Drive-by Weekend Update

[signalflareblue]

(only not the SNL kind)

Friday: Saw Sin City with Nathan. It was excellent. It's essentially two and a half hours of artistic, film-noir gore and hookers with guns. There's even an entire sequence of Clive Owen (I don't think his jaw could have been so manly without computer effects) talking about Valkyries while almost naked women pull fancy

Comments

[rosenwillow]

re: friday - aww. when i was in chicago (where you're from - hey!) there was this huge group of uchicago kids on our bus talking about sin city in a really obnoxious way. you know, analyze to death. and the guy who was talking most of the time wouldn't listen to anyone else. it sort of drove me crazy.

re: saturday - are you A side?

re: sunday - my (non-jewish) friend and i just exchanged "happy passover" IMs ... i don't really know why you would care about that. except that i'm working on it ;)

[signalflareblue]

re: re: friday - I thought we were supposed to do that! Damn them for stealing our flaws. I'm not sure there is much to analyze about Sin City, except that the timeline is a little out of chronological order.

re: re: saturday - No, I'm not that cool. Especially since B side played with three TCNJ forwards.

re: re: sunday - Um. Way to recruit?

[lilyoda]

Sim City was excellent.. =D I have never saw so many gentials ripped, cut or blown off with a gun...=O

[signalflareblue]

Speaking of the lesbian... I'm still a little unsure of the gender politics of that movie. "She was a dyke, but god knows why. She could have had any man in town" (or something to that affect) Eurgh, but he was a vulgar guy, you know... And she was still an object of chivalry and general male-gaze-thong-wearing-cinematography, without being an available sexual object. Good or Bad? In any case, I've decided that the overwhelming heteronormativity of the movie was part of the film noir style, and that I can therefore take it ironically and ignore it.

Your boyfriend can suck it up... Clive Owen doesn't begin to make up for massive amounts of naked women fanservice.

"BOTH of them" was excellent. Although I did like "you've got a bum ticker!" too.

[_swallow]

> "She was a dyke, but god knows why. She could have had any man in town"

Frank Miller's gender politics are, everyone in comics fandom I've met agrees, massively fucked-up. Still: I felt that not only was the movie's attitude towards sex and women "part of the film noir style", but also that that specific line, given by that specific guy, was being presented to us absolutely as a character note-- not as even the, you know, belief argued by the entire movie (as you said, I think the movie's style intentionally left its viewers room to take it ironically), or the belief held by the producers; but rather importation information about this character-- considering that it came fairly early in his vignette-- and his undeniably objectifying (etc.) yet oddly, sweetly chivalrous understanding of women.

I think I got this feeling so strongly because of a combination of how ridiculous that line is to me and, I thiiink, anyone with even a shallow contemporary idea of homosexuality; and of how the line was delivered (both of terms of the actor

[signalflareblue]

That's a really interesting way to think of it - I hadn't really considered what it means to frame so much of the plot in internal monologues. I will point out, though, that her girlfriend was only mentioned, and that she played the exact same role as the other women did in relation to their chivalrous men, which seemed to me to be a way of delegitimizing her homosexuality outside mind of that specific character.

Out of curiousity, what do you think about the fact that only men were involved in castrating eachother?

[I also feel obligated to say that your "objectifying yet chivalrous" should be "objectifyingly chivalrous", but I think that's beside the specific point.]

[ai_weili]

You're kidding me, Leah! We're the same person! That quote was my away message earlier!

[signalflareblue]

Crazy! Which one of us stole the other's brain? (Also, its such a good quote.)

[ai_weili]

You must have stolen mine because my head aches and my nose is stuffy. (Sure signs of stolen brainage.)

[signalflareblue]

I must have pulled it out through your nose, mummification style. If you take sudafed, it might regrow.