Wednesday, December 26, 2007

does kate hudson's new movie Fool's Gold give anyone mommy-daughter deja vu?

Monday, December 24, 2007

so today began my big move to the new apartment in my parents' basement. it actually didn't take long, and now the place is pretty much ready to go, except for the cable and internet. the big problem is, there is this big empty space in the living room that i don't know how i'm going to fill. so i'm opening it up to suggestions. i was thinking about trying to get a pool table on craigslist, any other ideas?

Saturday, December 22, 2007

in honor of the fact that oxygen played "bend it like beckham" twice consecutively the other night, and the fact that i watched it both times, i thought i'd finally write that post i've always wanted to write about why it is the gayest movie ever. well, i mean besides the fact that it was originally supposed to be a lesbian movie (check imdb). subtext is a powerful tool, and even without having the two main characters officially have any sort of romantic involvement, the movie gives you the full effect. i'm going to list the reasons why.
1- where to start? okay, keira knightley's haircut in that movie.
2- both girls are definitely introduced as being kinda "queer". jess, in her preference for playing sports, wearing track pants, and not owning shoes besides sneakers, is contrasted with her superfeminine engaged sister, who asks "don't you want all this?" as she plans her wedding. it's clear jess's answer is no. her mother asks her who will want to marry a girl who is great at soccer but can't make round chipoti, and it's clear that she's like who cares.
3- juliet, who will only buy sports bras, is constantly nagged by her mother to give up the sports and care about boys. when her mom says she saw "that kevin" walking with a girl, juliet says "kevin can shag whoever he wants," cuz she don't care. also, according to her mom, she has posters of butch women all over her room.
4- juliet's "discovering" jess and recruiting her for the girls' soccer team plays like a chick spotting a cool, hot chick and telling her she digs her. lots of footage of juliet watching jess playing soccer from across the park, very cute.
5- jess's relationship with her coach is a forbidden love because he is not indian, and jess's choice of an "other" as a sexual partner serves as a metaphor for a homosexual relationship.
6- along those lines, jess's best male friend comes out to her as gay, so the film contains someone coming out of the closet. his homosexuality is clearly compared with jess's situation, so as a viewer it is not difficult to make the leap and see him as a foil for jess and her as a queer heroine.
7- i would feel like i was pushing it with number four, except that jess's choice of a lover is jonathan rhys-meyers, who is probably the least not-gay actor in hollywood these days. that's what's so brilliant about having him in the middle of the love triangle. like these two smart, hot women are head over heels for that guy? did they see him doing the airplane at the end of the movie? also, if juliet actually is supposed to be gay, it would make sense that she only "likes" one guy, and it's her unavailable coach.
8- when juliet spots jess kissing the coach, her first response is "you bitch!" and it seems that she's more focused on jess's betrayal than on the coach's choice to try to make it with jess. maybe because she wanted to be the one jess was smooching.
9- then there's the subplot where juliet's mom mishears their fight and thinks that it was about jess breaking juliet's heart (which it was, but whatever). so we get to watch the mother come to terms with her daughter's homosexuality. this is especially interesting because we get to see certain scenes through the mother's eyes, like when juliet and jess kiss after discovering that the talent agent saw their game. while we know that it is platonic, we see how through her reading of the situation, something more is going on. this is the director giving us a clue of how we should be watching the movie, reading between the lines to see the lesbian subtext.
10- there's just so much sport playing. you know who likes watching girls play sports? lesbians.
11- at the end, who rides off into the sunset together (or flies off on an airplane to america)? not jess and her boyfriend, who is too busy running around the cricket field with his collar up. nope, it's jess and juliet, who are going to be playing on the same soccer team in california. ladies, why don't you just save time and move to san fran?
12- when juliet's mother finally confronts her about the gay thing, and juliet clears it up (until 3 months later when her mom will get a phone call from america, "um mom, actually yeah.") in response to her mom's jubilation, juliet is all "and so what if i was? there's nothing wrong with being a lesbian." aw, go gay pride.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

shit. i was so excited about seeing Sweeney Todd, it being the combined work of my favorite favorite composer/lyricist and a director i like pretty well (even if his last few works have been crap). and i was even surprised to see that the times gave it a pretty good review. But it gave the reviewer nightmares! and that doesn't bode well for me. the olsen twins "double double toil and trouble" gave me nightmares. i'm moving into my basement. i can't go see sweeney todd.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

also if you like reading hilaaarious recaps of lesbian tv shows (or at least L word and south of nowhere), you'll love this blog, which has kept me entertained for the last three weeks at work, and i don't know what i'm going to do now that i've finished reading all of the backlogs. we need new seasons!
boot, tila picked the guy. that's why don't date straight girls.
also, i started my internship yesterday, and i'm feeling really good about it. i mean, i'm sick as hell of being an intern, and i wish i was making some money. but i feel like i'm on the right track, like i see the kind of stuff that the people with the real jobs at my company are doing, and i would totally like doing that job. tv is awesome! and take that asia society, who didn't hire me. my lovely new boots are now walking me elsewhere's, and it's way cooler.

