It’s a sad weekend at the movies when we’ve got the formulaic What Happens in Vegas (40 at Metacritic) and what is apparently the really shiny turd of Speed Racer (36 at Metacritic)… and not much else. I wouldn’t condemn either of these films before seeing them, but things are not looking up. For those looking to see a good film, here are some I’ve been hoping to catch (all on limited release):
Persepolis is the poignant story of a young girl in Iran
during the Islamic Revolution. It is through the eyes of the
precocious and outspoken 9-year-old Marjane that we see a
people’s hopes dashed as fundamentalists take
power—forcing the veil on women and imprisoning
thousands. Clever and fearless, Marjane outsmarts the “social
guardians” and discovers punk, ABBA, and Iron Maiden. Yet
when her uncle is senselessly executed and as bombs fall
around Tehran in the Iran/Iraq war, the daily fear that
permeates life in Iran is palpable.
The Savages is an irreverent look at family, love and
mortality as seen through the lens of one of modern life’s
most bewildering and challenging experiences: when adult
siblings find themselves plucked from their everyday,
self-centered lives to care for an estranged elderly parent.
In China, it is simply known as ‘The River.’ But the
Yangtze—and all of the life that surrounds it—is undergoing
an astonishing transformation wrought by the largest
hydroelectric project in history, the Three Gorges Dam.
Chinese-Canadian director Yung Chang returns to the
gorgeous, now-disappearing landscape of his grandfather’s
youth to trace the surreal life of a “farewell cruise” that
traverses the gargantuan waterway.
Plus, there are some wide release movies on the horizon that could be good…
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Buckling swashes, excellent fantasy, fun special effects, and hopefully good writing to hold it all up. The music from the last one was pretty great, too (Imogen Heap!). Unfortunately, Heap’s track for this one has been shifted off the Prince Caspian soundtrack and into her album.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Fail or succeed, it’ll do so spectacularly.
WALL-E
Pixar keeps hitting movies out of the park; I have high hopes for their latest.
Hancock
Will Smith as an anti-hero with superhero abilities. C’mon this movie be good be good be good be good.
The Dark Knight
If this could even equal Batman Begins in quality, I’d be ecstatic.
The Super Soaker Bottle Shot is a pump-action water blaster
that allows you to choose how much ammo you want. Nearly
any standard water or soft drink bottle attaches with a twist
to the blaster!
If I purchase one of these, I’ll be sure to review it here at tumbledry, your summer fun source. Incidentally, during the summer of 2006 Dan and I picked up the Super Soaker Max Infusion, a gun which can shoot in one of two ways. You get the standard water stream, which is respectably thick. But then you get the truly ridiculous “Flash Flood” option which, at short range, absolutely drenches your opponent. I’ve still got mine, I’ll have to pull it out. I still remember the first time I tried the Flash Flood feature; I aimed the gun at the shower stall in Selby Hall (I was living there for the summer doing chemistry research… free housing woo!), and I pulled the lever. ABSOLUTESOAKAGE. I mean the entire back wall of the shower was covered in water. Whoever thought of this feature was brilliant.
Anyhow, I can highly recommend the Max Infusion (oh glorious Flash Flood), and we’ll see about this Bottle Shot model.
In what is probably my favorite news story this year, we learn about The world’s first bionic sea creature: Winter. Early in life, this wild dolphin was injured in a crab trap and found floating with no tail. She healed up in captivity, but was in need of a prosthetic. So, after over a year of prosthetic fitting and work to restore functionality, she got a new tail!
In the creative parlance of headlines, here’s what I’ve come up with: Tursiops truncatus Treated to Technologically Terrific Tegumental Tail.
A featured picture on PhotoshopDisasters shows a provocatively posed model in the magazine Maxim. But what’s this? The picture has been retouched? Shocking! The repeating nature of the background of the image clearly reveals where the retoucher tucked in the sides of the model, enlarged her breasts, or both. The glaring hack job is comical on first sight.
…perhaps her bathroom tiles are deliberately crooked.
But, when you think about it, the implications are rather serious. Certainly, consumers become aware of the pervasive, dramatic nature of retouching when they see a screw-up such as this Maxim error, or when they see something like the Dove commercial showing a model before a shoot and after. Indeed, the umpteen layers of professional make-up, perfect lighting, and extreme digital retouching are par for the course. Now, it’s not too hard for a 20-something guy such as myself to see these photographic liberties as media’s latest sally against whatever non-warped ideas of body image society has left. And yet, with the utter inundation of modified images, it’s still difficult to keep a grip on what a normal body looks like: it’s hard to keep sight of the coast when the current keeps pushing you out to sea.
Furthermore, the issue becomes more personal when you try to explain this retouching to, say, a teen/tween daughter. You can show them before and after pictures, side by side, and they understand. That is: they’re smart; logically, they comprehend what you are saying. However, I don’t think young women (and, increasingly, young men) get it. “Sure,” they think “these magazine pictures are fake, but if my friend Chastity is closer to looking like the picture than I am, I still have to relentlessly pursue proportions of an extreme type.” When it comes to retouching, you can take a fang or two out of the beast, but it still bites and holds on — sometimes through the teens, and sometimes forever. Derek K. Miller writes about trying to give his daughter’s some perspective at his blog Penmachine:
Second, I have two daughters approaching adolescence now,
and I can see how the relentless repeated messages from
these sources could warp their perceptions of what is normal.
My wife and I continue to point out the distorted
perspectives as part of teaching our kids media awareness,
but it’s a fair bit of work.
Third is my experience over the past year, specifically with
health and weight. Between the beginning of 2007 when I
was diagnosed with cancer, and the end of July, I lost over
50 pounds. It’s taken more than eight months to gain it back,
sometimes requiring me to eat more than I actually want to.
Beforehand, I thought that my stable long-term weight of
about 200 pounds (91 kg) was a little higher than it should
be, but nothing to be too concerned about. Now 200 pounds
seems like a lovely, wonderful weight, a healthy place for me
to be, even with all my new lumps and bumps and scars from
my treatments and surgeries.
So looking at the shows and magazines that are obsessed
with the tiniest weight fluctuations and skin changes in
celebrities grinds my teeth. These are trivial, pointless
concerns—and what annoys me most is that it’s not only
obviously what sells, but it also invades my brain when I
don’t even want it to. Why is there even room in my memory
for whether one or the other stick-thin actress has a
pregnancy “bump”?
But here’s the thing: as bad an influence as the magazines are, even doing something like removing the retouched images wouldn’t do much; they are just one source of pressure on young women. The front lines of outlandish body proportioning have moved to cinema — and due to the advancements in technology, the effects in this medium become more believable every single day. Obvious examples are easy to spot, e.g. Angelina Jolie was just a starting point model for her digital avatar in the movie Beowulf.
As educators of young people, though, we have to be ready to expose the more subtle retouching in film. It’s no longer “you can’t believe every body you see” — everyone knows that — it’s “you can’t believe every body you watch.” Sometimes it feels like a piece of a Brave New World.
