Feminist Fiction (Film) Friday

I played hooky earlier this week and went to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I didn't really have the time to spare but I knew if I didn't go to see it this week, it would be gone by this week. And I was right. Marigold is not a particularly good movie. Every single plot twist in the film is telegraphed before hand. And yet...messy as it is, predictable as it is, the movie is totally enjoyable. Not the least of the pleasures is watching the actors. Judi Dench. Bill Nighy. Maggie Smith. Tom Wilkinson, Dev Patel (of Slumdog Millionaire). It's kind of like watching an actor's master class.
Nighy and Dench have worked together before in Notes on a Scandal, and although that is a very different movie it has something in common with Marigold--it has a couple of terrific parts for women who are no longer young; who are in fact ... old. Both Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are 78. (Tom Wilkinson is 64; Nighy is not yet 63.) Both Smith and Dench have resumes that go back to the middle of the last century. Dench's first credit on IMDB is 1959; Smith's first listing is 1955.  That's 1955 people--pre-Space Age.
In Marigold, both actresses play women who have been betrayed by the people they love. They're victims who ultimately refuse to be victimized and on their own terms, find happiness. They are not glamorous women. The camera zooms in on their fragile, wrinkled skin and it's a cruel contrast to the lovely, smooth-skinned ingenue who plays Dev's girlfriend in the film. And yet, the stories the audience want to see belong to the older actresses. (Nighy and Wilkinson are terrific in their roles too, but we are talking of women here.)

A day after I saw the movie, I started seeing the stills from the next James Bond movie, Skyfall. and there was a photo of Dench as "M" looking...stunning. Judi Dench and I are the same height (5'1") and believe me when I tell you how short that is. And yet...she looks like she could face down a couple of dictators before breakfast and still have time to whip out an economics treaty. In the movies that have always defined a very particular male fantasy, she is the woman in charge. I love that.
Then there's Maggie Smith.  Her role as the Dowager Countess is the reason everyone is so addicted to Downton Abbey. She is playing a powerful woman whose power has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with intelligence and cunning.
I love that these women are still getting terrific roles. As with Helen Mirren (67) and Meryl Streep (63), they are defining what it means to be a woman of une certain age on screen They play women of substance.
Just as I was the oldest person in the audience when I went to see Twilight, I was by far the youngest person in the audience at The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I sat behind a row of women in their 80s who loved every single moment of the movie. A lot of movies coming out of Hollywood these days marginalize women, make them into sex dolls and cartoons. But there is hope. Women like movies too--even women old enough to be great-grandmothers. It's nice to see a movie that celebrates life even in the "golden years."

Feminist Fiction Friday

One of my clients is looking for books featuring women cops who are partnered with other women a la Cagney & Lacey.  The book he had was really not good, so he challenged me to find one better. There's the Rizzoli & Isles books of course, but that's already been turned into a series. I realized that I couldn't think of any other books off the top of my head except for C.J. Lyons' books and her sleuths aren't cops, they're doctors and nurses.  Anyone have any ideas?

Seriously?

My alarm radio went off this a.m. and I woke to the voices of various people urging me to come see them on the Gulf Coast. Men and women with heavy Southern accents were saying their names and their home towns (Biloxi, Mississippi is the only one I can remember) and urging me to come on down. The sponsor for this travel commercial?  BP.  That's right. The people responsible for despoiling said Gulf Coast. 

Mother's Day Reading: "Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu

Mother's Day is coming and I have been reading stories about mothers for the 365 Short Story Challenge I've been involved in. I ran across this story by Ken Liu, which is in the archives of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. (You can read it online here.)
"Paper Menagerie" is a beautiful story, nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula Award and I don't know what won instead but this is a story that will haunt you. Check it out and then go to Liu's site to read his other stories, which have similarly been picked out for honors. He's a tremendously good writer.

Feminist (Non-) Fiction Friday--Erma Bombeck

When I was growing up there were a number of women writers whose stories of family life were published in magazines like Ladies Home Journal and McCalls and Good Housekeeping and in newspapers coast to coast.  There was Jean Kerr (wife to theater critic Walter Kerr and author of Please Don't Eat the Daisies), there was Peg Bracken of the I Hate to Cook cookbook. (Great recipe for oatmeal cookies but most of the other recipes are ...let's just say the title is not a joke.)

And then there was Erma Bombeck, whose obituaries described her as a "housewife humorist" when she died in 1996 at the age of 69. 

  Doesn't that sound ... dismissive? The "housewife humorist" had an audience of 30 million readers in 900 newspapers in North America. From 1965 until her death, she wrote more than 4000 newspaper columns. Every once in awhile when I'm looking for a recipe in one of my mother's cookbooks, I'll find a Bombeck column that she cut out and used as a bookmark. They always make me smile. "Housewife humorist?" I guess people need their labels. But she was no hobbyist proto-mommy blogger, the lady could write.

When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, 'I used everything you gave me'.--Erma Bombeck (See more quotes here.)

Billy Bishop Goes to War--the Movie

One of the best experiences I ever had at the theater was at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A. where John Gray and Eric Peterson performed their play, Billy Bishop Goes to War. (It won the L.A. Drama Desk Award.)
Billy Bishop Goes to War is a musical based on the life of Canada's WWI flying ace, Billy Bishop of Owen Sound, Ontario. Peterson, one of Canada's best-known actors, played Bishop and a host of other characters, zipping in and out of the roles with the ease of changing a prop. It was an amazing show.  I've since seen it performed in other venues, by other actors, including, David Ogden Stiers (of M*A*S*H). He was so physically different from Peterson (tall, robust, balding compared to Peterson's slight, wiry frame and red hair) that it was strange at first but it was also an excellent performance.
Gray and Peterson have been performing the play for 30 years and now they've re-imagined it, tailoring the title character to Peterson's real age. They've also filmed it. It was supposed to be released on DVD last November, but if you search for it, all you find is a paperback copy of the play. You can watch the trailer here. You can buy a copy of the play here. I am going to track down the movie.

Richard Godwin interviews me

Richard Godwin, author of Mr. Glamour and Apostle Rising, as well as many, many short stories (including "Getting High on Daisy" in the Drunk on the Moon anthology) has interviewed me on his "Chin-Wag at the Slaughterhouse" blog.  We talk noir, Joseph Conrad, what scares us and more. You can read it here.