What I love (and don't love) about the Lego Movie!

If you've followed the Legos tag on my blog, you can probably guess that I approached this film biased towards wanting to like it. So you can take that as your grain of salt when I tell you that I found this film loads of fun -- and I felt that its clever and imaginative aspects were original enough outweigh the flaws.

The big item The Lego Movie got right was exactly the point the Lego Universe role-playing video game got wrong, as I explained a couple of years ago on one of my other blogs. "Lego Universe" (the game) was basically a generic adventure video game in which the characters and backgrounds happened to be made out of Legos -- but it totally ignored what makes Legos so addicting. You want to buy a given set because of the clever ideas they showcase in the instructions, and then when you get bored of that set, you can take it apart, put together the pieces (and ideas) in your own new ways.

The Lego Movie was built around the idea of how Legos really work. The tension between following the instructions and doing your own thing was the central conflict of the film (and neither was presented as the one right answer). I know that doesn't seem like much of a moral dilemma to base a film on, but it's a real question, and one that's unique to the world of Lego. So they took advantage of their assets to make something original.

Another original point I loved was the treatment of the prophecy trope. I just don't get what is supposed to be so compelling about the story of the young protagonist who is destined by prophecy to solve the universe's problems. I discussed this recently in Harry Potter and the three tropes, and then when my kids recently decided to re-watch the Star Wars films, I noticed they used the same damn three tropes. (Well, with one difference -- in Star Wars, but mom didn't sacrifice herself for her kids so much as randomly die when the plot required it.)

The Lego Movie gave us a far more interesting and entertaining look at how prophecies work. The film explored how belief a the prophecy affects people's behavior, and showed people continuing to hold their beliefs even in the face of contrary evidence (like the fact that Emmet was "the special" but wasn't a master builder).

One trope The Lego Movie unfortunately used in the traditional phoning-it-in way was to have the entire conflict center around the protagonists having to fight the villain who is evil just for the sake of being evil. As I've said before, I really hate this trope, and it drives me nuts that it is so ubiquitous. Can't we as a culture come up with anything more interesting than that to offer our kids? But I forgive The Lego Movie for this, and even for using the painfully unoriginal formula in which the villain ties the hero to a time bomb and leaves him there (to escape). I forgive The Lego Movie because Lord Business and Bad Cop were pretty entertaining as villains go -- and because insisting that films not use the "evil villain" trope would be to hold them up to a impossibly high standard, more challenging even than the Bechdel Test.

Speaking of the Bechdel Test, yes, The Lego Movie passes it. Not with flying colors, but, happily, one of the fun jokes of the piece (where Unikitty is listing off the things Cloud Cuckoo Land doesn't have) was an exchange between two named female characters. Overall, the treatment of gender wasn't too bad, but could have been a lot better. I essentially agree with this article by Tasha Robinson about how Wyldstyle's awesomeness served mostly just to demonstrate Emmett's awesomeness.

Although I think Robinson's analysis is right on the money, I want to temper it with a couple of remarks. First, it's not really true (as Robinson claimed) that "Her only post-introduction story purpose is to be rescued, repeatedly". Wyldstyle has action sequences throughout and saves the day multiple times. The climactic win in the end was due to Wyldstyle's broadcast encouraging the ordinary citizens to use their own creativity to build whatever they want. Of course her brilliant idea centered around her great epiphany that Emmet was actually awesome -- thus proving Robinson was right with the second half of her claim about Wyldstyle's purpose: "to eventually confer the cool-girl approval that seals Emmet’s transformation from loser to winner."

I mention my one technical quibble with Robinson above because I want to contrast it with what she said about How to Train Your Dragon II. I read her article before watching How to Train Your Dragon II, and thought about her claim about Hiccups mom, that "once the introductions are finally done, and the battle starts, she immediately becomes useless, both to the rest of the cast and to the rapidly moving narrative. She faces the villain (the villain she’s apparently been successfully resisting alone for years!) and she’s instantly, summarily defeated." And I went into the cinema thinking, "Oh, come on -- it can't be that bad." But it was!!

The mom's uselessness in the end of How to Train Your Dragon II struck me as really weird and incongruous because the action scene was just so damn long. Like a lot of films, the whole last section of the movie is a sequence of action segments as the heroes eventually defeat the villains. In all this time, they couldn't come up with one thing for this amazing mom character to do that is critical to saving the day? And it's the contrast with the Lego Movie in particular that makes the problem in How to Train Your Dragon II especially striking: in the action sequence at the end of the Lego Movie, every single one of the main hero characters (Emmet, Wyldstlye, Vitruvius, Unikitty, Metalbeard, Benny, Batman) gets an individual moment of doing something critical.

