Or is it the Clothes You Wear?

On Sunday there was a marathon of Dungeons & Dragons going on in my living area. So I took that as a prime opportunity to watch Georgy Girl, the 1966 film starring Lynn Redgrave and Charlotte Rampling. While not as swinging' London as I had hoped, mainly due to my false hopes from the The Seekers' theme song, it is the lovely kind of movie which is not made, or at least not seen, anymore.

Georgy Girl is not at all about window shopping on Carnaby, but the choice not to. The entire movie is really surprisingly feminist...and I'll try to explain without giving anything away. There are love triangles and babies involved, we'll leave it at that. There are also choices that are made by characters that could easily be condemned by the viewer, if not conceptualized as feminist. "Having everything" does not necessarily mean doing everything without any less desirable aspects of life. Rather, "having everything" is understood to mean making choices to be sure that what is desired from life is possible.

It's refreshing to view such complex portrayals for women, expressing beliefs that are rarely legitamized. I'm having similar feelings about the main character in a book that I'm reading, We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is a novel comprised of ficticious letters written from Kevin's mother to Kevin's estranged father. Kevin was the sole gunman in a Columbine-esque school shooting, and most of it has to do with the reprecussions from that. (To be honest, I'm not very far, I forgot how time-consuming it can be to read adult literature.) But, the character relates very openly feelings about deciding to have a child and raising a child that are very seldom heard outside of feminist discourse. In any case, the book is supposed to be really disturbing, so when I'm finished with it, I'll let you know. I'm taking a break to read the new John Green, which, unfortunately, is ending his streak for me.

Oh, and I've also been watching this a lot, in an attempt to perfect some of the moves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw6Fjo6VXTg

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it

So in an earlier post I blogged a letter to Douglas Coupland. Doing some library research online, I found this letter to Coupland on a librarian's review blog of The Gum Thief, the same book that incited my letter:



Dear Mr. Coupland,

I just read The Gum Thief and found it to be such inane drivel that it was actually painful to read. It wasn't particularly funny or clever or well-written, but for some unknown reason, it got good reviews...elsewhere. But it just doesn't work for me. You seem bent on taking advantage of your notoriety as the guy who wrote Generation X. Okay, congratulations. Enough already.

Signed,

Not a fan



I wouldn't go that far, but she's Canadian, so I think she took it a bit personally.

Anyway, I still have to watch Georgy Girl, the Thanksgiving Gossip Girl episode, and I bought some music last night so hopefully I'll be posting soon.

Just a quickie, but holy moly

I just stumbled across this gem, one of the original LP covers for a soundtrack that ended up on the Crippled Dick Wax compilation Vampyros Lesbos. I don't even have words for it. (Courtesy of LP Cover Lover)

Saved by (cute) technology

So I began a Facebook page due to some slight peer pressure from Molly and April, mostly. I'm really not catching on - none of it makes much sense. So, feeling about as modern as cellophane-wrapped hard candies in an old lady's purse, I did what I always do when I'm feeling less than great: look at pictures of baby animals. This one really did the trick:

Those Damn Dolls!

The other day I finally watched my Netfilx which had been laying about for some time. I took in the cinematic delights that make up The Valley of the Dolls, a 1967 film starring, notably, Patty Duke (pictured above with a bottle of Dolls) and a pre-Manson, Polanski-loving Sharon Tate.

I love camp, so I really enjoyed the movie. There are enough 60s freeze shots, montages of photo shoots and scenes of women screaming and throwing things to satisfy. I thought that the wardrobe wasn't as strong as I would have liked for a late sixties era film, but there is an awesome All About Eve-like relationship between two Broadway (way square, right)stars (one addicted to Dolls, thanks to California) which ends in a wig-pulling scene of awesome proportions.

I've seen Russ Meyer's genius explosion of bosoms and drugs known as Beyond the Valley of the Dolls a bunch of times which definitely lessened the impact of this one a bit. If you've never seen either, I would recommend watching them in their release order. But please, watch them. Meyer's film is definitely my favorite movie to show people for the first time. Really, it has everything you could ever want from a movie, including transvestites, Nazis, and the Strawberry Alarm Clock.

But this recent viewing really reinvigorated my relationship with Netflix. (As well as with this blog). It had been languishing for quite some time as anyone who is my friend on Netflix could tell you. Pitiful really for a cinema studies student. But I'm fully committed again - committed in the same way that I am to finally finishing Buffy and Angel as well. I think the next one will continue with the swinging sixties in the form of Georgy Girl. That title song is great, so the movie has to be as well!