joreth | Entries tagged with reviews (movies)

I watched a Korean movie on Netflix called Love & Leashes, about a submissive guy who transfers to another department at work and meets a woman in that department who he wants to be his Master. Although she is ... "intimidating", she has never heard of BDSM before, but she finds the idea intriguing.

Korean culture is very different from USian culture, and how they conduct relationships is different. Going into this movie, I didn't know if what I was watching is actually how BDSM relationships are done in Korea or if it's more "the writers know nothing of this subject but thought it would sell a movie script", because it's definitely not how I would recommend conducting a D/s relationship here. But a USian friend of mine who has been living and teaching in Korea for the last several years chimed in to give some background:

It's based off a webtoon by an anonymous author. And the style in the movie is pretty spot on with Korean bdsm forums and the lingo in Korean is super accurate and could only be known by pretty extensive research or experience.

Even the word for fake Dom -- 변바 is in it. It's super niche bdsm slang. Same with 연디 date d/s.

When it shows twitter handles those are a few letters off from real people I know irl in Korea. The background info is... eerily exact to the real bdsm scene here.

Even not knowing if it was a culture difference or uninformed writing, 20 minutes in and it was already 50 shades more charming than the piece of shit I've been choking down lately.

The characters' motivations are clear and their behaviour is consistent with both their personalities / histories, and also with what is known about BDSM, kink culture, and kink psychology. There's no abuse happening at all - it's being led by the sub with negotiation and boundaries from the dom, there was discussion and concern about unfair power imbalances due to the work connection, and it was established that the "newbie" to BDSM had personality tendencies in this direction already and does not find kink to be disgusting or that it must be the result of some childhood trauma.

In other words, everything that is happening so far makes sense, in context.

It's very rom-comy, not erotica, and I think that helps. Trying to make her dark and foreboding as a dom would, I think, remove a lot of its charm.

It does make me miss having a puppy, though.

Some of my notes while watching it:

OTG they're so awkward! It's very endearing.

OK, her digging her red heel into his fully clothed back is so far way more erotic than every sex scene in 50 Shades combined.

Puppy play, verbal humiliation, pain, service submission, nurturing dom ... someone here has actually at the very least read about D/s and not just attended a public dungeon with play restrictions.

AFTERCARE!!!

[discussing how his last girlfriend dumped him for being into BDSM]

"Do you really enjoy all this pain and suffering?"
"It hurts ... but I still feel so alive, you know?"
"I don't get it"
[crestfallen] "It's understandable."
"I mean, if it makes the person you like feel more alive, why can't you do it for them, you know? It's not like it's anything bad."
[slow hope]

#SoMuchBetterThan50ShadesOfShit

The movie version feels very manga, without being cartoony, if that makes sense.

They are so adorkable

By the end, I felt it had remained charming the whole way through. It was very much a rom-com complete with confusion arising from not communicating and a ridiculous happy ending, but it was so very pro-kink and the leads were sweet and adorkable and endearing.

Note to all writers: this is how you write "quirky" and "relatable" characters, not by making them Hollywood pretty but having everyone else describe them as "plain" while giving them no personality but making them clumsy. Also, don't soften a "hard" edged woman. Not everyone who has a strong personality is using it as a wall to hide behind and keep people from getting too close, and making a woman softer and smaller is not how she finds someone to love her. Plus, it's totally possible to be "strong" and even "hard" without being a bitch.

Also, a submissive man is not "weak". We see the male lead here standing up to his bosses and taking control of situations when necessary but also never stepping over the women around him when he needs to be aggressive. He supports them and uses his privileged position to make them heard, within the cultural context.

Anyone wanting to write about kink in an erotic setting where there is a conflict to overcome needs to address the idea of shame. And unlike the current most popular example, the goal is not to reinforce the shame of the kink tendencies, but to either overcome it or to find a way to deal with social shaming in an appropriate cultural context without internalizing it. This is a good example of one way to address shame well.

Finally got around to watching the Ms. Marvel series on Disney+ and I'm SUPER impressed with the cinematography. It's clever and creative and quirky and both subtle and outrageously cartoonish and it's seamless to the live-action happening.

Really, just these opening scenes is ushering in a new era of YA television, honestly. It's told in a similarly serious tone to any adult TV show I would love but it's so fun and colorful and engaging that I think it probably appeals to a much younger audience. I think it's a great way to bridge the generation gap, actually.

The pace of the effects slowed down and got more subtle after the first episode or two, so that we could focus more on the story and not get distracted by the visual onslaught of creativity but the effects remained throughout, maintaining its young style.

And the story was, in Disney fashion, heavily pro-family. Other reviews have covered the cultural accuracy and since it’s not my culture, I’ll just say that I both recognized some cultural aspects from my time on the Bollywood circuit with Indian clientele and also recognized more universal elements of love and family and being a teenager and generation gaps that it seems we all go through in our own ways.

The series is really quite impressive, technically speaking. It is more “comic booky” than some of the other Marvel series, or rather more YA comic booky because there are darker and more subtle and sophisticated ways to still be comic booky (see Netflix Marvel and M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable), which makes sense as it features teenagers but it’s fun even for adults and has plenty for everyone.

I found this show utterly charming the whole way through, and the cinematography especially is impressive. I think this is a good one for GenX and older Millennial geeks to watch with the kids. If you have kids who are old enough to sit through a series with a multi-episode story arc, I recommend giving this one a go with them.

Two movie characters, gender and other identifying characteristics irrelevant. Each line is a new panel.

1) That's it! I'm leaving!

2) No!

2) Wait!

2) There is...

2) something I need...

2) to tell...

2) you...

1) I don't want to hear it! I'm outta here!

2) ...

1) ...

2) ...

1) So don't even bother!

2) [mutely grabs hair in frustration]

1) [walks away]

2) [stares silently in anger]

1) [keeps walking]

2) ...

1) ...

2) [exasperated sigh]

#JustFuckingBlurtItOutAlready #AlmostAllMovieConflictsCanBeSolvedByCommunication

I am frequently asked for TV recommendations. My parents just asked me to write down all the shows I was recommending to them because I apparently blurted out too many titles to remember. So I started writing out a list, and then also a short description so that she would know what they were about and why I recommended them.

Then I got the idea to archive this list somewhere and add to it as I go so that I don't have to keep writing it out every time. I watch a shitload of television (and movies), across just about all genres, and it's hard to remember them all, or to remember which movies to recommend to which people, who might have different tastes.

So I'm going to attempt to start a list. We'll see how well I keep up with it. I'm starting with a list of TV shows that I think my parents would like including my own description, and I'll be adding titles of shows that I recommend for other people, along with descriptions of those at a later time. For right now, if it has a description, it's because I'm recommending it to my parents. If it doesn't, then I recommend it, but for people who have different tastes than my parents. Later, when I update this post, I'll also update the explanation here. It's late, so I'm just trying to get through my parents' list right now and I'll come back to this later for the others.

I am also going to list what network the show is on, but if the networks keep changing their inventory to make it too difficult to keep up, I'll abandon that. I may make a Listal list, ~~but I can't include commentary on individual entries, just the groups within a list~~ (apparently I can: https://www.listal.com/list/my-tv-show-recommendations).

I may also consider an airtable database, but you have to create an account (apparently) to see my databases and I know my parents are not going to do that, so that's a project for later down the road. I really like the Listal service, but I also really want to have my commentary on each listing.

So, for now, my TV show recommendations:

Netflix

Grace & Frankie - hilarious comedy. 2 very different women in their '70s who don't like each other get dumped by their husbands so they can marry each other and the two women end up supporting each other. Hijinks ensue.

iZombie - cop drama with an undead twist. A promising young doctor gets attacked at a party on a boat, falls overboard, washes ashore, and wakes up dead with a craving for brains. Unable to tell anyone that she's a zombie now, she gets a job at the city morgue so that she can steal brains without anyone noticing. She discovers that she takes on the personalities of the brains she eats and also accesses some of their memories. When a murder victim comes in, she tells the investigating police officer that she's "psychic" and starts teaming up with him to solve crimes.

Cobra Kai - surprisingly good drama. Bad guy from the Karate Kid movie, Johnny Lawrence, is all grown up now and re-opens his old dojo and starts teaching karate. But he's still a jerk. Daniel LaRusso is now a successful car salesman with a beautiful wife and kids who tries to stop Johnny from imposing the abusive values of Cobra Kai dojo on the next generation.

The Good Place - absurd comedy. Eleanor wakes up in an office waiting room, where she is told by an administrator (played by Ted Dansen) that she is dead and in the good place. But the description of Eleanor's life on earth in her file is not true. Now Eleanor has to figure out how to prevent anyone from finding out that she was actually a terrible human being so that they don't kick her out of the Good Place and send her to the Bad Place.

Lucifer - supernatural cop drama. Lucifer, God's favorite son and angel who was cast out of heaven to rule hell, decides that he's done taking orders from an absentee father and abandons his underworldly administrative position for a life of luxury up on Earth. Where he meets Detective Chloe Decker and discovers that he rather enjoys helping her solve crimes even though she seems to be the only human on the entire planet who is immune to his charms.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - musical comedy. Rebecca Bunch is a successful New York City lawyer with a ton of anxiety problems who spontaneously decides one day to quit her lucrative position and move across the country to California, where her old middle school boyfriend lives, because dating him one summer is the last time she remembers being happy. The question is, can she convince him to love her and get back together, or is she just a psychotic stalker with a penchant for sappy musical numbers?

Dead To Me - thriller / mystery. Recently widowed when her husband was killed by a hit and run vehicle, Jen struggles to cope with single motherhood and latent anger issues. Until Judy appears in her life. The exact opposite of foul-mouthed, angry Jen, Judy is sweet and kind and a little bit hippie-dippy. But who is she? Where did she come from? And who killed her husband?

Dexter - cop drama with a murderous twist. Dexter is a forensic scientist with the Miami police department. He investigates murders by studying the methods by which people kill, including a specialty in blood spatter patterns. All the better to hide his own serial murders. But it's OK because he only kills other bad guys!

Fuller House

Sense8

Altered Carbon

One Day At A Time

Black Mirror

Sex Education

Hulu

Elementary - Sherlock Holmes cop drama. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never liked the character he created and deeply resented his popularity. Consequently, the character of Sherlock Holmes is kind of a jerk. Doyle was trying to tell us that the sort of person who relies on "logic" is someone we should dislike, but for some reason, everyone loved his stories anyway. Over a century later, dozens of remakes have been made but they all have to work with this unlikable character. This imagining takes the Sherlock character into new realms, with Lucy Liu as Dr. Watson, not his sidekick and chronicler but a partner who can hold her own against the legendary Sherlock Holmes. Holmes and Watson team up together to solve crimes while we get a very different perspective on who they both are.

