Contagion

I saw Contagion over the weekend, and there were a lot of things that were 100% right about the movie, and a few that were questionable.

Who doesn't like a movie that glamorizes their stinky and nerdy profession?  I really appreciated how the cinematography saw the world through the eyes of an epidemiologist or microbiologist.  That menacing doorknob is just covered in deadly germs!  Why won't you people stop touching your faces all the time*?  It was jarring in the places where the movie slipped out of assuming that you know most of what's going on to explain some basic stuff to the audience (I'll admit that I didn't know what fomites meant).  And as someone who's done public health work outside of the CDC, I was a little insulted when the state health departments were portrayed as full of idiots.  Still, I appreciate that it was a detour that allowed the movie to talk to the audience like it's not watching the movie as part of a college course.

Speaking of the movie's respect for its audience, there was a strong undercurrent in the writing of someone who thinks people who haven't studied his specialty are dangerously stupid.  Still, the bad guy profiting off of a bogus homeopathic remedy (but I repeat myself) had educated himself just enough to lie well by the time he was able to influence the public.  In the beginning, he was just lucky to have guessed that the first few deaths were the beginning of a major outbreak, and still pretty paranoid.  His conspiratorial thinking wasn't entirely wrong, even if it was corrupt.

I also had a hard time believing that none of the health professionals read blogs about their area of work.  If you're charged with keeping the public healthy, it's a good idea to know how they're thinking.  And of course, there are those written by professionals for each other.  There was an absolute divide between the crazies who don't have degrees and certification but do read blogs and the trained professionals who only talk to each other.  For an attempt to humanize health professionals, there was quite a lot of paternalistic ivory-tower moralizing.

*As a feminist who rarely gets excited about makeup, I recently decided that the "don't touch your face so you don't ruin your makeup" thing is probably a force against the spread of disease.  On the one hand, it seems like you're sacrificing your freedom to rub sleepy eyes to the patriarchy, but on the other hand, don't touch your face so much.

Corner Bait

I've been only barely entertaining myself over the weekend, and I kind of randomly decided to rent The Golden Compass to keep me amused while I wait around for Andy to finish up some schoolwork.

I would love to be in the room with a time-traveling Republican from 2005 who turned this disc on. Not only is this a children's movie at the beginning of a book series where the progtagonists kill God, but nestled amongst the previews was an advertisement for the World Wildlife Fund's advocacy for the polar bear in the face of global warming.

I have a hard time believing that this double-affront on Republican orthodoxies was an accident.

Even if the WWF wasn't consciously trying to get the goat of Republicans (hopefully) past, they couldn't pass up the PR opportunity that a neat-looking armored polar bear in a hugely-hyped and expensive children's movie presented.

What I learned from WALL-E

It's ok if I generate enormous amounts of waste, because it will make a robot happy some day.

Saw Superbad

Hooray for anti-date-rape messages in popular culture!

It's not a movie until there's a white person in it

I liked this essay at CHUD.com (via Racialicious).

I'll admit it: I am completely incapable of understanding other cultures, races, ethnicities and creeds without a white surrogate. I am frightened by the other. They smell different. They eat loudly. They lambada.

Thankfully, Hollywood feels the same way.

Read the whole thing. What it made me think of was how when I saw previews of Apocalypto - which has been widely denounced as racist and imperialist - it occurred to me that it was the only movie I could think of that was entirely about nonwhite people. (Bear in mind that I'm a total movie dilettante, so I'm sure I'm both looking in the wrong places and can't remember most of the movies I have seen anyway.) I only later learned that the white people come at the end, so I guess I was holding out too much hope for Mel Gibson to do something interesting and, uh, not racist. As the CHUD essay mercilessly points out, it's a much more daunting task to find an American movie that has no white people than it is to find a movie that has zero nonwhite people.

Given that most people in the world aren't white, and that the medium of film allows artists to take us anywhere in the world and anywhere imagined, that's pretty pathetic.

Praise the Internet

I was telling someone about having watched an old documentary about graffiti in NYC in the early 80s, and upon googling it, found that the whole thing is online. It's called Style Wars, and now you can watch it.

Cool, huh?

Knocked up

Went out to see it tonight, and I think that the feminist hand-wringing over how abortion was portrayed in the movie was misplaced. They didn't use the word "abortion," it's true. And movies rarely portray a woman's choice to terminate realistically, sure. But this is a comedy, and if there's anything that abortion is not, it's funny. And frankly, I sympathize with the character's opting to have the baby - it wasn't a very convenient time to have a kid, but kids just aren't convenient anyway. I've been ambivalent about the idea of kids for a long time, but when a decision that big is so hard to make (and I have a hard time choosing what to order on a long menu), it makes sense to just go with what you've got sometimes. I think that the movie captured really well that ambivalence isn't always torture. My favorite moment in the movie was a scene where Elizabeth was alone, readying the nursery, and folding the tiny baby clothes on top of her enormous belly.

And - it was funny. And surprisingly tasteful when it comes to sentimentality - I could have gone for more, but I sometimes tear up when the Simpsons gets sentimental.

UPDATE: The one thing that did get my feminist undies all in a bundle were the shots of the baby crowning during delivery. Who the fuck gets a Brazilian before giving birth?! It was portrayed as incredibly disturbing, but it all looked nice and neat, and if you're going to be that graphic, you might as well tone down the porniness. Yeesh.

Just so you know

Pan's Labyrinth is not an appropriate movie for kids. Don't be confused, like I was. It's gory and scary and I'm sure it takes a few years' reading practice to keep up with movies that have subtitles.

It's also really good and I'm not sorry I drove an hour and a half in a snow storm to see it.