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I don't want to write a super-long entry right now, though I could... I had a really busy weekend, starting at about 1PM Friday; I've been all over the city and back a couple of times. We furnished the patio this weekend, at least a little. It isn't luxurious but there are spaces out there now, a place to sit and relax or eat or work on something.
I grilled a bunch of food out there tonight, and we spent most of the evening there, playing cards (we stopped about halfway through the game, and I have a significant lead). I learned something about grilling vegetables: don't mix them on skewers. Onions go on the grill first and are on for 10 minutes before things like green pepper and mushroom, which can also stand to be on for quite a while. Tomatos go on last and need only be grilled for a couple of minutes, until the skins start to peel away. I was not following any instructions, merely going by trial and error. I know you aren't supposed to cook onion and meat on the same skewer, but now I know what vegetables can go together on a skewer as well.
Also finally managed to see Sin City at the cheap theater... it is flawed, but I generally liked it more than not. It's really more of a horror movie than I recall anyone mentioning, though... I mean, if I had to classify it by genre, that's actually where I'd put it. Horror is very slippery as a genre, and not all horror stories are particularly supernatural. There are too many gushing amputations in Sin City for it to quite be otherwise - and cannibalism, and more than one decapitation, and talking corpses, and otherwise violent homicides in detail, and.... (Have to mention, at this point, that I've never read very much of the comic. Something about it always turned me off.)
I have spent more time than I care to admit in the last couple of weeks trying to convince people that The Historian is not, in fact, a horror novel... it's not the fact that it has "vampires," it's the quality of their presence in the book that matters in terms of classifying its genre. But I'll talk about that sometime in the next few days on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
minxbot - it comes down to the second half of the book not being quite as good or suspenseful or exciting as the first, and to some of the systemic logic seeming scattershot. Still worth reading, I think. But apropos to what I was saying, horror fans who read it expecting horror writing, on the basis of it ostensibly being about Dracula, will encounter something different, because it's primarily about people researching Vlad Tepes. Their "vampire" encounters are infrequent, and more annoying than terrifying.
At any rate, I would classify Sin City as horror that looks like a crime drama: because of the particular texture of the ultraviolence, and because of some intrinsic plot elements that go way past the usual hard-boiled conventions. By the same argument as the vampire thing, the presence of serial killers - I mean actual pathlogy-driven, pleasure-deriving serial killers like Kevin and Junior, not just people who accrue a high incidental body count like Marv and Dwight - does not automatically make something a horror movie. It's all about how the subject is handled. And when you see what Kevin has done, and what becomes of him as a result... well, any lingering doubts should be settled.
(Edited to add: On reflection, I think the movie's flaws probably outweigh its virtues. However, worrying that it's going to encourage people to be vigilantes, kill sex workers, or slap women around is probably not necessary.)
I grilled a bunch of food out there tonight, and we spent most of the evening there, playing cards (we stopped about halfway through the game, and I have a significant lead). I learned something about grilling vegetables: don't mix them on skewers. Onions go on the grill first and are on for 10 minutes before things like green pepper and mushroom, which can also stand to be on for quite a while. Tomatos go on last and need only be grilled for a couple of minutes, until the skins start to peel away. I was not following any instructions, merely going by trial and error. I know you aren't supposed to cook onion and meat on the same skewer, but now I know what vegetables can go together on a skewer as well.
Also finally managed to see Sin City at the cheap theater... it is flawed, but I generally liked it more than not. It's really more of a horror movie than I recall anyone mentioning, though... I mean, if I had to classify it by genre, that's actually where I'd put it. Horror is very slippery as a genre, and not all horror stories are particularly supernatural. There are too many gushing amputations in Sin City for it to quite be otherwise - and cannibalism, and more than one decapitation, and talking corpses, and otherwise violent homicides in detail, and.... (Have to mention, at this point, that I've never read very much of the comic. Something about it always turned me off.)
I have spent more time than I care to admit in the last couple of weeks trying to convince people that The Historian is not, in fact, a horror novel... it's not the fact that it has "vampires," it's the quality of their presence in the book that matters in terms of classifying its genre. But I'll talk about that sometime in the next few days on
minxbot - it comes down to the second half of the book not being quite as good or suspenseful or exciting as the first, and to some of the systemic logic seeming scattershot. Still worth reading, I think. But apropos to what I was saying, horror fans who read it expecting horror writing, on the basis of it ostensibly being about Dracula, will encounter something different, because it's primarily about people researching Vlad Tepes. Their "vampire" encounters are infrequent, and more annoying than terrifying.At any rate, I would classify Sin City as horror that looks like a crime drama: because of the particular texture of the ultraviolence, and because of some intrinsic plot elements that go way past the usual hard-boiled conventions. By the same argument as the vampire thing, the presence of serial killers - I mean actual pathlogy-driven, pleasure-deriving serial killers like Kevin and Junior, not just people who accrue a high incidental body count like Marv and Dwight - does not automatically make something a horror movie. It's all about how the subject is handled. And when you see what Kevin has done, and what becomes of him as a result... well, any lingering doubts should be settled.
