallels with the Book of Job become unmistakable.  In his quest for answers, Gopnik meets with three rabbis who come off sounding a lot like Job’s faithless friends.  The centerpiece of these meetings is the story of the goy’s teeth told by Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner).  A member of the congregation is a dentist who discovers Hebrew letters etched on the back of a patient’s teeth.  The letters spell:  “Help me.”  He puzzles over the meaning of the message.  Following the method of Kabbalah, he converts the letters to numbers.  Maybe it’s a phone number.  He dials the number and gets a grocery store.  He goes to the grocery store but learns nothing.  Gopnik asks what happens in the story; did the dentist ever learn the meaning of the message?  Rabbi Nachtner doesn’t see the point of the question.  The dentist goes on living his life.  So what?  We feel Gopnik’s frustration.  Like him, we want answers and no one seems inclined to give them to us.  Gopnik finishes by asking what happened to the goy. “The goy?  Who cares?”

The movie is full of messages that prove either meaningless or impossible to interpret.  We have Gopnik standing before a chalk board covered in mathematical equations – Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – which “proves we can’t ever really know what’s going on.  But even though you can’t figure anything out, you will be responsible for it on the mid-term.”  The blur of figures on the chalkboard neatly echo the Hebrew characters on the chalkboard in his son’s class.  We see similar figures again when the son is reading Torah at his bar mitzvah.  Are the messages from Hashem any more certain than the messages from Heisenberg?  There is Arthur’s Mentaculus:  pages upon pages of numerical scribbles which he uses to win at an illegal game of poker.  There is the TV aerial which picks up odd signals when twisted one way or another.  There are dream sequences in which Gopnik imagines himself having sex with the neighbour and being shot by the rednecks.  There is the coincidence of simultaneous auto accidents with its latent significance.  And there is the final meeting with the third rabbi.  This is the ancient Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell) who refuses to meet with Larry Gopnik but will meet his son Danny to congratulate him on his bar mitzvah.  At the meeting, the venerable Rabbi Marshak quotes words of wisdom which are nothing more than lyrics from Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love”.  What does it all mean?  What is Hashem trying to tell us?

As a storm approaches, Gopnik receives a phone call from his doctor regarding the results from his x-rays.  They need to talk.  They need to talk in person.  The film ends, just as indeterminate as Rabbi Nachter’s story of the goy’s teeth – or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle for that matter.

A Serious Man wins the award as recipient of the harshest diss of any Oscar contender.  That diss comes from Ella Taylor in The Village Voice and focuses on Jewish self-loathing and what she describes as its “Ugly Jew iconography.”  This prompts her to call it a “loathsome movie.”  The problem with her review is that she wasn’t paying attention when she watched the film.  She says that all the Jewish people in the film are ugly, and excepts the nude sunbathing neighbour by reasoning that she is “probably a shiksa.” The problem is:  in the movie I saw, the neighbour is Jewish, as the film makes clear on at least two separate occasions.  Ella Taylor also complains about how Gopnik’s life gets better all by itself.  However, the movie I saw implied that Gopnik’s life was about to get a whole lot worse.  Taylor comes off sounding like she has a chip on her shoulder.  It seems her vision was too clouded by anger to watch the film that was actually playing at the time.  Too bad, because she missed an excellent film.

The Verdict

Both are eminently watchable films.  Are they Oscar worthy?  Apart from Christoph Waltz’s performance in Inglorious Basterds, I don’t think so, although A Serious Man comes close.

March 05, 2010

Related posts:

1. Dissing the Oscars – Precious
2. Dissing the Oscars – The Blind Side
3. Dissing the Oscars – An Education

I approached The Hurt Locker with a healthy dose of skepticism.  I said to myself:  “Not another American film that tells the story of working-class grunts while ignoring the stories of those whose lands they occupy.  I’m getting tired of American military propaganda.”  I had just finished reading Leilah Nadir’s The Orange Trees of Baghdad, Canadian journalist Nadir’s memoir of life for her family under American occupation.  One of the things which struck me about Nadir’s account was the lack of engagement by American troops in the daily life of ordinary Iraqis.  For obvious security reasons, Americans remained cloistered in the Green Zone.  This meant that American troops could remain relatively unaffected by the consequences of their presence there, could avoid empathy for the people they were “helping,” and could maintain unchallenged the stereotypes of a radicalized Islamic population.

