Dance or die

Natalie Portman has quite a metamorphosis.

We all know the story. Whatever the story is, we’ve likely heard or seen it in some form or another. And then Hollywood comes around, slaps some glitter on it, and sells it back to us for $10 a pop. ($15 for 3D and $20 for IMAX 3D.) Yes, Black Swan is hilarious.

But not unintentionally hilarious like Burlesque, no. Rather, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is a much cleverer two-fer: On the surface, it’s a sleek, psychological thriller and modern-day remake of Swan Lake; but just below the surface, it’s also a critique of showbiz, and in particular Hollywood’s oft-used storytelling tricks and motifs, some would say cliches. Although, it’s critique of Hollywood is not as dark and cynical as Billy Wilder’s was in Sunset Blvd, it’s no less scorching.

The storytelling archetypes are all there: the doppelgangers of Hitchcock’s and Bergman’s films. Hitchcock, in particular, as the “Master of Suspense” contributes quite a lot: there’s the overbearing, smothering mother; and there’s definitely something very Marnie-esque about Nina’s (Natalie Portman) frigidness. There’s the tip of the hat to All About Eve: showbiz as the endless star-making machine that chews people up and spits them back out, for no sooner has Nina taken over an “older” performer’s place than she has to watch her own back and keep an eye on her understudy (Mila Kunis).

Aronofsky is careful not to overdo things too much until the final act, when all hell breaks loose. The Kafkaesque (ha!) anti-metaphors and exaggerations converge with simplistic dialogue to make fun, I’m sure, of certain ham-fisted directors. “You are the only one standing in your way,” mutters the evil casting director to Nina a whole 30 or 40 minutes after the viewer had already gotten that point. Yeah, that also sounds like something someone would say in the clueless Burlesque.

The only critical flaw (or not) is the ending. The story is solipsistic like American Psycho and Aronofsky’s own Requiem for a Dream, so there’s quite a lot of subjectivity to be expected, but the quick back and forth shots between subjectivity and reality muddles the ending to the point of absurdity. I mean, the swan queen doesn’t “really” kill herself, does she? Does she?

But I know, it’s just a story. It’s just a performance. It might even win an Oscar or two.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

The irony isn’t lost on anyone when at the beginning of 9500 Liberty an elderly white man points his scolding finger at a group of Latino children and rants about them not speaking English or knowing the Constitution and the children rebuke him pointedly telling him that they do speak English and that before the white Europeans arrived, the land belonged to Native Americans. Underlying their we’re-just-like-you defense is that the man’s rant ignores the central most tenet of the Declaration of Independence that everyone is endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights chief among them: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

When director Annabel Park asks the man why he is so angry, he explains the reason is that he heard a cashier at Lowe’s speaking Spanish, which betrays the fact that his rant is based more on his xenophobia than anything else. (The man’s justification for taking Native American land, “There was no Constitution,” recalls Chief Justice Marshall’s logic in Johnson v. McIntosh that implicitly established racial supremacy over Native Americans as the reason they didn’t “own” their land.) This opening scene sets the tone and lays bare the raw emotions the immigration debate stirs up in people.

Directed by Park and Eric Byler, 9500 Liberty chronicles the events leading up to the passage of a law in Prince William County, Virginia that required police officers to investigate a person’s legal status if there was “probable cause” to suspect that person was in the country illegally.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because the county’s immigration law is nearly identical to the one Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law in April.  And if there was any proof that Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration (and race baiting) law SB 1070 was a political tactic conveniently timed to galvanize the Republican base in time for the midterm elections, the proof in the pudding is 9500 Liberty. The heated debate after the passage of the county’s law ensues like a disturbing case of déjà vu, except of course this happened in Virginia in mid-2007. Spoiler alert: incumbent Republicans running on an anti-immigrant platform get to keep their seats.

Much of the film’s first half has already been seen by thousands of people on YouTube, where the project has its roots. Byler likes to call his film an “interactive documentary,” which points to not only his and Park’s meta presence in the film, but also the fact that viewers of the project on YouTube become part of the story. Byler says the film’s second half has changed significantly since the passage of the Arizona’s law, with his intent being on turning the film into a more positive and hopeful crystal ball for what can happen in Arizona.