Lie To Me - Sherlock Holmes-like cop drama. Cranky, abrasive Dr. Cal Lightman develops the theory of "micro-expressions" - tiny, quick, involuntary expressions that pass over people's faces that give away what they're thinking. Very loosely based on a real (but debunked) theory where Paul Ekman would analyze expressions from video, one frame at a time, whereas Lightman is able to read these expressions in real life as they happen with almost magical accuracy. The Lightman Group is a private business for hire that will detect people's lies and solve mysteries, sometimes even partnering with the police to solve crime.

Bones - odd couple crime drama. Forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan teams up with FBI agent Booth to investigate crime, loosely based on the real life and novels of a forensic anthropologist named Kathy Reichs. Agent Booth brings human remains to a federal science lab where Dr. Brennan "Bones" studies them to help solve their deaths.

Numb3rs - odd couple crime drama. Two brothers, one a decorated and successful FBI agent and the other a brilliant math genius and professor, who don't get along with each other because they don't understand each other. Until one of Don's FBI cases needs Charlie's mathematical expertise and brings them together.

Full House

Family Matters

Perfect Strangers

Designing Women

Wonder Years

Golden Girls

MASH

Cheers

Married With Children

Firefly

Doogie Howser

Disney+

Agent Carter - historical cop drama. Agent Peggy Carter was a secret British agent who worked on the Captain America project in World War II. After Captain America went Missing In Action and the war ended, she moved to the United States to work with the super secret organization called the Strategic Scientific Reserve in New York City, where she tries to solve crimes while battling her coworkers' and superiors' disbelief that women are capable of doing anything other than serving coffee and filing paperwork.

The Mandalorian

Other Networks

Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

I've been watching Cobra Kai. I hesitated to watch it because, even though I was a Karate Kid fan, I a) didn't want them to screw it up and b) had some complicated feelings about making the villains into the protagonists. As I keep saying in my Poly-ish Movie Reviews, I am character-driven. If I don't like the characters, I won't like the story no matter how well it's told, and if I do like the characters I will probably like the story no matter how terribly it's told.

Which makes unlikable protagonists very challenging for me. And Cobra Kai is about an unlikable protagonist.

One of Franklin's favorite books is about an unlikable protagonist. He holds it up as an example of how to write that kind of character well. I disagree. I hated that character from the beginning, I never felt sympathetic towards him, and I wasn't surprised at all at how bad he turned out to be (I may have not guessed the very specific details of the ending, but I wasn't surprised that he turned out as evil as he was).

Some unlikable characters are popular because we love to hate them. Bestor from Babylon 5 is one of these for me. He's written in a pretty nuanced, complex way, and yet I still hate him no matter how many little humanized tidbits the show throws at us to make him relatable. I think those humanized bits make him so deliciously evil that I really enjoy hating him. I want him to suffer and I enjoy every time he loses.

Then there is the "flip the script" or "mirror" method of telling a tale from the other perspective. Such as in Maleficent, where we are presented with an origin story or "reasons" why someone's actions may have been interpreted as evil depending on the perspective of the storyteller.

If you look at a war in progress, the "other side" is evil because they're the other side, but if you tell the story from that other side, then the first side is evil because THEY are the other side. Maleficent waging war on humans makes complete sense when those humans keep coming into fae lands to massacre all the fairies. But to the humans, she's an existential threat.

Johnny Lawrence is not Maleficent. There is even an episode where he tells someone else the story of Karate Kid but from his perspective, where Daniel LaRousso was the bully. And I can see how he reached that conclusion. But he's actually wrong. It's like how I can see how Republicans reach their conclusions, but they're factually wrong about them.

Johnny Lawrence is an asshole. He is the bad guy. No amount of "understanding his reasons" changes that. And yet, I care about what happens to him. A lot of the time I want him to suffer, but I want his suffering to teach him a lesson so that he'll stop being an asshole.

This isn't an origin story. But it kind of is. Now that Johnny is an adult, he is able to perpetuate the abuse that he suffered as a kid onto a whole new generation of kids. So we can see exactly how you can take someone who is kind and compassionate and considerate and slowly warp him into someone who is cruel. And how that can be done without even necessitating malicious intent.

Johnny Lawrence is, and always was, an asshole. But it's possible that he may have a redemption arc. What I'm liking about this show is that it's not a clear arc. It's also possible that he will never find redemption, depending on where they take his character. As long as his methods result in what he sees as success, he has no reason to see why he's a bad guy. Both possibilities is what makes this story interesting for me.

That's where the conflict really is - will Johnny redeem himself, or is this just a Walter White or Thanos situation? He succeeds and yet remains a bad guy with no redemptive arc? Some people will just straight up tell you in what way they are evil and completely believe they are in the right. Nazis, racists, misogynists, domestic abusers, etc. Johnny could be written by people like that, or by people who want to tell that kind of character's story. Or he could be written by people who want to believe that even those kinds of people can see the light. Which character is Johnny Lawrence? We'll find out.

I think the actor playing Johnny is pretty brave to bring back this character and tell his tale. At least, in the way that it's being told. If this had been basically like that one space movie where it's just a 2 hour ride justifying violence and violation because reasons, I wouldn't be saying this. I think this show (so far) stays on the right side of the line between *explaining* violence and *justifying* it.

After completing the first season, I don't like Johnny Lawrence. I'm not supposed to like him. And I dislike him enough that I'm not even rooting for him. He could change, and I would be glad to see that change, but I don't root for him to win the fights he gets into or hope that he comes out ahead in his interpersonal conflicts. I want him to get his ass kicked. I want the people in his life to leave him. I want him to fail. But if he somehow manages to learn from those failures and become a better person, I'd like to see that too. He is simultaneously an exercise in hope for growth and in schadenfreude. He's Schrodinger's anti-hero.

I don't like him and I'm not rooting for him. But I'm *invested* in seeing what happens to him.

And *that's* how you fucking write an unlikable character.

Everyone else is fairly boiler-plate, and yet also still well written and acted. Each of the characters has a predictable path or an archetypal role. But there are a *lot* of them. This isn't a black hat-white hat good vs. evil story where everyone is basically the same character (or no character) except for the one rogue they throw us as a bone.

There are several different archetypes in the show, each with their own arcs and developments, and each face enough nuanced conflicts that their arcs have several pivot points that could take them in one of several directions.

But this show is really about Johnny Lawrence, an unlikable character as the main character. This is more than just an anti-hero story. In all the anti-hero stories that are popular right now, they're anti-heroes but they're also somehow likable. They're bad guys but they're charming, or they're ethically grey but sympathetic, or something along those lines.

We've been "flipping the script" for a while now, telling anti-hero stories or telling a story from the villain's perspective. And in order to get the audience to be invested, ultimately we end up making those characters likable who just make poor decisions or who have something terrible happen to them. While terrible things did happen to Johnny that molded him into the person we see now and who makes poor decisions, he is ultimately someone who is not likable. He is toxic masculinity personified.

They had a difficult job here, because the '80s movie was pretty standard with writing the antagonist as a clear-cut villain. Johnny was a bully and there was no real reason for his bullying other than he was an asshole. Yes, his sensei made him an asshole, but he was definitely an asshole with no depth underneath.

Now we want to tell his story? Not how he became an asshole, but to tell the story OF an asshole? How do you give depth to a character originally written as shallow? He has to really be an asshole, even with that depth. There has to be a reason why he seemed to take pleasure in beating the shit out of Daniel and why he treated Ali the way he treated her.

He is very much like a lot of my backstage coworkers, who are assholes and, honestly, unlikable, but I can get along with them fine because they're real people and real people are messy, complicated creatures.

Johnny Lawrence is an asshole. I don't like him. I'm not supposed to like him. I'm probably supposed to root for him? But the writers and the actor keep him as an asshole so maybe I'm not supposed to root for him. Either way, I'm not rooting for him.

But I am invested in him and his outcome.

I think this show is exploring a lot of complex themes and emotions and ethical dilemmas. In some ways, it's still a little heavy-handed, like the original source was. But by telling the story from the antagonist's perspective while still maintaining those same morals and themes, it complicates the story and gives it a lot more character and a lot more grey areas.

And I really liked the pinnacle season conflict in which it didn't matter how that conflict was resolved, Johnny Lawrence could not win either way. So how do you root for him when both outcomes would suck for him? You choose which moral lesson you want him to learn from the two possible losing options?

In anti-hero stories, we root for the protagonist to succeed at, what is actually an "evil plot" - we want Danny Ocean to rob the casino. In Bandits, we want Joe & Terry to succeed at robbing banks and to "get the girl" Kate. We want Dexter to continue to kill people, or at least not get caught for it. We want the bad guys to get away with what they're doing because they're the protagonists and we get attached to them.

But I don't want Johnny Lawrence to succeed. I'm not rooting for him. I don't like him. And I'm not supposed to. At least, not yet. So they gave us a conflict in which he can't win, even if he succeeds. He is still unlikable. Anti-heroes are likable. Or, at least, sympathetic.

I do not like stories with unlikable characters at the helm. I like to dislike certain unlikable characters as foils or villains. And I really strongly dislike stories that romanticize or justify unlikable characters ("but he was abused!", "but she wanted it!", "but he started it!"). I'm also totally over "privileged white man has some kind of challenge that actually a lot of people have but his challenge turned him into the asshole he is today, so let's spend yet another show explaining his story" kind of tales.

But, at least through season 1, I think Cobra Kai does an excellent job of creating a realistic, nuanced unlikable protagonist that is keeping me engaged and invested in the outcome. And I have to say that I'm impressed. I heard good things about the show, but I was still expecting to not like it, or at least find it meh. Instead, I actually think it's really good. I'll get back to you after a few seasons before I go so far as to say it's brilliant. But it could be.

I just hosted a Brat Pack drama marathon. It was 3 of the movies that literally define the Brat Pack. David Blum, a reporter for the New Yorker, started out writing an article about Emilio Estevez shortly after St. Elmo's Fire. One night, Estevez invited Blum out to hang out with most of the cast, as they often did. Blum changed the focus of the article to the whole group and called it Hollywood's Brat Pack.

I grew up in the '80s with the Brat Pack as my role models. I watched a lot of movies in the '80s. If it hadn't been for my love of books and music, I very much could have been Xavier Cross from Scrooged with how much television I watched as a kid. Those Brat Pack movies, though ... Most of what I enjoyed in the '80s did not age well. I go back to watch the classics now as an adult and I'm really kind of horrified, if I'm being honest. I still love my old movies, though, because nostalgia is one helluva drug - forget about beer goggles, you oughta try on rosy nostalgia glasses sometime!

Anyway, the media I consumed as a kid was ... well ... rough. It was hard. It was deep. Frankly, it's no wonder that GenXers are pretty fucked up. The Outsiders, Stand By Me, Old Yeller, Neverending Story ... I'm still not over Artax's death. We grappled with some shit back then.