Of course, listing off the main characters like that gives another hint about the Lego Movie's gender problem: of these seven heroes, only two of them are female. OTOH, it could be worse -- it could be just one. Unikitty, by the way, is very cool and entertaining. She's not defined in relation to some male character. She's a princess, but her princessness is about running a fun fantasy land, not finding a prince. Plus, she has her own interesting personal conflict trying to remain cheerful at all times -- and learning how that doesn't exactly work (reminiscent of the "Turn it off" number from The Book of Mormon).

In The Lego Movie's favor, they cast a black character in a role that would stereotypically be played by a white character (instead of putting a black character in a stereotypical black role) -- and they played it up in a funny joke where Vitruvius confuses Gandalf with Dumbledore. I wish they could have done a little better at mixing it up for the ladies.

Personally, I'm the parent who is as interested as the kids in playing with our Lego collection. And I thought it was fun that the Lego Movie included such a parent character. The sad part is that if they'd cast that part as someone who looks like me -- i.e. a woman -- it would have been criticized as "tokenism" or as unrealistic or something. We're not at the point where I can simply watch an ordinary movie and expect to see a character I can relate to, in my own gender, and have it be perfectly ordinary and not even noteworthy. We've still got a long way to go, baby...

This point aside, the film has a lot of really clever, funny stuff in it. Looking at all of the amazing details of the Lego worlds in the movie makes me want to get to my Lego table see what I can build! (With the kids, of course.) We can make our own little world where everything is awesome!

Why can't we have nice things? Savoia & Sowa's "Marzi 1984-1987" (Part 3 of my "rethinking economics" series)

Three young girls in a friendship triangle, jostling over which two are best friends. One friend is distraught about not getting accepted into a coveted ballet class (pronounced "not skinny enough" by a teacher who had, herself, not quite made it into a prestigious ballet company), and the other two are left with mixed feelings about their own elation at getting accepted. Seeing strange new things while visiting cousins in the country; enduring marathon mass services with a very pious mother. Sylvain Savoia & Marzena Sowa's Marzi is full of scenes from growing up that are easy to relate to -- making the unfamiliar aspects of the setting all the more vivid and striking. You see, the story of Marzi takes place in Poland, under communism.


As you might expect, Marzi's young experiences involved things like standing in long lines in the bitter cold, waiting for the opportunity to buy a little bit of meat from a tiny shop that doesn't have enough for everyone, and rushing out to another shop to buy as much toilet-paper as possible as soon as the neighborhood gets news that there's been a delivery. Marzi's experience involved being downwind from Chernobyl and not knowing whether she would be permanently affected, despite the precautions he family took. She also recounts getting fine new refrigerators from Russia (and having almost nothing to fill them with) and seeing her parents hoarding cash (including US dollars) to buy things on the black market in case of emergencies.



Yet even the seemingly-unfamiliar components of the story recount universal human experiences. Marzi was happy with her cloth doll until her friend got a Barbie doll. As always, the joy of having stuff is relative, not absolute. If you're reading this, you probably have a phone and the means to occasionally buy nice clothing and a Barbie doll -- and you don't think much of it. But the key wasn't so much that Marzi's friend had all of these things, it was that she had them and the other kids at her school didn't. (I'm sure I don't have to provide you with any illustrations of how this applies to your own childhood, and possibly also adulthood.)

Marzi's friend's parents worked in the meat industry, hence had the opportunity to buy themselves as much meat as they wanted, including some to sell on the black market and/or sell preferentially in exchange for kickbacks. So they could shop in the one big store in their town that was always fully-stocked with anything you could want -- but where they only accepted payment in US dollars.



This is the part, naturally, that brings to mind a brilliant observation by Jared Diamond:

[T]he values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs.

This is one of the main reasons why -- for Americans -- the private sector is the only true sector, as I discussed earlier. It's why Americans today have a pathological fear of public sector providing any kind of goods or services.

A related story was featured in the book The Collapse of Belief, which I reviewed at Main Street Plaza:

Years ago, during the Soviet reign in Eastern Europe, a visiting diplomat from that region had his belief in the superiority of communism collapse when he first entered an American supermarket. He thought the store was fake at first. "If it were real," he said, "there would be long lines of people to buy all that food." But when he instructed his driver to take him across town to another store not on the planned route, he saw the same thing, and his conviction cracked.

It's a neat tale of how new evidence can help you think outside of the box, which is the point of the whole book. Yet, ironically, (though the book is good overall) this particular story pats its American audience on the back for thinking squarely inside the American box. America has giant stores chock-full of any goods you could possibly want -- always plentiful and inexpensive! That's what makes America great!! That's why we won the Cold War! Boo-yeah, go team!!

The tales of lines and shortages under a centrally-run economy are, of course, true. But look where clinging stubbornly to this triumph has led us.

