Category: Movies

culture

People Who Have No Money Should Have Nothing

I’m a tad upset.  The House just voted (all the Republicans and ten Democrats) to de-fund Planned Parenthood.

Why?

Planned Parenthood has been the target for the Right since it was founded in the 1920s—during a time, it should be stressed, when you could go to jail for distributing information about contraception.  Jail.  Because such information was seen as destructive of public morals.

Again, why?  This should be a no-brainer for Conservatives.  Privacy.  The ability to control your own person.  The responsible management of your own life.  But time and again we keep running up against this perverse negative reaction to anything that smacks of responsible sexuality.  I have said this before, but I think it bears repeating, that the right wing jeremiad against abortion has little to do with abortion—it is a war on sex.

Planned Parenthood is the number one provider of gynecological services for poor women, under and uninsured women, women with few other options if any.  The fact is that no federal dollars have been spent on abortion since the Hyde amendment was passed in 1976, and yet—and yet—this persecution continues.  It only makes sense if we stop thinking that this has anything to do with fetuses.

There is a very silly movie from 1964 called Kisses For My President.  It starred Polly Bergen as the first woman president of the United States and Fred MacMurray as her hapless husband.  You can imagine what the bulk of it is about—he has to fill the role of First Lady.  It’s a comedy.  Ostensibly.  As the frustrations of his position mount (I choose my words carefully) he clearly resents his position and decides to do something about it.  His solution?  He gets his wife pregnant.

Now, for some reason which today would be head-scratchable, she has to resign as president.  On this occasion, she yields to the inevitable and MacMurray is beaming like a man once more in charge.

Does anyone not see the horror in that scenario?

In 1964 businesses were still firing women who became pregnant.  There were no laws to prevent this.  The idea that a woman might want some say over her own life was still bizarre.  The sexual revolution was just underway and most Americans didn’t like it so much—not because they minded the idea of more sex so much as they hated the idea that their kids would be doing it.  Once it was well underway, though, it became far clearer that underlying all the cheesy jokes and Playboy aesthetics was the very serious issue of providing half the population with the ability to manage their own lives, their own dreams, their own futures.  Roe v. Wade was the capstone of this movement because—

This must be stressed today because we have generations that have grown up not knowing this history, not having to live under these conditions.

—because the inability of women to say no in matters of personal sexuality and to control their own fertility trapped many of them in cycles of dependence and poverty.  The fruits of the sexual revolution were not that boys got to get laid a lot more but that women have the final say in whether, when, if, how, and with whom any laying was going to take place.

For women who yearn for a baby and live in circumstances in which such an advent is welcome, wanted, and cherished and is not a crushing weight and a drain on small resources, it may be difficult to understand what a calamity an unwanted pregnancy might be.  But for any woman who wants to have a say in her own procreative decisions, there should be no question today that the Right, through the instrument of the Republican Party, is trying to turn this country back to a time when the movie cited above makes perfect sense and offers a welcome message.

What it really means is that if you don’t have the means in hand, and you’re a woman, these people want you to be silent, subservient, and second-class.

The reality is that women with money have always had access to abortion.  The euphemistic “time in the country” mentioned in so many mauve novels meant just that.  If you were poor, you went to a butcher in a dirty room and took your chances whether it was successful or you ended up with an infection that would kill you or a hemorrhage that wouldn’t stop.

The Republican Party is tied to a constituency of moneyed interests and moral morons who care nothing for average people.  Why we continue to vote them into power is a testament to a propaganda machine that has worked tirelessly to convince us that our interests are best served by having all protections stripped from us if we live below a certain income level.  They are marching us forward in our goal to become the wealthiest third world nation on the planet.

Absurdity

Other Buzzzzzzzz

I am not going to go see the new Green Hornet movie.  I knew that long before its release, when I heard Seth Rogen had been cast as the Hornet.  I just knew it would be a waste of everyone’s time, money, and sentiment.

I’m sorry.  Hollywood has been doing superhero movies now for decades and they’ve gotten a few of them pretty right.  Except for a ridiculous semi-musical romantic interlude, the first Superman movie with Christopher Reeve was fine.  Mostly this was due to Reeve and co-star Gene Hackman (who can save just about any movie), but they treated the material lovingly the whole way.  Subsequent versions, not so much.  In fact, by the fourth outing as Superman, Reeve must have been a bit embarrassed.  Clearly, the problem with sequels is that we’re dealing with material that was born to be a serial, and the best medium for that is television, not big budget cinema.  That said, a few of these aren’t so bad.  It helps not being immersed in the comic books to begin with (for instance, I was able to enjoy all three of the primary X-Men films without getting all worked up over the liberties taken by the studio that incensed many dedicated fans—except for a Baker’s Dozen back when I was 13 or 14, I did not follow the comics), but I can more or less enjoy many of these outings.  Have to admit, though, to date the Marvel franchise has fared much better.

But the Green Hornet is another matter and one of the things that Hollywood so often forgets is that the material must be taken seriously!

green-hornet-1.jpg

These were the guys I grew up with.  Brit Reid and Kato as played by Van Williams and Bruce Lee, 1966 to 67.  The car especially, Black Beauty, really rocked.  Now, I saw these in first-run and haven’t seen them since, so doubtless they have dated and dated badly.  But my imagination took the original viewing and went amazing places with it, and that is the problem with a lot of these films.

No doubt the film-makers took a cue from the Iron Man movies.  There is a lot of humor in those films, but—the films are not humorous.  Tony Stark is funny, but funny within context—and with a lot of credit going to Robert Downey Jr. for just doing a tremendous job in the role—and that’s something film makers fail to grasp time and again.

For instance, the best Three Musketeer films ever made were the Salkind productions in the 70s with Michael York and Oliver Reed.  Great films.  And funny!  But funny as a consequence of the action within context—the characters themselves were not jokes, they were serious.  Much later, a third film was made, Return of the Three Musketeers, with the same cast, but something had been lost—they were turned into buffoons in order to artificially inject humor rather than letting it arise from the context, and it is painful to watch.

Long ago now Tim Burton made a Batman movie and cast a comic actor, Michael Keeton.  A lot of people probably moaned, fearing the worst.  But Burton treated the material seriously and Keeton played it straight.  Likewise in the sequel, but when Burton lost control Keeton bailed, and good for him, because the studio starting injecting jokes, much as had been done with the James Bond films, and taking the premise much less seriously, until they produced a truly foul film (one of the few I have been utterly unable to watch more than 15 minutes of).

Keeton, however, had done serious films before.  He had a reputation as a comic actor, but more in the line of Jack Lemmon than Seth Rogen, who has gone from one slapstick dumbshit vehicle to another, and apparently the studio opted to play to his strengths in that regard here.

I don’t like movies or television that rely on stupidity to carry the story.  That’s why I no longer watch most sitcoms.  Stupid is not funny to me.  The great comics knew that good comedy was not to make fun of people’s stupidity but to derive the humor from stupid situations.  Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp was not stupid.  Lucille Ball’s character was not stupid, either, she simply never knew enough to follow through effectively on her schemes, and the situation tripped her up.

That said, superhero stories walk a fine line between significance and the absurd.  I mean, really, these people are improbable at best.  It is all too easy to paint them as ridiculous or such utter fantasies that no real drama could result from their stories.  It’s difficult to write sympathetically, not to say powerfully, about people who are so much more than average.  And the scenarios!

But that’s what makes them iconic, because they achieved that balance and then some.  So you have to be careful when translating them from one medium to another.  In this instance, they clearly didn’t get it.

Now back to our regularly scheduled day.