Daniel & Ana

Directed by Michel Franco
Alameda Films



Daniel & Ana is an opinion piece, the film equivalent of an op-ed. While it is a forgone assumption that a film will represent the opinion of its authors and that every film necessarily adopts a particular point-of-view on its subjects, Daniel & Ana endorses a position. Daniel & Ana assumes an expository stance, occupying the characters lives in an effort to discuss an issue bigger than they are. This film discusses underground pornography; the analysis is not on the macro level of an industry or the societal impact of the industry on Mexico, but rather on the micro level, this is a case study of this particular pair of siblings.

The course of the film follows the older sister Ana, as she prepares for her wedding, and trails the younger brother Daniel as he exists, for the most part, in his sister’s wake. For most of the film, their relationship is relatively normal. When the siblings begin behaving oddly, their parents suspect nothing, seeing the strains in the siblings’ relationship as a result of the wedding, and nothing more. Ana and Daniel are nothing if not predictable.

While Ana is the central character, the film revolving most directly around the events in her life (despite the parallel surveillance of Daniel), she is not fully formed as a character. Ana is object more than she is subject. Not only is Ana objectified as a sightly woman throughout: not only by the comments of Daniel’s friend saying that she is doable and of the cameraman for the porno saying she is hot; not only by her rape which is a sort of ultimate objectification; but, by the movie itself, by the shallow presentation of her character. In this film Ana is only ever acted upon. As dutiful sister, daughter, and girlfriend, she only causes concern when she temporarily cancels the wedding. The wedding sets the tone of the piece, it determines what is normal, what roles each character is to play, and what behaviors are acceptable. Ana reinstates the wedding in a search for refuge; the wedding is a return to normalcy and an escape from everything else. Everything will end with the wedding.

Review by Elisheva Zakheim

The Switch

Directed by Josh Gordon
Bona Fide Productions



The Switch is getting a lukewarm reception, unless of course you count Capone's review over at AintItCoolNews.com, which makes the film sound like the culprit behind most major World Wars. Others found it sweet but lacking depth, and as usual in the case of movies that don't land with mainstream audiences, I loved it.

I liked the fact that The Switch wasn't all about gross-out sperm humor, which is what the marketing campaign made it seem like it was going to be, focusing entirely on the moment in question of the actual titular switch. The marketing campaign made it seem like the movie was going to be a Farrelly Brothers movie or something more akin to, The Back-Up Plan. But it wasn't.

This is a movie about what happens after a wacky mishap, the human fallout. It's more about the resulting child and less about the night he was conceived. Maybe it's because of the age I'm at, 28, and my thinking about having a family of my own soon that made The Switch the kind of story I could really grasp onto.

The film operates under what Ebert calls, "an idiot plot," where the entire film hinges around one secret that, if revealed, would essentially fix everything or ruin it forever. But unlike the frustration that typically comes with movies like this, as an audience member, I was rooting for the secret keeper and not wanting to ring his neck like I so often do. What's the difference this time? It's not really a secret. The two main characters already love each other, and we know that early on. They are simply too afraid of messing up their friendship and too frustrated with each other to say anything about it. Sounds less and less like the movie that was advertised, doesn't it? That's because this felt like a small film, maybe even an independent. But it was marketed to mass audiences.

Usually, movies like this play relationships oh-so-very-coy, and the main character seems totally oblivious to the fact that her male best friend is in love with her. I hate that. So, Aniston's portrayal of a character with mixed emotions, in love with her best friend but believing she deserves someone who will actually speak up for her and behave in a mature way, is refreshingly different. It helped me keep my patience with Bateman, who plays quirky and verklempt very well—so well that if it weren't for Aniston's more down-to-Earth portrayal, he would've driven me crazy. It's as if we have a romantic comedy where the woman is unwilling to participate in the traditional structure, refusing to wait on the man to resolve his feelings before moving forward in her own life without him. The trouble is, there's still that pesky problem of being in love. Yes, every romantic comedy is the same.

If you've been on the fence and you like movies about what happens after the seemingly "happily ever after," then give The Switch a try, eventually. Yes, there's a happy ending. Yes, at it's core, it's a populist movie about family and how we have to overcome the mistakes of the families we were raised in to build our own. But every once in a while, and with a cast like this, what's so wrong with that?

Review by Audrey M. Brown

Excerpted from Born for Geekdom

The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter

By Holly Robinson
Three Rivers Press

Holly Robinson begins this book by saying that, essentially, this is a story she has never told. That this is a story she didn’t want to talk about. I am so glad she did.

I am not much for holding back information about my own life and it is completely unfathomable to me how anyone could manage to grow up with a father who raised, became an expert on, and built an empire out of gerbils. I suppose if one was squeamish about having others think you were quirky or odd, you might hesitate, but the story of Robinson’s childhood growing up with a retired Navy captain-turned gerbil farmer is absolutely delightful in its implausibility. I, for one, would not only share the story, but wear it like a badge of honor. I hope she does now that the word is out!

Robinson’s writing is conversational and comfortable. It was like listening to an old friend roll her eyes as she recalled the things her ignorant, dorky parents used to do. We all had embarrassing parents growing up, and it is simply lovely to read about someone whose family was undoubtedly weirder than your own. For anyone who still has secrets locked away in her closet, frightened that her friends or her children or her children’s friends might someday discover, The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter is a huge sigh of relief.

Robinson, while no doubt mortified by her father’s obsession with gerbils, was also mystified by her mother’s tacit refusal to have anything to do with them. She was raised by two individuals who, for all their weaknesses, modeled the notion of following your dreams for their children. Those dreams didn’t necessarily coincide or even complement each other, but Robinson may have benefited heartily from her mother’s example that a wife need not blindly follow her husband’s ambitions, military leader or no.

This story is a lighthearted, entertaining read and Robinson does a lovely job of reminding us that there is no such thing as a “normal” childhood.

Review by Kari O’Driscoll

The Things We Carry

Directed by Ian McCrudden
Lono Entertainment



The Things We Carry tells the story of two sisters coping with the death of their drug-addicted mother Sunny (Alexis Rhee). After leaving her mother and sister Eve (Catherine Kresge) to travel the globe, Emmie (Alyssa Lobit) returns home upon news of her mother’s death. The sisters are forced to confront both Sunny’s drug-addicted friends and each other while searching for a mysterious package.