Yes, America is the land where you can buy anything you could possibly imagine at any time of day or night. Consumer spending is practically the measure of the strength of the economy. If we're surrounded by crumbling public infrastructure, the electrical grid, rail network, and waterworks have had no improvements beyond emergency patching for thirty years, aging bridges are in danger of collapsing, the young population continues to slip behind in terms of the getting the education necessary to contribute to current and future technology, etc., at least we can always go to Target.

It's part of the reason why reasonable health care reform is such a battle in the United States. People can invent stories of waiting in long lines for a tiny ration of health care under "socialized medicine" and Americans are primed to believe them. It doesn't matter that it's as simple as in the tale of the diplomat above to step outside the US and see that the stories aren't true. It doesn't matter that such tales don't even make sense when you think about them for two minutes, or that US healthcare is among the most expensive in the world, by a lot, for the same treatments, or that the closest thing I've seen to the "waiting in long lines for a pitiful scrap of health care" is the model where people hold out until their problem is an emergency, and then go wait in line to have it treated at the emergency room because they don't have any health insurance. Communism made Marzi's family have to wait in a long line to get a few sausages -- while their American counterparts had as many sausages as they wanted -- so why should "socialized medicine" be any different?

Why, indeed...?

Maybe it's difficult to keep past triumphs in their proper perspective when planning for the future.

See also Rethinking economics 1: the private sector is the only true sector and Rethinking Economics 2: Lessons from Switzerland!!.

How to understand Israel from comic books alone

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I love reading autobiographical comic books that are set in other countries. I don't know much about Israel, but during the past couple of years two interesting graphic memoirs came out about people's experiences in Israel, so, naturally, I bought 'em, read 'em, and learned a thing or two!

The first book is Sarah Glidden's How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less , and the second was Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City by Guy Delisle.

Glidden's book is a memoir of her Birthright Israel trip, beautifully illustrated with watercolors throughout. First thing I learned: just for being Jewish one can get a free 10-day, all-expenses-paid trip to Israel!

Glidden's story isn't so much about Israel itself as it was about how young Jewish-American liberals feel about Israel -- also an interesting topic, BTW:

I found the book a little frustrating, though, because she set off with the express intention of confirming her belief in the pure black-hearted villainy of Israel, and her grand epiphany was that it's more complicated than that. Well, duh, it's more complicated than that. If the situation were simple, the conflict would be resolved. Yet, weirdly, she seems taken aback to discover that Israelis have justifications for some of their controversial actions:

Glidden did a lot of interesting research before her trip, and told some great stories about the things she saw matched up with her expectations (or didn't). Yet, there's a limit to how much insight you can gain from a 10-day guided tour, and in the end I was mostly just glad not to have so much emotional baggage around such a complex and important issue. (Of course I'm sure I have equivalent baggage surrounding other equally complex and important issues...)

Delisle, by contrast, spent a year living in Jerusalem where his wife was working for Doctors Without Borders:

Delisle identifies as Christian (he's a francophone Canadian), but he mentions in the story that he doesn't believe in God. (Glidden also mentions in passing that she doesn't believe in God.)

His occupation for that year was a combination of stay-at-home-dad and comic book author/artist -- in particular keeping his eyes open for interesting stories in his surroundings. I had an easier time relating to him since he came upon subject of Israel without a lot of preconceived ideas, just looking to learn what he could. And it was actually kind of fun simply to encounter a story in which a man has to juggle his childcare obligations with trying to find time to do his own projects.

Delisle met tons of fascinating people during his stay, and saw some remarkable things. He taught comic-drawing workshops to a variety of students -- Palestinian as well as Israeli, and the contrast is pretty amazing. He visited Hebron multiple times, guided by people on all different sides of the conflict. He met Bedouins and Samaritans. He met people who were separated from their lands and livelihood by the wall (as mentioned in Glidden's comic above). He watched the Doctors Without Borders mobilize during an armed conflict in Gaza -- and much more! And all of the characters and stories were fascinating and surprising.

ETA: also often entertaining and funny. I hesitated to write that the first time because so many of the situations are serious -- yet the human condition is funny, often even in tragedy.

I have to admit I liked Delisle's book better -- it gave a more extensive and varied portrait of the lives of different people living in Israel and Palestine. But I heartily recommend both of them, not just to learn a thing or two, but as interesting human stories.

Cars 2: still my favorite James Bond flick, but...

You may recall that I saw Cars 2 in the cinema with my kids and quite enjoyed it. My husband didn't go with us, so he had to get the kids the DVD for Christmas in order to see it.

