And on a lighter note: Save the Cones!... another neglected species in desperate need of your help. Please think about putting your support behindThe Traffic Cone Preservation Society. A rare Dwarf Speckled Cone adoption costs $4.50 (plus $2.25 shipping). They take Pay-pal. If you are short of cash, you can print out a Membership Card from their website for free. I'm disappointed at the list of names of Charter Members. You'd think some celebrities would have (been) signed up.
Wednesday, October 02, 2002
The rest of my review of My Big Fat Greek Wedding that I started below, cut off by my incompetence with HTML:
The Last Time I Circle Danced...
was at a Kitka concert at a Methodist Church one block from my house. Yes, I'm an (ex-)Unitarian middle class ethnically ambiguous (Swedish/Welsh/English) white person, and yes, circle dancing, besides being good exercize, tapped into my need for a sense of ethnic rootedness. But I wouldn't marry a circle dancer—they’re not my type. I'd rather marry a polka dancer. Wait, I can't marry a circle dancer or a polka dancer, it's not legal for me to marry anyone yet. The movie never addresses the problems of marriage as a construct, it only addresses the compulsive nature of marriage. Thank the gods they didn't follow the lead of Monsoon Wedding and couple off every last single character right down to the second cousin twice removed from Toledo.
There, now I've talked about every movie I've seen in a theater all year, except Spiderman. Spiderman definitely swam against the tide of compulsory couplehood. Was Peter Parker that movie's gay character? Hm... another time I'll revisit that question.
And still another time I'll tackle why everyone thinks gayness is an ethnicity. We have a flag, don't we? We must have a homeland and an aboriginal language if we have a flag... Maybe we could declare war on someone, say they stole our homeland. I think Tuvalu sounds good this time of year.
Suffice it to say, just because a white/light-skinned Greek-American, English-American, or Queer-American does the hora, it doesn't make her an anti-racist, or a white-supremicist, or Just Like You and Me. Well, Just Like You, anyway. Ethnic dancers are just dancers, and the Serb nationalists are still hostile to non-Serbs, and the Greek nationalists are hostile to Turks and Islamic Cypriots, and Russian nationalists are hostile to (the dark-skinned) Caucasians -- all under the flag of Orthodoxy.
In summary, go see My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but don't waste your time as I did looking for brown people in the movie to problematize its racial agenda, or guessing who they are going to kill off to give the movie more depth and remind us of the history of real sorrow that trails behind those quaint Orthodox rituals.
The Last Time I Circle Danced...
was at a Kitka concert at a Methodist Church one block from my house. Yes, I'm an (ex-)Unitarian middle class ethnically ambiguous (Swedish/Welsh/English) white person, and yes, circle dancing, besides being good exercize, tapped into my need for a sense of ethnic rootedness. But I wouldn't marry a circle dancer—they’re not my type. I'd rather marry a polka dancer. Wait, I can't marry a circle dancer or a polka dancer, it's not legal for me to marry anyone yet. The movie never addresses the problems of marriage as a construct, it only addresses the compulsive nature of marriage. Thank the gods they didn't follow the lead of Monsoon Wedding and couple off every last single character right down to the second cousin twice removed from Toledo.
There, now I've talked about every movie I've seen in a theater all year, except Spiderman. Spiderman definitely swam against the tide of compulsory couplehood. Was Peter Parker that movie's gay character? Hm... another time I'll revisit that question.
And still another time I'll tackle why everyone thinks gayness is an ethnicity. We have a flag, don't we? We must have a homeland and an aboriginal language if we have a flag... Maybe we could declare war on someone, say they stole our homeland. I think Tuvalu sounds good this time of year.
Suffice it to say, just because a white/light-skinned Greek-American, English-American, or Queer-American does the hora, it doesn't make her an anti-racist, or a white-supremicist, or Just Like You and Me. Well, Just Like You, anyway. Ethnic dancers are just dancers, and the Serb nationalists are still hostile to non-Serbs, and the Greek nationalists are hostile to Turks and Islamic Cypriots, and Russian nationalists are hostile to (the dark-skinned) Caucasians -- all under the flag of Orthodoxy.
In summary, go see My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but don't waste your time as I did looking for brown people in the movie to problematize its racial agenda, or guessing who they are going to kill off to give the movie more depth and remind us of the history of real sorrow that trails behind those quaint Orthodox rituals.
