Feminism
I've been a little busy at work lately and bad about posting. To make up for this, I leave you with my favourite Ali G video.
I've been a little busy at work lately and bad about posting. To make up for this, I leave you with my favourite Ali G video.
In an effort to find out the air date for the OC season three, I inadvertently got spoiled. Still I am happy to find out that they are not going to torture us by not airing until it's practically Christmas. According to this source (warning - links to spoilers) we get our fill of Marisa and Ryan on September 8th! Anyhow, break over, back to work.
I just finished this book. I know it has a reputation for being erotic, but glancing at the cheesy paperback image on the cover, I had my doubts. How erotic can people have been in the 1920s when this was published anyway? Well apparently VERY! This book, with the exception of a few anachronistic comments, reads like a 21st century novel. There's really not much to the plot - talk, talk, sex, talk about sex, argue about sex, more sex, some fretting, then more sex. However, it's not some tawdry Harlequin. (Not that I, ahem, have ever read one. Oh, okay fine, I have! But I was about 13!) It's quite an exquisitely crafted discussion about the meaning of sex and its importance in life.
I read in the introduction that the author wanted to discuss sex frankly in a climate that was rather repressed and saw it as an embarrassing necessity. It succeeds at being quite explicitly graphic, yet philosophical. It traces the sexual awakening of the wife of a WW1 veteran who is permanently paralysed from the waist down. Her husband, frozen, and in some way representing Victorian pre-war ideals, is the lodestone around this young woman's neck. Will she choose familial and societal obligations or her more primal desires? What's most striking is how the book portrays sex as a very natural act, and doesn't punish the heroine à la Madame Bovary for her adulterous ways. What's also interesting is that all those dirty words you know? They've existed since the '20s. Yeah, your grandparents knew them. Maybe even THEIR parents. Weird.
Well, I had a hard time convincing anyone to see Birth with me. I had to wait until I had an alone night, and to be honest, I wasn't expecting much given the very low profile this movie got in cinemas. But I was absolutely thrilled with it. The movie, better known as "the-one-where-Nicole-Kidman-takes-a-bath-with-a little-boy," is kind of an old-fashioned drama. While the pacing is slow, the tension builds steadily enough to keep you riveted.
Without giving away much, Anna (aka Nicole) is confronted by a young boy claiming to be the reincarnated version of her dead husband. We find all this out in the first ten minutes. Anna, who's been mourning for ten years and is about to remarry, doesn't believe him at first. But as the child insists, begging her not to remarry, she starts to wonder. There's a wonderful scene where Anna's watching a symphony with her fiance. The camera stays on her face for several minutes and though she hardly changes expressions, we see a dramatic shift as she begins to wonder, hope, fear, believe that maybe it's really him. It was a great reminder that Nicole Kidman really can act. A frumpy Anne Heche and a still exquisite Lauren Bacall also put in good performances. And the child, well, he's near-perfect, conveying the requisite adult characteristics that lead Anna to believe him without being overly precocious.
I was fairly sure I'd be disappointed with the end, since it's hard to tie up these kind of stories satisfactorily. But it doesn't disappoint either. I like movies that keep me thinking afterwards and this one did: What would you do if that happened? Would you believe him? Would you wait for him? Is there only one person for all of us, or is love more about timing and a confluence of circumstances? How well do we know ourselves and why we fall in love, and keep on loving someone?
While this isn't exactly a date movie, and it's certainly not a comedy, it is a nice piece of New York society cinema that's worth a second look.