I also read a lot, as I mentioned. One of my favorite authors back then was one of the most popular authors of the time - Judy Blum. She tackled some pretty hard stuff too. Her coming of age novels were grounding. I remember the controversy over her 1975 novel, Forever. That book examined both suicidal depression and teen sex. Talk about heavy topics. In the story, the main character has premarital sex at the end of high school, believing she will be with her partner "forever", but in the end [spoiler alert] discovers that one's first love rarely lasts forever and she will move on from him.

The fact that the characters have sex as teenagers and do not end up married, and the main character uses birth control, makes this book come in a whopping #7 out of the top 100 "most challenged books" in the US, for how often it gets censored and banned.

I bring all of this up to talk about Cuties.

I finally watched the movie Cuties. I've been defending it and haven't even watched it yet. So I decided that if I must watch something before I criticize it, then I must also watch something in order to defend it. So I did. To be totally honest, absolutely nothing I have read, both pro and con, accurately explained to me what Cuties was about.

[SPOILER ALERT - The entire plot of the film follows]

Amy is an 11 year old Muslim girl growing up in France. Her family is, by my standards, extremely repressive. She is required to cover her body and hair, and pray for piety and modesty. She is moved into a new apartment and, presumably, a new school, where she meets the Cuties - 4 girls who have formed a dance team of that name.

These girls show their skin and defy authority. They are rebellious and obnoxious, but really not any worse than all the kids I knew at that age. Their first act of rebellion is to convince the entire schoolyard to pose and freeze one day when the bell rings to summon them back to class. I mean, that's hardly dangerous or scandalous. Just irritating to the authority figures.

After some routine bullying, Amy eventually gets accepted by their group and starts hanging out with them. She starts wearing less modest clothing, but again, nothing worse than anything I did at her age. She shows her legs and her midriff. I probably still have some of my old crop tops from the '80s. I have always been proud of my stomach and I liked showing it off.

As for legs ... well, I grew up in an era of knee-length shorts and I am still uncomfortable in anything shorter (although I have no problem with *skirts* that short, but shorts have to be to my knees). So let me tell you sometime of the nearly impossible task of finding shorts for women or girls that don't have half my ass hanging out. I literally have to wear men's shorts in order to find any long enough to make me comfortable. Girls wear short shorts because that's what's readily available.

Anyway, so the girls are dressing less modestly than Amy's Muslim family would like. But not any less modestly than any tweens I have seen since ... oh, probably the '60s. In fact, the tight mini skirts we see the Cuties in when we are introduced to them look suspiciously like the skirts I had back in the '80s. In the '90s, one of those mini skirts literally got me my first mall job when I was 16 - my boss liked my ass in that skirt and wanted to watch me reach up and straighten the suit jackets in that skirt all shift.

So, the Cuties have heard of some dance competition and they want to enter. So they rehearse all the time. All of their routines that we see are pretty standard hip hop routines - nothing particularly special or controversial. No twerking or crotch-splits or anything.

Amy wants to join their dance troupe, but she has never danced before. So she steals her older cousin's mobile phone to watch the practice videos the Cuties have uploaded so far and searches the internet for music videos to learn by. Unfortunately, she finds videos of voluptuous women in thongs twerking. So, guess what kind of moves she learns?

Here's the thing ... the right-wing propaganda of this film is totally wrong of course. It has nothing to do with pedophilia or sex trafficking or child prostitution. It is, of course, a criticism of the oversexualization of young girls, just as the producers and directors say it is.

But the defenses of the film led me to believe that it was a criticism of *the dance industry* and how *it* oversexualizes girls. But that's not true either.

The Cuties are not part of any dance studio or dance industry. They're 4 tweens (and Amy) who want to be famous dancers who emulate what they see in pop media. With, as far as I can tell, absolutely no adult supervision or guidance. Certainly no *pressure* to dance this way.

Amy's mother has no idea what she is getting up to. She has 2 small children to care for and a husband who is off somewhere courting a second wife (without telling her about it until it's a done deal). I'll get back to this in a minute. The only time we see Angelica's family is when she and her brother get into a fight and her dad yells that he's trying to sleep ... in the afternoon. We see Yasmine's mom, who seems nice enough, but clearly has no clue what the girls are getting into. None of the other girls' parents ever enter the picture.

So Amy, desperately trying to fit in, learns these very adult dance moves on her own. Then, when Yasmine gets kicked out of the group, and the group freaks out because the preliminaries for the dance competition are too soon to teach another girl the routine, Amy jumps in, proves that she's been studying their home videos and already knows the routine, and also introduces the other girls to the very adult dance moves she has also been studying.

These moves get incorporated into their routine. This routine wins the girls a spot in the competition during the primaries. When they get caught sneaking into a laser tag facility, Amy gets the girls out of trouble by explaining that they are dancers and celebrating their acceptance to the competition. To prove that they are really dancers, she starts doing the adult dance moves, making the two male employees so uncomfortable that they just let the girls go. The girls don't realize that the men were uncomfortable and trying to get out of watching tweens twerking, they think Amy just convinced the guards that they are legitimate dancers which, for some reason, gave them a free pass.

As they practice for the competition, Amy becomes more and more self-confident. She starts wearing even more revealing clothing and moves through her school with the same arrogant attitude as the other Cuties. Later, she picks a fight with a rival dance team, who manage to pants her and take pictures of her in her underwear to post on social media, mocking her for her childish undergarments.

Amy, filled with lots of really big emotions at this stage in her development and with her oppressive home life and her humiliation on behalf of her mother for her father bringing home a new wife, starts making really bad choices. She steals lots of money from her mom's purse and takes her friends and her brother on a shopping spree for more adult underwear and clothing.

Amy's mom eventually learns of the theft and freaks out, yelling and hitting Amy for getting out of hand. She even calls in a priest to do an exorcism, but the priest says there are no demons there. So Amy's mom and grandmother strip her and splash her with water, having earlier established that water washes away sins. Amy goes into a kind of trance-like convulsion partially consisting of some of her booty-shaking new dance moves.

Later, when her cousin discovers that she still has his phone and tries to take it back - her one connection to this grown-up, outside world of music videos and social media - Amy locks herself in the bathroom and takes a picture of genitals. I am unclear on if the picture includes her new adult underwear or not. The film shows her taking the picture but does not show us the picture (thankfully). She then posts this picture on social media.

Now her new friends hate her because she went too far. They call her a whore and say that they are receiving harassing messages to show off their private parts like Amy. So they kick her out of the group and bring back Yasmin. As her father's wedding day approaches and her grandmother continues to push her into being a dutiful, subservient, Muslim Senegalese young woman, and her period begins, all of Amy's really big feelings take over.

Amy sabotages Yasmine and shows up to the dance competition. With no time to wait for Yasmin, they accept Amy and run on stage. This is the one scene where we see the routine in full. And it's ... discomforting. The girls look like strippers. And I don't mean they look like some of these hip hop dancers who have some sexualized moves in their routine. I mean that I don't recall any hip hop in their new routine at all. The entire routine consisted of them humping the floor and putting their finger in their mouths and grabbing their crotches.

And the audience is having none of it. Except one dude, apparently. He seemed to think the routine was fine. But everyone else in the audience was shaking their heads, one mother covering her young daughter's eyes, some booing, lots of mumbling. The judges, however, all seemed to think it was fantastic, if their smiles and nods were anything to go by. That's disturbing.

While dancing, Amy seems to have some kind of emotional breakdown. Everything that has happened up to this point seems to have all come crashing in on her mind as she realizes what she's doing. She starts crying and flees the stage in the middle of the performance.

She runs home, where her grandmother sees her competition costume and calls her a whore, and then attacks her mother for having raised a whore daughter. Amy's mom finally stands up to her mother and tells her to back the fuck off and takes Amy into her room to comfort her. They seem to reach an understanding. Her mom tells her that she doesn't have to attend her father's wedding if she doesn't want to, which is about to start. So Amy changes out of her dance costume into a reasonably modest pair of jeans and a sweater, skips the wedding, and goes outside to play jump rope with the neighborhood kids.

And that's where it ends.

There was no "dance industry" in this film. It was mostly just 4 girls with too much unsupervised, unguided exposure to grown-up media. Had they been a part of a studio, it's quite possible that they would have been discouraged from the dance routine they choreographed.

This movie was far more like a Judy Blume novel, or a John Hughes film. It showed young kids under immense pressure with either not enough parental guidance or the wrong kind of parental oversight. Then, left to their own devices, their very large, overwhelming feelings drown the hormonal tweens and leads them to make very poor choices while they try to figure themselves out.

In the end, Amy figures out that she made some poor choices. But she can make other choices, and life will go on.

A few days ago, I just spent several hours watching teenagers kill other teenagers, get into large-scale fist fights with each other, learn how to use machine guns and grenades and kill enemy soldiers, and then barely-out-of-teens having lots of sex and snorting lots of cocaine and drinking obscene amounts of alcohol. These movies were also about young people figuring out that they made some poor choices, but that they can make other choices and life will go on (maybe not for the ones who died, but the rest will go on).

A whole bunch of years ago I read books with girls getting their periods, having sex, dealing with death, feeling lots of feelings, and also figuring out that they made some poor choices, but that they can make other choices and life will go on.

This is what it means to have a "coming of age" drama.

There is a country song that says "I believe that youth is spent well on the young / 'Cause wisdom in your teens would be a lot less fun". I don't happen to agree that youth is spent well on the young, but I definitely agree that wisdom in your teens would be a lot less "fun", for some value of "fun". I am frankly amazed some days that I lived to see adulthood. Between racing my car and rolling it down a hill and running from and waiting out a mountain lion from atop a water tower and sneaking out at night to party with kids doing way to many fucking drugs, it's really only luck that allowed me to live to see "wisdom". I'm not sure that my middle aged wisdom would have resulted in less fun, so much as different fun. I'm having lots of fun as an adult too, only with much less risk.

My point is that the teen years are a pretty fucking foolish age. It's when bodies change and emotions get really large but the brains are not yet developed enough to know what to do with with it all. Everything is confusing, everything is humongous, everything is immediate, everything is absolute.

And that's what we see in "coming of age" stories. These stories are uncomfortable. These stories are challenging. These stories are difficult. These stories are often a little bit ugly. Because that's what the teen and pre-teen years are - uncomfortable, challenging, difficult, and often a little bit ugly.

Which makes Cuties a pretty damn good representative of the "coming of age" genre.

The movie does not draw any hard conclusions, as a good "coming of age" drama ought not. But what lesson it does impart is that the oversexualization of these young girls was definitely not for their own good. Amy was caught between too repressive and far too unfettered at a time in her life when her emotions were also too big whilst her knowledge and reason was far too inexperienced.

This led her to ping-pong between extremes, both being wrong. She needs to stop bouncing back and forth off the opposite walls and find a path between them that she can walk at a more reasonable pace without banging herself up on both walls. Which is, I feel, a common dilemma for many young girls. It certainly was for me.

