jane dark's sugarhigh!

waitress and knocked up

"The film also deserves credit for showing a young, unwed mother taking responsibility for her actions, rather than opting for the easy abortion route." This quotation is timeless, in its way; in this case it's three years old, from a review of Saved! that appeared in the Catholic News Service.

Saved! is perhaps the most influential comedy in American cinema...this Spring (especially if you're watching the new DVD release of Weeds Season 2, wherein Saved!'s adult romance between Mary-Louise Parker and Martin Donovan, as mom Lilian and Pastor Skip, returns in the form of mom Nancy and DEA Agent Peter). Both this season's hegemonic Hollywood comedy, and its little indie that could, revolve around the same core plot point; apparently the Non-Sequel/Franchise market is committed to the drama of the implausibly pregnant young woman facing down a complicated and morally ambiguous choice.

As you will know by now, that choice isn't whether to keep the baby. As in Saved! (and many others; this seems to convenient analogue for particular reasons), the abortion option is thought about only far enough so that it can be shown to be unthinkable even in secular terms. To this point, Waitress and Knocked Up are roughly identical films.

Of course, they go different directions: in Waitress, the protag keeps the baby but ditches both husband and lover; in Knocked Up, the woman is not really the protag and thus, by definition, keeps the baby and the father. It would be nice — or interesting — if this gave the movies meaningfully different valences, but it doesn't; they both finally read as sentimental moralizing.

However, at least a couple distinctions can be drawn, the most obvious of which is that, non-stop for the first 70 minutes and intermittently after, Knocked Up is really freakin' funny. Waitress, conversely, is only very intermittently funny (largely thanks to the diner's's Flo, Cheyl Hines, late of the Larry David Show), and goes instead for a sweetness which is now wounded, now cloying. This might be by way of noting that one is a big studio machine, one a tiny Sundancer (relatively speaking).

And this indeed the difference that counts, in every possible way. One might enjoy how Waitress, more free to defy phantasmatic heartland test audiences, allows its hero to go her own way rather than re-coupling up per Hollywood protocols. But that would way overplay the film's independence of thought: it ends with the most grating affirmation of "core values" imaginable, insisting that the mystical bond between mother and child is absolute, transcendental, beyond human will or desire or freedom. Not only is this demonstrably not true, it's every bit as theological as any ending you could imagine; it certainly doesn't curtsy any less to the grinning idiocy of Christian values than does Knocked Up or, for that matter, than does The Greatest Story Ever Told.

And that, finally, is what sucks. Proffered as an "independent" and even propositionally hip and eccentric film, it forwards the most conservative, essentializing, and traditional message conceivable. Knocked Up, we suggest, is all the good parts of Saved!: well-written, well-framed, charming, with an appealing supporting cast. Waitress is just Saved!'s "Pastor Skip," brought in to retrench the community's core values and indeed revivify them, turning backflips and speaking in excruciating hip-hop patois to better convince his Fundie flock that the moralizing message is still relevant and even cool.

Given its circumstances, this is a movie that should have been impossible to hate.

18) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
17) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
16) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
15) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
14) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
13) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
12) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
11) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
10) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
9) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
8) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
7) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
6) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
5) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
4) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

while lady sov and the streets slept...

...some rig called Modeselektor — in the midst of a chopped and bitmapped post-two-step dance track — tossed a kind of capsule analysis of a certain stratum of Brit nationalism, somewhere among the yobs and swells, chavs and bogens, with a precision that either the Ess-Oh or Mike Skinner would give a finger for:

There are many others sorts what haven't got a clue / they don't do pilates they shoot up in the loo / they got surround sound / a Rottweiler hound / they don't want the Euro replacing the Pound

— "Silikon" (feat. Sasha Perera)

personism: the early years

Poetry is at its very roots tendentious.

In my opinion, the line: 'I walk alone into the road' constitutes agitation: the poet agitates for girls to walk with him. It's boring, you see, on your own! Ah, if only there were poetry as powerful as calling people together into co-operatives!"

— Vladimir Mayakovsky, How Are Verses Made? (1926)

28 weeks later

So it turns out that the problem with zombie movies is symmetrical to the problem with war as such. War is so amorphously expansive and at the same time so socially powerful that it can cast its shadow on the most varied of films (and poems and plays and paintings...) so that they are each in turn seen to be "about" the war (one would need only to read the last couple years of film sections at the Gray Lady and the AltWeekly Formerly Known as the Voice to be exhausted by this fact).

Zombie movies (especially if one annexes vampire flicks) have, symmetrically, the broadest screens on which allegorical shadows might be thrown, aimlessly taking the penumbral shape of the social crisis du jour: now colonialism and now communism, now consumer culture and now AIDS. The receptivity of the zombie film may indeed explain why any notable changes in the genre (as in the recent trend of "fast zombies") is such an occasion for critical meditation, inspired perhaps by the hope that the films might take on a somewhat-greater specificity.

That's not to say that zombie films are no damn good. In fact, fast zombie films are on a roll — as enlightened viewers of 28 Days Later and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead will attest — and the sequel to the former keeps things rolling. Its achievement is for the most part that it bridges the symmetry mentioned above; indeed, the presence of occupying US soldiers, Green Zone and quarantine is plain enough that, to rely on the ever-useful wisdom of Giles the Librarian, "the subtext is rapidly becoming the text." For a brilliant minute or so, it seems that the film's formal innovation will be to use recorded headset audio from the actual Green Zone (as seen on YouTube!) as the entirety of the dialog, and improvising the zombie movie around it. That would be audacious indeed.

However, that's unfair to what makes the movie appealing, which is not merely that it's a zombie movie about Gulf War 2, or a war movie with zombies. The kicks are largely in swift brutality, again shot not just for maximum aggression but also to disguise the highly relevant information of who's been bitten and infected). We get as well some shiveringly ambiguous moments: there remains no way to know why, exactly, Robert Carlyle's wife invites him to kiss her while she lies on a gurney in the med lab's panic room. Love, revenge, pure mephistophelian calculation. But on that kiss hangs the tale.

If war — and particularly insurgency — is contagion, the opening space of contagion in this film isn't Mesopotamia but Europe. The referent in that regard is no more Iraq than the French Revolution, which threw the Continent into a panic at the threat of ideological infection. And not just the Continent; no one, perhaps, was more repulsed than Edmund Burke, crafting his withering analysis while clinging to Britannia's splendid isolation. Here of course it's England where the insurgent plague, the "Rage virus," is birthed; situation is reversed. Can it be quarantined? As ever, it's a matter of carriers: a boy, a helicopter, the same pilot from The Matrix...

16) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
15) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
14) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
13) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
12) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
11) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
10) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
9) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
8) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
7) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
6) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
5) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
4) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)