He thought it was OK, but found it riddled with problems. For example, the theme seems to be that -- as long as you're being true to yourself -- it's OK to be ignorantly disrespectful to other cultures. (Indeed, the movie seems to say that McQueen had no business expecting his friend not to make a scene everywhere he goes, as a condition for being invited along.) Also, the spies could have transferred their photo anywhere, so why did they arrange to do it at that huge party that was being covered on international television? Neither one of them had any reason to be at that party, or even in Japan at all. (Answer: It was the simplest way for the writers to arrange for Mater to get mistaken for "the American spy.")

Personally, I don't really like it when a script is obviously written as a vehicle for showing off stunning visuals and effects. This film has really amazing, cool visuals, but suffers a bit from this cart-leading-the-horse storytelling. And to have a leading villain who's not only German, but is a professor wearing a monocle -- can you get more cliche than that?

Now, I don't want to see any comments telling me "lighten up -- it's just a kids film." If you're tempted to do so, please read this post carefully first. Yes, all the formulas are new for kids, so they can't tell the difference between something that's original and something that's last week's refried hash. But that's no excuse for phoning it in and acting like kids don't deserve better than last week's refried hash. You guys have probably had the experience of re-watching a film as an adult that you loved as a kid, and being carried away by the mixture of magic and memories. And you've probably also had the experience of re-watching a childhood favorite and thinking, "This is total garbage -- how did I ever watch this?!" And the memory is ruined. So, I hold kids' entertainment up to high standards, and I'm not going to apologize for it.

(Though I will admit to sitting by and not making any negative remarks when my kids choose and like something that I think is total garbage *cough* Bey-Blade cartoons *cough* and I'll even listen and talk to the kids about the stories and characters, etc. But I like to recommend and watch better fare with them.)

That said, Cars 2 is not garbage. I'm actually trying to figure out why I like Cars 2 in spite of its flaws. Crazy plot holes aren't always a major problem if a film has other strengths to make up for it (I learned that from Heat Miser and Snow Miser). I think it's because of the following:

I don't usually like James Bond movies (or action movies in general) in part because the set-ups for the action sequences are so absurd that my suspension of disbelief is completely overwhelmed and I have trouble getting excited about the action. (Related: I really don't need to see any more sequences of people outrunning exploding fire-balls.) But with Cars 2, it's so absurd that there's hardly even any pretense of suspension of disbelief. Instead of having the characters drive cars covered with crazy gadgets, have them be cars covered with crazy gadgets!!! It doesn't matter that it doesn't make any sense, indeed their whole universe doesn't make sense if you think about it. Don't even try to make sense out of it -- just sit back and enjoy! :)

We're all misfits! Rudolph, Hermy, and the Misfit Toys!

The Grinch and The Year without a Santa Claus may be my favorite Christmas specials, but Rudolph is the one that started it all, and launched the Rankin/Bass Christmas special series.

With its charming characters and catchy tunes (Holly Jolly Christmas!) this one has always been one of my favorites. Its theme -- that it's OK (even great!) to be a misfit -- was something I certainly appreciated as a kid. I imagine it was the same for other kids too.

It's also fun to analyze how this story shows the changes in our cultural attitudes towards bullying. The lyrics to the song "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" were written in 1939. As the song goes, Rudolph was ostracised and bullied for being different. The song doesn't seem to indicate that there's anything a priori wrong about bullying people for being different -- it only became wrong after Rudolph's defect proved itself to be a strength.

We can see how this works in detail in the (1964) special. When the other young reindeer started laughing and calling Rudolph names, their adult supervisor not only failed to stop the kids from bullying:

He actually compounded the problem and kicked Rudolph out of the class for being different. And Santa himself wasn't much better.

However, in the special, Santa realizes he was wrong for mistreating Rudolph before Rudolph's nose saves the day, so maybe attitudes towards childhood bullying had already changed a bit between 1939 and 1964. And (as I discussed here) we can see further cultural evolution in children's media such as the album Free to Be You and Me.

And now my kids are asking me to put on a Christmas special, so I guess it's time to enjoy it again! Or perhaps one of my other favorites:

"Santa Claus is Coming to Town" (and the invented origins of the Santa Claus legend)
"The Polar Express" takes belief for belief's sake in whole new directions!
"Nestor the Long-eared Donkey" saves the Christmas™ brand
Mr. White Christmas: The fabulous world of Heat Miser and Snow Miser!!!
The Grinch and the True Meaning of Christmas

Merry Christmas!!

Battle for Dream Island!!!

As a parent, I end up having to watch a lot of low-quality kids' entertainment. My general strategy is (as long as it's not something actively offensive), just not to worry too hard about it, and let my kids learn and decide for themselves what they like. And when I find kids' programming that I think is clever, to recommend it:

Enter Battle for Dream Island, a cartoon series my kids found on YouTube.