As much as I might wish for a different kind of film, The Hurt Locker is what it is, and it is good enough that it deserves to be encountered on its own terms.  Although it opens by orienting itself  in the anti-war camp (by quoting Christ Hedges’ book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning:  “The rush of battle is a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug”), nevertheless, it is extraordinarily non-judgmental.  No analytical psychologizing like we find in Apocalypse Now.  No sanctimonious moralizing like we find in Platoon.  Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) has arrived to replace his recently blown up predecessor.  Another member of his team, Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), has him pegged for a redneck cowboy who’s going to get them all killed.  In a sense, Sanborn is right; James is a redneck.  James swigs whiskey and listens to his metal-head music.  Somewhere in his past he got a girlfriend pregnant and now there’s an infant son, but he barely acknowledges their existence.  His only possession is a box of bomb components … and a wedding ring on a chain – all the things that have nearly got him killed.

However, as Sanborn discovers, there’s more depth to him than his redneck image would first suggest.  James develops a friendship with an Iraqis boy who sells DVD’s and calls himself Beckham (Christopher Sayegh).  When he discovers that the remains of a boy (whom he mistakenly believes is Beckham) have been used for a “body bomb,” he ignores the ordinary protocol of blowing up the body with C4 and risks his life by defusing the bomb so the boy’s remains can be buried with dignity.  He promises the other member of his team, Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), that he will “get him out of this.”  He makes good on his promise, although, in what can only be construed as a parable for the war in Iraq, he creates the very situation from which he rescues Eldridge and, in the process of rescuing him, shatters his femur in nine places.  Not exactly the kind of hero that makes viewers feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Despite what appears to be an existential disengagement, James does have a backhanded empathy for the Iraqis he encounter.  That is because the Iraqis he encounters most intimately are those who have planted and armed the bombs he has to diffuse.  He carries on a “conversation” with them as he tears apart a car, searching for the triggering mechanism.  And in the penultimate episode, as he surveys the crater left by an exploded oil truck, he tries to get inside the heads of the men who set off the explosion.  Was it a suicide attack?  Or did they watch in the shadows and detonate the bomb remotely?  To perform his role, he has to think like them.  When the tour of duty is over, we see James in a supermarket standing before a shelf with a hundred different brands of breakfast cereal.  We wonder, perhaps with James, what kind of a mind lies behind the product displays in a giant box store.  Is it driven by an internal logic which we can somehow diffuse if we think long enough about it?

After dissociative images of cleaning leaves from a rain gutter and playing with his son, we see James back on Iraqis soil for another tour of duty.  Although there is the suggestion (thanks to the Hedges’ quote) that James is either addicted to or in love with war, there is also the suggestion that war is the only way James knows to quell his dissociative tendencies.  He knows himself only when he is at war.  If war is an addiction, it is only an addiction because it feeds a craving for purpose and identity.  A disaffected working-class American has only two options to satisfy this craving, and Hedges has documented both of them – religion and war.

Without being preachy, Bigelow presents to us an average American soldier who has no more insight regarding the forces that shape his life (and perhaps oppress it) than the average Iraqis insurgent.  The Hurt Locker concludes indeterminately, a fresh tour, the next iteration of a cycle that could go on forever.  In that sense, the film is true to the story of the American military.

March 03, 2010

Related posts:

1. Dissing the Oscars – Precious
2. Dissing the Oscars – The Blind Side
3. Dissing the Oscars – Avatar & District 9

The Blind Side

How could such tripe ever get nominated in the first place?  Because I don’t live in America, it’s difficult for me to gauge the inner workings of American culture, but one possible explanation is that this is a case of liberal Hollywood throwing a bone to the rabid dogs of the culture wars.  The film is enormously popular amongst conservative evangelical Christians (it’s set in and around a Memphis Christian school) and reviews like this one from crasswalk.com are typical. Groups like the American Family Association have delighted in Bullock’s semi-conversion and reason that, if making the film has such an effect on the esteemed Ms. Bullock, then God’s hand must have been in it, and God can’t make bad films.  Just ask Charlatan Heston.

