Movie Musings
Recently, I sat down with some friends “from away” to show them 2 movies: New Waterford Girl and Marion Bridge.
I’ve wrote about these before, I know, but no one really reads this, so I don’t care 😀
One thing I thought about whilst watching NWG (other than how pretty it is in CB/NS), was the role the scenery played in the film. That’s a bit of a “duh” statement since it’s ABOUT New Waterford so it makes sense to have it as the filming location (for the most part. I believe they did some scenes in Sydney and the Pier and whatnot). But in a way, the cragginess of the shore and the weather and the general…dampness that’s portrayed really accentuates the desperation/determination Moonie has to leave.
Another thing that I was reminded of was our weird regional hostility. After Lou clocks a guy at a party, she’s met with the insult “fuckin’ Ontario lesbo bitch”. Now this is a vast generalization, and I am well aware of it, but a lot of people from Ontario are assholes. Especially in regards to easterners. I had several incidents at university that involved people from Ontario insinuating that Nova Scotians/Newfs/whathaveyou were all poor, dim-witted alcoholics. We are indeed known for our festive nature and the like, but to say that the entire population consists of stupid drunks is a bit much. I think it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here; as in who started the insult war first, us or the mainlanders. And I don’t think I know the answer to that.
I’m not even gonna get into the lesbo part of that insult. I love my home dearly and am a proud Caper, but goddamn it is NOT a really liberal place.
Nor is it a place that things are openly discussed. My friend said that Marion Bridge was subtle, and I think that’s the best description for it. One of my first viewings of it was with a mainlander who said it was awful because they never said anything directly and you had to infer an awful lot. Well, welcome to my life. We don’t talk about shit. But holy crap can we talk AROUND shit. That is why I think that Marion Bridge is *the* Caper movie. Despite one of the main characters being “from away”, she nailed our inflection. I was actually shocked to learn she was from Alberta. Molly Parker was incredible and she delivers my favourite line of the movie, complete with an “an’ all that” before it: “Y’know that sign? At the Causeway? The hundred thousand welcomes or whatever? They should just put ‘shhhh'”.
I’ve seen a good number of Canadian movies. I have a bias towards the ones from home, clearly. I do wonder about the Canadian Identity that comes through in them. If you were to watch a BC movie, would it be as easily recognizable as one to the audience? What about one from Ontario?
I think that just means I need to watch more Canadian movies.
One Week
I’ve recently watched this movie several times, and it wins the award for Most Canadian Movie Ever. And while watching, I realized that I quite enjoy it, despite Joel Plaskett being in it (briefly, thank jebus). I particularly enjoy seeing all the landmarks and scenery I saw whilst doing a cross-country drive a few years ago.
Right America Feeling Wronged
K I know I am SO late to the party on this but holy fucking balls. HBO Canada aired this documentary today and I happened to catch it. WOW.
I like to think that I’ve got a pretty normal interest in politics. I follow what’s going on in Canada as much as I can and I try to keep up with the big stories throughout the world. I’ve got my opinions, like everyone does. I think our Prime Minister is a giant asshat with the personality of a grapefruit but as much as I dislike the man, I didn’t cry when he was elected (though I was not pleased). Nor did I think he was the Antichrist. And while I strongly disagree with a lot of his Conservative beliefs, I didn’t want to leave the country when he was elected and I didn’t think that he was going to ruin the country and systematically take away our rights (even though he’s cut funding to the arts and minority organizations. but that’s another story). My point is that while I don’t like the party or the guy, I deal with it and didn’t go all to pieces when he won.
The same cannot be said for people in this documentary.
WOW
People are crying and sobbing over Obama winning. People are calling him the Antichrist. People are saying that they wouldn’t vote for “the black guy”, or some other lovely racist language.
The film is by Alexandra Pelosi (yes “those Pelosi’s” according to this review).
The rampant…ignorance and bigotry that emerged from these people is astounding. Someone compared socialism to the Nazi party. I don’t know how many said Obama was Muslim or was going to use the Koran instead of a Bible for swearing in and so forth. I couldn’t believe it. The ignorance! What the hell?! Now, granted, I’m one of those dirty liberals (from Canada, no less! and i’m a big scary lesbian!) so maybe that negates my opinion (or makes me more of a threat?). I have to wonder, why are so many people afraid of progress? And I’m not just asking about the US here, though I do find it just appalling that they still systematically deny gays/lesbians the right to marry and so many states are cracking down on abortions. What is it about progress that is so bad? What is it about being open minded that is going to ruin society?
