Review of My Week with Marilyn and a bit of Meta on Marilyn

Saw the flick My Week with Marilyn last night. This was the film based on the memoir by Colin Carter, about the week the film documentary writer and director spent working on the film The Prince and the Showgirl with Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier. Kenneth Brannagh and Michelle Williams were nominated for Oscars for their portrayals of Oliver and Marilyn. They deserved them, particularly Williams who so perfectly portrayed the title character, that I almost thought I was watching Marilyn Monroe on the screen. Her performance went beyond mere mimicry to depict the desperate and hungry soul that lay beneath the movie star sheen. It is by far the best thing about the movie and possibly the only reason to see it. That and Brannagh's take on Olivier...who is humbled, humiliated and maddened by his encounter with Marilyn. Brannagh is almost perfect for the role of Olivier since he in some respects shares many of Olivier's character traits...the notorious ego.

The problem with the film is it is less about the notorious struggle between Olivier and Monroe to make The Prince and The Showgirl, which drove Olivier back to the stage, and more about why men fell in love with Monroe and got their hearts broken. Which is a shame, because we already know that. All you have to do is watch Monroe's movies, which are much better. The best parts of the film focus on Olivier, or on the making of Prince and Showgirl, the worst on Colin and Marilyn. 60% is on Colin and Marilyn - and there's not much to it. Sort of silly boy crush - and done better in other films. Also Colin is a character that it is difficult to care much about. A privileged lad who is resourceful and self-absorbed, not to mention a bit of a user. When the prop girl, whom he was dating and had slept with, Lucy, portrayed by Emma Watson (yes, the one who played Hermoine), tells him that she's glad that Marilyn broke his heart, because he's the sort who needed to have it broken, I wholeheartedly agreed.

Rent it for the performances...not the story. The dialogue is not bad. Bit slow in places, but considering the story - that's to be expected.

After watching it, it occurred to me why characters such as the one's Marilyn Monroe portrayed and in the end became herself...always grated on my nerves. Harmony in Buffy and Angel is basically a similar trope as is Darla. The pretty ditzy girl who exudes sex, that men fall over themselves to help or assist, with her curves and her blond locks, and her
seemingly mindless little girl banter. She uses the heterosexual male gaze against him, she uses the heterosexual male desire to dominate against him as well...she's like a siren, luring him with her song, before she can sink in her teeth. As Arthur Miller tells Sir Laurence Olivier... she's destroying me. I can't write. I can't create. I can't work. I can't think. She's devouring me.

Yet, when we are in the women's perspective...that's not the intent. Marilyn states at one point to Colin, who fails miserably to understand, "They all fall in love with Marilyn, but when they discover I'm not Marilyn...they leave." Marilyn is a tragic story of how giving in to the male gaze, becoming that obscure object of desire can literally destroy you. She took pills to wake up, pills to sleep, pills to be happy, pills to come down. She had to always be on, always be the sex symbol, always that obscure object of desire with the smokey kitten voice. She could never just be plain old Norma Jean.

Review of the Film Margin Call

Just finished watching Margin Call. It's a hot day, so I'm inside reading and watching movies on tv with the A/C blasting. And regarding...Margin Call? Wow. Just Wow.

Margin Call is an independent film about the 2008 financial crisis from the point of few of an investment banking firm, similar to Leheman Brothers, just hours before Black Monday.



This film is possibly the best film that I have seen to date on the 2008 financial crisis or Wall Street period. If you want to understand what happened on Wall Street and the financial crisis? Rent this film. But ignore that...it is also amongst the best films I've seen this year or last year for that matter. Certainly amongst the best written and structured. It was nominated for best screenplay for the Oscars, and won various critical awards. Deserved. The script is the sparse style of David Mamet, and for a while I thought Mamet was the writer. Nope. The writer is J.C. Chandor. It was produced by Zachary Quinto.

The cast? Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey in a room battling each other with nothing but words and their eyes. Rare to have a film that is suspenseful and tight, and has no action, it is all propelled by dialogue. Everything is conveyed through the words the characters use, their body language and shots of the building and the city.

The film takes place over a 36 hour time period within the halls and offices of a top-level investment banking firm. A senior risk analyst portrayed by Zachery Quinto is requested by his former boss, who was just laid-off, to finish project he'd been working prior to being fired and to be careful. What happens next....is a financial horror tale with no blood, no violence, just words.

Nearly flawless, it is admittedly slow to start and took me a while to figure out what was going on. Unlike many movies, this one treats the audience as if they are on the same level plain, and does not dumb things down. We enter the action as if we are investment bankers or literally flies on the wall. The writer doesn't explain things to us. And that is a good and bad thing. Bad in that it takes a little while to catch on, good in that it makes the film more real and valid. If there's a hero or central protagonist, it is Kevin Spacey's Sam Emerson, who is Quinto's bosse's boss. And runs Quinto's department. Spacey is humanized with the mourning of his sick dog, who serves as an apt metaphor for his situation.

Highly recommended.

This, that, and the Buffy Character Wars Poll Results

1. Hot day. Stayed in during most of it. That time of month, which explains the headaches and crankiness. Although not as hot a day...as summer in the midwest or Kansas. OR for that matter Manhattan. Brooklyn is always about 10 degrees cooler than Manhattan.

2. Still reading Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale - which is the best non-literary/non-classic romance novel that I've read. (Literary/classic romance novels were written over 100 years ago and are still being read today, examples include Wuthering Heights (yes, it is a romance novel), Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Rebecca, and Anna Karina. I don't know if Thomas Hardy's novels count. But I daresay Baroness Orzy's The Scarlette Pimpernell does.

Kinsale can actually do dialect well. If you want to read a romance novel who does it correctly and consistently? Read Kinsale - she demonstrates why Kleypas' sucks at it.
Read enough books and broad enough a variety, you begin to see why some writers are better than others.

3. Buffy fandom character wars poll...

Hmmm, so far 92 people have taken my poll. Of the 92, roughly 50% have friended me (as far as I can tell...after about 92 - you get a headache reading the lj names of all of the participants and just throw up your hands and give up. Will state there are some creative lj names out there...far more creative than mine, where were you when I was coming up with my name people? Most I can't spell. Or pronounce. But that's nothing new, I can't pronounce the last names or first names of half the people I work with, which is probably a bigger problem.).

Anyhow...of the 92 to date?

[Behind the cut is my analysis of the poll results. I explain my choices. I speculate about others...(most likely I'm wrong), and do a hap-hazard and meaningless analysis.
Please don't take anything I write personally. I can't read your minds. And like I told you when you took the poll - you could change your mind tomorrow. The poll is hardly definitive. Polls never are. That's why marketing isn't a science. ]

( results of the Buffy Character Wars Poll and my explanation of my choices, speculation about other's choices, and hap-hazard analysis of the overall results )