The film is loosely based on the real-life experiences of sisters Athena and Alyssa Lobit; Athena produced the film, while Alyssa wrote the script and stars as Emmie. As Eve and Emmie, Kresge and Lobit execute their roles with a muted intensity that speaks to the internal struggles of their characters. Lobit’s nuanced turn as the rebellious Emmie presents a woman whose antagonistic exterior hides a sensitive interior. The rest of the cast's performances are largely forgettable, as the other characters are merely meant to serve as catalysts to Emmie and Eve’s introspection and confrontation.

The Things We Carry alternates between scenes from Emmie’s memory and the sisters' present-day reunion, illustrating how they reached the point of estrangement. These vignettes are artfully articulated, as visual cues from the present (such as an image of a jacket or a yellow cab) serve as links to Emmie’s past. Flashback sequences on film tend to come off as confusing or campy, so it’s a testament to Ian McCrudden’s direction and Alyssa Lobit’s writing that the flashbacks are so effective at enhancing the storytelling and building narrative tension.

The film is saturated in yellows and browns, and features unnaturally bright lighting that emphasizes Emmie's discomfort in returning to her hometown. These blown-out images are placed in counterpoint to the beautiful violin and bass compositions of Timo Chen, whose score ebbs and flows, entering moments of reflection and heightened emotion and serving as an aural bridge between remembered past and lived present.

What is perhaps most impressive about the film is its complete lack of didacticism. Emmie may feel morally superior to her mother, but the film does not necessarily agree. The Things We Carry does not make moral judgments about any of the characters' actions; though the film centers on the detrimental effects of Sunny’s drug use, she is not presented as merely a drug addict—she is also a mother, a wife, and a friend. Ultimately the film is not without its flaws, but The Things We Carry survives on its earnestness and engrossing narrative structure.

Review by Joanna Chlebus

Mesopotamia

By Arthur Nersesian
Akashic

Sandy Bloomgarten is a writer you either envy, pity, or outright hate. In theory, she's an excellent reporter, but often, to pay the bills, she resorts to working for gossip rags like The Enquirer. Who of us in a bind hasn't resorted to similar means? But when tabloid celebrity gossip takes over your professional ambitions and drives you to alcoholism, it may be time to reevaluate your work-life balance.

In an attempt to make ends meet after a bad divorce, Bloomgarten takes a freelance gig near her Tennessean hometown of Mesopotamia, where she's forced to briefly reconnect with the strange, confusing liberal Jewish family that adopted her from a Korean orphanage at birth. Her nearly-mixed-race heritage and her family's strained relationship history could have been teased out in a much more interesting way, but is instead only played up for its freak factor and used by Bloomgarten to demean herself through unnecessary use of slurs like "kook" (a portmanteau of "gook" and "kike") and offset her discomfort as the only "squinty-eyed Jewess" most people have ever encountered.

Along the way to finding a story worth reporting, one of Bloomgarten's sleuth companions ends up dead as they piece together the murder of several local Elvis impersonators. She ends up babysitting for a widow with seven children who sing various songs by The King as punishment. She has orgasmic sex with a Hunchback of Notre Dame-meets-Phantom of the Opera ogre who finds and saves her from being raped by a pack of local hoodlums. These are only a few of the slightly less than believable encounters the fill the first half of Mesopotamia. It only gets weirder from there.

Bloomgarten's legitimate problems—such as alcoholism, accompanying one-night stands with strangers, and other situations which call for an exercise in compromised, possibly poor judgment—are glossed over, which left me with an icky feeling. This is no doubt due in part to having encountered the destructive nature of alcoholism firsthand, though I was generally unsettled by the rampant drunk driving, possibly unprotected NSA sex, and pill-popping found in the book. Is it because I'm the straightedge monogamist type or because the novel, with a female protagonist, was authored by a man without an inherent sense of how a woman would act in these improbable situations? Do I simply misunderstand sexual liberation and flagrant drunkenness as gendered? All of these things are possible. I can often lose myself in fiction, but personal hang-ups aside, this was one novel that failed to sell me on the improbably destructive plot.

If you're going to be able to enjoy Mesopotamia for the hedonistic, celebrity-crazed cultural artifact that it is, you'll need to bone up on A-lister gossip from the past year and retain random Elvis trivia to make sense of the puns and wisecracks. Often, you'll feel like you're spying on some sort of Bizarro World skeptics convention with a few too many of the characters tossing around self-righteous anti-Bush, pro-global warming propaganda that the most devoted leftist thinker would find irritatingly cliche. If you'd like to finish the book without being tempted to hurl it across the room, you'll also want to cultivate a bit more sympathy for the protagonist than I did.

Review by Brittany Shoot

The Bradshaw Variations

By Rachel Cusk
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

In earlier times, a set of variations on a theme in classic art music was a chance for a composer to play around with a melody, try it on in various guises, and allow the audience to hear possibilities. Each variation was minute, an aural petit four to be savored briefly while one contemplated on the sweet yet temporal nature of life. Cusk’s novel The Bradshaw Variations is indeed a set of variations, each chapter holding their own like variations on the theme, offering a brief but blinding insight into life.

Questions of meaning within family, vocation, and sexuality arise as Cusk introduces her reader to the lives of Thomas Bradshaw, his wife Tonie, his daughter Alex, and his two brothers and their families. Thomas, the main character through which most of the action is understood, is taking piano lessons during his interim as a stay-at-home dad. His experiences practicing and learning works by Beethoven and Bach ground the entire novel in a specifically artistic linguistic; Cusk deftly uses musical metaphors throughout the work to create a story that is aural as well as visual and emotional, without succumbing to cliché or cheesy, florid prose.