I've gotten hooked on this series with them because I think it's clever and funny. But there's an additional, unusual aspect of it that impressed me:

The series started with twenty contestants (all of them anthropomorphized objects) with approximately an equal split between male and female characters. Yet -- even though it's a cartoon -- the female characters aren't given any of the typical signals to mark them as female (eg. big lips and eyelashes). The characters vary widely in personality, hence aren't gender-stereotyped. I know this shouldn't be exceptional, but I don't think I've ever seen any cartoon do this. And yet it works. It works great, in fact!

The series is almost over (after a run of a couple years), but I look forward to seeing what the artists do next. Go Leafy!!

(see also this post for contrast)

Short review of Cars 2

My kids and I just saw Cars 2, and I have to say, it's now my favorite of all the James Bond movies.

Free to be a homemaker...

One point where I feel like the feminist messages of the seventies were fairly effective was in convincing people that men are also responsible for housework and child-rearing -- that it's not automatically the woman's job. There's still a long way to go, but I have the impression that, for men and women of my generation and later, expectations on this front changed noticeably compared to the previous generations.

This is true for child-rearing in particular. Not so long ago, pushing a baby-buggy was equivalent to wearing a dress. I have a vague memory of this being a popular comedy situation, to show the poor man having to take care of his child for an afternoon. The director would even have the poor sap wear a frilly apron over his dapper suit, to emphasize the absurdity of the situation. He's a man and he's trying to take care of a baby -- hahaha!! Now you see men walking down the street carrying babies in pouches or pushing them in strollers, and it doesn't cross anyone's mind to see that as strange.

The "Free to Be..." album I discussed the other day had a track about how it's OK for a boy to want a doll because he might want to learn to nurture babies too. (Aside: this track, like the one about boys crying, seemed to portray bullying as inevitable, but basically said the boy shouldn't be bullied for wanting a doll.) Then there was another track that struck me as almost controversial: "Housework".

"Housework" is a poem that says, essentially, that those smiling ladies you see doing housework in TV commercials for detergents -- they're only smiling because they're actresses. Really, nobody likes doing housework, and that's why the mom and dad should share the housework load.

My modern-sensitivity-and-awareness brain immediately makes the connection between that statement and the central tension of feminism: For every role/trait that is seen as feminine and bad, some women will argue "Stop seeing this bad thing as feminine!" and others will argue "Stop seeing this feminine thing as bad!" And often both positions have merit.

It makes me wonder OK, is the above dissing SAHMs? And hence feeding the supposed enmity between career women and SAHMs that is so overhyped?

Then I wonder: Am I just being hypersensitive about this, from reading too much feminist Mormon housewives? I mean, is it really insensitive and un-PC to say that even homemakers don't like housework? Plus, I know that many SAHMs would totally agree with the moral of the poem: that the housework is not just one person's responsibility...

Thoughts?

"Free to Be" -- forty years later...

I remember how old I felt when I first noticed that I could start a sentence with "Twenty years ago..." and speak from first hand experience. Now that I'm on the cusp of forty, I can easily tell you about stuff from thirty years ago, and it's only getting worse...

But, aaaaaaaaaanywaaaay....

Right up there with Schoolhouse Rock, Free to Be... You and Me totally captures (for me) the messages to kids in the '70's. According to the wikipedia article, "Free to Be has become a cult classic across the United States amongst many who were children of New Age parents in the 1970s" -- which I find kind of funny because my parents back in the '70's were pretty far from "New Age" (they were conservative Mormon Republicans). And yet I still think it's a [cult?] classic.

My parents aren't the ones who played it for me -- I don't remember exactly where I first heard it. But I bought a record album of it myself (for fun) as an adolescent in the '80's, and my mom (despite having opposed the ERA like a good Mormon), didn't appear to object to it. I recently found a CD of it, and I've been listening to it to see what I think of it now.

If you're not familiar with the album, it's a collection of clever and fun songs and skits that challenge traditional gender expectations. One central point to keep in mind is that essentially all of the messages in the album were countering other messages that kids were also hearing quite loudly. So every time you hear a song on it whose theme makes you go, "Well, duh, everybody knows that" -- then you've found a point where this album (and other voices from that time) had an impact and changed cultural assumptions.

The song that sounded (to me) the most dated was the one telling boys "It's all right to cry." I have two little boys, I watch tons of media directed at them, I read popular parenting advice, and I talk to lots of other moms in Europe and in the US, online and in person. I haven't done a formal study, but the gendered message I remember from my childhood -- that it's shameful for a boy to cry -- has fallen out of favor, and it's not just Glenn Beck. ;^)

It's my impression that our cultural expectations have changed on at least three fronts: (1) getting your feelings out instead of holding them in is viewed today as healthy and not exclusively feminine, (2) It's somewhat more acceptable for boys to express feminine traits and interests, and (3) Childhood bullying in general is no longer seen as inevitable or acceptable. Keep in mind, folks, that "Free to Be..." came out a mere three years after the popular Johnny Cash song A Boy Named Sue, in which it's presented as a more-or-less reasonable act of love for a father to name his son "Sue" specifically for the purpose of ensuring he'd be bullied, and hence come out a tougher man in the end.