Byler says he started the project hoping to cut down the middle and document for the ordinary citizen how the debate can overcome loud voices on the fringe right and left. Ordinary citizens, contends Byler, are put off and tune out of the political process by these people and their utter contempt for civil dialogue, who like to hijack town hall meetings with hysterical hollers and inciting hate speech. One such person may or may not be Greg Letiecq, a Glenn Beck-type provocateur and author of a rather hateful blog dedicated to bashing immigrants and sensationalizing crimes committed by people with Spanish last names.

Letiecq’s snide put-down of protest marches as being from the “leftist third-world” and flippant remarks when he sees people marching on the street chanting “Sí se puede!” are strange and tone deaf in that they seem ignorant of the fact the First Amendment protects the right of the people to peacefully assemble to redress grievances. Instead Americans, he insists, write letters to the editor. And presumably, also start blogs.

Incredibly telling is Letiecq’s justification of the immigration law, saying that since God helped elect the Board of Supervisors, its anti-immigrant agenda is actually God’s agenda, and therefore those speaking out against the board are also speaking out against God. (BTW, according to Letiecq slavery was God’s agenda, too.) I’m sure many other Christians would disagree.

Despite its scrappy videography (it did start as a web series, after all) 9500 Liberty soars by showing the deeply damaging effects a discriminatory law can have on the community. With SB 1070 scheduled to take effect in just weeks, it remains to be seen if Arizona too will follow Prince William County’s example and repeal the law. Come to think of it, it may not be so much a question of “if” but “when.”

Eight is Enough

What hath Ke$ha wrought?

The documentary 8: The Mormon Proposition plays out like an episode of one of those popular crime shows on TV. The scene of the crime? California. The perpetrator? The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The crime? Well, it’s not exactly a crime per se, but a rather series of ethically questionable events that led up to the passage of Proposition 8 in California that took away marriage rights for gay couples and redefined marriage in the state’s constitution as being between one man and one woman.

The film, directed by Reed Cowan and Steve Greenstreet, is really an indictment of the Mormon Church’s collusion of its religious activities with its covert political agenda to fundraise tens of millions of dollars from its own members and bankroll the campaign to put an end to marriage equality in California. Narrated by Oscar-winning writer Dustin Lance Black, who was raised Mormon himself and wrote the film Milk about slain gay rights activist Harvey Milk, the film exposes secret internal church documents that reveal the church’s deep involvement in the creation, campaign, and passage of Proposition 8. The roots of the church’s political operation in California can be traced to its involvement in the marriage equality battle in Hawaii in 1996 where it created the blueprint for what eventually happened in California: The church created a front group or “coalition” to obfuscate its direct involvement and strategically cast the group’s president as a “concerned” Anita Bryant-type mother to be supposedly unassailable to critics.

But by far the most disturbing fact brought to light is that church leaders leaned on their congregations like some sort of mob and made church members donate exorbitant amounts of cash to the Prop 8 campaign—some families cleaned out their retirement fund, while others cleaned out their children’s college savings accounts. It’s all rather heartbreaking and upsetting. The film connects this to the church’s complete intolerance of gay Mormon youth that results in disproportionate rates of homeless youth and suicides in Utah compared to other states.

What’s sad, as the film shows, is that the Mormon Church itself has a history of being persecuted in the United States by evangelicals, having been forcibly expelled from states like Missouri and Illinois before settling in the Utah territory. While the film does mention that Mormons believe in plural marriage families in the afterlife, it’s unclear why the film neglects to mention that in the post-Civil War Era, the federal government practically forced the church to end its practice of polygamy, through coercive tactics like denying polygamists basic civil rights like the right to vote—which is essentially the reason the church officially not only no longer sanctions plural marriages but in fact, excommunicates members who do engage in plural marriages. There’s a wasted opportunity to employ some dramatic irony here, but the Mormon Church’s history with marriage rights is messy and convoluted so it’s somewhat understandable that the film would sidestep the issue altogether.