Telling an uncomfortable story about an uncomfortable situation does not necessarily condone or support that situation or that action. It depends on how the story is told. For instance, 50 Shades very clearly romanticizes abuse by not recognizing what the character does as abusive and perpetuating the trope that a man can be "saved" by a good woman.

Flowers In The Attic wasn't romanticizing parental abuse or incest, although both were the vehicles for the tension in that novel. It was telling a story intended to make the reader feel off-kilter because of the horrific things happening to the characters. It was definitely never defended as some sort of introduction to a world people were clamoring to get into. Not a single person read Flowers and said "sure, it's not totally accurate about incest, but at least it got people talking about it, and maybe we can guide them to the correct way to do it!" You were supposed to feel uncomfortable when you read Flowers, even if you could empathize with the characters.

Cuties told an uncomfortable story. It showed a girl chafing at her repressive upbringing, flinging the chains off and jumping head-first without the benefit of a parachute, and only then realizing that she actually just jumped out of a frying pan and into a fire. To mix my metafores, which I have a tendency to do.

The movie seemed to imply that it was the influence of the media (social media, pop media, etc.) that was responsible for Amy's decent into hypersexualization. And, yeah, there is a lot of it out there for children to stumble across. But I also think that this is the inevitable outcome when children aren't given any guidance for how to navigate that media and what it means. I saw little to no adult mentorship in this film, other than Amy's occasional lessons to pray for a life of subservience to a man and no respect for her agency in any form.

What I definitely saw absolutely none of was pedophilia, btw. Pedophilia is a mental health condition where adults are sexually attracted to pre-pubescent children. Most pedophiles do not harm children. Most are aware that they have a dangerous condition. Sexual assault tends to be perpetrated by people who are not pedophiles. I know this is difficult to understand, but assault and abuse (in all their forms) are not about *attraction*, they're about *power*.

There was absolutely no pedophilia anywhere in this film. There was nothing about adults being attracted to pre-pubescent children. In fact, everyone (but one older teen in the audience of the competition) was repulsed by the sexualization of the girls.

There was also no *system* or *industry-wide* hypersexualization of children. This was not Toddlers & Tiaras or Dance Moms, where the industry itself is so competitive that it keeps falling into more and more adult requirements of children for the sake of competition.

But there *was* children exhibiting sexualized dance moves that they learned from pop media. And the tone of the film clearly disapproved.

We can possibly have a conversation about the ethics of a director teaching children how to play these kinds of roles where their characters are doing adult dance moves, but if we're going to have that conversation, then we need to talk about children in horror movies for the last 50 years, and docudramas showing young guerrilla soldiers, and every movie from the '80s showing teen violence and bullying. There better not be a single person complaining about Cuties who also thinks Lolita or The Professional are good films.

Child actors are still actors. They are required to play roles to tell the story. Sometimes their characters are bad people and sometimes they do bad things and sometimes bad things happen to them. This is unavoidable if we are going to tell stories about the experience of children. It's challenging to protect a child from the experience of playing a role, and that's an ongoing conversation that needs to continue. But children in real life go through some shit, and if we're going to tell stories about the lives and experiences of children, we're going to have to see that shit they go through. We have to be able to share our stories as children.

And that's what this film is, by the way. It's the dramatized experience of the creator - a Black Muslim Senegalese-French woman. This is her story. She needs to be able to tell her story, and we need to be able to see it. And this story very clearly tells a tale of a young girl who lived through some shit and made some poor choices, as children do, and life went on.

Just like every good "coming of age" story ever.

Now, having watched the movie, I would not say this is a film critiquing the dance industry's use of children's bodies. I would say that this is a film telling the story of a young girl experiencing things that some young girls experience, many of which are harmful and cause hardship to the child. That makes it a "coming of age" film. And one that has an opinion of some of those experiences, and that opinion is pretty solidly against them.

Here's an excellent, in-depth comparison between the movie version of 50 Shades of Abuse and the books.

It's interesting because it's titled a "lukewarm defense", but I think that word "defense" is way stronger than the review justifies, even with the qualifier "lukewarm". The movie itself was, production-wise, not terrible. But since the source material was abhorrent, saying that a movie had good cinematography isn't a "defense" of the movie. Put it on mute and just enjoy the visual imagery. This reviewer makes some good points about how the script changes gave Ana more agency, but IMO, that only makes it more awful because nothing that happens makes any sense when the characters have agency.

But, anyway, if you can't bring yourself to read the books or see the movies, but you do have an hour to kill and want to be reasonably well informed on the subject, this is a pretty good video to watch.

My basic opinion is still the same - the books were offensive abuse-porn, the writer is an awful, awful person, and I don't care that the books brought BDSM to mainstream attention, I think it did more harm than good by romanticizing abuse without actually describing any real BDSM. The movies were less terrible than the books mainly due to the production team fighting the author at every step to fix her fuckups and basically try to tell a different story while capitalizing on her fame, but that only makes the problem more complicated and harder to compensate for.

And, I'm [not] sorry but I cannot forgive either the books or the movies for claiming to be about BDSM when a character tells a sadist to "do your worst" and he spanks her on the ass with a belt 6 times.

For me, that's a warmup. And I'm probably one of the more vanilla people in my network. Not to yuck anyone's yum if a little light spanking is your thing, but that's not a kinky sadist "do your worst" scene.

If you want a story about "a more worldly, experienced man takes a young, naive woman to be his wife, knows what she wants before she does, and trains her to be his sex slave" fantasy that addresses the control fetish, plays with fantasy-based non-consent and yet somehow doesn't violate consent because it establishes that the character really, deep down, likes it, and has actual, real kinky sex in it written by someone who has done actual, real kinky sex, I recommend the Training of Eileen series:

Book 1 - Elicitation https://amzn.to/2WagGr3
Book 2 - Evocation https://amzn.to/2WagKHj

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzk9N7dJBec

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For all that I complain about Bewitched, there is one episode that I really like.

Of course, I still have to watch it in the context of the era, because it does some things that, today, I would not find acceptable. But the message really does have good intentions.  This episode is actually so important that it was prefaced with a personal message from Elizabeth Montgomery. She addressed the camera directly at the top of the episode about the importance of the message and how strongly she (and the advertiser) feels about it.

In this episode, Tabitha has a best friend stay the night. She wishes her best friend was really her sister because she doesn't much care for having a little brother. So Samantha tells her that having her friend sleep over is like having a temporary sister.  The little girl arrives. She's black, and her father works with Darrin at the advertising company. Tabitha gets into it with another girl at the park over whether or not she can be sisters with someone of a different color.

Darrin's company is wooing a new client, who believes in making sure anyone he hires for anything has the type of home-life that he approves of before hiring them. So this guy shows up at the Stephens' house unannounced and Lisa opens the door.  The client misunderstands who Lisa is, with some help from a child's way of not quite explaining things. He gets the impression that Darrin is married to a black woman and this is their other daughter (he already knows about Tabitha and Adam).

Later, the two girls talk about how they wish they could be really sisters. Tabitha accidentally changes Lisa's skin and hair color. She changes her back, but then changes herself to match Lisa. So we have literal blackface on this show, which made me very uncomfortable.  But Lisa points out that their parents would be upset if their children are the wrong color, so Tabitha goes back to her own color. Then both girls are sad that they don't look alike anymore, and therefore can't be sisters. So Tabitha accidentally gives them contrasting spots - she has black-skin-color spots and Lisa has white-skin-color spots. And then she can't take them off because, subconsciously, both girls really want to be sisters.

The rules of this universe are that one witch cannot undo any spell that another witch casts (otherwise that would solve all of the show's plot devices before they start). So Samantha can't get rid of the spots as long as Tabitha really doesn't want to. So she has to do some digging to find out why Tabitha doesn't want to.

The girls talk about the racism they experienced from the other girl in the park and how they really want to be sisters. So Samantha tells them:

"Sisters are girls who share something. Usually the same parents but if you share other things - good feelings, friendship, love, well that makes you sisters in another way." She insists that they can be sisters if they want to, no matter what skin color they have.

This convinces Tabitha that they can safely get rid of the spots and still have the connection they want.

Meanwhile, the Stephens are hosting the office Christmas party downstairs and Lisa's parents arrive to pick her up from her slumber party the night before (the father had to go out of town to secure another client, so the Stephens were basically babysitting for a couple of days).

Earlier in the day, the client fired the advertising agency because of Darrin's "mixed marriage", but he didn't put it clearly enough for anyone to understand that this was the reason. Just that he didn't approve of Darrin, and since nobody knew that he had come over and spoke to Lisa, nobody knew what it was he didn't approve of.

In an attempt to woo him back, Darrin's boss invited the client to the Christmas Party at the Stephens' house. Apparently (this all happened off-screen), the client was "curious" enough to accept.  So he shows up immediately after Lisa's parents do, while Lisa's dad stepped away with their boss to talk about the new contract he just acquired for the company, leaving Lisa's mom standing in the hall with Darrin, when the client rings the doorbell.

Mistaking Lisa's mom for Darrin's wife, he opens his big ol' bigoted mouth to say how brave he thinks they are and how maybe someday what they're doing will become acceptable. And yes, he phrased it like that, implying not only that it wasn't currently acceptable, but that he didn't think it ought to be, only that maybe someday in the future it might be.

He offers Lisa's mom a little black baby doll for her daughter for Christmas, and Darrin is handed a white baby doll for Tabitha, and then says he didn't know which side of the family that Adam took after so he decided to play it safe with a stuffed ... panda bear. Yeah, picture that for a moment, if you don't immediately get it.

Then he runs off for eggnog before either parent can react. Lisa's mom has no idea what just happened, but Darrin (having just been taken off the account at this client's insistence because of being "unsuitable" or whatever) figures out that the client must think that they're married and this is why he was fired from the account.

Meanwhile, Samantha gets the kids straightened out and Darrin's boss, Larry, has a chat with the client. Now that who is married to whom and which child belongs to whom is understood, the client wants Darrin back on the team. As it finally dawns on Larry the reason for the client's decisions, he steps back for a moment, while the client puffs up with pride at being such an understanding, forgiving sort of man.

Larry steps back into the conversation and tells him, in no uncertain terms, that he doesn't want his account because he doesn't want to work with a man like this.  Overhearing this conversation, and shocked and pleased at Larry's character, Darrin tells Samantha that, in the spirit of Christmas and given the circumstances, if she sees an opening where her witchcraft would help, she has free reign.

Shocked, the client goes on the defensive and even says "but some of my best friends are Negroes!" So Samantha wiggles her nose, and suddenly the client is seeing everyone at the party with black skin.

So, again, literal blackface that made me uncomfortable, but for a purpose they felt was helpful back in the '60s.