Friday, December 14, 2007

do you ever wonder why pregnant women don't tip over? yeah, me either, cuz that's the fucking dumbest thing i've ever heard.
sorry, guess i'm a little crabby cuz my shift at the bookstore's going an hour and a half longer than i thought it would.
i dunno what's up with all the anti-abortion messages coming from hollywood lately. first there was knocked up, which basically ignored the reasonable question of why the main character wouldn't choose to get an abortion on discovering her pregnancy from a one-night stand. actually, that didn't even bother me that much, because i figured that's just how she feels, she doesn't have to prove anything to me. but then comes another movie about young'uns getting pregnant, juno.
this time, the girl seems within a pretty obvious age range for getting an abortion, 16 yrs old. juno is planning on getting an abortion, and goes to the clinic. on the way in, she runs into a lone fellow student protesting abortion. she kind of mocks the girl, until the girl's bogus claim that the baby already has fingernails hits a chord. walking in, she receives an odd greeting from a young dyed-hair, pierced receptionist who tells her about the way flavored condoms make her boyfriend's balls taste, and tells her she has to write her entire sexual history on a form.
now, i guess a defender of the film would say that juno ended up not getting an abortion because of her irrational fear based on the false information about the baby's fingernails. i actually think the movie gave the impression that abortion clinics are unfriendly and unprofessional places, and that the character was actually misplacing the fear of its strangeness onto the issue of fingernails. i think after seeing this representation of an abortion clinic, a teenage girl would be very hesitant to go.
personally, i guess i'm not sure how important all this stuff is. knocked up was kind of a non-issue i thought, even though many of my friends argued that it seemed a very anti-abortion movie. but i think just having seen the second one of these within the year, and one that goes even farther against the fact that sometimes abortion is the right choice, and especially as roe v wade is coming back to the supreme court, i think something foul is afoot in lala-land. who doesn't want us to get our abortions?

Monday, December 10, 2007

it's funny. when i first got home, people told me about an mtv show called "a shot at love with tila tequila" and how tila is bisexual and so there are both men and women on the show competing for her love. i was vaguely intrigued, and decided to check it out. actually i wasn't intrigued at all, but i watch so much tv that i was bound to catch it sometime. actually, that wasn't even what happened. i just watched one of the commercials and saw one girl pulling another girl's hair and calling her a bitch. and that confirmed what i had expected of the show, that the "bisexuality" was just an excuse to have slutty, jersey-stripper type women on the show for guys to gape at, with the added bonus that they might make out with each other.
when there were only four competitors left, i finally watched an episode. i'm glad i did, and since then i've grown quite attached to the show. this is mostly because it took a turn that i doubt the show's planners expected. namely, dani. the initial female competitors were about 99 percent trashy looking femme-y girls, and one percent dani, the cute butch firefighter. at least thats the impression i've gotten from one of the tila tequila marathons, though i think i changed the channel pretty quickly.
the point is that now, it's down to two people- dani and bobby. i like this because it feels like the show started with the idea of "oh yeah dude, lesbians are hot." and now it's gotten much more to the truth of what is hot for lesbians. or i mean we all like a pretty woman, but then there are the Shanes (from the L word) of the world, who score big in the lesbian world, but get little attention from the larger american culture. and this is, obviously, because men aren't into them. "lesbians are so hot," sure, unless they're butch.
and that's what's so beast about how dani has made it down to the last two. first of all, it's nice to see a hot butch woman getting this much tv time on a non-gay network, especially one that lots of teenage girls are watching. second, it seems like none of the men really took the women as competition for most of the show. and kind of rightly so, because most of them had very little chemistry with tila, and looked like most of their experience kissing women was at strip clubs. but now, bobby is kind of like "shit. this woman has all of the masculine energy i do, but also understands women."
i have a feeling dani is not going to win, the big two reasons being that recently 1- tila was accused of being straight, so obviously she is not dating a woman, and 2- dani was apparently at the go-nyc party, looking quite single. which is sad, because it really seems like she has it in the bag and bobby could have gotten a much-needed kick in the ass. either way, it's nice to see a real lesbian dynamic treated with a decent amount of respect, and it's funny to think that it came from such an unbelievably trashy source.

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

the world is a cold place for a big-footed woman. after committing the fashion faux pas of wearing sneakers to a job interview, i realized it was time to grow up and get some real shoes. with my sister along for the ride to give fashion advice, i headed out to soho to buy me some classy footgear. unfortunately, this and subsequent trips have brought back some painful repressed memories, and i realized that it wasn't due to fashion preferences that i had given up buying nice shoes. buying shoes when you have big feet is miserable. okay, in the first place i've got very specific tastes when it comes to nicer shoes. in the second place, being very tall (which is often accompanied by having big feet), i'm always looking for the flattest shoes available. so my first challenge is to find the style i want without heels. not easy! it seems every woman in the world wants to be a lot taller than they are except me. sorry. so, say i finally find a really cute pair of shoes, and magically (i'll come back to this later) they are in my size. nice? wrong! i would say about 75% percent of shoes that look cute in a normal size suddenly look hideous when they are a large size. especially when they are flat, as heeled shoes can hide the extreme largeness of a shoe. but you know what? that doesn't even matter, because i rarely even reach that point of the shopping experience. nobody carries shoes over a size ten! and for the nail in the coffin, apparently shoemakers have stopped making half sizes for the bigger-footed women. i'm a ten and a half. okay there, i said it. i'm a monster. oh, but the point is, elevens are too big. i don't even know what i'm supposed to do about this. there are no shoes that fit me. aargh! so, anyone who has resented tall women, now you know how much shit can suck for us. next time, just look over at our giant, ugly shoes and then remember the last time you went shoe shopping, you saw a shoe you liked, and you bought it. damn.

Monday, December 03, 2007

hey blog.
the nicole/jessica woman from heroes was in melissa joan hart's "drive me crazy." she played adrian grenier's ex-girlfriend. also, i'm watching heroes right now, and it sucks. i wish i was that mexican girl with the creepy attachment to her brother so i could kill everyone on the show. oh shit, sylar just shot her. never mind.
um, why was i writing this entry. oh yeah, public service announcement- i have taken two shifts at park slope books, so please come visit me from 6-11 on saturday or 5-10 on sunday, 7th avenue between 2nd and 3rd st. bring me some food if you want, i get hungry.