Part of the spoken text says that crying boys aren't "sissies," but instead boys who are afraid to cry (and hence risk being called "sissies") are the "sissies" [implying that being a 'sissy' is still bad]. Naturally, that way of deflecting-yet-reinforcing the label "sissy" wouldn't be considered OK among liberal parents today. That said, I'd be pretty surprised if our gender awareness hadn't improved at all beyond what was on the cutting-edge-of-mainstream forty years ago.

The whole album is quite heteronormative (to anachronistically use a term that has come into ordinary public discourse fairly recently). That is, the album assumes that girls grow up to be mommies, boys grow up to be daddies, and (if they get married) mommies are married to daddies, period. Again, keep in mind that this was a mere three years after Stonewall, so mainstream awareness of LGBT issues was a fair distance in the future. The message that both girls and boys can grow up to be whatever they want to be was already pretty controversial. And teaching one generation of kids not to be limited by gender expectations helped set the stage for them to question gender roles even further -- in ways that many people in the previous generation didn't think of.

A track that hardly seems dated at all is the tale of Princess Atalanta. Female characters in kids' movies and television have sadly made a lot less progress than many parents (like me!) would hope (see, for example, The Hathor Legacy). Most parents of little girls I know are powerless against the lure of the Disney Princess pink ghetto (though I've heard some creative strategies for dealing with it). But I really like the way Atalanta's own autonomy takes center stage in bringing about her "happily ever after". [If you read the wikipedia entry, they explain how "Free to be" took some major liberties compared to the original story, but, really, no worse than Disney does.]

So, which song do I like/remember best after all these years? Probably the title track. Anyone else have memories (fond or otherwise) of this album?

"Prospettive" vs "Gatti neri Cani bianchi"

Comics are a great tool when learning a new language!

For Italian, as I've said earlier, I like Diabolik, but... it could be better. The main problem is that the setting is so generic. Even though Diabolik is an Italian comic series, I think it's actually supposed to take place in England. But it could just as well be taking place anywhere. It's a standard international crime/action story -- like a reverse James Bond story (reverse because the criminals are the protagonists). But when I read a foreign comic book, I'd rather taste a bit of the culture as well as the language.

So, on my recent trip to Italy, I picked up two new Italian graphic novels: Prospettive and Gatti neri Cani bianchi. Both stories are about twentysomething Italian women, moving from one boyfriend to the next, contemplating life and (especially) death. Despite these similarities, they're surprisingly different from one another.

Prospettive has more a sense of place. This story is grounded in Catania, a city in Sicily, in the shadow of Mt. Etna, the most active volcano in Europe:


I can read ordinary Italian (in comic book form), but when they start slipping into Sicilian dialect, it gets challenging...

One thing that surprised me about Prospettive is that the main character, Agata, seems very open and curious about people, and yet she can't bear the thought of leaving her home town. She's rather leave her beloved fiance than leave Catania.

Gilla, the heroine of Gatti neri Cani bianchi is just the opposite:

"I was born here, but this city seems foreign to me. So I said to myself... If I'm going to feel foreign, I might as well be foreign for real."

It's not even clear which city in Italy she's from.

So she packs up and moves to Paris:


Gatti neri Cani bianchi has kind of the same problem as people discussed in Eat, Pray, Love. Gilla has no responsibilities of any kind, she arrives in Paris and gets a free, furnished apartment, complete with an amazing vintage fashion wardrobe, and luckily she happens to have the Barbie-doll bod for it. So she mostly wanders around Paris talking to ghosts. I'd be tempted to call it "self-indulgence as self-discovery" except that it's not clear she discovered anything. Not to be mean to the book or anything -- it's an entertaining story with beautifully researched and executed artwork.

The thing I found most interesting about it, though, is that part of the reason she has these particular adventures is because of her beauty and her level of privilege -- yet she doesn't seem to be aware of it. The closest point was when a French student who was working his way through school called her leisure a luxury -- and she sarcastically responded, "What do you expect? We Italians are so superficial..." Which kinda left me going, "Um... being Italian's got nothing to do with it..."

Interestingly, while Gilla's beauty was ever-present yet unmentioned, it's the opposite for Agata. Other characters say she's beautiful, but she's not really:



It's one of the things I like about graphic novels as a medium -- there are things you can show in images that you can't express in a natural way with words.