The client freaks out because, well, regardless of anyone's racist beliefs, if everyone around you suddenly changed skin color in front of your eyes, you'd probably freak out too. So he leaves.

The next morning, the Stephens' and Lisa's family are all opening Christmas presents together around the tree. The doorbell rings and it's the client. He asks Darrin to take his account and offers an apology:

"I found out I'm a racist. Not the obvious, out in the open kind of a racist, not me, no, I was a sneaky racist. I was so sneaky, I didn't even know it myself."

Usually, particularly in older shows, when they cover the topic of racism, there's only one kind of racist - the mean ones who actively discriminate, but never any real violence. It's like, on these shows, racists don't lynch people because "we're past that now", but they're visibly angry and say mean things, and usually have some kind of power to prevent people from doing something, like entering a building or patronizing an establishment.

These shows offer a caricature of a racist, to make them easy to identify as racist but not *actually* truly offensive. And I kinda get it - they have 23 minutes to make a point, so they're going to do it in as clear a way as possible that will get past the very conservative censors.

This is the only episode of any TV show that I can personally recall seeing where they addressed the fact that racism comes in other forms. They showed a man who believes he is a "good guy" whose racism is more subtle and uses more microaggressions rather than outright violence or hatred. And they showed him humbled and ashamed as he struggled with the realization that he was not as good a guy as he thought he was.

And the producers and actors thought this was such an important message that they took the time to break the 4th wall and tell the audience how strongly they felt about this message. Even the advertiser got in on it. Which is a pretty big deal.  Had they simply showed the episode, boycotts would have been called for whichever commercials were aired at the time, and the producers would have had to do some kind of damage control to keep advertising clients and soothe viewers.

But, instead, Oscar-Meyer put their logo right behind Elizabeth Montgomery in her preface, and her speech included their name among those who felt the subject of their episode was important and who stands behind it. I'm sure boycotts were probably still called for, but the producers, the network, and the advertiser all got out in front of it and took responsibility for their stance.

So, as someone with light brown skin, which has lightened enough with my years out of the sun that nobody can even tell my chicana heritage by looking, I can't say that the blackface in this episode is justified under the "it was the era" excuse or not.

I will instead say that *if* the blackface can be excused for the era, and *if* the viewer can sit through the discomfort of modern sensibilities seeing it, I am rather proud of the show for making the attempt they did to address racism, and in particular that there are different types of racism and that all types are unacceptable.

I have a love-hate relationship with this show. I have seen most of the episodes before over the years, but I am watching the entire series now as part of my experiment to compare and contrast TV romantic couples over the decades and moral lessons of their relationships.

Watching this show now, after having developed the particular viewpoint I have on feminism and romantic relationship ethics, I am sitting in a strange place where I still manage to enjoy the show while simultaneously hating every character in it. As a character-driven media consumer, this is a weird place for me to be in. But I will say that the show is giving me lots of fodder for rants.

So far, this show is at the bottom of the list for me in ethical romantic partnerships. I somehow manage to still enjoy watching it, but I don't recommend it. I think everyone in this show is a terrible example of a person and the lessons learned at the end of each episode are not the lessons I feel should be the takeaways. People are punished for bad behaviour, but not for the reasons I think they should be.

This episode is the exception. Darrin doesn't go on any of his anti-witchcraft rants and doesn't try to hamstring Samantha and none of the other relatives jump in to interfere in their relationship and remove anyone's agency. In this one instance, Darrin is right to be concerned about the effect of witchcraft - namely getting found out and doing harm to someone else with the inexperienced child's wish-craft.

This episode focused entirely on an actual, real harm to society, and both the botched and corrective witchcraft was the solution. And the harm it highlighted was a subtle, insidious form that is not easily recognized because of the lies and misdirections we are taught about said harm, intended to confuse us and muddy the issue.

So, for once, I applaud Bewitched for going in the right direction. It could be done so much better today, with a more sophisticated touch on the subject, but given the era, I'm actually kind of surprised at how well it *did* do.

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OK, I'm waiting until I finish the whole show (up to wherever is current) before I give a full review of The Magicians, but this line really pissed me off:

She says "that's what I'm mad at you for - not the cheating part. The part where what you did made me lose you."

Here's what happened -

A guy and a girl (both socially awkward) finally hook up after months of tension. They start a relationship. No conversation about monogamy takes place on screen.

The girl comes from openly poly parents. Both the guy and the girl have a couple as their best friends who are clearly in a primary but open relationship with the guy in the couple being flagrantly bisexual and fucking every cute boy that moves.

So one night, after partying particularly hard to celebrate something big, the guy in question ends up in a drunken, debaucherous threesome with the open couple.  He wakes up the next morning with very little memory to find the girl sitting on the edge of the bed where the 3 of them are sleeping, pouting. She storms off.

With no conversation about what any of this all means, they just assume that they're broken up now and the girl goes and has angry revenge sex with another guy in the social group.  They spend the rest of the season mad at each other and awkwardly tying to complete the tasks that make this a show in the first place.

What is pissing me off about this line is that it is totally devoid of personal responsibility.  She is not mad that he cheated, she's mad that his cheating *made her so mad that she broke up with him*.

WTF DUDE?

What he did absolutely did not "make her lose him". That is a choice she made. And she's totally free to make that choice, but it's still her choice. Thousands of couples experience cheating every day and choose to stay together and work through the circumstances surrounding the cheating. She of all people has a background in how to deal with this.

In fact, her own mother managed to have an affair and make it work. Her parents have one of those toxic "poly" relationships where they only ever do anything *together*. But her mother started a relationship with a guy without the father, and that counts as "cheating" in their relationship.  Eventually, they hashed it all out, and the Other Man joined the couple in a triad and everyone was happy.

So, I mean, toxic and fucked up, but even they had the tools to deal with it that didn't resort to ending a relationship for a first infraction and without talking about it.

If she didn't want to "lose" him, she could have prevented it. He never intended to break up with her and regretted (what he remembered of) his night with the other couple. It was a casual fling borne of high emotions and copious amounts of alcohol. It was not an action *intended* to end his relationship. That was not its goal.

She didn't "lose" him. She rejected him after his infidelity. Then she deliberately set out on a course of action intended to hurt him with her revenge sex (which he pointed out the difference when she got mad at him for judging her for it - "what I did was a mistake, what you did was on purpose and malicious").

And she's mad at him for it.

No wonder finding him in bed with their friends hurt her - she has no concept of owning her own shit, of accountability, of knowing her own emotional landscape, or of taking responsibility for her actions, let alone how her emotions dictate her actions.

I didn't much like her throughout the show. Now I hate her.

If she is to be mad, she should totally be mad at the betrayal of their (implicit) agreements and promises to each other. That's OK to be mad about. Weird to me, because I don't operate that way, but a broken agreement is worth getting upset about. But to be mad at him because *she* got so mad that she broke up with him?

That's some impressive mental gymnastics to abdicate any responsibility right there.

As far as I'm concerned, the Terminator franchise is a trilogy, with T1, T2, and this latest one, T6, finishing it up. If you haven't yet, don't bother seeing any of the others.

Even if you're one of those who needs to "finish a story" or "hear the whole thing", don't bother. It keeps getting retconned and rebooted, so you're really not losing any of the story by not seeing the others.

I would also recommend the TV show the Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I don't think it's necessary either, because this latest film is also a soft reboot that makes that show ... I'm going to say "a different timeline", because the whole franchise is about time travel, so I can rationalize away any incongruities that way.

So, yeah, in my personal headcannon, the story is a trilogy right now with T1, T2, and T6. And I say this as someone who is fine with all 3 sets of trilogies being part of the Star Wars canon, so that ought to tell you something about how little I care about T3-5.

So here's what I think about the Terminator trilogy...

#Irony: The original Terminator movie is about Sarah Connor - a woman who eventually gives birth to the leader of the resistance who is supposed to save the world. It has male action characters, but it's ultimately about Sarah and her relationship with Kyle Reese. It's basically a romance story set in a pre-apocalyptic action film.

The second Terminator movie is about Sarah Connor again, now a fucking badass guerrilla warfare soldier. And, again, it has some male action characters, but it's still about Sarah and her psychological journey from "normal girl" to Mother Of The Saviour And Terrorist. She does her own ass-kicking in this film, keeping up with literally super-human characters in the protection of her son, John.

The rest of the films I won't mention because they're terrible and not the point. The original two films, that set the story and the standard for the Terminator franchise, are a WOMAN'S TALE.

Here's the irony ... people are pissed off because of the strong woman-heavy cast of the latest Terminator film, and accusing it (as they always do of anything that doesn't subjugate minorities in the plot or in the telling of the story) of "pandering" to the new "identity politics" of the feminist cult and younger generations.

It's like people complaining about sci-fi, or Star Trek in particular, getting political. Like, have you ever SEEN the original shit before? That's what IT IS.

Terminator is a chick flick. That's why it's so good. It's a woman's story. It's just that the woman in question, and her story, doesn't involve flowers or wedding dresses. I mean, for fuck's sake, it even includes her getting pregnant and raising a child as an integral part of the plot!

Women have a lot of different stories to tell. Some of them are action stories. Some of them involve fights and fast cars and war and blood and death. When you tell a woman's story, not just what men *think* about women, but her actual story, you get diversity; you get adversity; you get pain; you get pleasure; you get redemption; you get vindication, you get action; you get adventure; you get hardship; you get conflict.

Whether her story takes place in the home or on the battlefield, those are still what you get when you tell women's stories.

Telling these stories isn't "pandering" any more than literally telling *any* story for a commercial enterprise is "pandering" because the producers want to make money from the sale of that story. It's not "identity politics". People want to make money, and they don't make money if they refuse to sell to literally half the population of the planet.

Women have stories to tell.

And in the case of many of these amazing stories finally being told, it's often the same story that they have *been* telling. You just weren't paying attention.

I wrote all of that before seeing the latest film. This was completely my reaction to seeing online criticisms from whiny boys about "too many women" in the new movie. I hadn't seen the movie and I didn't read any reviews, I just saw some complaints about "pandering" and "identity politics" and all the usual bullshit that comes every time women play any kind of role in an action film that isn't the sexy villain, the refrigerator'd girlfriend, or the current love interest.

Now that I've seen the latest Terminator, and realizing that I like it and reflecting on why I like it and the first two but not the rest, I think my claim of this being a woman's story is consistent.

I think one of the main reasons I didn't like the rest of the films (and there are several reasons not to like them) is because they stop being a woman's story, not just because they were poorly told or executed.

The rest of the movies, if I recall correctly because it's been a long time since I've seen them and I only saw them once because they were terrible, unlike the first two - the rest of the movies stop being about Sarah Connor, and start being about man vs. machine, using the term "man" in this context as deliberately gendered and not a shortened form or stand-in term for "humanity".

