Nevermind that she's a spineless demotard access blogger. Put aside the odious moral cretinism she affects on behalf of her warmongering party. Ignore the fact that her mindless cheer leading is so annoying it could give every massive stone head on Easter Island a migraine. Marcotte has plumbed the abyss of pandering to the lowest, most cowardly, most cravenly toadying demotard and dredged from the slime an Oscar nod for shlockteur Quentin "One Trick Pony" Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards.
I suppose it takes a real feminist like Marcotte to praise one of Tarantino's sub-juvenile revenge fantasies. Not like all those fake feminists who can recognize Quentin's "men with breasts" characters when they see them. Marcotte's odious brand of faux-feminism, in which women are free to act just like men, fits nicely with the boring ripoffs of grind house tropes Tarantino has been putting on to his dick flicks since Reservoir Dogs. (For those of you unfamiliar with g'industry palaver, a 'dick flick' is a movie made to appeal to adolescent boys. Essentially the other side of 'chick flicks.')
Taratino's masturbatory cartoon violence must be as comforting to smug, clueless pwoggies like Marcotte as it is exciting to the pud-pulling nose pickers that comprise the film's target audience. On those few occasions when they hear about God-Emperor Obama's latest foray into bloody-handed violence in Afghanistan or Pakistan, they no doubt imagine something very stirring and cinematic like Bastards. None of the dirt and grime of war from Kathrine Bigelow's by-miles-superior The Hurt Locker can be allowed to disturb the beautiful pwogwessive minds of Marcotte and her Amen Chorus. Truly, Marcotte's film preferences are as repulsively, contentlessly shallow as her politics.
[shrug]
ReplyDeleteHaven't seen the movie, but in all honesty: I HATE the term "men with breasts" used to complain about female characters. What does that even mean? If the characters are shallow in order to fit into whatever violent milieu Tarrantino wants them in, then they're all shallow: males, females, whatever.
Lord knows, I don't wanna' go back to the days of Puppet On A Chain:teh movie, where all we ever got was the catatonic ex-heroin addict (who didn't even get any dialogue in a two-hour flick) and the hero's girlfriend, who was so cringing and colorless that you were relieved when the villain bumped her off. Ick.
I don't know who coined the term "men with breasts." Probably Roger Corman. It's useful shorthand to describe the sort of comic book female character that adolescent boys prefer. Although these days, they're called "strong female characters."
ReplyDeleteI don't really have a problem with that in adventure stories. Maybe it would be out of place in a Pinter play, but that's a different animal, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteFrank Miller once lauded the character of Maid Marian in the old Hollywood production of Robin Hood, saying that a character like Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark was "a boy's woman, not a man's woman," or whatever. That a "real man" could never feel passion for somebody so "girlish."
Well, we all know what kind of "girl" ol' Frank grew up to write, so that should be a warning in and of itself. :p Anyway, it's a stupid thing to say. It's not as if the people who made Robin Hood were making a "less adolescent film" just because Maid Marian never put on pants and shot arrows at anyone.
I'm not sure I understand that Miller quote. But then, sexuality in is films is as confused and immature as his writing. (ex: "The 300") So there ya go.
ReplyDeleteBut to understand Tarantino you really have to understand Corman and what's loosely known as the "Corman Formula." It all has to do with marketing cheaply made exploitation or "grindhouse" films and whatnot - I won't bore you with the details - the upshot being that, in order to plausibly dodge accusations of rank misogyny, one must leven the film's ultra-violence in some socially redeeming way. Thus the "strong woman" was born.
The point isn't to show women as strong, capable people on their own terms. The point is to paint the screen with blood and gore in order to titillate the target audience (males ages 13-35 generally). Put a woman behind the shotgun blowing off another woman's head in graphic 3D technicolor splendor, and you can plausibly deny you're pandering to the fantasies of misogynistic bastards for cash.
And that's all Tarantino does in his films. The fact that his visual style and production values is better than Corman's ever were (or could hope to be) is neither here nor there. Tarantino makes popular trash (as guilt-free as possible) for a dumbed-down, immature audience of juveniles. The fact that it was nominated at all calls into question the Oscar awards continued usefulness as a gauge of film quality. The fact that Marcott panders to her know-nothing demotard fanbase by lauding that piece of faux-exploitation garbage calls into question her so-called "feminism."
Dude. Back the hell off my man. I'm not a dumbed-down juvenile, and I thought Basterds was one of the best pictures I've seen in years, man -- years.