BANG! If Dr. Seuss Were a Nuclear Physicist...

Check out my new review at Rational Moms of James Lu Dunbar's BANG! The Universe Verse.

OK, so now we're "The Incredibles"

Remember how I was saying that the film What's Up, Doc? reminded me of my romance with my husband? Well, now that we're married and settled down, I've found a film that describes us even better!!



The scene where the parents were trying to drive/navigate/park in the city especially reminded me of our recent stay in the US.


Everyone OK back there?

The Incredibles is my new favorite Pixar movie, beating my former favorite, Wall-E. I just wrote a new post about The Incredibles for The Hathor Legacy explaining why.

Interestingly -- even though my post was more about the feminist content of the film -- the comments focused more on the moral of the tale. I'd thought (in terms of moral) The Incredibles was like Cars (on the surface the film appears to be making a point, but in reality, it isn’t).

I thought that the "moral" of The Incredibles was "It's OK to excel, and it's OK to fight back against those *cough* non-existant *cough* social forces that are forcing you to be mediocre." But, who knows? Maybe it's more complicated than that.

And my kids liked the villain "Bomb Voyage" for his super-ability to speak French:


How come the French cartoon character always has to dress up as Marcel Marceau?

Me and my inner "manic pixie dream girl"

Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She's on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness. [...] But what does [the MPDG] ultimately want? As is usual with Manic Pixie Dream Girls, the filmmakers don't seem to have given the matter much thought.

-- from Wild Things

This is one of the biggest challenges when writing fiction: you need to include characters who are unlike yourself. The simplest thing is to write what others look like to you -- without giving a second thought to what they look like to themselves. It's not just a problem for men writing female characters (though they're frequent offenders), but for all sorts of writers writing all sorts of "other" characters: white people writing black characters, gay people writing straight characters, religious people writing atheist characters (and vice-versa), etc.

Practically every time I watch a movie, I analyze the portrayal of female characters. Which is why I was surprised that I'd never noticed the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" archetype -- even though there's one at the center of one of my childhood-favorite movies: What's Up Doc?. And, although people can expect to be forgiven for their childhood tastes, in this case I still like the movie -- and I see it as a (jokingly-exaggerated) version of my romance with my husband.



Of course I don't mean the comparison seriously, and if I did, it would be less complementary to my husband than it is to me. The film definitely fits squarely into the genre that my friend Holly describes as: "the wild-yet-innocent cutie-pie who uses her childlike delight to entice some young male sad sack into a candyland of cutting work and skinny-dipping."



My husband is partial to the earlier version of the same movie, Bringing up Baby -- essentially because Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant did a better job of acting than Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. (He specifically complained that O'Neal was only cast for his tan). Despite that point, I like "What's up, Doc?" better because I think the script is better, and the underlying screwball situation in "What's Up, Doc?" (with the four identical suitcases) is funnier than the thing with the leopard. I think "What's Up, Doc?" suffers from many of the flaws of the "manic pixie dream girl" formula, but redeems itself in a few ways.

The Barbra Streisand character actually does have some motivation, as is explained in the film. She's been expelled from a string of universities -- she's bright and does well, but "something always seems to go wrong." After blowing up a classroom while studying chemistry, she had set off to go back to her parents' house, but was hesitant to face them. So she was wandering around, essentially homeless (looking for opportunities to steal food), and trying to decide what to do next.

And how did she get from there to spicing up the life of an absent-minded professor...? That's a question she answers directly:


"Because you look cute in your pajamas."

Her situation is absurd, but you have to keep in mind that every character in the film is absurd. There's the professor (doing very serious research that involves tapping rocks with a tuning fork), the eccentric rich guy who has set up a foundation in his own name to fund this sort of silly research, there are jewel thieves working for the hotel, and a couple of spy-vs-spy guys battling over secret government documents, not to mention a guy driving a convertible who smilingly says "Oh, all right" and joins into a crazy car chase just because some guy jumped into his car and said "Follow that cab -- I'm with the government!"

Then, there's the professor's fiancee (played by Madeline Khan), who is the funniest character in the film:



Despite the fact that she represents the terrible fate the professor must escape from, she find her own new-and-better boyfriend by the end of the film.



So, from a feminist perspective, the film could be better, and it could be worse. Streisand's character sets out for adventure and finds it (even if it is just the usual adventure female characters get: romantic comedy).

Personally, as a Mormon girl, I was brought up immersed in the mindset that Holly describes in the article Forever Your Girl: I was encouraged to embrace the pursuit of a man as being "the only passion, the only pursuit, the only goal" that really matters for a girl. I didn't have it quite as bad as that -- I was encouraged in other goals and talents -- but I'd internalized the pervasive message that a woman's own accomplishments are consolation prizes compared to a woman's one true success: snagging a successful man. (I've portrayed this mindset in the novellas Youth Conference and Saturday's Warrior.)