Linda Hamilton wasn't even in all of the other sequels. Those movies were not about her journey. They became about John Connor, or about Arnold, or about continuing to bleed a franchise. But since the story ultimately is about Sarah, taking her out of the story led to the storytellers losing focus.

Hence reboots and direction changes. They lost sight of what made the story interesting in the first place. I mean, sure, the special effects of both were groundbreaking, so from a technical point of view, T1 & 2 were interesting on production quality alone. But even if we can appreciate a pretty movie, if the story isn't at least as good as the effects, it won't become a classic, iconic, a genre-setting game-changing film (I'm looking at you, Avatar, where even Sigourney Weaver couldn't save that movie).

T1 & 2 were that kind of film because the story telling gave the special effects a purpose. The effects were a *vehicle* to tell the story, not the other way around. T6 brought us back to the story, back to the premise, back to its roots, even with the use of a soft reboot plot device, which, incidentally, basically implies agreement with my assessment that the other 3 movies pretty much don't count.

What makes the Terminator movies interesting is the woman's story. Once you remove that, no amount of action or special effects save the film. Because women's stories are still just people's stories, it *could have been* possible to move on from Sarah and start telling the story of another person in the saga, even if the next person's story was a man. It *could* have been done.

But the next 3 producers / writers / directors didn't treat it as someone's story, they treated it as men's eye candy, and, apparently (by implication), men don't care about the story, they only care about the action.

I mean, I suppose that explains why porn written for het cis men (and a lot of gay cis men) is all "fuck the plot, it doesn't matter why these two people are screwing, as long as we get to the screwing!" People just assume that men don't care about the story, only the action.

But I would propose that the success of the films and TV shows that are successful and/or popular in the last several years suggests that men *do* care about the story too, they'll just take pointless explosions if that's what's available. And if you can marry a good story with a well-produced film in a genre that is favored by men as a group (whether you personally *liked* the story or not), that movie will do very well at the box office, or at least it will do well in popularity over time.

The trick, apparently, is to get enough men to relate to a good story that happens to feature a woman (or several). But that doesn't seem to be a problem with storytelling, that seems to be a problem with the collective male bias and expectations.

Anyway, it's late and I'm rambling. Point is, now that I've seen the latest Terminator in the franchise, realized that I like it, and thought a little about *why* I like it, I think that the reason why I dislike the previous 3 movies is because they stopped being a woman's story.

As I keep pointing out in my Poly-ish Movie Reviews, and to people who keep trying to recommend movies and books to me, I am very character driven. I need to either identify with a character or want to know a character - like, date them or have them in my social circle - in order to enjoy a film or book. If a writer can get me to connect to a character, the story doesn't even have to be all that well-written or produced for me to like it.

When Terminator stopped being a woman's story, it stopped being a people's story. It became fluff. It was all action with no real purpose. I suppose there might have been some themes in some of the sequels somewhere, but really, the story ended with Sarah leaving the focus. Without a focus or a purpose, the story just kept getting lost. And the movies sucked.

So when the saga became once again a woman's story, I enjoyed it, and I think it was a fitting chapter in the longer tale.

And if there's anything I can ever say good about reboots, it's that it gives me the opportunity to pretend that the chapters the reboot scratches over don't exist. I mean, that's also why reboots suck - they overwrite previous chapters, and if you like those previous chapters, then that's a bad thing.

But now I can safely reconcile "Terminator is a trilogy made of T1, T2, and T6 and let's pretend the other 3 don't even exist" in my head, because even the franchise seems to be saying "yep, those other 3 don't exist, here watch this reboot that erases them!"

Those are the 3 that are telling a woman's story and that story is what makes Terminator interesting. The others lose sight of this, and consequently are just not as interesting to those of us who are story-dependent.

Women have stories to tell. And our stories are interesting.

I originally wrote all of this in 3 Facebook posts. In the comments of one of them, somebody asked me how I felt about "the big reveal".

Spoiler alert!!!

( Here's the long answer to that question )

My bottom line is that even the reveal, with all its legitimate criticisms, is still part of Sarah's story, which makes it fit into the woman's story trilogy that makes these 3 chapters in the saga such excellent films and the other 3 chapters suck because they are not Sarah's story, not a woman's tale.

T6 is Terminator's redemption film. We are back to telling Sarah's story, and that's why it works. Women have stories to tell. And when you allow us to tell them, the films are engaging, interesting, and they work.

Watch on YouTube

www.imdb.com/title/tt3104988/ - IMDB
www.crazyrichasiansmovie.com/ - Official Website

So, I just saw a pre-screening of Crazy Rich Asians. And I fucking loved it. Seriously, put it on your calendars to watch when it comes out for wide-release and give it a good opening weekend box office return.

I normally can't stand rom-coms and rom-drams, although I watch a lot of them (film student, movie review podcaster, masochist). They basically all go the same way - by following the standard Rom-Com Formula (TM) and occasionally picking one step to change as the "twist" in the film:

1) Neurotic young, thin woman who is a) hyperactive; b) clumsy (because that's how you make unobtainably attractive women feel "relatable"), and/or c) brusque and perfectionist meets ...

2) Extremely attractive man who is either a) emotionally distant, b) charming and charismatic; or c) warm yet stoic.

3) Woman and Man have everything or nothing in common and get thrown together by circumstance, whereupon they immediately proceed to hate each other.

4) As more and more things go wrong, continuing to keep the characters together, they are forced to reveal a vulnerability or two that erases or excuses whatever character flaw that has been their defining feature up until this point, so that

5) The characters fall in love with each other, but are not aware of it yet, because

6) The resolution of the continuing conflicts happens so that the characters are no longer forced to be together.

7) In their pending or ensuing absence, True Love is finally revealed and one character rushes to share the revelation with the other character before it's Too Late.

8) Optional ending: It is already Too Late, and the rushing character goes home dejected, but then the Plot Twist intervenes and fixes whatever it was that makes it Too Late so that the other character now shows up at the first character's home to confess their own undying love.

Additional elements that rom-coms might throw in can include:

The ex-lover who sows seeds of dissension and mistrust in order to win back their love-interest (or just cause trouble).

A current lover who prevents the main characters from hooking up because one of them is unavailable, and who seems like an OK enough person at first but is then revealed to be a total douche so that the audience feels justified in rooting for that character to get replaced by the main character and the audience doesn't have to deal with the thought that they are wishing for the misfortune of a "nice person".

Alternately, a current lover who never turns into a total douche but is just a nice person who is also totally flat and boring so that the audience can mollify itself over rooting for the other main character, and because the current lover is "nice", they willingly step aside for the other main character because it's the Right Thing To Do and they acknowledge that there is no chemistry between them and their lover anyway.

The best friend who tries to protect the main character by sabotaging the budding relationship "for their own good".

The best friend who tries to keep the relationship together (or jump-start it) because the main character is clearly not capable of managing their own shit.

Goofy parents who wholeheartedly support the main characters in their every wacky endeavor.

Strict parents for whom nobody will ever measure up to their standards for a child-in-law.

A gay friend. Just because. Usually to help with someone's deplorable fashion sense and/or to provide comedic relief.

A pet that either knows when someone is an asshole before the main character does, that knows when someone is a keeper before the main character does, or that is an annoyance to highlight the flaws of somebody who doesn't find the pet annoying.

So, all this to say that the things I hate the most about rom-coms were not present in Crazy Rich Asians, even though there were enough elements present to make it clearly fall square within the genre.

A few spoilers, to explain what I mean, but not the conclusion of the film and I'll keep the details to a minimum (to avoid all possible spoilers, skip down to the very last paragraph for my final comment).

First of all, the main characters were not strangers who meet and hate each other. When the film opens up, the couple has already been dating a year and the relationship is going well. They clearly adore each other and are compatible with each other.

The next thing I liked about the movie is that *this fact never changes*. There is no big reveal that someone is a douche, or that someone has a secret past that the other person might leave them if they find out, none of that.

The premise of the movie is that Nick is so rich with old family money that he's basically "Asian royalty", and Rachel doesn't know that until he invites her back to Singapore for his best friend's wedding, where Rachel meets his family.

So, there *kind of* is a "big reveal", but it's not like someone used to be a sex worker or used to be married or invents a fake past that they get "caught" about and then have to own up to it.

Nick doesn't tell Rachel because Rachel comes from a very humble background and Nick is pretty down-to-earth himself so he *likes* being "just a guy" with Rachel, not the famous Nick Young the way he is with every rich woman who knows who his family is.

And he knows that she's going to learn about his family because he voluntarily invited her to go to this wedding. He breaks the news to her in stages, because it's kind of a lot to take in, but I wouldn't say that it's really the same kind of deception that make the usual rom-com plots.

The third thing I liked about the movie is that the main female character is smart and capable, but still a little messy, and it is her smarts and strength that move her along through each obstacle.

In fact, most of the women characters have some depth and nuance to them, even if they are put into a particular role for the sake of the plot.

Rachel is a professor of economics and very good at her subject. She specializes in game theory. Nick loves that about her, and praises her intelligence and accomplishments in her field both to her and about her to others.

In each setback that she experiences, a woman close to her reminds her of her strengths and supports and encourages her, and she walks into her next challenge (usually alone) armed with her intelligence and courage. Every gain she makes in the plot is because of something she *did* deliberately, using her skills.

Speaking of which, we come to the next thing that I liked about the movie. The conflict is never about incompatible personalities, "opposites attract", or that really irritating trope where someone has a misunderstanding and goes off half-cocked without discussing it with the other person. Nick and Rachel genuinely like and trust each other, which means that they *talk* to each other. So the conflict has to come from somewhere else, not lazy script-writing and secrets.

The conflict is a culture clash, which is a real, legitimate conflict that can be big enough to break apart a relationship. Nick's mother is the foil in this film. But unlike most American movies where the "in-law" type character is the "bad guy", Mrs. Young is not a flat, 2-dimensional villain. Her motivations are all understandable and make a logical sense if you know and accept her premises. The actor who played Nick's mother did that deliberately.

Mrs. Young comes from a very specific cultural background, with very specific priorities and roles. Rachel comes from another cultural background with very different priorities and roles. It's not that either are necessarily better or worse than the other. While it's clear which position the screenwriters feel should win out, they don't make the other position out to be evil or bad ... just not right for our main characters.

The actor playing Mrs. Young intentionally set out to make her motives clear and understandable, so that we as the audience could empathize with her and so that she would not become the "villain", even though she was the antagonist and the personification of the conflict.

There was another subplot in this film that I really liked. So far, I haven't really given any spoilers because I haven't mentioned any specifics and everything I've said is pretty clear from the trailers. But for this one, I am going to give some.

Nick has a cousin named Astrid. Being part of the family, she has access to the family money and doesn't even blink at a $1.2 million price tag for a pair of earrings. She marries a "commoner", a man of more humble beginnings and a military background.