For all its superb storytelling and investigative reporting and research, the film is at its weakest when it furthers its Mormons-are-bad-people storyline, which causes the film to lose what ought to be its focus: the church’s involvement in the Prop 8 campaign. That this happens multiple times in the film’s last two-thirds exacerbates the problem. For instance, a former Brigham Young student’s harrowing and torturous episode at the hands of other church members in the 70s has little bearing on what happened in California in 2008. It seems this part of the film is only there to prejudice viewers against the Mormon Church. Utah State Sen. Buttars asinine comments comparing gays and lesbians to radical Muslims are also immaterial to the story. We get it, Mormons really, really don’t like gay people, but this really paints Mormons with rather wide brushstrokes and is unfair even to the Mormons in the film that openly criticize the church leadership and tactics.

On the other hand, the film resonates when it connects its characters directly back to Prop 8. For instance, the film begins with the wedding of Tyler Berrick and Spencer Jones, who are both overjoyed when they are able to obtain a marriage license, which is then juxtaposed with the intolerance of their Mormon relatives.

For all its pillaging of its church members, it’s not entirely clear if the Mormon Church succeeded at anything other than spending tens of millions to take away rights for a possible short period of time. With the federal lawsuit Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which challenges the constitutionality of Proposition 8 in light of holdings in Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas, making its way to the Supreme Court, perhaps the Mormon church did ensure one thing: that it wouldn’t have the last word regarding marriage equality.

I couldn’t help but wonder: What’s with all the hate?

I was never an avid fan of Sex And The City, but just like I was never a fan of Seinfeld or Friends but still somehow ended up watching them, I was a casual viewer of SATC throughout its run on HBO. It’s rare to have a strong female lead on TV, it’s even rarer to have four in one show. Film, unfortunately, fares even worse. Unless it’s some formulaic romantic comedy starring Julia Roberts or Sandra Bullock, there really aren’t that many female-driven tent pole summer movies. And even those rom-coms get a label that movies like Avatar and Iron Man 2 don’t get.

I watched the first SATC, and didn’t like it very much. On the big screen, the show’s shallowness and self-indulgence was magnified to the point of almost being unbearable. It didn’t help that the Michael Patrick King, the film’s writer and director, approached writing SATC’s big-screen adaptation as a really, really (really) long TV episode. Cinema has very different rhythm than TV, and SATC rather disappointingly stuck with its TV in its timing and flow even if the sets were splashier and the costumes bolder.

I watched SATC 2, and while I thought it was an improvement over the first one, I wasn’t particularly impressed. However, I do think SATC 2 did not deserve the public stoning most reviewers gave to the film. Most of the harsh reviews SATC 2 received were unnecessarily hateful, loathsome, and ridiculous. I mean, since when was SATC 2 supposed to be the next Citizen Kane?

It really isn’t a surprise that almost every mainstream and not-so mainstream film critic blasted the film. Since SATC 2 begins with a wedding between two men it’s easy for people who can get married and take this civil right for granted to dismiss the scene as a joke and laugh at gays instead of laughing with them. The wedding scene, like the rest of the film, revels in its own campiness. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) in a tux as best man and Liza Minnelli as officiator of the wedding and performer of “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” are either excessive or supposedly offensive depending on which reviewer you read. Perhaps venerable film critic Roger Ebert’s confusion sums it best: “[Liza Minnelli’s] religious or legal qualifications are unexplained; perhaps she is present merely as the patron saint of gay men.” Yep, that’s the joke. You see, camp is a deliberate reworking of heterosexist cultural artifacts through a queer lens. It’s rather sad frustrating that gay people can’t get legally married, but instead of wallowing in that fact, why not rework the institution and get married anyway? Camp is also all about deliberate exaggeration often to the point of self-parody. Liza Minnelli’s rendition of a song that’s already campy may be too much for some people to handle, but that’s the point. Liza Minnelli is lampooning her status as a gay icon.

Here’s where SATC 2 does a much better job than the first film at establishing a mood and tone. Director Michael Patrick King’s sardonic camp is prone to being misunderstood and derided, as was his brilliant, post-SATC sitcom The Comeback, also on HBO and co-created with Lisa Kudrow. The Comeback was canceled after barely making it through one season.