Another old favorite that doesn't hold up quite as well is Harold and Maude. This film makes an appearance in my novel in a way that I (still) think is reasonable:



However, I clearly see Holly's point about the film:

Maude even claims the youthful role of life’s cheerleader, standing up and shouting, “Go, team, go! Give me an ‘L.’ Give me an ‘I.’ Give me a ‘V.’ Give me an ‘E.’ L-I-V-E. LIVE!”

But her cheering is in service of someone else’s life: Despite the fact that she’s healthy, passionate, and vibrant, Maude takes her own life on her 80th birthday. She justifies the act by asserting that 80 is an ideal age to die: “Seventy-five is too early,” Maude tells Harold, “but at 85, well, you’re just marking time and you may as well look over the horizon.”

But the real reason for Maude’s suicide is that it leaves Harold not just richer and wiser, but unencumbered. Maude’s willingness to disappear ultimately serves male development and autonomy. Her embrace of Harold and discarding of her own life are just what is needed to transform the formerly morbid, macabre boy — and that, of course, is also the ultimate goal of Fascinating Womanhood.

If you're going to be a character in someone else's dream, it's fun to be the exciting, adventurous character. But it's also fun to dream your own dreams. :D

Santa's invented origins, courtesy of Rankin-Bass!

In the olden days, people didn't have electric lights. So the change in the number of daylight hours was a really big deal for people who lived far from the equator. Additionally, what you could eat depended on the season. Harvest coffers were full in the late Fall, and the best time to slaughter animals for fresh meat was early Winter.

Obviously, when the days finally started getting longer again, it was time for a celebration and a feast! It was time to deck the halls with what lights and colors you could find, in honor of the warmth and light to come. It was also time to enjoy some of the best food and ale you'd have all year -- and share it liberally with the neighbors -- before saving the rest saving the rest away to keep you through the Winter months.

There was no mass communication or rapid transit, so the legends and precise dates and customs of Yuletide varied from town to town, just as languages and dialects varied across the countryside and from one land to the next. But there were a number of elements that were standard fare:
* Feasting and drinking,
* expectation of charity -- the "haves" of a community were expected to share the feast and ale with the have-nots, upon request or for a symbolic price such as a song,
* lights and colorful decorations,
* a late-night vigil or party,
* masks and role-play (choosing a king of the feast),
* other normally-frowned-on behavior, such as gambling,
* stories and legends.

Despite how far removed we are from those days, vestiges of all of these customs have been preserved -- spread across the entire holiday season in Halloween, Hanukkah, Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year's, Epiphany, and others.

Now, here's my question: Am I nuts to think that the real story of these customs is more interesting than some random, just-so stories?



Obviously, I'm thinking of the Rankin-Bass special Santa Claus Is Coming to Town -- one of the canon of TV specials that were so central to the Christmas traditions of my childhood. I have no memory of ever being disappointed by the idea that Santa Claus isn't real. Yet I remember being a bit disappointed when I realized that the children's questions -- posed in this special -- are legitimate questions with interesting answers, but the real answers have nothing whatsoever to do with the answers given in this special.

The impact of Clement Clarke Moore's poem ('Twas the Night Before Christmas) in shaping the "Santa Claus" legend is interesting. Ditto for the contributions of Thomas Nast, and even advertising campaigns by Coca-Cola and Montgomery Ward.


That beef aside, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town is a fun little program. Burgermeister Meisterburger steals the show with his song-and-dance about how he hates toys and is outlawing them. He's not quite Heat Miser and Snow Miser, but he has a lot of good lines. (Actually, he looks a lot like Heat Miser, now that I think of it...)


Jessica, a.k.a. Mrs. Claus, isn't nearly as interesting as I remember her -- along with her early-70's ballad about her grand epiphany that her place is beside her man. Maybe I'm just getting picky in my old age.

Of course, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town isn't the only Rankin-Bass special about a made-up Santa origin story. Fifteen years later they came up with The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. (I discovered this just last year, through a comment on my blog.) Naturally, this second Santa-Genesis story is totally incompatible with the first.



The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus has a far more Paganesque feel to it than the earlier story. I give it points for the explanation of how Santa speaks so many languages, plus its attempt at illustrating the cruel injustices of the world. Like all of the Rankin-Bass specials, this one is kind of weird and trippy.

On some level, though, I feel like it's not quite as charming as the light, insouciant Santa Claus Is Coming to Town. Is it just a question of childhood memories and nostalgia coloring my opinion?

Do the rest of you have any opinions on which Santa origin story is best? And why?