Jennifer deBie's Blog, page 4

I love movie trailers

Contains spoilers for Million Dollar Baby (2005), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), and Charlie’s Angels (2019)

I love movie trailers.

That two-minute hit of emotion, the music, the character-establishing jokes and ‘stinger’ as they go out. It’s a high that I have spent too many hours combing YouTube for.

A well-made trailer is the film distilled. It’s a microcosm of what the viewer will be buying a ticket for: a bill of goods. It holds just enough back, a third act twist, a surprise character reveal, a fortune’s reversal, that the whole story isn’t told in those two minutes.

It deceives the viewer, but with the promise that the viewer will be glad for the deception in the end.

Examples?

Let’s talk about Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2005). The goods, as promised by the trailer, are gruff coach Eastwood, hopeful boxer Hilary Swank, and Morgan Freeman as the wise adviser. There’s a priest, a disapproving mother, an absent daughter—story elements that we’ve all seen before in some form or another.

And we’ve all seen sports movies. We know this underdog story.

But, I promise, you don’t know this underdog story.

And I won’t spoil it more than that, but the third act of this film changes everything. The list of goods that you were sold shifts and the story explores tragic nuance in a way that we don’t often see from Eastwood anymore. And if you’ve braced yourself emotionally and sent the children off to another room, it’s a well I would recommend you plumb.

On the lighter side, take Mike Newell’s Mona Lisa Smile (2003).

Julia Roberts as a progressive new art professor at a stuffy New England women’s college in the 1950s. There’s a flirty Italian professor, who we know Roberts ends up with because in two minutes and twenty seconds the trailer shows them together in about 10 different scenes, including bed, there are precocious students (Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Ginnifer Goodwin), who we know are precocious because they show off in class, and enough shots of idyllic, upper-crust New England life to let you know what kind of community is surrounding our players.

Again, we’ve seen this teacher-tackles-new-school-and-becomes-beloved story before. It’s comfort food.

And Mona Lisa Smile is comfort food, but there’s more substance than simple warm fuzzies.

The Italian professor is fun, but also sleeps with his students, has tacitly lied about service in WWII, and is primarily important in that he delivers our film title in the stinger at the end of the trailer.

But the students.

There’s this moment in the third act:

Dunst has married before graduation and moved out of the dorms.

Her husband has the pedigree, to make their families happy, and questionable lovability. He has checked the homemaker box on his life plan, and now has a career to build, dinners to miss, and a doting wife to neglect. Dunst has gone to her mother about this, and been told in prime, mid-fifties, old-money fashion, that this is the job. That wives have been swallowing this bitter pill for generations and now it’s Dunst’s turn, so get over it.

Gyllenhaal is the slut of the group.

We know this because she has birth control and dates older men. It is while on one of these dates that Gyllenhaal sees Dunst’s husband with another woman. With her, the audience sees the liaison from a distance, and then Gyllenhaal’s recognition, and now we know she now has a grenade.

Dunst’s conventionality has been grating against Gyllenhaal’s liberalism all film, and now one has a bomb in her back pocket that will destroy the other.

Things come to a head in dorms one weekend.

Dunst is screaming. She’s calling Gyllenhaal a whore and worse because she needs a target for all this pain. She’s hurting someone else because she’s hurt. She’s been a bully and a bitch all movie and we, as the audience, know that this ire is a product of the pressures and repression piled onto a ferociously intelligent young woman, but we also secretly want her to go down.

We want that break, the crash that will humble her, and Gyllenhaal, standing there silently with the grenade in her back pocket and every reason to use it, seems primed to deliver this mean satisfaction.

Watching this movie for the first time, I wrote the line in my head. One sentence that would absolutely shatter. The kind of cutting, simple response that only happens in movies. The kind of response that, in real life, you would only think of hours after the confrontation ends.

Then Gyllenhaal hugs her.

Holds on to this girl who she hasn’t liked very much, but who just needs to be held.