It’s OK to criticize a film on its merits, but a lot of the criticism against SATC 2 slammed the film for daring to show something other than what is allowable under the heterosexual male gaze. For instance, a valid criticism of SATC 2 is that it’s too long and many reviews did criticize the film for it, but reviewers rather disappointingly also used the film to point out things “women of a certain age” aren’t allowed to do. Ebert said in his review, “I don’t know a whole lot about fashion, but I know something about taste, and these women spend much of the movie dressed in tacky, vulgar clothing. Carrie and Samantha also display the maximum possible boobage, oblivious to Arab ideas about women’s modesty. There’s more cleavage in this film than at a pro wrestler’s wedding.” Translation: “I don’t need to see that!” In the same vein, showing things he doesn’t find sexy is also a no-no for Mr. Ebert: “And crotches, have we got crotches for you. Big close-ups of the girls themselves, and some of the bulgers they meet. And they meet some. They meet the Australian world cup team, for example, which seems to have left its cups at home.” Translation: “Ewww, camel toes and guys’ bulges.” Plus, since the coinage of the term “cougar,” it’s simply irresistible not to use it to describe at least one character. The Village Voice’s Ella Taylor, in her review titled “Aging Disgracefully,” rather predictably calls Samantha (Kim Catrall) “the sex-crazed cougar.” Meanwhile, Mr. Ebert calls Samantha “a sexaholic slut.” Just for kicks, here’s how Ebert described James Bond in the 22nd Bond film: “Daniel Craig remains a splendid Bond, one of the best. He is handsome, agile, muscular, dangerous.”

If it hasn’t been obvious by now, Roger Ebert’s review was by far the most irritating in terms of its gratuitous ha-ha sexism is funny tone. In the last paragraph of his review, Ebert writes in his mocking tone and offers a consolation prize for “male couch potatoes” “dragged” to see the film: you get to ogle at women’s cleavage! Ebert punctuates this discovery by asking rhetorically, “Do women wear their lowest-cut frocks for each other?” Somewhere in the middle of faux concern and frat-guy high fives, Ebert ends up sounding like an ass. But this really shouldn’t be surprising for a guy who begins his review: “Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of Sex and the City 2 are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row. Their defining quality is consuming things.” Translation: “These bimbos irritate me.” Groundbreaking. (Meanwhile, I’m sure after preaching about consumerism, Mr. Ebert went back to his Twitter to dish about his iPad and losing his MacBook in Cannes.)

Another thing that comes up in reviews is how the films deviate from what the TV show was. Everyone has his or her own revisionist idea of what SATC was or used to be before it hit the big screen. It’s all basically bullshit.

For one, the show was always shallow and tended to focus on trivial matters of the upper class. This a show where episodes were titled “My Motherboard, My Self” (Carrie’s relationship troubles are mirrored in her laptop troubles) and “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” (Carrie feels slighted by a former friend because of some missing shoes), and where the premise of the series finale was Carrie’s oh-so difficult choice between her life in New York City or her new life in Paris. Aside from some of the show’s B and C plotlines (Samantha’s cancer and Charlotte’s fertility problems), SATC wasn’t a show people watched for its depth and diversity. And that’s OK, SATC was really an escapist show, where viewers were allowed to live vicariously and allowed to believe a freelance columnist can make enough money to own that ginormous apartment in Manhattan and buy designer shoes and clothes.

Additionally, the charge that SATC 2 perpetuates gay stereotypes is pretty ridiculous. Roger Thomas’s rant about the film’s gay characters in Salon is tantamount to “they’re too gay and I don’t like it.” Thomas also makes a series of silly and unfounded allegations about SATC in general:

“The two main gay characters, Carrie’s chubby pal Sanford (Willie Garson) and Charlotte’s sassy BFF Anthony Marantino (Mario Cantone), are tragically asexual helpmates whose main role has always been to provide relationship advice to the show’s straight female characters, fling bitchy quips, or let their flamboyant outfits serve as a visual punch line.”

