Clash of the Titans - Medusa battle (original) 1981

I loved this a lot when I was young because Medusa was very scary and Harry Hamlin was quite something. I think I became all about Greek myth because of this movie. I personally wanted a clock work Owl Friend. I guess I understood what a mythic hero actually wanted--some kind of proof via gifts and stuff that you were heroing right? 

Anyway, my tutelary deity was exactly Athena from this movie and books I read at a really small age. And in some way, I never stopped being that age.

I think "The Collector" is required watching.

I'd never even heard of this movie, which is probably ridiculous, and everyone else already knows about it. I only caught it today on some antenna-based movie station, which probably had it as a "horror" genre film in line with the coming Halloween holiday--which falls short of its meaning. But this tense, well-acted, psychological thriller starring Terence Stamp ("Kneel before Zod!) and Samantha Eggar actually is a brutal story about a Nice Guy who kidnaps a woman and basically works through so many dynamics of misogyny and abuse that it is practically a handbook of what fucks woman-blaming Manboys be.

This might not be a movie for everyone. It represents a stalker and kidnapper who has isolated a target and cut her off from everything, controlling her behavior--not always through violence, but sometimes through manipulation and even seeming pleasant at times. Such a stalker! He buys art books, makes tea, buys toiletries! He provides a place for his victim to stay and proclaims he's a gentleman and pretends he's above violence, but the drama between his need to control and her desire to be free is tense and real.

The title comes from his hobby of collecting butterflies. There is a deep scene where he shows his victim his collection, and she comes to the realization that she has been collected, like a thing to be had, dead, just like they are.

I'm not going to give away all that unfolds, but it is grim and sad and still and all, compelling and revealing. I'll admit I was rooting for a way for a happy ending to somehow come out of it.

Spoiler alert--no, watch the movie. The movie and the novel, by John Fowles, are available at Amazon. And probably elsewhere if you skulk about more than I did.

The November Man: A Netflix find I watched In the Theater

I have a soft spot in my heart for action movies--I have watched and enjoyed (because of my ability to post-phone criticism) openly illogical and over-the-top shoot-em-ups like all three Expendables movies, because I grew up watching Rambo and Commando and all the Steven Seagal movies and the Chuck Norris Missing in Action movies, and so, so much more. I viewed them as a nice break from the teen slasher movies.  So I am forgiving of mindless action flicks. The November Man isn't technically an action film, but it isn't exactly the post-Cold War thriller it wants to be.

If I judged it on action movie terms, it is too slow-paced and has unnecessary character details. If I judged it as a spy thriller, well, it has some plot holes that are just awkward, and the movie has a real dilemma because it has at least one scene where an actual atrocity is committed by the Pierce Brosnan character (who we're supposed to sort of like, I guess) in order to shame his former protégé-turned-assailant about his inhumanity. He slices an innocent young lady's leg, after having held a gun on her.

Let that sink in: This movie has a female character who exists just so that the main character can brutalize her to prove a point in a very dumb way to another male character, because...

Uh, no movie. I will not play along with that. There is no "why" other than convenience.  We are never told what happens with her by the way--spoiler alert! Because technically, why should we care what happens to her so long as the lesson is learned!

I don't want to give away too much of the twists. Brosnan is good, he always is, here in a kind of "past-it and jaded, being a spy was never like "Bond" anyway", sort of way. Bill Smitrovich is impressive, and his character is not a good one. But he still owned it.

The acting is not any of the problem here. It's the story and the framing.

 Some of what happens makes no logical sense--and I have to be snotty--really? The movie has one of those awful "dude walking away from exploding car" cliché scenes--yawn. Car chases and the necessary accidents exist in a world where, apparently, cops and emergency vehicles don't.  Surveillance drones just fling about over major cities like no one would notice. Women seem to exist to be victims. Cats walk through walls. Being suspected of being semi-traitorous does not get you at least a suspension from a managerial position at a spy agency (well, I presume that shouldn't be true...). People just punch up intimate data about other people via a password over their phones or laptops (I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's bordering Snowden territory--way-too-easy.) The machina is all too deus-like for my taste.

This is a movie I'd have appreciated as a Netflix find for having some psychological drama and good acting, but on the whole, as a first-run viewing, it isn't great. Interesting and watchable--but not great.