Grace

Simple, unflinching, reckless acceptance.

It was a breathtaking moment in a beautiful film. The women are real, their joys and cruelties and triumphs are tangible, and the ending lingers between bittersweet and hopeful. This one, do watch with the kids, at least the ones old enough to sit through almost two hours of film.

If nothing else, for that moment between Dunst and Gyllenhaal. Kids should be exposed to ferocious forgiveness.

One last movie before we go, lets talk about Elizabeth Banks’ Charlie’s Angels (2019) and Kristen Stewart’s butt.

The trailer for this reboot of a reboot shows beautiful women, car chases, a dance sequence, some witty banter, and one very prominent shot of Stewart’s, white-clad posterior as she infiltrates a herd of jockeys at a horse race. There’s even a whipcrack sound for effect as she slaps her riding crop.

I don’t know, but I would bet money that this trailer was cut by a man.

It shows women as competent, but they’re also sexualized, and one of our central protagonists—an accomplished engineer/inventor, is given ten seconds to be stunned by a closet full of disguises and recklessly grab things in the weapons bunker, a lot of real estate when we’re looking at two minutes and twenty seconds of trailer—is made a little bit softer.

In the film, written and directed by Banks, a woman, Stewart’s ass is only filmed incidentally from a distance as she walks towards a crowd of other jockeys in silks. There is no whipcrack.

The dance sequence takes place in the center of a party, and the typical shots of cleavage, pelvic thrusts, and hip-shakes are, again, only filmed incidentally. The actresses are in ¾ profile shots most of the scene, and the whites of their eyes draw focus as they look up and around for guards on upper balconies at the glitzy party they’ve infiltrated. They’re beautiful, graceful, and clearly working.

The closet? It’s full of bulletproof leather jackets and bras that offer comfort, support, and an extra layer of Kevlar right over the heart.

The film industry is a notorious boys club. It could be another decade before true gender parity is achieved both in front of and behind the camera. It’s not often that women are given the budget and the freedom to pursue a vision like this, Patty Jenkins and Wonder Woman might be the only comparison in franchise films, so it’s a shame that Charlie’s Angels probably won’t be getting a sequel.

The box office doesn’t justify it.

The film isn’t a masterpiece. The plot could have been streamlined, and the cold open, while fun and important, should have had another pass to reaffirm some character relationships or lack thereof.

But, despite that, and the bad reviews: the actors have real chemistry and the dialogue is fun. The action set pieces are solid, the fights well-choreographed, and the empowerment message is there.

This Charlie’s Angels exists in a world where all of the women speak multiple languages, they design revolutionary power sources, shoot guns, ride horses, run NGOs, unapologetically eat cheese and drink wine, drive beautiful cars, and learn from every punch thrown at them. Seduction is not their go-to information gathering technique, and they don’t betray each other.

The women don’t betray each other.

What a world, eh?

Chase thunder lovelies, until next time

—JdB

The Obligatory New Decade Essay

The start of a year.

The end of a decade.

It seems I’m a little late marking the occasion, other writers and creators have done far more interesting and poignant things to show the change from 2019 to 2020. Among my favorites are Stephanie Burt’s piece on poetry for the new year in the Washington Post, and Dan Murrell’s Decade in Film supercut for Screen Junkies on YouTube. Both of which appeared in timely, polished fashion, whereas true to form my blog post on the subject is long overdue, and likely to have a few typos.

That said, it’s never stopped me before, why should a few swappde letters stop me now?

January 2010 saw me half-way through my junior year of high school, running something like 30 miles a week, and burning upwards of 5,000 calories a day. If you’d asked me to define myself then, I probably would have mentioned being a runner before speaking about marching band, Girl Scouts, FFA, NHS, or UIL. My senior year would be punctuated by ACT testing, college-campus tours, and saccharine melodrama over the last football game ever, but in January of junior year, that was still 10,000 miles away.