So, God or no God, what’s wrong with The Blind Side?

Dull Story

First is a screenplay that is as predictable as a Big Mac.  Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) persuades her husband, Sean (Tim McGraw), to support her personal charity project:  rescuing poor black Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron) and giving him a shot at a football scholarship.  They welcome him from the projects and into their mansion, buy him stuff, get him a tutor to boost his GPA, and orchestrate interviews with prospective colleges.  Big Mike plays some good ball, gets a scholarship.  Based on a true story.  Tug on my heart strings.

But where’s the dramatic tension that drives the story and engages the viewers?  We come close a couple times, but the situations are diffused with platitudes as sickly sweet as cotton candy dipped in maple syrup.  A case in point is the luncheon with Tuohy’s sister and southern belle friends who genteelly question her about the big black boy who appears in the family Christmas card.  It’s clear they disapprove in their own politically correct racist way, but, says one friend, “Honey, you’re changing that boy’s life.”  To which Tuohy glibly replies:  “No, he’s changing mine.”  The issue never arises again.  Get me a bucket.

Horrible Acting

Quinton Aaron, as Big Mike, offers as much emotional range as a piece of cardboard.  Jae Head as the Tuohy son, is one of those annoying hyperactive child actors you’d like to dress in leg irons and drop in the harbour.  And Bullock offers yet another convincing portrayal of Bullock playing Bullock, although this time she does it with a modest southern accent.

Pernicious Message

In my review of Precious, I had challenged the review by David Cox of The Guardian who had suggested that the film was an insult to the poor and a pernicious film.  I think it was a simple case of a typo; his observations in that context are dead on with reference to The Blind Side.  The difference between the two films is that Precious tells the story of Precious, whereas The Blind Side tells the story of how the world ought to congratulate the Tuohy’s for reaching out to some black kid whose story, to the extent that we are told any of it, is utterly incidental.  In effect, The Blind Side is masturbation.  There’s more than cotton candy to that sticky feeling.  Nowhere is that clearer than when Tuohy asks her husband:  “Am I a good person?” and receives the only answer a sane husband can ever give in such a situation.

The pernicious element emerges when the Tuohy’s are considering whether or not they should legally adopt Big Mike.  When Leigh Anne suggests they send him to a child psychologist because he might have issues, Sean says:  “Michael’s gift is his ability to forget.  He’s mad at no one and he doesn’t really care what happened in the past.”  This is a kid who grew up with no father and was raised by a crack-addict mother who had at least twelve children by an assortment of men.  Viewers can’t help but extrapolate from this exchange between a husband a wife to a wider message about how white people generally ought to think about race relations in the south.  Let’s avoid serious self-examination.  Let’s not bother to acknowledge hurt.  Or try to heal.  Let’s just forget the past.

I’ve noticed a curious tendency in the comments on the reviews that diss this film:  many who think the film is wonderful take a passive-aggressive tack, suggesting that it can’t be criticized as racist because it’s a true story about real people who did in fact rescue a black kid from the projects and did in fact launch him on a successful pro ball career (Michael Oher was a 2009 draft pick for the Baltimore Ravens).  I suppose that depends on what you mean by “true.”  If “true” means “factual”, than this story is no more true than Avatar.  Once it moved from an interview of the real Tuohys to a concept pitched to Warner Bros. to a screenplay pitched to actors, it had gone through more layers of interpretation than a game of “Telephone” in a kindergarten class.  If, on the other hand, “true” means “a vehicle that speaks truth,” one that gives voice to the stories of those who might otherwise go unheard, one that speaks to questions of justice and invites compassionate listening, then this movie is as false a piece as I’ve ever watched.