I really admire Pelosi for taking this on. I wouldn’t have had the balls to do this. Or to do it with a straight face and not pick fights with the rednecks.
If you’ve not seen the doc, check it out. It’s on YouTube and Googlevideo. My two favourite parts are when a McCain canvasser notices her two lesbian neighbours have an Obama sign and when some little old lady at what looks like a townhall meeting calls Obama an “arab”, and McCain grabs the mic from her and says he isn’t, he’s a nice guy who just happens to disagree with his views.
Mewvies
I recently re-watched a few movies about Nova Scotia (oddly enough they’re easier to find in BC than they are in NS. Go figure). I own New Waterford Girl and rented Marion Bridge and Margaret’s Museum. I’ll also probably re-watch The Hanging Garden at some point this week as well.
Perhaps I’m biased, but these movies are great. New Waterford Girl is 99.9% perfect. It humorously and accurately captures the desire and need for many young people have to leave Cape Breton. Not that we’re all like Moonie, standing on the highway with a sign reading Mexico, but there is large outpouring of people from home. Which is both good and bad. There isn’t much going on at home, though there are some kids there that are making an effort in terms of music and culture. While NWG is set in the 70s, it’s still very true. The rampant Catholicism, odd cultural practices, funny sayings/phrases and the “come from aways” that find the place amazing. And it is. I loved growing up there and wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything. But to stay and carve out a life? No. The ending of the film though is what makes it for me. As Moonie is leaving, she’s listing off the things about home that she’s learned and loved, whereas at the beginning of the film, she’s listing off the things she knows about London and New York, as she sees them as better than Cape Breton. I can relate to that. I left home, moved back to Halifax then moved again and no matter where I go, I will always consider Cape Breton my home and will cherish the things I’ve learned and experienced, and am proud of my odd little quirks that come from living there, including my sometimes bizarre accent and dialect. The accent is a hard one to imitate and many of the actors did a fine job.
Marion Bridge contains my favourite line from any movie EVER. After returning home to see her dying mother, Agnes (Molly Parker) is out drinking (despite being a recovering addict) and says: “You know that sign on the Causeway? That hundred thousand welcomes or whatever? They should just put “shhh””.
WHY YES THEY SHOULD. We have an odd tendency to talk about things without actually talking about them. Or not talking about things at all. Ever. People, myself included, can have entire conversations about something WITHOUT ACTUALLY SAYING ANYTHING ABOUT IT. There’s a lot of reading between the lines in convos at home and there’s parts of MB where you really need to listen to what’s not being said. Also, this is probably the best movie in which the distinct Caper accent was NOT mangled. I have very few complaints about the movie. I don’t think I have any, really. It’s a very distinctly Canadian/Nova Scotian movie and I am on a mad hunt to find my own copy.
Margaret’s Museum is based on a fabulous short story called The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum. It’s set in Glace Bay, in Cape Breton in the early 1900’s when the mining industry was thriving, but people were still fairly poor. Kate Nelligan fucking makes the movie for me. She’s the perfect old crotchety Caper mom and has the accent down pat. Helena Bonham Carter, while fabulous as usual, cannot do the accent. And it was bad enough that it kind of annoyed me (though not as bad as Julianne Moore’s in The Shipping News. Ohgod). The pacing was a little strange at times (the book is better) and it never ceases to bug me that they changed the location of “the nuthouse” from Sydney River to “Muddy River”. Really? You couldn’t just KEEP IT THE SAME because IT’S REALLY THERE. Sigh. But anyway, it was nice and it had a bit of Gaelic in it, which is always nice to hear. Plus it starts off with The Rankin Family’s version of Mist Covered Mountains. Points for that.
Mean Girls
Being the wonderful (haha) grad student that I am, I have the opportunity to work with some faculty on their projects as an RA (research assistant, for those out of the academic nerd loop). I had the chance to work with two of my favourite professors this year on two projects, one involving race/ethnicity and television and one involving girls and bullying. The bullying one has been highly, highly interesting and has made me look back on my experiences with bullying and how the media portrays it.