I don’t know what show Thomas was watching but the show made it pretty clear Stanford and Anthony had sex lives before they became a couple in the first movie. In fact, in one episode we see Stanford’s then-boyfriend going down on him, which is by far way more than a show like the supposedly more progressive Modern Family would ever dare to even imply.

Another problem for Thomas is Stanford and Anthony’s coupling: “It’s the clichéd, condescending hetero fantasy, the one in which you introduce the only two gay men you know, and magically, the sparks fly.” Again, no, that’s not how it happened. In fact the show specifically made fun of that hetero fantasy in the episode where Carrie tripped and fell on the runway. Here, Charlotte introduces Anthony to Stanford and they instantly dislike each other. This episode set up a rivalry between the two that lasted through the entire series, and it wasn’t until the first film that they shared a kiss independent of their being brought together by either Carrie or Charlotte (Kristin Davis). It was a rather genuine moment because the romance was on their terms and not anyone else’s.

In fact, I would say Thomas’s piece ranks close to Ramin Sedooteh’s piece in Newsweek in terms of its glorification of heterosexism. Both Sedooteh and Thomas are overly concerned and preoccupied with how heterosexual viewers perceive gay people. For Thomas, this means Stanford and Anthony exist only as punchlines and minstrel representations of gay men, when that’s not at all the case. But facts are really irrelevant in Thomas’s attack of the show in this little gem of a paragraph:

“Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a glitzy, kitschy wedding, or a gay man who loves fashion, but the problem is the fact that, in the Sex and the City universe, that’s the only form of gayness that exists. The characters are stuck with a neutered marginality, a world bathed in sparkles and camp in which the term “broom” isn’t considered offensive or infantilizing and Liza Minnelli still rules the discos. It’s a culture, unbeknownst to many straight Americans, that has long since disappeared from the life of the vast majority of gay men. For people my age, who came of age in the ’90s, the mainstreaming of gay culture meant pushing away from those clichéd ideas of gayness and finding new icons. Not Liza but Ellen. Not show tunes but indie rock.”

I’m not going to say SATC was a beacon of progress in depicting gays and lesbians, but it actually faired pretty well in depicting a range of “gayness” beyond just Stanford and Anthony. I’m not doing any in-depth research here, but even I remember the time: Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is mistaken for a lesbian, Samantha dates a woman for several episodes, Carrie dates a bisexual man, Samantha befriends her transgendered neighbors, a suspected closeted guy (Nathan Lane) marries a woman in the Hamptons, Carrie attends a queer prom. I’m sure I’m missing other examples, but the point is that no, Stanford and Anthony aren’t the only depiction of “gayness” that exists in the SATC universe. And no, the term “broom” isn’t “infantilizing or offensive,” it’s camp meant to lampoon the strict gender binaries of heterosexual marriage. Finally, I don’t know where Thomas gets the idea that Liza and Ellen or show tunes and indie rock are mutually exclusive for gays to like.

SATC 2 is no more inane and self-indulgent than Iron Man 2. There are valid criticisms against the film, to be sure, but the way the film was ridiculed reinforced ideas of what is acceptable for men and what is acceptable for women. If there is one irony is that the film itself criticizes these perceptions of women being “nagging bitch wives” or “dressing inappropriately for their age” or just even having a voice. It’s disappointing the media went and proved what the film said was right and collectively told these women to STFU.

Love, thorns and all

La Mission is a brutally honest portrayal of a single father Chicano struggling to cope with acceptance of his son’s homosexuality.

Che (Benjamin Bratt), a man born and raised in San Francisco’s Mission district, is supportive of his honor roll and UCLA-bound son Jess (Jeremy Ray Valdez), until he discovers photos of Jess and his boyfriend kissing. Che closes up and in an irrational bout of rage, kicks Jess out of the house. In the periphery, the film addresses gentrification, feminism, and race-class relationships namely though the character of Lena (Erika Alexander), an African-American woman and Che’s neighbor. Early in the film, Che accuses Lena of “slumming it” in the barrio to be hip.