March 02, 2010

Related posts:

1. Dissing the Oscars – Precious
2. Dissing the Oscars – An Education
3. Dissing the Oscars – Wrap Up

I am the bones of my mother,
Laurentia, the womb of a continent
lain in place a billion years,
magma cooled to granite,
feldspar, quartz and mica,
groaning beneath the weight
of ice a mile thick or more,
crying away the pain with rivers,
north through the Arctic watershed,
south through the Great Lakes waterways.

They came with their blasting caps,
their boring drills and dynamite,
graders and big-wheeled trucks,
roaring from first light until
the sun went down, then it began again:
a billion years blown to bits
in the blinking of an eye.  For what?
For that frenetic two-day flurry
round-trip scurry from the city?
Bury the land in asphalt
to appreciate its beauty?

Though I’m nothing but the pickings
of a corpse, I will endure.
Long after your greatest monuments,
and you with them, are ground to dust,
my hard bones will still be here,
dead arms stretched wide, a host,
but not for you,
pointing the way, a guide
to the river, running deep
with my mother’s tears.

March 01, 2010

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Olympic Women’s Figure Skating

Topping the list is three minutes of pure emotional porn on Tuesday night as Joannie Rochette completed her first skate in the Olympic Women’s Figure Skating competition notwithstanding the fact that her mother died on Sunday morning.  This is as close as figure skating gets to NASCAR racing, where half the people are watching because they secretly hope they’ll see an accident.  I wonder which was more challenging for her – the grief or the voyeurism.  She went on to win the bronze medal on Thursday.  After all the fans went home, Joannie came out onto the ice and celebrated with a can of beer and a cigar.  Well done, Joannie!  People can post condolences on her website.

Copyright

While we’re still on the topic of ice, hell froze over this week.  The Computer and Communications Industry Association (whose members include Microsoft, Google, T-Mobile, Fujitsu, AMD, eBay, Intuit, Oracle and Yahoo) filed a submission to a U.S. regulatory body that prepares an annual report on the status of the intellectual property laws of its main trading partners.  Michael Geist writes in his Toronto Star article:

The CCIA warned that including Canada on the list of countries that need reforms undermines the credibility of the process, adding “Canada’s current copyright law and practice clearly satisfy the statutory adequate and effective standard. Indeed, in a number respects, Canada’s laws are more protective of creators than those of the United States.”

Too bad the people making the submission don’t know how to write.  Who cares about copyright protection when the stuff being protected is crap?

Climate Change Denial

Speaking of things freezing over, Conservative MP, Maxime Bernier, affirms his climate change skepticism in this press release.  Unfortunately, M. Bernier misconceives the nature of the debate.  Climate change isn’t a scientific debate; it’s an actuarial debate.  It isn’t a debate about the correct assessment of facts; it’s a debate about the correct assessment of risk.  I, for one, am unwilling to allow a bonehead like Bernier to assume, on my behalf, a risk – even an infinitesimally small risk – of catastrophic consequences simply because there is a debate about the underlying science.  Common sense suggests that we proceed as if the science were correct.  If, at a later date, the science is demonstrably wrong, the worst thing that can happen is that we suffer a little embarrassment.  I’d rather be embarrassed than dead.

Besides, does anybody really believe that climate change denial is motivated by a loyalty to truth?

Youth For Christ Gets a Crack at Native Kids

Winnipeg’s City Council demonstrated an utter lack of historical knowledge this week when it approved spending $3.4 million dollars (which triggers an automatic $3.2 million in federal “stimulus” funding) to support a Youth For Christ sponsored “Youth Centre For Excellence.”  The building site is on the northern edge of the city in a primarily aboriginal neighbourhood.  CBC News reports that First Nations leaders said the proposal “stirs up thoughts of historical assimilation.”  If I recall correctly, the last time church organizations undertook anything like this, they called it cultural genocide, the churches issued apologies and ended up paying substantial compensation.  As a partner, the federal government bore financial responsibility for an even greater part of the compensation package.  So why are we letting this happen all over again?  In a wildly moderate article, Dan Lett of the Winnipeg Free Press points out that Youth For Christ is a proselytic organization which includes a column in its annual report for the number of people it converts. However, the organization assures that it will not turn away anyone who resists conversion.  I find that so reassuring.

