...is to look it up on Wikipedia. A lot of times, you find out stuff that enriches your understanding of the film, or gives you new movies to check out.
For example, we're watching TOKYO STORY this week.
"Orson Welles said of Make Way for Tomorrow, "It would make a stone cry,"[2] and rhapsodized about his enthusiasm for the film in his booklength series of interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles. In Newsweek magazine, famed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris named it his #1 film, stating "The most depressing movie ever made, providing reassurance that everything will definitely end badly."[3]"
MWFT is not available on any streaming service. Which means I have to hunt it down on DVD.
I'm shocked, shocked that a National Review writer has decided to take issue with the "Bechdel test." The test, as I'm sure you know, is a very simple way to check if your movies have even a moment in them that isn't dude oriented.
Here's Wikipedia:
The Bechdel test asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added.
In the past few years, the Bechdel Test has begun popping up casually in reviews like a feminist Good Housekeeping Seal of approval. Take this appreciation last month of the 1992 film A League of Their Own, published by Katie Baker on the site The Ringer: “It is, in my possibly blinded by love but also correct opinion, one of the best sports movies there is. And it is an honest ode to women and sisters and friendships, with a story that breezes through the Bechdel test by the end of the opening scene.”
Hey, and you know what? Tom Selleck’s Matthew Quigley appears almost immediately in Quigley Down Under. Hurrah, this film breezes through the Cowboy Test by the end of the opening scene!
Neither of these two tests gives you any hint as to the worth of a film, and furthermore neither of them tells you anything about a film’s general feminist wokeness. It doesn’t even tell you whether the film is entirely about a woman.
A couple of observations:
•You know why the "Cowboy Test" is ridiculous? Because there have been a million fricking movies about cowboys. We actually have no need of further cowboy movies — though, admittedly, I'd watch one if a good one came along — because just about every permutation of the genre has been exhausted. The Bechdel test was invented, meanwhile, because such female-centric moments were relatively rare.
•Smith is right that the Bechdel test doesn't tell you about the worth of a film or its feminist bona fides. Nobody makes those claims for it! (Check the video above for confirmation of this.) Instead, the underlying question is this: Does this movie contain a single moment that's not all about the guys in it? It is the very minimum a movie can do, in other words, to put a female perspective onscreen.
• Which means that the Bechdel test doesn't do much to constrain movie art: The art itself is pretty constrained — the movie business has increasingly been designed to appeal to and arouse the passions of teenage boys. To the degree female characters are designed to appeal to this demographic, it's not often with their agency apart from men in mind.
The Bechdel test was created because movies are so dude-oriented that getting such a moment was unexpected, to be noted.
Smith says the Bechdel test is irrelevant because women don't make the kinds of movies that reap big box office. "Have a wander through the sci-fi and fantasy section of your local bookstore: How many of these books’ authors are female? Yet these are where the big movie ideas come from. If a woman wants the next Lord of the Rings–style franchise to pass the Bechdel Test, then a woman should come up with a story with as much earning potential as J. R. R. Tolkien’s."
Which is ... stupid. Tell the makers and viewers of Wonder Woman that they don't like sci-fi adventure. For the love of god, tell my nerdy-ass wife — but give me a head start out of the room.
Hollywood discovers that there's an audience for women-centric movies every couple of years, then promptly forgets it. Using that amnesia to justify the ongoing omission of women and women's perspectives from our films isn't just dumb — it's clearly leaving a lot of money on the table.
Smart conservatives, you'd think, might embrace the Bechdel test for this reason if for nothing else: It just might help them make a ton of cash from an underserved audience.
At The AV Club, Tasha Robinson makes the case for continuing with physical media instead of relying on cloud-based streaming services like Netflix. Some of what she says makes sense, but not this:
And then there’s the fact that DVD/Blu-ray selection is still far greater than streaming selection. For example, check out this comparison list from September 2011, showing that only about a fifth of the movies on the IMDB top 250 are available via Netflix streaming—a percentage that dropped recently with the lapse of the Starz deal. Or consider Netflix’s Alfred Hitchcock library: More than 40 films available on disc, but only six available on Netflix Instant, and only two of those (The Lady Vanishes and The Man Who Knew Too Much) among his classics. Not only is any given film still far more likely to be available in disc form, those discs are still more likely to have options like subtitles, alternative languages, and disc extras.
That's only true if you consider Netflix the end-all, be-all of streaming movies. That's not the case.
Just to use Robinson's example: No, Netflix doesn't offer much in the way of streaming Hitchcock flicks. But Amazon Instant Video actually has a fairly complete roster of Alfred Hitchcock movies available to rent or own in a streaming format, including biggies like "Psycho" and "Rear Window."
If you lock yourself into one service, yes your choices will be limited. But that's not really necessary for most folks. On Friday night, I used Netflix to watch "Brokeback Mountain." On Saturday, I paid $4 to rent "Hugo" from Amazon. No, cloud-based services aren't complete. But if you're willing to take a buffet approach to your movie streaming, they're a lot closer than Robinson's example suggests.
This Guardian essay on the 10th anniversary of 'Amelie' has me a little defensive, casting the movie as syrupy and cloying:
Amélie didn't bother to adjust to the 21st century at all. It revelled in its Eurodisneyfication of Montmartre, as Libération's Philippe Lançon put it. At the start of a decade of strife and realpolitik, it was already a film out of time, for the dreamers only. There is a pivotal scene where Audrey Tautou realises there is a banal explanation for the man who appears repeatedly in the album of discarded photobooth headshots: he is a photobooth repairman. This peek-behind-the-curtain feels like a Wizard of Oz homage, but unlike Dorothy, it doesn't liberate Amélie. She still needs someone else to shove her out of clotted fantasia, even when it threatens her happiness.
