Rabbits, Blinkity

Woody Allen movies are excellent in many ways, but they irk me on a very profound level. Let's talk about it!

I recently had a discussion with a friend (Hi Steve!) about Allen's work and morality, or lack thereof. (Mostly vis-a-vis Roman Polanski and that whole stepdaughter thing.) The end result was, not wanting to be the sort of person who complains about things they don't watch, I agreed to make an attempt at some of his films. Thus, I was in the curious position of watching a Woody Allen film in entirety for the first time, while having previously read quite a bit of criticism about both him and his films, especially about to his supposed misogyny or lack thereof.

So I had assumptions. I expected a couple of possibilities. First, that the whole thing might be overblown, that his films would be at worst reasonably well made, original stories, which due to their tremendous influence would feel just a touch stale. Second, that they might be the worst sort of 1950s sexist and classist tripe, only considered worthwhile because that sort of thing tends to go over the heads of the (white, straight, male) critical establishment. Or most likely, some combination of both.
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Lucy Liu is playing the character of Watson in the new Sherlock Holmes series. Which is rather awesome. I have a theory that eventually, every classic male character will be re-imagined as and played by a woman. I have a corresponding theory that this, too, is awesome.

Now all we need is a round of classic female characters re-imagined as male...

So right about now, you're thinking, oh, great, another tribute post, blah, blah, blah. But this one has a twist. I have never consciously listened to a Whitney Houston song. No idea why, it just never came up. I'm sure I've heard at least a few before (we'll just have to see), but if you were to ask right now, "name a few of her songs," I wouldn't be able to even get one right. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to listen to 5 Whitney Houston songs, one after the other, at random. As I do this, I'll type about them. It'll be different, at least. Here we go!

My Love is Your Love

First, the obvious: yes, she had a fantastic voice. Particularly in the lower register. In the context of this song, it's kind of simultaneously light and heavy - she's almost mumbling or whispering a good part of the time, but her voice just cuts through the bass and the backup vocals like a red-hot feather.

Relaxing.
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The really interesting thing about The Good Wife is that the "wife" in question wasn't ever actually that good - at least not in the way that the obvious connotation of the phrase would indicate. "Principled," or even "Pragmatic" might be a more accurate choice of word, if less provocative. Alica Florrick is, in fact, so principled that her morals wrap from "good" right back around to "evil" on a regular basis. So it was something of a relief last season when she finally hooked up with Will and threw Peter out; at the least it should have relieved her of some of her tension. And it worked! Sort of.

Alica's Nerves

On to the episode: Alicia's been having sex, and is therefore enormously pleased with herself, complete with new bangs. She gets over herself pretty quickly, though, when she manages to get her client implicated for murder, via the usual shady-sounding leading questions. Add to that her... uncomfortable relationship with Kalinda, and not wanting to be seen with Will ever. Sure enough, it's business as usual. But with unusually passionate arguing.
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"Deals. Why, they're the very foundation of civilized existence."

This was a bit unexpected. Rumpelstiltskin... blew up the token black (seriously, TV Godesses?) fairy godmother. And then made the Rapunzel deal with Cinderella in exchange for the ball ticket.

This episode was all about favors, in fact, and who owes whom. Ashley/Cinderella owes Mr. Gold her baby. Shawn owes Ashley and their child a chance at a family, complete with tiny glass slippers. Emma owes Henry time, and a whole lot of slack for annoying but right. We already know that Regina owes Gold seemingly unlimited favors. Graham owes Regina his job and possibly a sexual harassment lawsuit. And now Emma owes Mr. Gold a favor as well. Not to mention, everybody owes magic (aka life?) a favor, starting with not leaving town. As in, it literally cuts them off at the sign by crashing their car.

But nobody scares Emma, so she plants her feet, shakes Mr. Gold's hand, and takes the sheriff's job offer.
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"It was the honorable thing to do."

So Snow White is entirely modernized in this edition. Instead of creepily keeping house for dwarfs, she's robbing stagecoaches to save up for a run to the border. Until she falls in love, at least. While it's possibly not quite at first sight, it's pretty close, but the part where Prince Charming - sorry, James - permanently dumps his fiancé is left for another flashback.

My jab in the deck of this review isn't quite fair - the Manic Pixie Dream duties are actually shared between Prince Charming and Snow White fairly equally. Sure, she convinces him that his arraigned marriage isn't all that, but he convinces her that there's more to life than running. Which is a nice twist. But neither of them grow up, which is my slight gripe about this episode, and Charming/White's characterization overall: the Evil Queen, Rumpelstiltskin, et. al. are all very complicated, conflicted, and interesting. Snow is still a bit 2D - her modern incarnation is a kindergarten teacher, for goddess sake! Couldn't they be a bit less, I don't know, like fairytale characters?
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"Who will protect Henry if you won't?"

In the opener, we see that clocktower (previously frozen) is now keeping quite reasonable time. Certain people are not so happy about this, as it turns out. So does our favorite fairytale town Mayor know she's an evil queen or not? Presumably she does, unless she has some other reason for not wanting the clock to run.

Meanwhile in flashback land, we see the first big deviation from the traditional tales. Snow White, it seems did something quite nasty to the queen - something worse than simply being beautiful, at least. Which explains a lot, I suppose; people don't usually destroy the world quite that randomly. I very much like where they're taking this: thanks to a nice combination of acting and writing, she's far more sympathetic and three-dimensional than might be expected. Which, in turn, makes her far scarier than your average villain. I rather hope they don't go the full tragic route, but we'll see. Very well done thus far.
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This kid wisely avoids listening to people on the Internet for advice about whom their role models should be.

Over at the Good Men Project, Justin Cascio tries to ask "Are the Kids All Right?", but manages to make it all about teh menz, as per usual.

Cascio posits that Lisa Cholodenko's film "The Kids are All Right," contains a tragedy of sorts, in the form of the character Paul. That he missed a chance to have a parental role with the kids, Laser and Joni, that his own lack of family is dysfunctional, and that this represents a loss in society.

Read More...With all due respect to my friend, this is bullshit. Let's talk.