Parliament Is Still Prorogued

In case you’ve forgotten, Parliament is still not sitting because Stephen Harper is having too much fun watching hockey in Vancouver.  He’s hoping that by the time the Olympics are done, everyone will be so mesmerized by all that gold that they will have forgotten about incidental matters like the torture of Afghan detainees.

RCMP cracked the Sneaky Greenpeace Case

CBC News reports that two months after 19 Greenpeace activists scaled the walls of Parliament to draw attention to Canada’s flaccid appearance at the Copenhagen summit, the RCMP has finally figured out how they did it.  Greenpeace made its move when the two police officers guarding Parliament Hill went to the Timmies on Bank Street for coffee and donuts.  The RCMP says it has beefed up security since then.  Although the RCMP refuses to reveal details, an anonymous insider has leaked the solution:  tell the MP’s to keep proroguing Parliament.  If the place is empty, then it doesn’t need protecting.

Walmart Invasion

Canadian Business Online reports that Walmart will be opening another 35 to 40 super centres in Canada, creating 6,500 jobs.  What they don’t report is that the new big box stores will probably cost Canadians at least as many jobs because most of the goods it sells are manufactured elsewhere, and it will eviscerate communities by driving local businesses into bankruptcy.  And because of Walmart’s anti-union stance, most of the permanent jobs it creates will not even pay a living wage.  Meanwhile four members of the Walton family appear in the top ten spots on the Forbes list of richest Americans.  It’s called the trickle up theory of economics – from your wallet into theirs.  Note to Walmart:  if you’re going to quote job creation figures, quote NET jobs created and say a little something about the QUALITY of the jobs created.  Check out Walmart Watch for more on the treat that awaits us.

Related posts:

1. This Week In Canada Eh
2. Canada Holds Copyright Consultations
3. Supreme Court of Canada Affirms Basic Human Rights

In June of 2008, I heard the Art of Time Ensemble perform with Steven Page at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto.  It was part of their Songbook series, an annual event where Andrew Barashko and the Art of Time Ensemble invite a well known Canadian artist to select a handful of favourite songs.  They commission arrangements of the selected favourites and then get together for a bit of a party.  CBC Radio 2 recorded the concert and it was broadcast in July of 2008 but wasn’t included on Radio 2’s Concerts on Demand roster because they ended up cooking an album with Jonathan Goldsmith as producer.  See Steven Page’s facebook page for a discussion of his choices and/or purchase here.  Here is a list of tracks and original composers:

1. LION’S TEETH / THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
2. I WANT YOU / ELVIS COSTELLO
3. FOOLISH LOVE / RUFUS WAINRIGHT
4. RUNNING OUT OF INK / BARENAKED LADIES
5. A SINGER MUST DIE / LEONARD COHEN
6. THE TAXI RIDE / JANE SIBERRY
7. TONIGHT WE FLY / THE DIVINE COMEDY
8. VIRTUTE THE CAT EXPLAINS HER DEPARTURE / THE WEAKERTHANS
9. FOR WE ARE THE KING OF THE BOUDOIR / THE MAGNETIC FIELDS
10. PARANOID ANDROID / RADIOHEAD

Reviews are mixed.  Keith Carman for Metro Canada is modestly receptive, giving the album a 3.5 stars but posting reservations:  Page is reaching beyond his abilities in covers of the Weakerthans and Radiohead, and the whole project pushes him outside his comfort zone.  Kirk Heron of Eye Weekly gives it just two stars, referring to “Steven Page’s overwhelmingly goofy voice”, saying that “the vocalist is still leashed to his not-so-serious Barenaked Ladies roots” and (in reference to the Radiohead cover) describing his voice as a “tin-can phone” above the beautiful arrangement.