Angelina Jolie and the Community Chest

 I think Angelina Jolie has done a pretty brave thing not just by making the decision to take her health into her own hands regarding obtaining a preventive double mastectomy, but also by coming out and explaining why this was the right decision for her. With an 87% chance of developing the disease that painfully and slowly took away her mother, she believes she is sparing herself and her loved ones an agonizing experience, and that is a rational choice, albeit a painful one to make, not in the least because as an actor, her body is viewed as part of her art. The decision was certainly difficult, but she made the choice that she found preferable.

The point being that it was her decision--and yet (and this is somehow predictable, isn't it?) I've read so much commentary about how this was "crazy" and not she's "mutilated" and other remarkably dense things that somehow imply that her breasts, because other people have seen them, have become a kind of community property. As if she should, perhaps, have run a series of polls to make sure that the admirers of her bosom were okay with her deciding that on the whole, she would rather not wait to be diagnosed with cancer before taking care of herself.  The point also being that no one commenting actually has to live with her decision, nor can they imagine what it would be like wondering from day to day whether their own body was likely to betray them.

Okay--The Onion Just F'd Up Tweeting the Oscars

Quvenzhane Wallis is a nine year old girl. She's already a really gifted actress, but she is still a nine year old girl. You really shouldn't post that about even a grown-ass woman, but whoever was on the Onion Twitter feed tonight? You really, really, really don't use that word about a nine-year old girl. People would be afraid to use that word because that is not a word that civilized people would use. We don't say it about women because gendered slurs are reductionist cheap nonsense--

But that's a nine year old girl in Hollywood you just used that on, Onion. C'mon. The media and the business and all that will surely screw with her brain enough the rest of her life over her being a woman, celebrity, actress, how she looks and how she acts without you dropping a c-bomb on her for a lazy throw-away joke. Grow the hell up and figure out the line between cruelty and humor.

Summer Reading: What a great week.

So, it happens that I spent the last two days experiencing my version of happy, which means wallowing in new book acquisitions. I got two books that I was very much looking forward to, and like a great big goober, I swallowed them both up at once and sort of have to reread them a bit to try and maintain my "happy" a little longer. I'm a bit like a baby crying because the candy she ate is all gone.

But it was good.

First up, I got The Apocalypse Codex, which is part of Charles Stross' Laundry books, which follows the exploits of pseudonymous hero Bob Howard, computer geek, civil servant, and necromancer as he goes about the not-especially glamorous business of preventing the Eschaton (or at least preventing the eschaton-minded from nibbling the almighty fuck out of our corner of the universe, or out of the heads of people who inhabit it). I love this series, and this book was no exception. Here, we follow Bob as he and some new (possibly recurring?) characters investigate a charismatic evangelist preacher who seems to be "saving" souls--for someone to eat?

I like that Stross depicts the supernatural spy in real world ways--having his regrets and night-horrors, being flawed and needing to explore why he does what he does. I also enjoy that he interweaves real-world history with real myth and fiction in a seamless package. I'm slavering for the next installment of Bob's adventures--and kind of hoping for more entanglement with the newer characters introduced: Persephone Hazard and Johnny MacTavish.--whose interactions suggest a wealth of standalone possibilities.


Another lovely read I gobbled was the Alan Moore/Kevin O'Neill graphic novel, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 2009. 

It's kind of hard to square the world as we know it, 2009, and the world as our heroes (mostly heroines) experience it, in Moore's 2009. I would not recommend anyone who wants to read LOEG start with this--by all means, read every one from the beginning.  But you'll not be disappointed when you get to this edition, just, um, depressed. Moore and O'Neill's 2009 (sort of like our world, but I hope not--much grimmer) is ugly and it's implied that the ugliness of our world has much to do with the ugliness/crassness of our literature. As with previous installments of LOEG, there is some lit and cultural criticism. But the portraits of Mina Murray, Orlando (as a woman) and others make this an oddly feminist work.

I am really loving the emerging character of Orlando/Vita, etc. The three thousand-year-old warrior and hermaphroditic immortal really is the voice of this issue. Also, you might shudder at the implied villain.

I totally recommend both of these books, but warn they are so devourable you'll really need to either read all the lit associated (and good on you, if you do!). Or you won't--it's a free country.  You do you, m'kay?

Breastfeeding Dolls and Being Female-bodied (Also--the U-word! And boobies!)

There's been a little interest over this baby doll that allows children to play at breastfeeding.  Some people find this a "mature" concept or just intimate or weird. I think these people are really too uptight. Female-bodied women who have given birth can feed their babies with their mammary glands. It's part of being a mammal. It's a scientific fact that this is what boobies are intended for. It's also the best way for most human babies to be fed, for many health reasons. So I'm a little flummoxed when I hear that some people find this to be a controversial toy--it's a doll. Kids like to mirror the behavior of adults, and have been playing with dolls since forever. Breastfeeding is totally natural--so it's natural for a child who is interested in family-oriented play ("house", we called it, when I was a pup), to use a doll to mimic suckling, just as they've used dolls to mimic bottle-feeding.