Thomas, formerly a professional who commuted to work in London like so many other suited desk jockeys, has left his job to stay at home, while his wife Tonie has accepted a position as head of department at a university. Their nontraditional role-switching carries with it consequences for how their family members react and how they negotiate disapproval. Cusk weaves a believable narrative of these very human actors, creating a counterpoint of voices. Both Thomas and Tonie’s parents see the occupational switch as irresponsible and somehow wrong, but are unable to voice the exact nature of their disapproval; furthermore, Thomas feels as if he is in some tired and ambiguous rivalry with both of his brothers, whose temperaments are like night and day. Regardless of the parental disapproval, Thomas finds fulfillment in his days at home, looking after Alexa, playing the piano, and cooking meals. Questions of masculinity are never approached; however, Tonie begins to recognize her own yearning sexuality, and the effects of marriage, age, and work on her own fulfillment. A Freudian theme permeates the novel, apparent in both Thomas’s relationship with his daughter and Tonie’s sense of abandonment, and with Tonie’s own relationship with her father, as viewed through her mother’s eyes. This novel questions what it means to be a family, laying bare the hearts of one in particular and allowing the reader to see their struggles and their moments of connection.

Cusk’s tactile engagement with the characters and their surroundings, coupled with her brilliant use of musical vernacular, create a community of very human characters that I could relate to, over boundaries of class, country, and gender. I read this novel twice, during my morning commutes to work and found myself captivated despite the rush hour bustle.

Review by Cristin Colvin

Bone Worship

By Elisabeth Eslami
Pegasus

After finishing Bone Worship, I wanted to let it sit for a while before I reacted. Full disclosure: Elizabeth Eslami is a friend, and has blessed a book of mine with a glowing review. Situations like this can be awkward, so over the years I’ve developed a de facto policy when I find myself faced with reviewing a work by a friend. Generally speaking, if I find a friend’s book lacking in more respects than is acceptable, I tend not to review it. Fortunately that’s not the case here; Eslami’s debut novel is wonderful.

Jasmine Fahroodhi is a young woman with possibly the worst case of sophomore slump on record, which endures until her parents pick her up at graduation—only a few days after she lets them know she’d flunked out of school. Her father, a Persian-born doctor, seems less rattled by his daughter’s failure in school than by her choice of a major other than pre-med. Jasmine goes home to Georgia with her parents, where her father embarks on his “Plan B” for Jasmine’s future: hastegar, an arranged marriage. Jasmine, as unenthusiastic about home life as she had been at the University of Chicago, musters only the mildest American feminist opposition to this plan.

Dr. Fahroodhi is a classic fish out of water. Opaque even to his family, he is frequently hostile to Jasmine—“you’re stupid” being among his most frequent utterances. Her reluctantly co-dependent mother, born in the Old South, oddly supports her husband’s plans for an arranged marriage, helping him take out “Bride Available” ads in newspapers catering to Iranian-Americans. Jasmine reluctantly goes along with the plan, which—true to the book’s dust-cover teaser—results in humorous and awkward meetings with potential suitors, and then the unexpected happens, though not in the saccharine way this telegraphic summary might lead you to expect. In the meantime, Jasmine stumbles through a series of suburban job-hunting moments, culminating in one of those menial jobs a lucky person finds every now and then that utterly transforms them.

That’s the plot, but this novel isn’t really as much about plot as it is character, primarily that of Jasmine’s father. Jasmine’s relationship with her difficult father is the central point of the novel. Early on, she remarks that despite having known him all her life, “If I had to stand up at his funeral one day and tell the world about his desires and hopes and who he was as a person, I’d stand there mute.” In the novel’s first pages Jasmine lists the seven big things she knows about her father—his lifelong aversion to broccoli; his habit of calling his parents in Iran every other Sunday; the fact that he used to beat their dogs with a shovel; his having pushed a young cousin off a wall in Iran, badly injuring her, and a few others as well distributed along the spectrum from banal to vile. As the chapters unfold, Jasmine examines each of those seven known things in some detail. Eslami deftly structures the narrative around each of these channel markers.

Eslami’s portrayal of Dr. Fahroodhi is frank, and there is much to dislike in the man. His vulnerabilities, explored as the book unfolds, may make the reader cringe on his behalf, but they do little to soften our impression of him; they mainly help reveal what broke him. Jasmine’s relationship with her father is one of those that might seem inexplicable to an outsider, a bond that apparently persists out of duty alone, with neither party gaining much. At that, it’s like a lot of father-daughter relationships. There is tenderness there, but it’s deeply masked: the unrequited love of a daughter for a man who observed his children “from a safe distance like a potentially flammable lab experiment,” the arguable love of a man for his incomprehensibly un-Persian daughter that mainly manifests as frustration and anger. That anger and frustration, felt on both sides, never comes to a head. Maybe it’s American of me, but I found myself wishing for a more open confrontation between the two.

All that notwithstanding, Eslami has not created a loveless father. Jasmine sees his love for her mother plainly and from a bit of a remove, as though it’s a specimen described in one of the natural history volumes she checks out of the small local library. One of the things I liked best in Bone Worship is Eslami's use of images, memories, passing conversations, and other bits of detail to represent Jasmine’s exploration of her relationship with her family and herself. The whole hastegar plot itself is a fair symbol for the involuntary relationship Jasmine has with her family—as we each have with our families. Eslami weaves these images into her prose quite deftly, and in ways that made me frankly envious of her sight. This is a hell of a fine novel, especially for a debut.

Review by Chris Clarke

Cross-posted at Coyote Crossing

The Kids Are All Right

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko
Mandalay Vision



In an attempt to beat the glorious heat last week, I ducked in to the cool air conditioned walls of The Archlight theater in Hollywood to catch an afternoon showing of Lisa Cholodenko's new high femme film, The Kids Are All Right. This movie is so fucking good, and it is refreshing to see a film written and directed by a (feminist, lesbian) woman about a family helmed by (feminist, lesbian) women starring women (who are feminists). The themes in this movie—family, love, sex, growing up—are highlighted by some of the best performances I've seen in quite a while.

Annette Bening (Nic) and Julianne Moore (Jules) play partners who have been together for going on twenty years. They've raised two teenage children, played spot-on by Mia Wasikowska (Joni) and Josh Hutcherson (Laser). When Joni turns eighteen, she and Laser make the decision to track down and contact the sperm donor their mothers used to fertilize their family.

Enter the salacious Mark Ruffalo (Paul). He wears leather, rides a bike, owns an organic restaurant, and scores with chicks. (He's sexy, so sue me.) Anyway... Paul develops a relationship with the clan and the wheel of family discourse is set in motion.

Perhaps the thing that impressed me most about this film was the easy yet indefinable family dynamic. I come from a family that many would have trouble categorizing, so I am always pleased to find films with alternative family constructs that actually work. The fact that these two women happen to be lesbians does not define their characters or their relationships within the family. This is not a "gay movie," nor a "chick flick." No, I would call this movie human, hilarious, heartbreaking, and hopeful.