Aware of the difficulty that comes from someone not used to her world marrying into it, Astrid does what she can to support her husband and to consider his feelings. She is aware of the immense privilege and power that she holds, and she tries to minimize her position and elevate her husband's.

But in spite of her efforts, her husband, Michael, is too wrapped up in his own toxic masculinity to accept what Astrid has to offer.

In the end, Astrid finally recognizes that all her efforts to make herself smaller can't help make someone who is fundamentally insecure feel bigger. While she still believes in loving and supporting a husband, she learns that this should not require losing herself in the process, that he needs to own his own shit and see his own value the way she always has instead of dismissing his value by comparison to her net worth.

In their final conflict-and-resolution scene, when Astrid finally stands up for herself, all the women in the audience applauded. She was not without empathy for her husband's difficult position, but as so many women have found themselves, she was done managing his emotions for him and done apologizing for who she is.

I found these three women characters to be the core of the film, with Rachel's mother, Nick's grandmother, and Rachel's friend to be terrific supporting characters.

Rachel is not our typical Born Sexy Yesterday ingenue, nor is she the cold-hearted bitch in desperate need of a makeover and a lesson in soft femininity. She is intelligent and resourceful and passionate and respectful and considerate.

Mrs. Young is a conservative, reserved, powerful woman who has made sacrifices, and those sacrifices show us where her humanity lies to prevent her from becoming a stereotypical Dragon Lady character. She is hard and unyielding, but not without reason, or without feeling. It is possible to be hard and feeling at the same time.

Astrid is quiet, nurturing, sensitive, and caring, with a sense of her own value and of the value of others. She sees the good in people, along with the bad, and accepts people for who they are.

Mrs. Chu is only seen for a short time on screen, but she is clearly a devoted, supportive mother, who manages to be the kind of mother who has made her entire life about raising her daughter without being overbearing or helicoptery. She is *friends* with her adult daughter, and yet still her mother, there to hold her when her daughter needs being held, there to tell her the things her daughter needs to hear but doesn't want to hear. She is strong and brave and loving and wants nothing more than for her daughter to find happiness.

Ah Ma (Nick's grandmother) is also only seen for a short time on screen. She is the revered matriarch of the family, the kind, hands-on parental figure who raised Nick and taught him the value and responsibility of family and tradition. She is also the woman who inherited the fortune and the shipping business that created it and married the world-famous doctor Sir James Young, giving the name to our current protagonists' and antagonists' family. She may not be very active in the Singaporean social life anymore, or in running the family, but her word is still law.

Peik Lin, Rachel's friend in Singapore, is new money, the source of most exposition in the film, and a member of a family that is perhaps the most 2-dimensional of the film and yet still manages to have some depth. She's crude and her family is tacky (with a delightful dig at Hair Gropenfürher), but she knows fashion (which is a *very* important skill among the über wealthy) in spite of (or perhaps because of) the outlandish outfits we see her in, and she genuinely cares about what happens to Rachel.

The acting of these woman portraying these characters was phenomenal, with nuance and tones giving them a realistic depth. Which is saying something, given that the movie is based on a book that others have said has enough material for a whole season of Netflix episodes but that was crammed into a 2-hour movie because the director felt strongly that we needed to see Asian faces on the big screen in romantic leads, in realistic representations, and in anything other than martial arts films.

The movie was not without its flaws. There is one scene in particular that was so cringey, where a guy does a creepy thing and the women laugh it off, that I actually said out loud in the theater when the laughter died down "that's not funny, that's fucking creepy".

Not all of the characters had enough screen time for the same amount of depth as the main characters, or even the 3 supporting characters that I mentioned. Peik Lin's family, for instance, were especially flat, as were some of the Mean Girls that Rachel had to battle during her Culture Clash.

The movie isn't perfect. But when we have so few examples of any given culture, the few movies that we do see can become All The Representation, either by design or by expectation, and it will always fail in that regard. When the last big all-Asian movie was 13 years ago (Joy Luck Club), having another one now has a lot to live up to.

It's like female-led superhero movies - when you only have one, it has to be "perfect" or else it's a failure. But, as one of the actors said of Crazy Rich Asians, movies with white male actors are so plentiful, that someone can make a crappy one, and Hollywood just throws more opportunity out there for more white male movies. Movies made with and by Asians should have the opportunity to be not-great movies without the fate of all future Asian movies resting on its success.

It's not a perfect movie. But the main characters who we are supposed to be rooting for actually like each other; the conflict comes from cultural pressures and not either incompatibilities that "love" is supposed to magically fix, nor foolish misunderstandings that could be cleared up if only the characters talked to each other; reprehensible behaviour is not rewarded with the prize of "a girl", of sex, of a relationship, etc.; the women are the real cores of the story; and the main women characters are realistic and nuanced.

That means that this movie is making it onto my *very* short list of all-time favorite romantic-comedies.

So, if you like romantic comedies, if you hate romantic comedies and want to see an exception to the tripe, if you like strong and diverse female characters, and if you supported any of the non-white big budget films to come out in the last 2 years in order to make a point about what kinds of stories Hollywood should be telling, then you should see this movie.

The Mentalist (2008)

www.warnerbros.com/tv/mentalist-season-1 - Warner Bros
www.imdb.com/title/tt1196946/ - IMDB
https://amzn.to/2HsaqqC - Amazon
https://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/70155590 - Netflix

I posted about individual episodes from The Mentalist that highlight what I really like about the show. I've finally finished the whole series and am ready to talk about it as a whole. I will try my best to avoid specific spoilers.

I've been watching this show for years. I still get Netflix DVD, and the reason I signed up for Netflix in the first place, back when it first came out, was I felt a monthly subscription fee was cheaper than all the late fees I wrack up from rentals. I get a DVD and then forget to watch it for MONTHS. Or I get it, watch it, and forget to send it back. If I like what I see, I'll obtain a copy to own.

My Netflix DVD subscription is also now used to help me archive movies for library collections, so I've had to bump shows for pleasure down the queue in favor of movies that I review and archive. So I've been making my way through the show for years. I had to put off getting new discs of the show for a long time, so I can only re-watch the seasons I've already acquired.

So I've loved the show forever, but I haven't finished it until now.

The premise is that a "psychic" who knows he is a fraud and a conman tries to increase his brand by going on TV to say that he's helping the police solve a serial killer case and he ends up insulting the serial killer, who kills his wife and daughter to teach him a lesson in humility. The show starts out with Patrick Jane as a relatively new consultant with the fictional California Bureau of Investigation on the day that the very newest agent joins the team.

The show is mostly episodic in a traditional Sherlock Holmes-style cop drama with one super genius of observation and a team of people who can't hope to match his prowess ranging from those who accept his methods to those who disbelieve his methods to those who resent his unorthodox methods. With the serial killer case weaving in and out throughout the show.

If you don't like cop dramas, with their police procedural format, their "cops are almost always the good guys and their prey are always the bad guys" tone, and their "sometimes the good guys have to bend the rules for the greater good" justifications, you won't like this show. I grew up on cop dramas in the '80s, so I love them.

If you don't like Sherlock Holmes-style shows with one character with nearly magical powers of whatever it is he does (investigate, diagnose, whatever) and, as a result, a personality that is very off-putting to most people, then you won't like this show. Jane is not quite the Dr. House grumpy, unlikable cynic because he is very charismatic and energetic and charming when it suits his needs. But he is cynical and brash and he doesn't quite see other people as real people, he often sees them as tools to achieve his own ends.

Patrick Jane is an out atheist, and pretty confident in the assertion that there is no God or supernatural of any kind. He shows us how many things that people think are supernatural are tricks that some people exploit because our brains are exploitable. He is arrogant and confident and fiercely loyal to those who have earned his respect. But still not above a practical joke here and there. I enjoyed seeing an atheist protagonist who actively pulls the curtain aside so the audience can see what's behind it.

As I've stated before, the show also routinely adds powerful women characters without stereotyping them; it has close to 50% female supporting cast; when the bad guys are women, they're almost always very intelligent women who get away with what they do for as long as they do because they are both very intelligent and because everyone underestimates them (although Jane does not underestimate them for being women, he knows how capable women are); and the main female lead does not have a romantic or sexual relationship with the main male character.

Now the criticisms.

Eventually, we have to wrap up the serial killer storyline. The killer takes on epic proportions, becoming Villain Sue, almost a God Mode Sue foil for our hero. He starts to get too big. So I feel that the writers wrote themselves into a corner and decided to take a left-turn to get themselves out. The killer becomes, in my opinion, too powerful and the plot becomes too convoluted, and then the character they choose to finally reveal as the killer is ... unbelievable, in my opinion. I don't buy it. It feels like they were running out of time and needed to pull someone in as the killer in a hurry.

But it's weird, because they wrap this arc up in the middle of season 6. The rush job that this feels like seems more like when a show gets a surprise cancellation notice so they have to finish up a story arc that they expected to have more seasons to finish. But in the middle of a season, that's not very likely.

So I don't like who they finally revealed as the killer. I feel that this choice doesn't account for so many of the, frankly, unbelievable details they used to set up the character of the killer. And I don't like how it feels rushed. So now, with half a season left to go and the main driving force behind our protagonist's motivation gone, the show takes another turn.

Now we have a cast change and a location change in addition to a plot change. The show needs to justify why Jane continues to work as a consultant with law enforcement now that the only reason he has for wanting to work with them is gone. He joined the task force originally because he wanted to take down the killer himself, and he needed to know all the details of the investigation to find him. Now he has no reason to continue doing what he does.

So the show invents a reason, having the FBI invite him to work with them doing the same job he did with the CBI. As part of his negotiations, Jane insists that his former CBI boss work on the team too. But now everyone is in a different role. His former boss is now not his boss, she's the newest member of the team and has the least seniority and the least authority. The senior agent under her at CBI started working with the FBI before her so he is now the senior agent, somehow, outranking all the other agents who we see only as extras because it's not very believable that the FBI has a task force made up of only 3 people. The new lead agent for the team is another woman who Jane has to start over from scratch to convince that he's so good at what he does that the rules don't apply to him. And, of course, there is a new Department Head who has to clean up after Jane's messes to justify having hired him in the first place.

Two of the characters from the old CBI unit leave the show and only give guest appearances. That's not so bothersome, I think they wrapped that story arc up pretty well. They had a sexual tension from day 1, so they finally concluded that relationship arc satisfactorily, IMO.

Now Jane works in Texas with a new team and a contrived reason for 2 returning characters but in different roles. These roles change their characters. The senior agent from the old team who is now the senior agent in the new team is not terribly different, but he used to be totally emotionless with only brief glimpses into an inner emotional landscape, and we see more emotion from him now. The new agent who used to be the boss agent, and who previously had no romantic relationship with Jane (which was a point that I liked), apparently stops being a hardass and lets her guard down now that she's not in charge, and the writers turn them into a romantic couple.