You know what? I still love 'Amelie," still adore Audrey Tatou's performance in the film. It is charming and winsome—and yeah, more than a bit precious. But so what? It's a movie that delights me every time I see it—makes me feel better, and even sometimes makes me feel more ambitious about my own life. I don't want to subsist on a diet of sugar, no—and 'Amelie' is a movie I can't really watch more than every couple of years—but every once in awhile just the right dessert can be an amazing thing.
We sometimes brandish our tastes—in art, music, and movies—as weapons: Sometimes used defensively, to avoid others thinking poorly of us, and sometimes offensively, to put others in their place. But what's treacle to me might be inspiring to you. I'm not against appraising works of art, putting them in their context, and trying to render some judgement on their quality. But I think I want to be confident and humble about those judgements—I like what I like, but it's OK if you don't. And I like 'Amelie.'
But amidst the fun, "Clones" introduces some darker notes regarding Anakin's fall, and I was surprised how much Toshi was invested in that particular story thread. Ever since The Moment in "Empire," he's been troubled by the idea of a good guy who becomes a bad guy, and he's watching Anakin closely. When Anakin found his mother just before she died and then went on his killing spree in the Tusken Raiders camp, Toshi actually stood up. He walked closer to the screen, upset, needing to see every detail of what was happening, and when the scene was over, he asked me to pause the movie.
"Daddy, those people took Anakin's mommy, right?"
"That's right."
"And they hurted her, right?"
"They did."
"So then he wanted to kill them all so they can't hurt anybody else, right?"
"Is that the right thing to do?"
"No." The way he said it, though, it was more a question than a statement. "But they shouldn't have killed his mommy."
He was still wrestling with it when Anakin confessed to Padme a few scenes later that he had killed all of the Tuskens, even the women and children. That made him ask me to pause again, and he was upset by what Anakin said. "Jedi are good guys, and they should do good things, and he killed little kids and mommies, and that's bad." We talked about the reasons why and he told me that he was sad for Anakin, but he was also mad at him. He's always thought of Anakin as a hero, and seeing him start his fall and giving in to anger and rage is upsetting him deeply.
This is, when you think about it, sophisticated stuff for a young child to be contemplating: Sometimes good people do bad things, and sometimes those bad things create consequences from which there are no escape.
I'm not an 'Attack of the Clones' fan. I doubt that I ever will be. But in somebody's life, that movie is doing the work of art: Moving a person to contemplate motives and existence beyond their own experience, and offering entertainment in the process. That is no small thing. Recognizing that tempers my own judgements: I don't like 'Attack of the Clones,' but it's OK if you do.
How to explain? It's like Harold & Maude, only if both characters appeared to be 12 years old and Maude was actually a vampire. And if it had the icy surroundings and slowly building sense of dread as in The Shining. With Scott Farkus from A Christmas Story making an appearance as Harold's tormenter. Oh yeah, and it's all in Swedish -- with all the awkward touches of pre-adolescent sexuality that might imply.
Every nation has its own creation myth, something that illuminates our understanding of how a country sees itself, and the emergence of China as an economic superpower in the last couple of decades has prompted some cinematic consideration of how it came into being. Notable among these movies in recent years was Jet Li's Hero, which featured some wonderfully staged action scenes -- it was a Jet Li movie, after all -- but was also troubling to Western and democratic sensibilities with its seemingly pro-totalitarian bent.
Hero, though, was preceded a few years by 1998's The Emperor and the Assassin, and one hopes that this version of China's creation myth doesn't really show us how that country's citizens and artists think of themselves -- because it is super twisted.
Long story short: Li Xuejian plays Zheng Ying, the King of Qin who in 221 BC united all of China's disparate kingdoms under one empire. He's the Chinese George Washington, only if George Washington had a frothing bit of Macbeth in him, sprinkled with a twist of Hitler: Even at the outset he's clearly insane -- and as the movie progresses, it becomes clear he'll do anything to consolidate power: Murder his own family members, wipe out all the children of a city, and destroy entire families at a whim. But he manages a moment of clarity early on, describing China as he will one day rule it with kindness and wisdom.
His lover, Lady Zhao, is played by Gong Li, who is one of the most beautiful actresses ever to appear on screen anywhere in the world at any point in cinematic history. (I wanted, during the movie, to call her Lady Rowwwwr.) She is so moved by Ying's promise to benevolently rule a unified China that she has her face branded, part of a plot to create a pretext for Qin's invasion of a neighboring kingdom, Yan. But she changes her mind when she sees Ying's dark side, and plots with a reformed assassin to kill the king.
We know from history that Ying did become the first emperor of China, and thus we know what becomes of the plot. But still, something buzzes throughout the movie: This is China's creation myth! And it's full of double-crosses, palace intrigue and deaths to fill two or three Shakespeare plays! We're apparently supposed to take it as a given that the unification of China was a worthy thing -- and if you're a Chinese moviegoer watching this, that may well be a given. The rest of us, though, are left aghast at the horror of it all. Put it this way: I've never seen a movie with so many dead children on screen.
China's movie industry is not known, for obvious reasons, for its subversiveness. But there might be a hidden message in all of this. Lady Zhao is so moved by the king's promises of benevolence, food, safety and even good roads for all that she deforms her own visage to enable Ying's military adventurism ... only to find his bright vision similarly deformed by the awful task of acquiring power. A lesson learned: Never, ever trust the king.