Nonetheless, at the heart of the story is Che’s relationship with Jess, and how Che’s discovery of his son’s secret creates an estrangement between them he struggles mightily to overcome. His discovery of Jess’s homosexuality destabilizes Che’s identity for he struggles to reconcile his hyper-masculine macho image with acceptance of his son and the notion that Jess is somehow a reflection of his own masculinity.

That is not to say the film paints Chicanos with broad strokes. The film is nuanced in its portrayal of Latinos: Yes, some react like Che, but also some are welcoming and accepting like Che’s brother, who at one point in the film reminds Che of a proverb their mother used to say: “De la espina y el dolor, sale la flor” (“From the thorn and the pain, emerges the flower”).

Writer and director Peter Bratt’s attention to detail is clear in his eye for symbolism and meticulous mise-en-scene. Bratt makes careful use of symbols of Chicano culture like lowrider cars, religious icons, and indigenous imagery. His writing and construction of the screenplay is superb, though the less-than-subtle foreshadowing leaves something to be desired.

La Mission is the type of film that the Hollywood industrial complex almost never finances or releases, which is why this independent release, which showed at Sundance in 2009 with the likes of Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, is making its final push through its theatrical run before the film is released on DVD on August 10.

Best Pictures

3. The Dark Knight

2. Milk (tie)

2. Slumdog Millionaire (tie)

1. WALL•E

My name is Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you…

Sitting in the theatre scantly filled theatre watching Milk was a surreal, extraordinary experience. The film wasn’t what I expected at all—and that’s a good thing. I expected a carefully choreographed biopic about the slain gay icon Harvey Milk, instead I got a tour-de-force, seamless docu-drama about the San Francisco city supervisor’s life and untimely death. Director Gus Van Sant’s decision to weave real, achieve footage only heightens the timeliness of the film in the wake of the passage of Prop. 8 in California.

The film shocks you at times, reminding you quite paradoxically of how far things have progressed and how things are relatively the same if not worse. Having seen the 1984 documentary by Rob Epstein The Times of Harvey Milk (which won an Oscar), I was familiar with Milk’s story, but Van Sant’s masterful seamless editing between real life, the script by Dustin Lance Black, and meticulous reenactments with Sean Penn makes the story feel vivid and present. The scenes where Milk battles the Anita Bryant-fueled Proposition 6 crusade in California is filled with ironic moments: Jimmy Carter in the mid-terms campaigning against Prop. 6 isn’t surprising, but seeing Ronald Reagan, then-popular former governor, rising star of the conservative Right, and soon-to-be president; urging voters to vote no on Prop. 6 left me wondering why so many high-profile politicians were so low-key the second time around, especially in light of the astronomical historic aspect of the election.

But what’s really extraordinary about the film is that you feel it, that it’s real. Sitting alone in the row of seats, I could hear people behind me sniffling—perhaps because of the agnition not only in the film with the movement and Harvey Milk’s death, but between the film and real life. Our realization that the hope and change Harvey Milk represented was robbed from us and as this election showed, has never come back.

Visual Design and the Femme Fatale in The Verdict

The visual design of the film The Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982) is important in many ways because it informs the viewer a great deal about each important character—giving us a glimpse, or a window, into a character’s personality and internal conflicts. In terms of the composition of the film’s mise-en-scène, as Michael Asinow and Shannon Mader observe, we learn important details about Frank Galvin’s life simply by looking at what’s inside the frame (51). Furthermore, as Cynthia Lucia argues, the film’s cinematography telegraphs to the audience suspicions about the character of Laura Fischer (40). Even though the film adheres for the most part to the genre conventions of the courtroom drama, it also borrows from the conventions of film noir.

From the beginning opening shot of the film, with its meticulous construction, the mise-en-scène becomes an important method of communication in the film—conveying to the audience a sense of the trials and tribulations of Frank Galvin’s life. In the opening shot we see an obscured, shadowy Galvin in the foreground, and the only other things we see are the lights of the pinball machine, the overcast gray daylight outside the window, and a beer mug illuminated on the windowsill. This opening shot evokes the conventions of a hard-boiled noir, introducing Galvin in a way that a typical male noir protagonist would be introduced with obscured lighting and the obligatory cigarette smoke.