The SlackerStalker Review of My Big Fat Greek Wedding
Racializing white people - the ibuprofen for that nagging race anxiety headache.
I give it one thumbs up.
It met the minimum lesbian film requirement: at least one conversation between two female characters about something other than a man.
But, one thumb down because it informed my life very little. It was a pro-nerd movie, and in that I related to it, but it had a super duper bright shiny happy pretty (nail)polished sheen that leaves out the good girtty underpinnings of the totally problematic religious aspects. They had the groom baptized just to use the church! Without him learning a damn thing about the misogynist and racist history of Orthodoxy! As though Orthodoxy isn't still killing people-- as though it was just a quaint hold-over from a forgotten time. I really wanted someone to die. Would it have killed 'em? Just one little death, that's all I asked.
It also had no animals in it.
The breakdown:
FOUR conversations between women not about a man: one about college, one about business, one about ethnic heritage, and one about a zit.
JESUS FIGURE: the grandmother. I coulda sworn they were going to kill her. I wish they had, not just to give the movie more depth, and the neglected role of women in Orthodox cultures a little more space, but to give more face time to an interesting "nonpretty" (almost third-gendered) character. Death would've helped develop her character beyond the "redemption" scene of her sharing her wedding crown with our heroine. Come to think of it, they had to gender her in that scene, showing her as a young woman, to resolve her place in the movie. Did we ever see her again after that? I didn't.
GAY FIGURE: the brother. Weirdly single, comes and goes mysteriously, likes the company of other young men, "comes out" as an artist. I hope there's a sequel where he marries the groom's best friend, who looked a little lonely and gay.
QUESTIONS: compulsive sexuality, fertility, consumption, but also celebrates those things in the end.
ANXIETIES RELIEVED: professional class/ working class anxiety-- resolved through mysterious vodka-like substance out of tiny fluted glasses; race anxiety among light/white skinned people-- resolved through (surprise!) circle-dancing! The timeless and functional ethnic tension panacea where we can imagine Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class Generic Unitarian White People (yes, a little redundant, that) linking arms and heaving into the grape-vine with the Sopranos, Woody Allen, Crocodile Dundee, Juliette Binoche and other valorized and racialized white people in the popular mind.
THE LAST TIME I CIRCLE DANCED: was at a
Racializing white people - the ibuprofen for that nagging race anxiety headache.
I give it one thumbs up.
It met the minimum lesbian film requirement: at least one conversation between two female characters about something other than a man.
But, one thumb down because it informed my life very little. It was a pro-nerd movie, and in that I related to it, but it had a super duper bright shiny happy pretty (nail)polished sheen that leaves out the good girtty underpinnings of the totally problematic religious aspects. They had the groom baptized just to use the church! Without him learning a damn thing about the misogynist and racist history of Orthodoxy! As though Orthodoxy isn't still killing people-- as though it was just a quaint hold-over from a forgotten time. I really wanted someone to die. Would it have killed 'em? Just one little death, that's all I asked.
It also had no animals in it.
The breakdown:
FOUR conversations between women not about a man: one about college, one about business, one about ethnic heritage, and one about a zit.
JESUS FIGURE: the grandmother. I coulda sworn they were going to kill her. I wish they had, not just to give the movie more depth, and the neglected role of women in Orthodox cultures a little more space, but to give more face time to an interesting "nonpretty" (almost third-gendered) character. Death would've helped develop her character beyond the "redemption" scene of her sharing her wedding crown with our heroine. Come to think of it, they had to gender her in that scene, showing her as a young woman, to resolve her place in the movie. Did we ever see her again after that? I didn't.
GAY FIGURE: the brother. Weirdly single, comes and goes mysteriously, likes the company of other young men, "comes out" as an artist. I hope there's a sequel where he marries the groom's best friend, who looked a little lonely and gay.
QUESTIONS: compulsive sexuality, fertility, consumption, but also celebrates those things in the end.
ANXIETIES RELIEVED: professional class/ working class anxiety-- resolved through mysterious vodka-like substance out of tiny fluted glasses; race anxiety among light/white skinned people-- resolved through (surprise!) circle-dancing! The timeless and functional ethnic tension panacea where we can imagine Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class Generic Unitarian White People (yes, a little redundant, that) linking arms and heaving into the grape-vine with the Sopranos, Woody Allen, Crocodile Dundee, Juliette Binoche and other valorized and racialized white people in the popular mind.
THE LAST TIME I CIRCLE DANCED: was at a