I left the theater thinking hard about the seemingly random associations with my own family. And a few hours later, I called my mom.

Review by Kadi Rodriguez

Cross-posted at LA Femmedia

Despicable Me

Directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud
Universal Studios



A few years ago my eleven year old sister was writing an essay on violence in schools. During our discussion of different types of violence, she astutely pointed out that not all violence is physical, and that a mean comment can be just as violent as a punch in the face. This led to an involved conversation about bullies in which, at one point, my sister looked at me and said, “I think bullies are mean to the kids at school because no one is nice to them at home. No one is giving them love.”

Despicable Me is the story Gruu (Steve Carell), a young boy whose dreams of traveling in space were thwarted by an uncaring mother and resulted in a grownup bully most proud of being the world’s greatest villain. That is, until he is bested by the younger, sleeker Vector (Jason Segal) and must enlist three orphaned girls in his grand plan to steal the moon. While the title of the movie suggests this is a film about a villain and his despicable acts, it is truly a love story about the bonds of parenthood, and the many ways people create family.

Like many animated features, Despicable Me appeals to both adults and children by providing timely social commentary amidst silly sights and situations. The beauty of animation is that it allows imaginary caricatures to perform acts that are very real, and very human. The title alone is a reflection of the human condition, for any one of us can be the “me” in question, participating in any variety of despicable acts on a daily basis.

As the titular Me, Steve Carell adds another credit to his list of bumbling anti-heroes we love to see succeed. Though his accent is mildly distracting, audiences will recognize the same humble wit that endears us to him week after week on The Office. Segal is equally impressive as Vector, a geek turned villain in response to a consistently disappointed father. But it is the always awesome Kristen Wiig who is perhaps the most despicable of all.

As orphanage headmistress Miss Hattie, Wiig delivers her lines like glass of sweet tea with razor ice cubes—sugary sweet and viciously sharp all in the same mouthful. Clearly a jab at the adoption system, as well as gender and class privilege, she callously sends Margot, Edith, and Elsie out the door with the despicable Gruu, who offers no credentials or identification, but is simply disguised as a doctor.

While the film neglects one of my cardinal rules of feminist filmmaking—having positive female role models—it did call into question traditional roles of masculinity, especially in response to parenthood. Margot, Edith, and Elsie were role models in their own right, emulating and each serving as a manifestation of responsibility (Margot), skepticism (Edith), and unquestioning affection (Elsie). In addition to having some of the funniest lines in the film, the sister’s camaraderie and confidence in their own relationship, as well as their unconditional love for each other and those around them, is what eventually turns Gruu from super bad to Super Dad.

Review by Alicia Sowisdral

Winter’s Bone

Directed by Debra Granik
Roadside Attractions



In my review of 2009’s Oscar-nominated film Precious I stated that it was incredibly difficult to objectively review the film because the realism that is presented is so detached from my own circumstances. After seeing Debra Granik’s gritty Winter’s Bone I find myself faced with a similar conundrum, although not to such an extreme.

For people living in the rural areas of the Ozark mountains a fulfilled life is not one of luxury. The goal for an individual is simply to survive rather than thrive in the harsh natural and social environment. The world presented in Granik’s dark thriller seems desolate and cold, but through the female protagonist it manages to glimmer with hope. Brilliantly filmed against the poetic landscapes of the Ozark mountains, Winter’s Bone is a glimpse into rural morality and the emergence of an unlikely hero.

Relative newcomer Jennifer Lawrence is a shoe-in for an Oscar nomination for her performance as Ree Dolly, a seventeen-year-old with a lot of responsibility. She is the chief caregiver of her two younger siblings, she lives with her nearly catatonic mother, and she only occasionally shows up for school. Her meth-dealing father has been arrested, posted the family’s house as bail, and vanished. If he does not show up at court, the family will lose their house and be thrown into a world where they have more enemies than friends.

The narrative is essentially straight forward, which allows Granik to lace the film with tension. Granik brilliantly proves that action does not equal tension and most scenes start and end on high notes with an anticipated release that never comes. At its heart, Winter’s Bone is a film noir with a missing person chase, a look into an underground crime world, and a feeling of constant danger. Lawrence successfully creates a new feminist hero that also harkens back to the great noir detectives of the 1940s.

In a low populated area like the rural Ozarks, the morality that is presented does not fit the mold that urban and suburban dwellers have become accustomed to. When a significant portion of the workforce consists of unskilled laborers, the job market is incredibly volatile. In one scene Ree sees her only two possible futures in two separate school rooms: join the army and escape or become a mother and join her miserable relatives.

Nobody appears content with their existence in Winter’s Bone except for the children who only appear in the film in brief segments where they can be seen jumping on a trampoline or playing in hay. The fact that the children get such joy out of such meager circumstances shows that Ree’s fight is worth it.

Review by Alex Carlson

Cross-posted from Film Misery

Grown-Ups

Directed by Dennis Dugan
Columbia Pictures



Every year, one of my nieces comes to visit my husband and I for a week over the summer. This year we took her to a couple of art museums, a jazz concert, and her first comic book store. We also did fun things at home like painting our nails and playing video games. On the last day of our visit, we decided to see a movie, and she wanted to see Grown-Ups. I did too, as a matter of fact.

I’m happy to report that I genuinely liked the movie. Though it has some foibles, that we’ll get to in a moment, the film is genuinely family friendly. Not only that, but it’s also family-centric. It’s enjoyable to see these guys, who are obviously friends in real life, working together on screen. On top of that, this is honestly the perfect summer movie. There’s a lake, a lake house, a rope swing, a picnic, and a vacation vibe that makes it the perfect movie for the upcoming Fourth of July weekend.

In Adam Sandler movies from years past, women were typically just there to serve beer in a bikini or reward him with sexual activity for academic or sports-related progress; here they get to be actual people with a more three-dimensional and emotional story. Though Grown-Ups is definitely a movie written by and made for men (nothing wrong with that), one senses that Sandler and company are genuinely trying to be more respectful and inclusive of their female characters. They don’t always hit the mark with that intended change, but their effort seems sincere.