In the months and years that followed, I would move across Texas for school, then across an ocean. I would decide not to be a high school English teacher (terrible idea, I would be a headache for principals and parents alike). I would decide to continue with the novelist dream (though not the Great American kind, too much pressure and the scales are skewed towards the dead, the white, and the male, and I’m only working with 1/3 of those traits). In college, I would hurt my knee training for a half marathon and never run again like I did in high school.

In the past decade I learned how to write poetry, how to cook a decent meal, and how to appreciate a really good cup of tea. I had my heart hurt for the first time, and then moved a little further from home and had it broken properly.

I had an epiphany about the unkindnesses I’ve dolled out in my own life. Micro-aggressions, selfishnesses, gossip and cruel words. I learned that I am not graceful in heartache, and that my friends are better people than I deserve. I can only pray that pain will make me kinder.

I celebrated!

New friends came into my life and old friends stayed!

And most of them seem to be getting married in the next year! May happinesses multiply in all their hearts and homes. It is lovely to know that my friends are loved as they deserve to be loved, and that they will be celebrated as they ought to be.

I’ve read more books and watched more movies in the past decade than in the previous one. Was surprised and delighted that the stars re-aligned to create a sequel for my favorite, dumb zombie movie, and finally got through that white whale book that The Mentalist told me was one of the most difficult novels in the English language. I watched all four hours of Gone with the Wind one night in one of my favorite Cork pubs with a small, dedicated group of friends. It still stands as incredible art, no matter its lies about an antebellum dream that may, or may not have existed.

I’ve watched my country from across an ocean, and still stand with Allen Ginsberg when it comes to her flaws. May I always be as clear-eyed when it comes to what and who I love.

It has been a long, strange, wonderful trip of a decade. I have grown upward and outward in so, so many ways. Grown in directions that don’t always fold back down into the container of who I was when I lived in Redwater full time, or even when I lived in San Angelo.

I heard somewhere that over the course of eight years ever cell in a human body will be replaced. If so, then in a decade, mathematically speaking, I am a person and a quarter different from who I was in my junior year of high school. A Jenni and a bit removed from my 16 year old self.

Would we recognize each other on the street?

Would she even make eye contact? Jenni the Younger could be a shy little thing, until she went to college and decided that being afraid was boring.

This morning I dug out my high school yearbook from 2010, and there I was on page 100, smile was only a little stiff in a blue t-shirt and coconut shell earrings that I’ve still got around here somewhere. Alphabetically in my graduating class, I fell between Whitney Crosswhite and Chance Edwards, two people whose names and pictures I sat between every year for 13 years.

Someday, if any one of the three of us is famous, someone might find that interesting.

Until then, it’ll just be a factoid from a yearbook I rarely think about.

But it’s nice to take a minute and see how far we’ve come.

It’s nice, some days, to remember.

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The Images we Share

Pieces of one of the costumes I will be modeling, should modeling happen. Photo credit to the loveliest Silver.

 

 

A friend recently asked me to pose for some pictures.

The friend is an artist, the pictures will be modeling the elaborate costumes that she builds. Costumes inspired by video games and comics, making them garments that will cover more than my average bikini, but less than what I’d wear to a job interview.

And I’m happy to do this. To be asked.

It’s flattering to be asked to show off your body, especially when you’re as proud of your body as I am.

Running, yoga, walking up and down a hill every day, taking the stairs and being 26 with a high metabolism.

I look good.

I feel like I look good.

And I trust this artist.

So, of course, I said yes. I’m thrilled to model for her. Thrilled to see how the pictures will turn out if and when we manage to be in the same state at the same time to make this shoot happen.

My body. Her art. Our choice.

It’s a beautiful thing.

And I will just have to trust that when those pictures go up online other people, strangers the world over, will see them that way.

Recently, a congresswoman was a victim of one of the most terrifying cybercrimes women deal with today. A lawmaker for the most populous state in the most powerful nation on earth, a woman who by rights should be celebrating the containment of fires in her state and working to govern the rest of our nation, is leaving her office because of pictures on the internet.