Is there something weird about the idea of pretending to be a mother when one is not old enough to have children--that suddenly becomes extra-weird when it means imagining one has developed functional mammaries? In other words--is it somehow normal for a child to imagine having a baby (and we adults presumably know where babies come from), and yet not appropriate to play out having the grown-woman's body required to nurture that pretend-baby?

Sexist Vintage Ads--

This might be my favorite--maybe a woman with fourteen fingers shouldn't be cleaning a stove in the first place! Delightfully thoughtless! Anyhow, the feature I snagged this from is over here. Somewhat disturbing are the number of ads built around the premise that women, erm, smell indelicate. As opposed to smelling like a light vinaigrette, as nature would have intended, if nature knew any better. (Or like a hospital. LYSOL!)

Like I said, I love old ads.

Outlandish old ad--Be a Mind-sticker!

Um. This was a real ad from a long time ago, when men worked in dimly-lit rooms and thin women danced around outdoors and stuck in their minds. They could do this because of the miracle of artificial sweeteners. Fat women never stuck in men's minds because they would never fit in the first place. The Coca Cola company really did a lot of work back then in making women's lives worthwhile by a) giving them good shapes and b) making men think of them.

I love old ads.

A Meditation upon Panty-hose.

My husband asked me a perfectly innocent question earlier this evening:

"Do you have any old pantyhose?"

And I found myself answering, "Of course, I'll give my old hosiery to any cause. They are a torture-device of the patriarchy aimed at 'normalizing' the appearance of women's legs. I categorically reject them and consider the women who support their usage traitors to feminism."

This response shocked me. I had no idea I felt so seriously about pantyhose, but I suppose I do. My husband meant merely to find a cheaper solution for trapping the lint from our washing machine than the chain-mail condoms one ordinarily purchases for such a task. But his innocent question touched a nerve with me regarding pantyhose. Recall, if you will, what they are--

(Remember the Kathleen Turner movie "Peggy Sue Got Married" and how she demonstrated what an innovation pantyhose were? Compared to the garter-belts or whatever--yeah, an innovation.)

A super-thin nylon stocking cunningly arranged as a type of leggings. The sizes are very random, and they really aren't meant, generally, for folks like me--

Curvy folks. I'm a Queen, or something. I stand 5'7" and am in the 200lb area. I'm a big old gal. And I....hate.....stretching out the nylons, rolling the little fuckers up, trying to make the crotch actually ride up to where my crotch is, and then wear these awful things when I know the following will happen--

They will run. Because they always run.

They will try to ride down. And the crotch of my nylons will at some point need to be tastefully rearranged in the ladies' room and sorted back up against my lady-bits. But before I get to the ladies' room, I'll be walking bow-legged a little bit like John Wayne playing King Lear, and looking for a horse, a horse! My Queen-sizedom for a horse!

They will hurt my mid-section--especially if they are the evil control tops--which can't, naturally, control everything. Why does any big girl ever think these are a good idea? They make for the middle-pudge, just sending the fat to roll up at a higher place. Ew. And if you are bottom-curvy, with a bottom-tummy pooch, they cause pink-belly. Itchy, sad, lines of bitter, miserable pink-belly. This is so hurtful and wrong. Instead of making one's bodily "lines" smooth under one's clothing, the control-top pantyhose really just rearranges the lumps and makes the wearer self-conscious and pained. (Sometimes there is a sound like Velcro being separated when one removes one's control-top pantyhose from one's midsection. And no, it doesn't feel good to hear that sound, although it is relief to get that machinery of women-hatred off! Off I say! Sound of triumphant albeit slightly mad laughter, here!)

Anyway, my actual legs in winter look a tiny bit like Roquefort cheese, being white with blue veins shooting throughout, and they are somewhat soft. In summer they are a little better, with a golden tan, and blue veins and a degree of Roquefort cheesiness all the same. But I prefer showing my natural gams, flawed as they are, to ever wearing those nasty nylons ever again. This is my manifesto: I have legs, and I know how to use them. They don't beg, and won't beg or suffer under the unnatural fiber yoke of itchy fabrics designed to hide the alledged imperfections of my walking apparati in future. This I vow.