ReplyDeletePanderdome may be a fucking moron politically, but she has a point about the Conventional Wisdom vis-a-vis WWII movies. I haven't seen a single picture about WWII that didn't focus entirely on the Good Old USA and take itself so goddamn' seriously that it made me want to spew (with The Great Escape and Kelly's Heroes being notable exceptions). Inglorious Basterds doesn't try to say anything, or pass on some kind of Message, it's just a good old rip-it-up Tarantino picture, except it takes place in WWII -- and, somehow paradoxically, was also one of the funniest pictures I've seen in a long time. I found myself laughing my ass off without guilt even as people were being scalped or having their heads caved in with a baseball bat.
I also rather liked that Basterds hit the theaters fairly close to the Christmas season. I told all my friends, "screw that phony-assed, cloying, standard-issue warm'n'fuzzy Christmas movie bullshit and go see Inglorious Basterds instead -- it's the feel-good movie of the season, man!" ...not to mention the fun I had trying to pick out all the films Tarantino was paying tribute to while watching.
I mean, c'mon, man... Nazis die, how could I cry? How could I not feel good after an hour and a half of seeing filthy fascist muthafuckas being shot, knifed, scalped, burned alive and blown up?
I know that lately, I sure as hell have had the urge to drag a banker out of his office and into the street and get a few pals of mine to hold him down while I carve a big bloody dollar sign into his forehead, that's for goddamn' sure.
.
(DISCLAIMER: I've only seen one other Tarantino film, Pulp Fiction, and totally dug that one, too.)
Smithee:
ReplyDelete...The point isn't to show women as strong, capable people on their own terms. The point is to paint the screen with blood and gore in order to titillate the target audience (males ages 13-35 generally). Put a woman behind the shotgun blowing off another woman's head in graphic 3D technicolor splendor, and you can plausibly deny you're pandering to the fantasies of misogynistic bastards for cash...
I'll have to take your word for it, as I haven't seen the film. However, "Everyone in this film is a fucking stupid, violent moron whom I hate" is a somewhat more sensible objection to me than the tired trope about "men with breasts."
Hell, we had Maggie and Maddy (and now Hillary) as poignant reminders that a love of violent solutions for complicated problems need have nothing to do with one's chromosomes. Does that put me in agreement with Pander? [shrug] Tough toenails. I believed that long before I ever heard of her and I'll go on believing long after she's been supplanted by some even less original and compelling pundit wannabe in Blogland.
Oh, and btw -- just so you don't get the wrong idea, here's some of my other favorite films of all time:
ReplyDelete2001: A Space odyssey
Duck Soup
A Night At The Opera
Casablanca
A Hard Day's Night
Yellow Submarine
Amelie
Slackers
Clerks
Don't Look Back
Fahrenheit 911
Frankenstein (original)
Dracula (original)
THX 1138
Mike, you can like or not like whatever you want. It's still a semi-free country. The guilt-free stylized violence Tarantino peddles by ripping off the best scenes from lousy grindhouse pics and loosely stitching them together with campy plot lines was certainly a novel formula for producing disposable throw-away movie-like product.
ReplyDeleteThese days - not so much.
However, Panderdome's analysis of WWII films, and war films in general, is stuck in the 50s along with her politics. I'm not going to go into a long-winded lecture about the history of anti-war films from "All Quiet on the Western Front" to Terence Malik's remake of "The Thin Red Line." You can look that up on any reputable film site.
But I'm fairly sure that making people feel good about sawing the heads off WWII german soldiers (Nazis or not) doesn't qualify Bastards as an "anti-war" film. In fact, I'm pretty sure it qualifies as "fucking retarded."
I don't know that I particularly hate anyone in the film, Ms. X. The characters they're portraying are boring stock characters from exploitation films, but that's as may be.
ReplyDeleteWhat I object to is trying to pass off this character, which was invented for the sole purpose of deflecting feminist criticism from films that pander to the worst, most violent, most misogynistic teenage male fantasies towards women as being some kind of icon of feminist liberation.
What this lame stock character has to do with an amoral political hack like Hillary is quite frankly beyond me.
Smithee:
ReplyDelete...What this lame stock character has to do with an amoral political hack like Hillary is quite frankly beyond me.
Just that it makes as much sense to call such a fictional character a "man with breasts" as it does to call somebody like Hillary the same thing.
I agree, Ms X. I never called Hillary a "man with breasts" nor would I ever do so. It makes no sense.
ReplyDeleteWhat I mean is, the phrase is used to describe film characters, not real people.
ReplyDelete