gmonkey42: cartoon Sephiroth (Default)
I got Stranger Than Fiction on Netflix. I'm enjoying it except for the fact that Maggie Gyllenhaal's character Ana is a giant Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She dropped out of Harvard Law School to run a bakery! She tweaks uptight IRS agent Will Ferrell! She didn't pay her taxes on the grounds that they fund wars and stuff! She gives cupcakes to homeless guys!

Seriously, it's difficult to resist the urge to fast-forward through all the scenes she's in.

Dustin Hoffman is hilarious and Queen Latifah is awesome as the foil to Emma Thompson's also very funny author character (who I suspect is actually not a very good writer, if she came up with a character like Ana). But this Ana is making an otherwise great movie barely tolerable.

And the MPDG-ness is contagious: Will Ferrell just brought her flours. Not a typo. A box containing bags of different types of flour. Because she's a baker! How quirky! You know she already buys that stuff in bulk, right? And it's probably a health code violation to sell baked goods made from flour out of unmarked bags from who-knows-where. Anyway. I stopped the DVD at that point. I'll watch the rest later.

I hope he does die at the end.

ETA: SPOILERS )
gmonkey42: cartoon Sephiroth (Default)
I've been reading this article from a link posted by [livejournal.com profile] springheel_jack in bits and pieces while I eat my lovely orange slices and wait for my queries to run.

It's about the racism and colonialism in Avatar, but with some new insights into this type of film that I hadn't seen before.

I especially liked the bit about Titanic. I had sort of an Ah-ha moment reading it: that's why Titanic is so enormously popular with girls (and women)! Jack is a male Manic Pixie Dream Girl! All the more reason not to shoehorn Kirk and Spock into those roles

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