We do get some of the stereotypical “nag” jokes, but hey…those are funny in small doses. I'm not one of those feminists who thinks you can't make any jokes out of female characters at all. I'm more in the Tina Fey school of "anyone is fair game," along with any subject matter as long as there's a level playing field of mockery. The men in the film seem to be at a time in their lives when they are feeling emasculated, but their problems stem from their own lack of action, not from the action of their wives. Though the story teeters around blaming the women for the men's problems, hallelujah, it never really does. I had characters to identify with that weren’t simply present to be pleasing to the male gaze, and filmmakers take note: non-sexist plots will make you more money at the box office.

Okay, so there was one slow-mo cheerleaders running scene, but it was of the wives cheering on their husbands, and quite frankly, I'd rather see the camera trained on the wife characters as being the visually appealing ones than some random girl bending over a car. (See the next paragraph.) In fact, there was almost a sweetness to this scene, although my fellow feminists may hunt me down for saying so. Part of any healthy relationship is finding your partner attractive, and I don't want there to be such a feminist backlash where we say any woman who wants to be attractive, or is, is a traitor. That just doesn't seem fair.

In all fairness, there were still several parts of the film that made me wince, especially with my 14-year-old niece by my side. In one sequence, you’ve seen it in the preview, a clearly under-aged girl, dressed far too scantily, leans over a car in a highly suggestive manner so that the older, married men can gawk at her. Kind of gross and definitely not realistic. We’re not stupid. We really don’t care to get hot oil or steam burns all over ourselves while tinkering with our cars, and we don’t lick our lips and make come-hither eyes at an engine. Oddly, I found myself forgiving these clearly exploitative moments, and my niece simply got through it by looking at me and rolling her eyes.

If you have a young daughter, the film might be a good gateway to discussing the portrayal of women on film. After all, if we censored what our kids watched based on sexism alone, they wouldn’t see much of anything at all. Better to watch it with them and talk about it. And this film is a great introduction to talking about lots of things: texting, video games, playing outside, marriage. In fact, I'd like to see a sequel since the cast had such genuine chemistry. If you can’t get your inner critic to shut up, Grown-Ups might be just the thing.

Review by Audrey M. Brown

Excerpted from Born for Geekdom

Made in Pakistan

Directed by Nasir Khan
Talking Filmain



These days, political analysts on both sides of the aisle are calling Pakistan a failed state. While the “most dangerous place in the world” does face profound political and social turmoil, such sweeping commentary fails to capture the more personal intricacies of the lives of ordinary people living inside the country’s borders. Pakistan is more than the Taliban fighters implementing Sharia law in the Swat Valley, and it’s more than the frequent bombings of embassies and hotels from Islamabad to Karachi. As a way of countering the predominant fundamentalist image of Pakistanis constructed by the global media, filmmaker Nasir Khan recently released a poignant documentary that defies stereotypes and sheds light on some of the common challenges faced by citizens with lofty and patriotic ambitions.

Made in Pakistan presents the way a new generation of young leaders negotiates the conflicting pulls of consumerism, family, politics, gender, religion, and traditionalism. The film follows four educated, upper middle class, young Pakistanis in Lahore—a working mother, a lawyer, an event/PR manager, and a politician—from General Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency and military takeover in November 2007 to former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in January 2008. Waleed Khalid is a lawyer and professor at the Pakistan College of Law. He is a devout, but not uncritical, Muslim who has joined others employed in the judicial system to protest government corruption, in part fueled by American aid. In addition to raising her son, Rabia Aamir is the editor of The Fourth Article, a newly established magazine by and for politically savvy Pakistani youth. Aamir is a cultural activist who wants to find solutions to the political, social, and spiritual upheaval in the country. These two characters were the ones with whom I felt most sympathetic.

On the other hand, we have Tara Mahmood, a girl for whom the whole world is one big party waiting to happen, and she’s the one organizing it. Tara provides a lot of comic relief to an otherwise weighty film (at one point she says, "Alcohol is not banned here; it is just not legally sold."), and I was particularly moved when finally given the chance to see beyond her bubbly veneer. By contrast, duplicitous politician Mohsin Warraich provides an ominous, slimy representation of modern Pakistan: The film doesn’t have an outright villain, but if it did he’s be the one. Made in Pakistan is a compelling view of the immense contradictions of modern Pakistani society.

Review by Mandy Van Deven

Originally published in Bitch Magazine

Just Don't Call Me Ma'am: How I Ditched the South, Forgot My Manners, and Managed to Survive My Twenties with (Most of) My Dignity Still Intact

By Anna Mitchael
Seal Press

Who better, I ask you, than a Yankee like me who moved to Texas to review Just Don't Call Me Ma'am, a book by a Texas-girl who moved to the East? Considering how absolutely dead-on hysterical this “survival story” was, I couldn’t be happier about how fate brought us together.

The one thing Anna Mitchael didn’t like was people calling her "ma’am." Ma’am is reserved for your grandmother – or an elderly lady that a twenty-something man is holding the door for. But ma’am is unacceptable when aimed at a woman who swears (even though the crow’s feet might say differently) that she is a spring chicken in the prime of her life.

This wonderfully humorous romp begins with Anna making her way through a myriad of places before settling in Brooklyn. Now, New York City to a Texas woman is something of a high-fashion, fast-moving, cement and glass world of cynicism, and as the author states, it wasn’t a full-on romance for her right away. NYC was an acquired taste.

From a breakup, Anna brings us back to the first time love bloomed; she was twelve years old, gazing at the neighborhood boy with the bright blue eyes who was bound to be the next All-American quarterback playing at Texas stadium. All the girls were massively in love with the young man and wanted to spend the summer trying to get him to notice them. But Anna was tempted by the one person she loved more than life to leave town that one fateful summer…her Grandma.

Grandmothers always know the right bribe to dangle, in order to get their grandchildren to come for a visit, and Anna’s was no different. She bribed her granddaughter with the soap operas that she’d taped all year long, and Anna salivated at knowing that she could spend a couple of weeks in front of the television learning all about high-fashion makeup hounds who spoke with a hoity-toity accent and slept, well, with pretty much anybody, anywhere. Unfortunately, when the two week excursion of sin was over, Anna got a call from her friend to let her know that the guy had found himself a girlfriend. Life lesson learned.