I wasn’t a bully in school really. I hung out with the “popular” crew for a bit and went along with the herd, so by association I guess I was. I got bullied. A lot. Right up until university actually and only one person who was involved in the nastiness apologized for her behaviour and she’s the only one of them that I have any respect for right now.
I remember having friends in elementary that would randomly stop talking to me, stop inviting me places and then after an arbitrary amount of time, resume socializing with me. I never understood it. In jr. high, one girl made it her mission in grade 9 to be as bitchy to me as she possibly could be for an entire year. And this girl who I admittedly do not care for was a cunt to me from the second she met me. (but she’s a twat so I’m not losing sleep over that). I figured it’d get better in high school but it didn’t. Same with university. That surprised me, actually. That women in their early 20s could be that catty, conniving, calculated and downright mean. The calculatedness is what really surprised me. One incident really, really sticks out in my mind and i still think about it to this day. Many of my bullies added me on Facebook and I felt obligated to add them back, perhaps out of fear, a residual fear from my younger self that didn’t want retaliation. But after a few weeks, I realized that I didn’t give a shit about these people and why the hell would I want them on Facebook? So I deleted them. not one of them has added me back.
For my job, I interview people about their experiences with bullying. We wanted a mix of those who have been bullied and bullies themselves (or ‘mean girls’). We got 2 mean girls. Two. While talking with one, we got on the topic of movies and mean girls and Jawbreaker was mentioned. I can’t say exactly what was said due to confidentiality reasons, but a comment about the movie got me thinking.
If you want to chart the progress of the mean girl in pop culture, there’s three things you should look at. Three movies, I should say. “Heathers”, “Jawbreaker” and “Mean Girls”.
Let’s look at “Heathers”. I cannot express how much I love this movie. My “”””friends”””” and I in high school had a list of all of our favourite quotes. It came out in 1988, so i was a tad young at the time so I got into it when I was about 15-16.
I’ll assume that you’ve all seen it but if you haven’t, here’s the Wiki synopsis.
The Heathers rule the school and Veronica hates them yet continues to hang around with them (how many people have done that in their lives?). I argue that The Heathers are bullies simply because they single out “losers” and “uncool kids” and mock them/make fun of them, make a point to uphold a certain level of aloofness, save for Veronica who ends up reuniting with one of her old, unpopular friends.
“Jawbreaker” was watched almost weekly with my “””friends””” in grade 10. I loved everything about it; the writing, the costumes, the music and the epic quotes.
“First you need to know something about them. The beautiful ones. The flawless four. Everyone wanted to be them. You know ’em, they went to your school too. They totally ruled. The one in the green, that’s Courtney. She was the leader. She was like Satan in heels. The blonde, Marcie Fox, a legend in her own little mind, known to herself as ‘Foxy’. Oh, the leggy one with the pigtails is Julie, doomed to be popular because of that face and because she was best friends with the one in the pink. That’s Liz Purr. She was special. Everybody loved Liz. Not just because she was beautiful and popular, and rich and smart she was all of those things but more than anything she was sweet. Courtney ruled with terror but Liz? Liz ruled with kindness, she was like the Princess Di of Reagan High and that pissed Courtney off. Liz Purr was well, she was perfect. I used to dream about what it would be like to be her, Elizabeth Purr. Its a shame about what happened to Liz. That was no way to wake up on your seventeenth birthday”
what I enjoy about this is that Fern sets it up right away and you KNOW these girls are bitches for the most part. What is also interesting to note is that essentially, Courtney bullies Fern into keeping her silence for offering her popularity in exchange for not saying anything about the accident. It’s also sort of telling that Courtney is fairly collected and calm about what’s happened: “I killed Liz. I killed the teen dream. Deal with it.”, like it’s a daily occurrence to kill your best friend.
Courtney: You knew Liz Purr right?
Fern: ..I know of her
Courtney: “Knew” of her, past tense. She’s dead Fern, she died. But we’ve got a bit of a problem because you know we did it. You heard us. That gives you a little something Fern, and it’s called power. The power to tell, and you’re the kind of girl that tells. A tattle-tale.
Courtney, realizing that Fern has the power, decides to turn that around to her advantage. If that ain’t bullying, I dunno what is.
“Mean Girls” was something I put off watching for a while because I am not a Lohan fan. But I fucking adore Tina Fey so I caved and watched it one night. It was cute, i guess. And interesting.