(Edited to add: On reflection, I think the movie's flaws probably outweigh its virtues. However, worrying that it's going to encourage people to be vigilantes, kill sex workers, or slap women around is probably not necessary.)
Re: sin city
not so sure about the feminist_rage rant, tho. the writer has points, but muddles others, especially through the kind of hyperbole that usually winds up making up a large part of that kind of rant. for instance, lucille does not parade around naked FOR men, she does what she would normally do and treats men as incidental. the women are not all "size 2", though I think it can fairly be stated that none is larger than an 8 or 10, which is still too small for realism. the irish terrorists being taken out was not an example of a "racist" stereotype unless you still cling to the fucked-up idea that the irish even are a "race" - that's a nationalistic statement, and so was the stereotype. The third point - about women being smacked around - is well-meaning but again hyperbolic; many many many more men are beaten up and killed through the course of the film, and this is not a film wherein the smacking-around-of-women receives implicit approval from the creators. (I think a more profitable complaint is a general one about the low value of human life in the film, not just female life.) The head-mounting is also something that is portrayed with disapproval, and probably not something that supports the rant writer's theory: it's meant to be sickening and wrong, so if someone objected to it for whatever reason - feminist or just on general principle that hobbits shouldn't eat people and put their heads on walls - then i think the film's creators did what they were trying to do.
I understand and have read many times over the reasons for objection to the idea of women, esp sex workers, being portrayed as the victims of a serial killer, but almost every commentary I've ever read on this slightly misses the mark in some direction or another. In some ways it's a deep discomfort with the idea that certain things arouse complicated feelings in most of the populace (of the WORLD, not just the US)... but I think they always have, and always will, whether it's ugly or not, and no matter how much we write essays about it being fucked-up.
And then I might add that I wonder about our own subconscious motivations for thinking it's fucked-up... how uneasy is our relationship to our own sexuality? It can't be the same for everyone, but I know a lot of women, even feminist women, are still being raised with certain messages, sometimes by religious or traditional parents, or sometimes by parents who were raised by those kinds of parents, or sometimes by parents who are just very fearful for their children. I know I got at least two out of those three. Are at least some of us enraged by this stock horror-film portrayal of sex->death precisely because it ties into our own subconscious feelings that we might, in fact, be "bad" and "dirty"? Regardless of whether this little pop-psych digression of mine is accurate or not, it would be understandable if it were the case for some, and probably even healthy. It would mean that we rebel against these messages about ourselves by saying, "That's fucked up!" when we see these fears depicted in entertainment. OTOH, that wouldn't necessarily indicate that EVERYONE having that response also experiences sexual guilt.
(more ahead!)
pt 2! Re: sin city
Doesn't improve the movie, though.
this kind of thing is why i don't read Bitch anymore... I just find most of the articles so intellectually weak, because they start with a good point, but don't know where to stop when supporting it, pulling out examples that have to be tied to a very specific viewpoint to work. (The thing about Lucille's nudity is a perfect example. You have to believe that a particular lesbian cares deeply about the male gaze to believe the premise of the comment, when it's more likely that the character is being portrayed as INDIFFERENT to it. The filmmakers are aware of the intended effect of the character's nudity on [at least part of] the audience, but I do not believe that the same effect is intended within the fictional world. At most it's an expression of trust.)
In general... there is always someone around the corner waiting to call someone else a bad feminist, and I always expect that I will be for saying these things. But I don't feel that most writers of most feminist pop-culture critiques I have read have a very good/sophisticated handle on human nature, or on any kind of history before 1900 or so. I frequently see mistakes that refer to, say, something 18th-century as "Victorian" or vice-versa; I also see popular myths repeated, and a general ignorance of what the actual legal status of a woman in a particular level of a particular society was at any given time.
So, in the end, when I was watching it, I watched it knowing that some people had critiqued it very negatively from a feminist standpoint. I could see where they were coming from, but I didn't happen to agree with all of it (ex: you cannot, cannot, cannot put female sex workers in a movie and A) have any of them die and/or B) not do a deep sensitive sympathetic character exploration of any of them --- without someone writing a negative feminist critique). The stuff that was bugging me was more like, "It was lame to split the Hartigan narrative" - Rodriguez was just referencing the structure of Pulp Fiction there, and I think it hurt the movie, and the story should have gone on from the few scenes of it at the beginning rather than being saved for the end. Then, Alexis Bledel - who I like - bugged me as Becky, because her own clear diction didn't fit with the character's speech patterns (poor grammar, etc).
PS - a lot of the problem with Sin City in feminist terms starts with comics. seriously, even though there are female comics writers and artists and there are male writers and artists who aren't particularly sexist, it's still largely a boys' club w/ pervasive endemic sexism. race is generally dealt with simplistically; i'd say it's not only an overwhelmingly male field, it's also predominantly white. how this ties into the topic at hand? well, it's my impression that most of frank miller's work is... er... macho. and macho SELLS in mainstream american comics.