In response to the interesting NYT article on equally shared parenting, I’ve just read Francine Deutsch’s Halving It All. In response to the craziness of my life, I’ve just read Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety by Judith Warner. And I do, in fact, have some thoughts on these things, which have — among other things — inspired me to make a chart designed to either make sure the distribution of chore labor is equitable or remind K. that it isn’t.
But right now I’m dealing with corrupt course shells in my online classes and heavy hay fever and various other things that conspire to make my attention span nil. So instead, here’s a snapshot from our midnight discussion, after watching I Am Legend on DVD.
me: “Next time we see a movie, no more zombies. No more apocalypse.”
K: “28 Days Later shreds that movie! That movie was lame.”
me: “28 Days Later wasn’t that good, and it featured the same trio of bombed-out urban scenes, jerky CGI-catapulted voracious zombies, and Difficult Personal Choices, like whether to strangle your dog because she’s infected or shoot your friend because he is.”
K: “28 Days Later is so much better than that movie.”
me: “Also, it’s called “the rage” in 28 Days Later, which is French for rabies, and in I Am Legend it’s described as a virus with ‘rabies-like symptoms.’”
K: “Will Smith doesn’t exactly carry that movie. Cillian Murphy is so much better.”
me: “He has jug ears, but Cillian Murphy is a pretty boy. And it’s pronounced hard-C, like the beer, not “Sillian.”
K: “Whatever. 28 Days Later ROCKS.”
me: “28 Days Later sucks. This movie just sucks more.”
K: “The script of 28 Days Later is so much better written.”
me: “What, when the militia is about to rape the preteen and Naomie Harris gives her a bunch of pills and says, ‘I’m making you not care’ ? That’s an example of excellent screenwriting? At least in I Am Legend, there’s no gratuitous child rape and no romance, not that I expect anyone to resist Naomie Harris, but still, it’s gratuitous. At least Will Smith blows himself up.”
K: “It’s great.”
me: “Gratuitous.”
K: “Great.”
me: “Whatever. No zombies, no apocalypse. Verboten. From now on.”
July 4, 2008 at 9:50 pm
I’m not a fan of zombie movies or violent movies, and I generally avoid them, but I did see 28 Days Later. I found it particularly disturbing and disliked it for that reason. Nevertheless, I think it was supposed to be disturbing, and that the whole point of the movie was that the “sane” “normal” uninfected soldiers whose job it was to protect the country were just as dangerous in their own way as the crazy zombies. If that was the point, then you can’t really say that the violence they did was “gratuitous” in the context of the film. Unpleasant, apalling, disturbing, yes; but gratuitous, no.
July 5, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Oh, but I don’t consider the militia’s violence gratuitous in the context of the film; I consider it gratuitous, period — just like all the violence in the film.
But then I’m a fan of subtler exposition and allusions to violence rather than “Romeo Must Die”-style spine-crushing close-ups (although “Romeo Must Die” is in all other ways a vastly underrated film…).
July 12, 2008 at 8:13 am
I agree with starryrift. It’s not that violence and gratuitous rape are lame in the context of what the writers and directors think they are doing with a movie. It’s that in the context of the culture we live in, the movies themselves are lame.
It’s easy to make an argument for the medium’s exposition of a “what’s wrong here” situation. Meanwhile, these kinds of content excite people and are desired by viewers. That’s more than lame, it’s sick.