Heron’s review is unfair.  The “overwhelmingly goofy voice” comment is ignorant and the only thing leashing Page to his “not-so-serious Barenaked Ladies roots” is public perception, a perception that reviewers like Heron only serve to perpetuate.  A little bit of scandal and a split from the Ladies may have the unintended benefit of helping Page transform himself into a “serious” musician.  However, such a suggestion would merely cloud the fact that Page has always been a serious musician.  Since his earliest days with the Barenaked Ladies, Page has been the melancholic, the darker figure who has kept the Ladies from a descent into Raffi hell by touching on themes like depression (think of “Brian Wilson” from Gordon), alcohol (“Alcohol” from Stunt) and drugs and suicide (“War on Drugs” from Everything to Everyone).

The selections on A Singer Must Die reflect that darkness.  A simple survey of key signatures reveals a preference for the minor key (“Lion’s Teeth”, “I Want You”, “The Taxi Ride”, and “Paranoid Android”).  And some, like “A Singer Must Die”, while written in a major key, spend a lot of time in the realm of III, VI & II, which gives them an indeterminate feel.  Then there are the themes.  Even Neil Hannon’s exhilarating “Tonight We Fly” lies embedded in a weighty philosophy (one that eschews god and survival of the soul, and calls us to live as if this life is the only chance we have to get things right).

As for orchestration, Page has always performed above more sounds than you find in a typical five-piece garage band.  In the Barenaked Ladies, there was always Jim Creeggan playing his double bass, cello and even the viola.  Their 1991 cover of Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” is an early example of an effective string accompaniment.  And woodwinds have often figured in their music.  So the presence of a fuller orchestration seems a natural extension of earlier efforts.  Jane Siberry’s “The Taxi Ride” lends itself particularly well to the Art of Time’s instrumental accompaniment.  The most challenging piece (for the listener) is “For we are the King of the Boudoir” by the Magnetic Fields because the accompaniment gradually descends into dissonance and concludes with Page’s “tin-can phone.”  It isn’t pop music and it isn’t listenable in the way that top 40 music makes for pleasant background music on the drive to work, so I can understand why Heron might not have liked it.  Nevertheless, the fact that we don’t like something does not, therefore, make it bad.  My suspicion is that the music here doesn’t challenge Page as much as it challenges the expectations of his listeners.

As I mentioned at the outset, I have something special for you.  I offer it to counter the suggestion from Keith Carman that with A Singer Must Die Steven Page is working outside his comfort zone.  In fact, my impression is that Page is only beginning to move into his comfort zone and it is work with the Barenaked Ladies that has kept him from pursuing projects that are truer to his own inclinations.

The best way to gauge one’s comfort zone is by what one plays when the audience isn’t paying attention.  A few years ago I caught Page making music in the living room of a farmhouse in rural Ontario.  There’d been some fiddling to a piano accompaniment, so Page pulled out his guitar and joined in.  Then he stuck a piece of sheet music on a stand, and started to sing.  The audio isn’t great because I pulled it from a camcorder and there’s a lot of talking in the background.  But the point isn’t the quality of the audio.  The point is his choice of music.  He sang “Love is the Sweetest Thing,” Ray Noble’s No. 1 hit from 1933.  Not surprising then that he selected Rufus Wainwright’s “Foolish Love” which is written in a similar style.  Maybe this is Steven Page’s comfort zone.  Enjoy:

Love Is The Sweetest Thing

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But then there’s Robert Fulford’s review in MacLean’s.  We read phrases like “narrative dead end” and “simple-minded story.”  A “sub-prime performance” and the worst performance of Sigourney Weaver’s career.  His primary criticism is that the film is riddled with clichés.  Even the extraordinary special effects become clichés because they get recycled throughout the film.  Salon’s Stephanie Zacherek goes one further by accusing Cameron of having no sense of humour.  Cameron aspires to lofty themes like U.S. militarization and colonization of both indigenous people and the natural world.  While Star Wars also presented an allegory with lofty themes, it at least provided the audience with comic relief via the chatterbox droid and the hairy pilot.  Cameron’s film offers no such relief.