From there, the author takes us on many journeys, offering knowledge about her Southern background, such as how the summers in Texas can actually kill; Southern desserts that Yankees just don’t understand, like bourbon balls; and, being a bridesmaid two hundred times and having to wrap yourself like a horrible Christmas package in pink taffeta and pretend to cry at the “I do” part. She lets us know that you can’t spit in Texas without hitting four hundred churches, and that vegetarianism is a much frowned-upon activity in the world of meat, poultry, and that white gravy. She brings us with her as she tries to adapt to mysteries like Brazilian waxing (which is so painful that I’m sure Hitler used this on his enemies at one time); trips to Las Vegas with the girls; and other topics I met head-on when words went from “get” to “git.”

I laughed out loud as she put a Southerner in Yankee-ville. It took me back to the times when a Texan smiled at me like I was a complete moron when I said “you guys” instead of “y’all.” And when I had, without thinking, told a Southern lady that I was from New England and her response was, “Really? You don’t sound British.”

What I realized while reading Just Don't Call Me Ma'am was that the accent that may frame our words, or whether our grandmothers cooked grits or mashed potatoes, simply doesn’t matter. In the end, we’re all people who are making our way through life the best way we can—whether in the backyard of our own upbringing or setting a course for adventure and moving into an unknown world.

I applaud Mitchael and hope that, like the great Erma Bombeck, she continues her foray into the wonderful – true – world of life’s humor. And, a special note to her, my Grandma was absolutely fantastic, too. It was so nice to read a story about one of the really great ladies the world had to offer. We become much better people when we are lucky enough to have those wonderful women in our past.

Review by Amy Lignor

Cross-posted at Book Pleasures

Half Life

By Roopa Farooki
St. Martin's Press

Love stories aren’t really my thing, but Roopa Farooki’s newest novel, Half Life, shows many shades of love in a way that warms the heart, wets the eye, and expands the mind. The book opens with Aruna Ahmed Jones’ seemingly crazy and impulsive decision to leave her year-old marriage. She does this quite literally by stopping mid-breakfast, throwing on a light jacket, and making her way through the Tube to London’s Heathrow International Airport where she hops the next plane to her hometown of Kuala Lumpur, and back into the arms of lifelong friend and ex-lover Jazz Ahsan. We soon learn that two years ago Aruna left Jazz in a similarly rushed and unexplained exit, and the story progresses by attempting to resolve the characters’ (and reader’s) unanswered questions about her ostensibly hasty retreats.

To go into any depth about the somewhat unsettling plot would be to reveal too much; indeed, I recommend the reader skip even the publisher’s description on the front cover flap and dive headfirst into chapter one. The core of this story revolves around the destructive nature of family secrets and the reparative qualities of truth. Half Life is full of subtle yet astute observations about the personal and social functions of one’s identity as a person of a particular class, gender, nationality, and mental health status—and exemplifies how all are historically and geographically situated. Without being too obtuse or heavy-handed, the story is, ultimately, about finding one’s authentic self while avoiding being a detriment to those one cares for deeply.

Language makes the ordinary extraordinary, and Farooki’s gift is in the ease with which she perfectly captures the complexity of a moment with a casual, pithy description. Literary hat tips are littered throughout with tender references to such masterful figures as the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore, British poet Wilfred Owen, and Jacobean dramatist John Ford—all of whose influences can be readily felt while turning the book’s pages. Farooki is obviously a thoughtful writer, and the story is executed with well-planned precision. Half Life is penned in a visceral style similar to that of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies or Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows. Farooki’s witty wordplay constructs a melancholy emotionality that mirrors the interplay between the main characters. The ubiquitous sense of suspense maintains reader’s interest even after the elements of surprise are effortlessly divulged.

Half Life is a substantative beach read that is engaging as it is accessible. But be sure to slather on the sunscreen or find a cozy spot in the shade before cracking the spine. You might just find you’re unable to put this book down once you pick it up.

Review by Mandy Van Deven

Cross-posted at VenusZine

The Horse Boy

Directed by Michel O. Scott
Zeitgeist Films



The Horse Boy is an emotionally stirring, thought-provoking examination of autism and its effects on familial life. Based on the autobiographical book of the same name, this powerful documentary examines the life of Rowan, the autistic child of journalist and horse trainer Rupert Isaacson and his wife, psychology professor Kristin Neff. The film documents Isaacson and Neff’s struggle to understand autism and bring comfort to their son.

Rowan suffers from severe tantrums, but his anxieties seem to disappear when he approaches horses. After countless Western treatments fail to ease Rowan’s symptoms, Isaacson decides to seek Eastern therapies. Isaacson and his wife travel with Rowan into the heart of Mongolia on horseback, seeking the spiritual aid of shamans. The film is, as Isaacson himself says, “a story about how, as a family, we did something crazy…in search of a miracle.”

The Horse Boy follows the family’s journey through the steppes of Mongolia. Their hope is that shaman’s can help heal Rowan—not to ‘cure’ his autism, but to ease his painful and dysfunctional behaviors. At its most basic level, The Horse Boy is about understanding autism, but the film is really about the bond between parent and child. The success of the film (and the power of the couples love for their son) is that the spectator understands why Isaacson and Neff are willing to be whipped by a shaman during a ceremony merely for the hope of bringing comfort to their son. The love they have for their child is evident in every frame of this film.

The Horse Boy offers no solutions or answers, but it does offer hope. Rowan’s transformation during this trip is powerful and real—he returns to the States a happier, calmer child. Whatever the cause of Rowan’s healing, it is clear that he has found some element of peace during the trip. The Horse Boy suggests there is hope of understanding autism and providing healing to autistic children.

Review by Joanna Chlebus

The Prospect of Magic

By M.O. Walsh
Livingston Press

The Prospect of Magic, a collection of ten stories, sets up a wonderful world where the real and magical live side by side. It’s enchanting. Some of the stories are hopeful, some are tragic, and some are sad, just like real life. All of them feature flights of fancy, just like the best magic trick.

The story centers around Fluker, Louisiana, where the World Famous Ploofop Travelling Circus decides to stay after its owner, Abidail Ploofop, dies. Margo the Mind Reader gives a eulogy, “a speech that, legend has it, wrapped a hopeful message around the mind of every person in attendance.” Soon, the townsfolk are playing poker on their roof with giants, receiving lions in the mail, and angry clown gangs roam the streets, making trouble. These delightful images of a circus gone to seed populate the stories, but never pull away from Walsh's general message of good will and that people can be accepted no matter what.