Pictures posted by an irate ex-husband.

Pictures posted by someone she once trusted. Once loved.

In my lifetime, I have been exposed to more art, music, literature, and ideas than women at any other time on earth, because of the internet.

Because of YouTube alone I can watch the Royal Danish Ballet’s 2016 of Giselle, listen to Bill Wither’s 1973 concert for the BBC, and rewatch the latest Star Wars trailer in a single, lazy Sunday morning.

That’s one website. One out of the millions of websites out there.

Millions of websites visited by billions of people who make trillions of connections every day.

And somewhere in that maddening stream of data, women and men are made vulnerable every hour of every day. Made vulnerable by others posting images, videos, or other content that was never intended for mass consumption.

They lose agency in the distribution of their own data, and the internet eats them.

If it can happen to a congresswoman with a bad ex, are there guarantees that the art I will become a part of will stay art?

There aren’t.

The cost of all that information and all those brilliant points of connection is that they can be weaponized against a person.

They could be weaponized against me.

I’m just going to have to trust the big, bad digital world and pray that there are more interesting things out there than my bare midriff, a bit of thigh, or some cleavage.

In fact, I know there are.

I’ll keep you all posted when the shoot happens, if it happens. However this goes, it’s gonna be an adventure.

Fire on Stage

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!

how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how

express and admirable! in action how like an angel!

in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the

world! the paragon of animals!

-Hamlet, II.ii

 

Almost two decades ago, my parents took me to see Hamlet in the restored, Italian Renaissance style theatre that has alternately been a jewel, a near-ruin, and a jewel again in my hometown.

I don’t remember much about the production. I was too young then to understand Shakespeare properly, I might be too young to understand it now, but I do remember that there was fire stage.

I remember because this was the hook, the carrot the parentals dangled to get me to go quietly.

There had been write-ups in the paper and special permits issued by the Fire Marshall to make the pyrotechnics in the Perot possible and I was then (and now) a firebug, same as my Daddy before me.

When it arrived, the fire was carried on stage by what I now know are the watchmen who first meet the king’s ghost in the first act. From our balcony seats, my promised flames looked suspiciously like a sterno can nestled in a wide, shallow bucket of dirt.

In the short list of life’s great disappointments, the fire in Hamlet ranks… somewhere.

Probably pretty middling. It’s been a good couple of decades and a bit.

Since then, I have been blessed to see fire on stage again and again and again.

From a community production of Legally Blonde that Dad took me to when I was about 15, to that Queen cover band (on a school night) Mom and I saw my senior year just because we could, to the Royal Moscow Ballet’s Swan Lake early this year with some friends here in Ireland, there has been great theatre and music and stage-fire across my life.

There’s magic in it.

Magic in the idea that there are people out there putting in the effort.

In a time when the world’s catalogue of film is a few clicks and an illegal stream away, the idea of getting dressed up, buying a ticket, and sitting in a crowd of strangers to watch actors who could fail at any second—it’s almost ludicrous.

Not paying for the cinematic polish of a movie theater. The cemented product that is a film.

But, paying for people. People who miss cues or forget lines or drop the curtain too soon or move the spotlight too fast—all things I have seen—but paying nonetheless.

Theatre in some form is possibly our earliest form of entertainment, from travelling bards and musicians to the Greek chorus and the religious pageants of the middle ages, to the incredible spectacle at La Monnaie today, we seem to have always had this fascination with telling stories and watching stories told.

It’s instinctual, intrinsic.

Part of what makes us human.

What makes that ticket worth the cost.

There’s a production of The Merchant of Venice being staged next month at the little theatre near my house here in Cork, and I think I’ll go. At twenty-six, I’ve learned a little more about Shakespeare than that first, Hamlet production.

I’ve learned appreciation for the people who breathe life and change and meaning into texts long since pinned and petrified by print and ink and centuries.

Appreciation for the firemakers.