The question isn’t whether Avatar is a good film.  It is.  It’s entertaining.  The special effects are stunning.  The immersive 3D environment is engaging.  But is it Best Picture material?

Here’s one way of looking at this question.  No science fiction feature film has ever won a Best Picture Academy Award.  How does Avatar stack up against some of its predecessors which have not received awards?  How does it compare to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, even The Matrix.  The answer is:  it doesn’t.  With “Open the pod bay door, Hal” and “May the Force be with you” and “Why oh why didn’t I take the BLUE pill?” we have films whose scripts and images have become cultural touchstones.  They have transcended their times and found a fresh audience in the succeeding generation.  And, as perhaps the greatest sign of cultural durability, they continue to support successful parody.  Despite its market penetration, Avatar will never succeed by any of these measures.

The other sci-fi film nominated in the Best Picture category is Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, an allegory of race from South Africa.  One is immediately struck by the similarities between Avatar and District 9.  Both involve military powers exploiting alien populations.  Both feature protagonists who undergo some form of genetic mutation which allows them to straddle the oppressed and oppressing cultures.  And both present an anti-colonial messages with absolute (and humourless) sincerity.

As with Avatar, District 9’s biggest diss comes from a Canadian film critic, in this case, from Rick Groen of the Globe and Mail.  What is it about this kind of film that gets Canadian so twisted into knots?  Could it be that our proximity to the largest colonizing power in the world (and the fact that we are repentant colonizers ourselves) makes us more sensitive than others to these themes?  Maybe we identify more readily with the straddling position of the protagonists and so crave a more nuanced presentation than the disaffected paraplegic ex-soldier of Avatar and the bumbling bureaucrat of District 9).

Like Fulford’s complaint about Cameron, Groen accuses Blomkamp of taking a perfectly serviceable premise and pissing it away on clichés.  After the bureaucrat accidentally sprays himself with alien goo, “what began as a nifty premise morphs into a cluttered scenario chockablock with the usual riff-raff. Oh, there’s a ruthless mercenary and a savage warlord and the inevitable cold-hearted corporation, this time intent on unlocking the DNA secret to the aliens’ bio-weaponry and, you know, ruling the world.”  Like Avatar, this film descends into a protracted military confrontation that blows everything up, including the film’s potential to deliver a nuanced presentation.  Applying the criteria I used above (comparison to iconic sci-fi flicks), District 9 doesn’t come close to Oscar-worthy.  It is shocky-schlocky special effects driven entertainment.

A more interesting and, perhaps, pressing question is whether the issues of our day – militarization, colonialism, xenophobia, environment – are well served by big media entertainment vehicles.  There is a danger that if blockbuster films financed by big media and lauded by a narcissistic entertainment industry can reduce even our most serious concerns to a string of hackneyed clichés, then we will be drawn a little further along a path of cynical despair.  Following the methods of corporate greenwashing, serious issues are merely opportunities.  They are objects to be colonized and exploited for profit.  And in the case of both these movies, the profits are enormous.  (Although District 9 doesn’t even approach Avatar, it still has grossed more than US $200 million.)  By assuming such a dominant position within our popular culture, these films can’t help but serve as a point of reference for framing debate.  But a “simple-minded” point of reference produces a simple-minded debate.

I’m mindful of another term, first coined by Jean and John Comaroff twenty years ago (ironically in relation to apartheid in South Africa):  colonization of consciousness.  When power controls the terms in which public discourse is possible, then those who are subject to power lose the capacity to imagine themselves outside the structures which legitimize that power because the only language they have to think with is the language of their oppressors.  And so, when power is structured on the basis of a free market economy, and its most popular critical voices are funded by big media, and its success is measured by the box office gross and by market penetration, are these voices not simply affirming what they claim to criticize?  One begins to wonder if perhaps the greatest violence in these films is the violence committed against the minds of those who watch them.

Related posts:

1. Dissing the Oscars – Precious
2. Dissing the Oscars – The Blind Side
3. Dissing the Oscars – Wrap Up