In "The Cat Who Ate The Boy," the young narrator receives a lion named Big Kitty mailed to the carnival, and after attempting to care for it, takes the beast to his grandfather. The story is told through the boy’s eyes, and Big Kitty that lurks in and out of the story soon becomes a metaphor for his parent’s relationship – an element that is in many ways big, strong and beyond the boy's control.

The title story tells of a teenage boy learning to deal with the magic he has, and how to reconcile it with the reality of the world. "The Dream Tow" tells of a fortune telling machine that reminds the characters to savour what they have in life, whether it’s a musical skill with a trombone or a happy marriage. The final story, "The Ploofop Refugees," follows Margo the Mind Reader’s husband as he deals with her impending death, and the possibility of the circus folks leaving Fluker.

All of these stories deal with the people from the circus and the Fluker townspeople as both everyday people, and people filled with magic. The ease the characters and stories show with the idea of giraffes eating leaves off the trees in the town square in the same story as the death of wife is remarkable, and is what sets these stories apart from other short stories in their sense of fun and community. The prospect of magic indeed.

Review by Taylor Rhodes

The Woodmans

Directed by C. Scott Willis
C. Scott Films



The prize-winning documentary The Woodmans chronicles the histories of a family of artists through conversations, monologues, journals, and both fine art photographs and family snapshots. The film’s narrative, from its start with the marriage of George and Betty Woodman to its finish with their lives today, is marked by their daughter, photographer Francesca Woodman, whose reputation has skyrocketed in the decades after her suicide in 1981 at twenty-three years of age.

After the Tribeca Film Festival screening, director C. Scott Willis, unfamiliar with the art world before the project, told how he met the Woodmans socially. They told him they were the parents of the famous photographer, and Willis made the embarrassing error of asking if their daughter would mind talking to his daughter, who was studying photography. Out of that situation and the Woodmans’ account of what had happened, Willis was inspired to make The Woodmans.

“Why did Francesca jump off a building?” while never voiced, and positioned as one question among many, is addressed in the pained, incomplete way suicide is usually discussed. There is no “interviewer” or even unifying message or theme, just unobtrusive aesthetic shaping of the movement forward of lives.

Francesca’s precocity—many of her photographs were made in her teens—is attributed in the film to her immersion in art as she was growing up. However, the film underplays the centrality of sexuality to her and most women’s lives (Francesca experienced a romantic break-up before her death) and ignores the sexual politics of the declining women’s movement, which coincided with Francesca’s adolescence.

Since both George and Betty have been artists all their lives, there is necessarily much about their making of art. The parental Woodmans speak loftily of exhibiting to a wider public, but there’s material here for an indictment of the art world: the winner-take-all reward system, the commodification of artistic product (Francesca’s photographs financed tuition for a collector’s children), and the competition among artist friends and, yes, family. Yet, the background of well-appointed studios and a house with a pool in Italy could fuel enough lifestyle lust to gentrify numerous bohemias.

Francesca, who with little success tried commercial fashion photography and worked as a photographic assistant, does “talk” about money through a chorus of friends and her fashion photographs. Indeed, her parents bicker about whether being rejected for a National Endowment of the Arts grant contributed to her suicide. (George does mention that his father “helped the couple financially” but disapproved of his son’s marriage to a Jewish woman.) In a film about questions, some fall away in the family drama.

Yes, artists will find much to like in this film—sumptuous art, the quotidian discipline and physicality of art-making, a compelling score by David Lang—but the film also has much for feminists to ponder about the choice to parent.

The mother, Betty, emerges as the hero, directly addressing the responsibilities of mothering as they intersect with the self. She wanted to “experience” childbirth and mothering, but was terror struck when presented with her infant son, Charlie, Francesca’s older brother, who became a videographer; Betty says baldly, “Maybe I’ve been an absolutely horrible mother.”

She made her pots, used in the household but not to be broken, behind the family house while mothering young children. (Avoiding interruptions presents a challenge for any parent, or anyone, working at home.) Visiting art museums, the Woodmans habitually set the children loose with pads for copying art, while they looked at art uninterrupted. When Betty talks about her daughter, she seems more mother than artist. In contrast, George admits that his daughter’s intensity was what made her interesting to him. Originally an abstract painter, he is now working in photography. Near the end, Betty becomes the triumphant artist, when a commission is installed in the American embassy in Beijing.

The Woodmans started with a faux pas and records a generous baring of lives and scars. Finding answers is left for the audience—like life, or art.

Review by Frances Chapman

The Demons of Aquilonia

By Lina Medaglia
Inanna Publications

The Demons of Aquilonia is a journey through a verdant panorama of beauty and a rich tapestry of the generations of families that comprise a small mountain village in the Italian region of Calabria. Lina Medaglia does a great job describing the push and pull forces that drive domestic and international migration. The beauty of the land is juxtaposed with the regional accent of Calabria, the ancient indebtedness that is the result of efforts to gain valuable, arable land and the general lack of opportunity that causes an all-too familiar “brain drain” toward urban areas and abroad. Such struggles of the countryside could be understood and found to be relatable to any person hailing from the rural side of the growing urban-rural divide.

The story presented in The Demons of Aquilonia does not flow in a linear fashion, and this communicates well the point that the central character, Licia, is in simultaneous dialogue with her those that share her current life after immigrating to Canada and family and friends from her her childhood spent in Calabria. For example, within two or three chapters you may travel with Licia between 1962 and 2006 discussing along the way Licia’s accent and her perseverance in Canadian schools and the revelations of her mother’s belief in the ‘Giganteschi curse’.

Medaglia’s portrait of her time in Calabria makes you wish that you were George Clooney with a sun-drenched villa on the precarious cliffs of the Amalfi coast. Alas, the closest that I have come so far is the imported Blood Orange Soda I recently picked up from Target. But Medaglia’s portrayal of the fractious dialogue between the past and present via the stories of older relatives provokes one to pursue one’s own odyssey through a genealogical tapestry. The Demons of Aquilonia is an appeal to understand the richness and complexity of one’s own past as this may gift us with a more holistic understanding of our personal identity. Understanding personal, familial history is a key to a deeper self-understanding and thereby a more firm ground on which to build an identity that is inclusive of the memories of those that came before us.