When compared to Heathers and Jawbreaker, it really seems that the “mean girls” are concerned with slightly different things. Sure, they still pick on/mock/shun those who aren’t as good as they are, but fashion and more noticeably, weight/caloric intake/appearance is HIGHLY emphasized and it is delegated by one leader. While all movies have a ringleader and a dark horse/outcast/outsider/odd duck in the group, this one is the only one that clearly (and i mean this) outlines rules that must be obeyed in terms of clothes/appearance/food.
Now, is that a reflection on society or is society a reflection on that and other forms of media? I can’t recall the stats offhand, but I remember reading somewhere that the number of girls having eating disorders under age 9 has risen exponentially. Is that from the influence of “friends” (i.e. mean girls) telling them they’re fat or whathaveyou? Or is it from other forms of media, like print ads, television, commercials and so forth?
I really, truly am curious to know why the mean girl has changed in the last 20 years, or really, if it’s changed at all and the focus on other aspects of her personality is what has changed. When I hung out with the popular crowd/mean girls, never once did the topic of what clothes to wear or what to eat come up. It was all about who could hang out with who and who was good enough to be in our group.
Also, why is it mean girls? What about mean guys? I know some supreme douchebags. My high school/first university was full of them. What are they classified as and why are girls the ones who are seemingly labeled as mean?
Soundtrack to your life
Sometimes I kinda wish my life had a soundtrack. In a sense it does, as whenever I’m out and about I have my iPod on. While it’s used to basically ignore the background noise of society, sometimes, oddly enough, songs tend to sync up to what I’m doing. Possibly the best one was once, during a walk home, it popped on “Everytime It Rains” by the fabulous Charlotte Martin, and just as the intro finished, a light rain began to shower down upon me. But I think it’d be sort of amusing to have background music to accompany your life. Like, if I was on the bus and someone starting being a douchebag (which happens fairly frequently on the buses I take), it would be rad if “The World Is Full Of Stupid People” was playing. Or, when I’m full of caffeine and being annoying to my girlfriend, it would be hilarious if Le Tigre’s cover of “I’m So Excited” was accompanying my antics.
But since that can’t happen for real, I’ll just talk about soundtracks to other things. I started to re-watch The L Word this summer and noticed that the soundtrack is actually pretty awesome. I missed a lot of it when I first watched it on my computer after stealing it since it didn’t air in Canada for the first time. I love the use of Liz Phair’s “Flower” during a flashback scene in Season 1 with Dana’s mother. I LOVE how much they play Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. Love love love. Most memorable to me at the moment is hearing “Rebel Girl” in the background during a scene at Wax, and “On The Verge” during the cruise episode of Season 2. I HATE (and I mean HATE) the consistent use of Betty songs. That needs to stop like, 3 seasons ago. I thought it was great to see Sleater-Kinney and Tegan and Sara in Season 3. Those were the only redeeming points of that season (yes I’m still mad and yes I know I should get over it but I think it was a shitty move they pulled). The music really creates a new element that adds to the scene. One of my favourites, and I admit a huge bias here, is during Great Expectations. There is a point where Finn is talking about lost love and how he gave up on art and his love. “Siren”, by Tori Amos starts quietly in the background then swells to be the main focus of the scene. Well, it is to me anyway. What makes it neat though is toward the end of the sequence, Finn hits the stop button on a tapedeck, and the song stops. Kinda neat. It adds a bit of reality to the music that’s generally just background filler.
However, sometimes music isn’t needed. “The Body”, an episode from Season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was void of music. Being the music freak that I am, I noticed it immediately and really, I’m glad the episode was music-free. “The Body” is quite moving and powerful, and I really think that music would have taken away from the tone of the episode.
So do soundtracks help or hinder a show/movie? Do you even notice? Or is it just mindless filler so as not to make the dialogue seem too boring?
Well this made me pee from excitement
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/coraline/news/1748615/exclusive_sneak_peek_at_coraline
As a huge Neil fan and giant nerd in general, this makes me exceptionally happy. I’m usually wary of books being made into films, as there’s usually a lot lost in translation, but this looks quite promising. “Stardust” was good and I enjoyed it, but I did think they could have done a better job.
I’d love to see a “Neverwhere” big-screen adaptation at some point as well.
g's blog 'o wonders 