Month: February 2013

When I hear “Chick Flicks,” I think of KFC cinema

I saw six out of ten, and found something worthwhile in five of them.

I’m not fond of the term “chick flicks,” but a couple of months ago, SamuraiFrog stole someone’s list called The Ten Chick Flick Guys Love But Refuse to Admit Watching. I haven’t done a list for a while, and it’s been a busy time. Like Frog, I don’t deny liking what I like, even if it’s not “cool” to enjoy certain things in popular culture.

Here’s the list with my comments:

Mean Girls
This is a “chick flick”? I saw it in the cinema and found this Tina Fey-penned film to be painfully true, and probably could watch again. I think I feel bad about Lindsay Lohan’s personal downfall in a way I don’t feel about, say, some reality star’s excesses, because Lohan showed real talent here, in Freaky Friday and even in The Parent Trap. She was also good in a limited role in A Prairie Home Companion after her troubles had begun.

The Proposal
Didn’t see it. Wanted to, actually, and maybe I’ll rent it. I like the notion of the power imbalance between the characters played by Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds, and I hear Betty White’s a hoot.

The Notebook
Never saw it. My initial inclination was that I didn’t have any real desire to do so. However, Jaquandor, who also did this list, seemed fond of it. Hmm.

Bridget Jones’ Diary
I liked this movie quite a bit in the cinema, though not enough to see it again. Loathed its sequel; the IMBD says there’s Bridget Jones’ Baby in production, which I probably WON’T see. I saw a lot of Renee Zellweger films for a while, then nothing until 2009’s My One and Only.

Titanic
I described it here as a kitchen sink movie, with SOMETHING to appeal to everyone. If you didn’t care for the love story, and I didn’t very much, you could appreciate the scale of the disaster or the portrayal of class differences. Both Frog and Jaquandor complained that bashing Titanic has been poseur style rubbish.

Sweet Home Alabama
I did see it in the movie in the cinema. It has left zero lasting impression on me, which is not a good sign.

Never Been Kissed
Didn’t see it. Was vaguely interested in catching it because of the baseball angle, and if I happen to be watching TV and it happens to be on, maybe I’ll see it someday.

Legally Blonde
I liked this movie, which I saw in the theater, more than I expected to. Have caught a few scenes on TV subsequently, and it seems to hold up.

Love Actually
I liked most of this movie, but I loved the end, with God Only Knows playing. Haven’t seen this since I first viewed it in the cinema, and probably should rewatch it.

13 Going On 30
I actually planned to see this in the cinema and just didn’t. Frog’s endorsement makes me want to rent it. I’m a big Mark Ruffalo fan.

So I saw six out of ten and found something worthwhile in five of them.

Mom: you were WAY too hard on yourself

“Hey, none of us are in jail. We didn’t end up as mass murderers, or anything. So there’s that!”

Around 1981, my mother took a cooperative extension course near her home in Charlotte, NC; I don’t even know what the topic was. What my sisters and I DO recall, though, is that it had a profound, and, from our point of view, negative impact on her.

The message she received from the class was that she was a bad mother. She worked outside the home most of the time when we were growing up. She left her children with HER mother for the bulk of the day. She wasn’t much of a cook – because her mother, who was pretty good, didn’t bother to teach her – so couldn’t share this with skill with her children.

The first time she mentioned this to me when I visited the family early in 1982, I thought she was kidding. But she brought this up time and again. In 1984, I remember spending a whole train ride from Providence, RI, where a cousin had graduated from college to New York City, where we rendezvoused with the rest of the family, trying, and failing, to convince her of her positive qualities.

After a while, my sisters and I developed some pat, and perhaps snarky responses to her ridiculous narrative:
“Mom, we all turned out fine, so you must have done SOMETHING right!”
“You were not around all the time, so we appreciated you when you WERE there.”
“Hey, none of us are in jail. We didn’t end up as mass murderers, or anything. So there’s that!”

This litany of hers went on, off and on, for perhaps a decade and a half; I specifically remember addressing this topic as late as 1996, because I probably said something such, “You have to stop beating yourself up over this! We’re not unhappy with you, but we’re sad that you’re so unhappy.” This wasn’t the first time my sisters and I had said that, but I don’t recall her launching into this particular diatribe, at least with me, again.

Still, I’m pained that she could be so susceptible, for so long, to someone else’s script. I knew that she could be emotionally squeezed by her mother and her husband at times. Still, this (bogus) message from a stranger really stifled her self-confidence at times.

As I remember my mom, two years after she died, I wish she could have listened more to her own voice.
***
Mark Evanier, his mother, her ophthalmologist, and a certain cartoon character, which is a fun story.

 

The idea of race

I never embraced the term ‘African-American’; it’s SEVEN syllables, versus one for ‘black’.

Leonard Pitts wrote a tremendous article, Dumbest idea in history? Race. You should read the whole piece.

Among other things, He explains that race became “that which would allow one person in rags to feel superior to another person in rags.” In the United States, “Whiteness was something that had to be learned and earned, particularly for those — Jews, Poles, southern Italians, Hungarians, the Irish — who were regarded as congenitally inferior. They were seen as white, says [Nell Irwin] Painter, but it was a sort of defective whiteness. They were ‘off white’ for want of a better term, and as such, a threat to American values and traditions. And they were mistreated accordingly until, over the passage of generations of assimilation, they achieved full whiteness.”

“As whiteness was invented, so was blackness. When Africans were gathered on the shores of that continent to be packed into the reeking holds of slave ships for the voyage to this country, they saw themselves as Taureg, Mandinkan, Fulani, Mende, or Songhay — not black. As Noel Ignatiev, author of How The Irish Became White, has observed, those Africans did not become slaves because they were black. They ‘became’ black because they were enslaved.”

This remained true, to an obsessive degree, even after slavery ended in the United States. Check out the detailed recording of black people in the 1890 Census: “Be particularly careful to distinguish between blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons. The word ‘black’ should be used to describe those persons who have three-fourths or more black blood; ‘mulatto,’ those persons who have from three-eighths to five-eighths black blood; ‘quadroon,’ those persons who have one-fourth black blood; and ‘octoroon,’ those persons who have one-eighth or any trace of black blood.”

Incidentally, the Census Bureau is considering getting rid of the term ‘Negro’, leaving the terms ‘black’ and ‘African-American’.

If ‘black’ is an imprecise term, then ‘African-American’ is even more so, as Pitts explains: As the example of Charlize Theron, the fair-skinned, blond actress from South Africa, amply illustrates, it is entirely possible to come from [Africa], yet not be what we think of as ‘black.’ Indeed, Theron, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2008, is by definition an African American. Yet, she fits no one’s conception of that term, either.”

I never embraced the term ‘African-American’; it’s SEVEN syllables, versus one for ‘black’. As long as the distinctions are made, I prefer the term ‘black’; after all, as Ken Levine noted, the James Brown anthem would sound very different if it were, “Say It Loud! I’m African-American and I’m Proud.”
***
Pitts also wrote about How Black Is Black Enough?

A great story by Bob Costas about the late baseball player Stan Musial on an extended section from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, January 28, 2012.

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