Review by Brandon Copeland

A Thread of Sky

By Deanna Fei
Penguin Press

Six Chinese American female characters form the main narrative perspectives of Deanna Fei’s ambitious first novel, A Thread of Sky. There is family matriarch Lin Yulan, once a revolutionary for the nationalist party in China, and her daughters Irene and Susan. Irene is a bereaved widow looking to herself reconnect with her three daughters: Nora, a finance and marketing success; Kay, the one most connected to her Chinese ethnic roots; and Sophie, the youngest who struggles with an eating disorder and was just accepted to Stanford University. Irene’s grand plan to unite the family is to plan a trip to China, a venture in which only women will be invited.

Lin Yulan’s revolutionary past is one that sets the tone for the generations that follow, as she raises both Irene and Susan to be independent women who strive for careers of their own. When Irene’s career as a scientist begins to find a renaissance after the birth of her first two children, she discovers she is pregnant again. Irene’s mother wants her to abort the child, but Irene does not, and yet, despite Irene’s own commitment to raising a family, the values instilled in her by her mother regarding the importance of self-sustainment are also ones she hands down to her daughters.

There are many complications on the trip, and all revolve around romance and relationships (perhaps with the exception of Sophie). Nora’s crumbling relationship with her Caucasian WASP-y husband leaves her in an escapist mindset when she assents to go on the tour. Having arranged a meeting with her grandfather while she was in China previously, Kay possesses her own agenda about the impending trip. (Lin Yulan and her husband, Kay’s grandfather, parted on bad terms when she left for the United States, making Kay’s overtures both risky and somewhat sentimental.) Sophie would rather stay at home preparing for her freshman year and developing a relationship with her African American boyfriend, Brandon. She also finds herself dealing with an eating disorder that arises not long after her father dies. Susan, a poet, although seemingly happily married to Winston, still finds herself thinking about an ill-conceived affair with a former creative writing student named Ernesto.

At one point early on in the novel, The Joy Luck Club is referenced. It is an apt moment that recalls the self-consciousness of many Asian American writers publishing today. In that novel, Jing-mei returns to China, sets foot on what is believed to be a kind of homeland, and finds some sort of resolution within the last handful of pages. This kind of return journey is not the one that Fei has planned. Indeed, the tour of China is just the beginning of a narrative about the complications of intergenerational relationships between these Chinese American women. Fei lets her characters find footing by exposing their flaws and judiciously characterizing their various goals and motivations. The novel finds its surest stride within character construction.

There is, of course, one other major “character,” which is the way Fei configures China. The Chinese American women struggle to find clear and transparent attachments to nation and place. China is not a landscape that yields easily to them, but Fei is clear to mark these women off differently than other tourists and mobile elites. Indeed, there is a large discourse related to China’s modernization that is being interrogated any time the six women find themselves in bazaars or markets, where global capitalism is ambivalently represented.

There is a delicate balancing act in the characters' desire to root out problematic inequities arising from China’s modernization while simultaneously discovering that such problematics are difficult and thorny to address. The most compelling parts of the novel are rooted here, especially when Kay attempts to constitute a mode of transnational feminism that is thwarted at almost every turn by the way upward mobility becomes one of the ways by which China’s future is brokered. It is clear that Fei’s novel does not broker to presenting China as an exotic, unchanging landscape that can be claimed by the credit card. Rather, it is complex and shifting, a place that is constantly being razed and rebuilt, preserved in some locations, but disintegrating in others.

A Thread of Sky does not conclude with easy answers and, instead, leaves many open questions. In this suspended state of expectance, the novel resolutely moves outside of sentimentalism and resides in a domestic drama that unfolds unceasingly and with admirable restraint. In this regard, A Thread of Sky manages to offer a visually stunning tableau of China’s evolution in the twenty-first century without shifting into the superficiality of a travelogue, letting the reader’s sense of an already complex geography change as her characters do too.

Review by Stephen Hong Sohn

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

The Truth About Delilah Blue

By Tish Cohen
Harper Perennial

After first reading The Truth About Delilah Blue's jacket blurb, it struck me as a beach book. It turned out I was only slightly incorrect; it's an airplane book, most satisfying when you really have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

Delilah, also known as Lila, is working as a nude model in an attempt to absorb the art education she cannot afford. Her father, a successful salesman who has long been the center of her world, now seems to be having trouble navigating the world on his own. It is at this point that Lila's long-lost mother reenters the scene, bringing a little sister and a family secret, both of which cause Lila to reexamine her viewpoint and direction in life.

The story’s center is a question: how do you solve a mystery that explains your entire life when one parent is too self-absorbed to recognize her part in the story, and the other parent is losing the part of his mind that remembers? Is it more important to go back or to go forward?

The Truth About Delilah Blue is well written, with an almost soothing narrative voice and descriptive prose that allows one to forgive the formulaic plot. Recipe for a summer’s read: Mix one plucky heroine with a family crisis, add a plot twist that no one will expect, sprinkle in a few quirky extras, and let combine for a hundred pages or so, more or less according to taste. Our heroine conquers her issues, shows them all, and lands the hot boyfriend just as she should, and voila, everybody’s fine. The story would have been sufficiently likable if it hadn’t tried to be more than it is, but unfortunately that’s not the case here. This book appears to be convinced it is a novel, not just a shortcut to a screenplay, but we have too many loose story threads, too many characters that enter with detail but drift off without explanation. Many concepts are touched on but none are done justice, from the pain of abandoned children to the sadness of a parent with Alzheimer’s and the anger at a parent that just won’t grow up. Any of these could have made for a successful story, several or all of them together if handled correctly and with enough detail. Unfortunately, Cohen sprinkles in only a little of each, and just ends up with soup.

The book is slow to start, and is most interesting in the middle third. The ending really isn’t one; only the father’s character sees resolution, while the others are left adrift in a sea of what ifs. Lila makes plans to be the one to gather up and hold together the loose ends of her family, and you expect to see how she manages the feat. Instead, the story just stops.

The Truth About Delilah Blue is enjoyable if you enter with little in the way of expectation. It’s just the thing to pick up before your next flight.

Review by Melissa Ruiz