The pinball machine recurs two more times in the film, this time with Galvin less obscured in the foreground: once after he’s trashed his office, and again after he decides to take the case to trial, which reinforces to some degree the idea that Galvin is playing a game with his career and not taking his profession as seriously as he should. As Asinow and Mader say, most of the scenes with Galvin are “confined and lacking in color,” which starkly contrast with the “almost palatial” and brightly colored offices of Concannon and the Boston Archdiocese (51). This sets up a dichotomy achieved through mise-en-scéne with the use of muted colors and drab furniture associated with Galvin that compels the viewer to root for him because of his status as an underdog. This construction in the story also evokes the archetypal David and Goliath story—with Concannon and the Boston Archdiocese cast as the gigantic (and resourceful) beast unwilling to pay the proper price for medical negligence; and Galvin as the potential hero, whose career and personal redemption rests on winning the case.

The film’s Laura Fischer, who’s cast in the mold of a femme fatale, evokes the genre conventions of film noir. The first time we see Laura, she is somewhere in the background in the same bar where we were introduced to Galvin, away from the camera, and we only know she is there because Galvin sees her, approaches her and strikes up a conversation with her. Then, we cut to a shot from behind Laura’s head as Galvin walks toward her. Even when she responds to the questions Galvin asks her, at first her face is still away from the camera, which goes to the point Lucia makes that Laura’s “presence defines her as menacing and truly unknowable” (40). In fact, we only get to see her face when she turns and asks Galvin, “And what are you? A cop?” She turns her face back away from the camera and we only get a profile of her face.

The prolonged suspense in introducing Laura builds up in the viewer a sense of curiosity about who she is—a curiosity that leads us to judge harshly in the bedroom scene that Lucia cites, where in addition to what Lucia says about the mise-en-scène conveying a sense of entrapment (40), the lighting is purposely unforgiving on her face, giving her harsh shadows on the left side of her face, particularly her eye. This in addition to the tension-building music growing louder while her scolding rant grows harsher; music that’s quelled when Galvin shuts the bathroom door on her reinforces the viewer’s suspicions about her and compels the viewer question Laura’s loyalty. The viewer’s curiosity is ultimately answered at the end of the film: Laura’s a shady and untrustworthy woman, who unlike Galvin, is unworthy of redemption.

Ironically, Laura’s rant may have been the impetus that lights a fire under Galvin to find creative ways around the roadblocks he’s encountered with the case; which makes Laura a more complicated character because she’s seemingly more threatening and inscrutable to the viewer, even after watching her consumed in alcohol at the end of the film. There are still questions about Laura’s character and her motives, like whether or not she planned to tell Galvin the truth before she was punched in the face, or what were her true motives behind that scolding rant in the bedroom—whether she meant it to motivate Galvin or crush him under the pressure of trying to win an unwinnable case.

Regardless of the ambiguity of her motives, however, the film does want the viewer to judge Laura harshly at the end of the film—presenting us with the pathetic drunk Laura has become, and the viewer is inclined to side with Galvin in refusing to take her phone call, feeling she must pay a price for her betrayal.

Sex and the City

The film adaptation of Sex and the City is a little too long, and clunky.

Cons: It doesn’t make a smooth transition from TV. The cuts and edits, and montages feel overly laborious, the show had more breathing room and didn’t feel as superficial (even though it was). There are passing references to writers block, and I think Michael Patrick King probably had some serious episodes of this while writing the screenplay.

Some things just don’t make sense: Why ditch the cliche at the beginning, then wholeheartedly embrace it at the end?–seems self-indulgent. The whole beginning and end sequences were a tad tacky–come on, referencing the song titles in the voice over?

J-Hud’s character Louise deserves more depth–that whole keychain-love thing was sappy. Are we even supposed to care about her ex-bf?

Also: what was up with that calendar thing? It felt totally inorganic and forced. There really isn’t any point to all the marking of the months.

Pro: Stanford and the bitchy queen together, no explanation.