I don't buy it. They have no romantic chemistry on screen and they spent 5 years building a deeply intimate but platonic relationship. Suddenly, it's all "I love you" and jealousy shit and I think it's a terrible arc. I would much rather have seen both of them meet someone else in their new roles with the FBI and fall in love that way, because both of them *do* have emotional damage that ought to start healing by 5 years into the story. Just not with each other.

So, my final thoughts are that if you are OK with letting a story go unfinished, watch until the final episode of Season 5. In the final episode of Season 5, they reveal a list of names that Jane has narrowed down the serial killer suspects to. That list is where I lost my suspension of disbelief. If you can let go of a story, then stop watching before you get the unbelievable list.

*I* need to finish a story, no matter how terrible it is (and, to be fair, this was not terrible). Midway through Season 6, everything about the story changes and it becomes, in effect, a different cop drama. It was ... OK. I didn't hate it. If the show had been like that from the beginning, I might have still enjoyed it, if a little less. I just didn't like the changes that were made. I became invested in the characters and the story as it was, and I don't think the changes were an improvement on what had come before.

Season 7 was very short, about half as long as any other season. Combined with the fact that the change all happens midway through season 6, and it felt as though Season 6 and 7 were two independent seasons of a different show. Or, perhaps a spin-off show that didn't do as well. In my experience, very few spin-off shows ever have that magic of the original. I felt that this was the same - a watered down version trying to capitalize on the popularity of the original, but missing that magic that made the original work.

Season 6 (post midpoint climax) and 7 were just OK. It didn't quite grab me. Jane had already established his Holmesian powers so all the episodes just took his skill as a given. We didn't have any build up for him, he was just running on steam from his earlier establishment. Same with his boss-turned-coworker-turned-romantic partner - she was just kind of there because we already knew her. But she was also different, and there were no really intimate moments in the script to reveal where those differences came from, so they were just kinda there too.

I might have found the last 2 seasons as a stand-alone show mildly entertaining and unique for revealing the whole supernatural facade, but it all seemed so ... soft. All the sharp and rough edges were rounded off and there was just nothing really there to grip onto. Frankly, it felt like the writers were just phoning it in. Which is a shame, because I think the new Head of Department character could have become really interesting.

I kinda wish I wasn't the type who needed to finish a story and I could have let it go before the big reveal at the end of Season 5. When I re-watch the show in the future, I will probably stop there from now on. But prior to that point, I think it was an excellent show in its genre and I highly recommend the first 5 seasons.

I have to admit, I just saw one of the most responsible things ever in a romantic comedy (Fuller House on Netflix).

A woman had a high school sweetheart. They broke up at the end of high school because they had different college dreams (and in rom-coms, if you go to separate schools for 4 years, your relationship is guaranteed to end anyway). 20 years later, they got back in touch, but she had started dating someone new.

At first, the two men competed for her attention, but then the high school sweetheart started dating someone new of his own (who just happened to be almost exactly like the woman, even down to a similar sounding name). Now everyone seemed paired up with people who made them happy, so problem solved, right? Each couple even got engaged. Except they still had feelings for each other. So, first, the high school sweetheart broke up with his fiance, and a few moments later, the woman broke off her engagement with her fiance too.

I want to point out that the show did *not* make either jilted fiance into a villain. There was nothing wrong with either character and no "reason" why each should dump them. They just loved each other (and in monogamy-land, you can only have one). I have to give it points for not villainizing the others, and for the characters just deciding to end it with people when they weren't feeling it. That is a perfectly valid reason to end a relationship (see my other posts on not needing to turn exes into evil villains before we break up with them).

So, now the two high school sweethearts are both single again, and both aware of each other's feelings. But, instead of jumping right into another relationship with each other (usually fading into another wedding scene in most rom-coms), they talk first about what to do. And they *mutually* agree that they need to process their recent breakups (because they did actually really care for their respective exes) and this new revelation of their feelings for each other. So they agree to not date each other for a month, to give themselves time to grieve and process first.

This is possibly the most emotionally mature, responsible rom-com plot I've ever seen.

#RelationshipBreaksAreMoreImportantThanWeRealize #HavingFeelingsDoesNotMeanWeNeedToActOnThem #IfTheRelationshipIsThatRealThenItWillStillBeThereWhenTheTimingIsBetter #DoNotMakeImportantDecisionsUnderTheInfluenceOfNRE

Just finished The Punisher [on November 27th]. I really liked it. Maybe not Luke Cage caliber but better than Daredevil and I really liked Daredevil. I think I'd put it in the same category, for me, as Jessica Jones. Both characters are just so fucking broken.

I thought that Luke Cage was possibly a better quality of script and story, but I liked the tragic damage of Jessica Jones better. Punisher had that same tragic damage. Where Jessica Jones explored the woman's experience of abuse and PTSD through domestic violence, and *finally* showed us a dimensional female character who is messy and complex, Punisher showed us a man's experience of toxic masculinity and addressing violent trauma from within a violent worldview.

"How do you live in the silence between gunshots?"

So basically any Netflix Marvel story that doesn't involve Danny Rand is worth watching.

Huh, here's an interesting thought: in a surprising turn of events, the woman, black man, blind man, and working class man all have depth and nuance while the rich white guy is flat, sullen, whiny, foolish, boorish, and manages to make even the group dynamic all about him.

So, like real life then.

B movie idea: Bad action flick of a wildly implausible conspiracy story with kung fu Hilary Clinton a la Sigourney Weaver in Defenders.

How much better would Defenders have been as satire mocking "Hilary kills all her rivals" conspiracists? White, privileged, whiney Rand makes more sense in this context - poor little rich kid mad at the white lady taking over the world and making teh menz feel bad about themselves.

I'm thinking an Inglorious Basterds absurdist romp where Hilary is just over the top karate awesome and evil, personally assassinating her rivals and co-conspirators alike to build her empire and keep her secrets. Alexandra Clinton running around spin-kicking Berniebros and Donny Jr. getting his ass handed to him by the evil Progressive Alliance while he stares torturedly into the distance at how much his rich life sucks?

And, seriously, cast Sigourney Weaver. She did Galaxy Quest, she can do action and satire simultaneously.

Gaten Matarazzo, who plays Dustin on “Stranger Things”, says that he couldn't get any acting jobs for 2 years because of his condition. He says that "they couldn’t write in a disability into the show because they had already written the script.”

Hey, writers! You don't actually have to write in a disability into a show. People with disabilities have lives. They have adventures. They have friends and families and enemies. They do things and they know things.

If Stranger Things had never added that one tiny scene where one of the friends teases Dustin about his lisp, and Dustin says "I told you a million times, my teeth are coming in, it's called cleidocranial dysplasia", the show would have been EXACTLY THE SAME.

You don't have to give people with disabilities a "reason" for existing in the story. You don't have to give women a "reason" for existing in the story. You don't have to give people of color a "reason" for existing in the story. You don't have to give trans people a "reason" for existing in the story. You don't have to give not-straight people a reason for existing in the story.

A story happens, people are part of it, and lots of times, those people happen to be people with disabilities, or women, or POC, or trans, or gay, or bi, or anything other than white straight cismen. Just write the fucking story, and then cast someone who can deliver the lines convincingly in it. Or, if it's a text-based medium, just write the fucking story and then change around some of the pronouns or descriptors just because.

Like, the terrible Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds could have been the exact same fucking movie if you had cast a woman in the role, or a person of color, or someone with a hearing challenge. Especially since the character didn't survive by some amazing abilities that he magically had exactly the right ones at the right time (like most of Tom Cruise's movies), but he survived pretty much on pure, blind luck (which is one of the many reasons I hated the film).

Straight white men don't need any particular "reason" to be in stories. Nobody writes a story and then says "wait a minute, we need a reason why he's straight and white for him to be doing this... I know! Let's write in a series of awkward flashbacks showing his struggle growing up where he likes girls or he doesn't experience racism, and how that leads him on his path to where he is today!"

We don't need to create a romantic subplot to give the women a reason to be in the story. We don't need to set a movie in the "ghetto" to give the character a reason to be black (which is different from setting a movie in the "ghetto" because we want to tell the experience of being in the "ghetto"). We don't need to explain away a character's disability if the story isn't actually about their disability.

Stories don't need to be rewritten to accommodate disabled people, or women, or POC, or anyone else. Only if the story itself is about the experience of being that particular kind of person. But an action film? A drama? A comedy? Just talking about people's lives and adventures? We all have them.

If their disability literally prevents them from doing the thing (like, probably a deaf character couldn't be one of those safe-crackers who listens to the tumblers to open safes), then, OK. But, like, this one actor with cerebral palsy talked about auditioning for a character *who had cerebral palsy*. She wasn't hired because the director was afraid her disability would prevent her from being able to physically handle the role.

As she pointed out, SHE HAS CEREBRAL PALSY. If SHE can't do those things, then the CHARACTER CAN'T EITHER.

So, just write your fucking stories and then cast people in them who can deliver the lines. You don't need to "write into the script" something to explain away your casting choice unless you are directly contradicting something in the script. "The character existed and had relationships and adventures" is not directly contradicting things like "the character also has a disability" or "the character also has a vagina" or "the character also has brown skin".

It is my opinion that social partner dancing is *the perfect* activity for poly people. Partner dancing is a conversation; it reinforces consent and active listening and communication; it actively supports multiple partners and good community skills; it's a physical activity that increases endorphins; it rewards effort and personal growth; it provides a pathway for intimacy and vulnerability; it creates an awareness of yourself, your partners, and your effect on others; and it satisfies the Physical Touch Love Language that so many polys seem to speak (possibly why they're drawn to community-based forms of non-monogamy in the first place).

I strongly recommend the movie Alive & Kicking, available now on Netflix (at least in the US, not sure about other countries). It's a documentary about swing dancing, from its origins to its modern day revival.

These are some of my favorite quotes from the documentary because they highlight exactly what I'm always saying about social partner dance and polyamory:

There's a leader and there's a follower. The leader always has to be thinking ahead, planning what they're gonna do next, how they're gonna move the partner. The follower is responding to what the [leader]'s doing and they have this great conversation.
It's a little hard to learn. It's like a lot of good things in life, maybe you have to put in a little work to get to a place where you get tremendous reward.
When you are social dancing swing, there's no choreography. You are dancing to the music that the band is creating.
You have to improvise, you have to negotiate. Kinda like jazz music, this ability to call and respond, to read your partner and see what happens.
You're sharing your imagination with someone else. That's real intimacy. In that moment, you never recreate it, that's what makes it special.
Unlike some dances I've observed that are partner dances but they're very much "I'm on a date with my girlfriend, don't ask her to dance", lindy hop it's understood that everyone dances with everybody. And the more the merrier. I mean I think really if there were a movie called "lindy hop", the tagline should be "the more the merrier".
...
There's an incredible intimacy that forms among strangers. You meet someone for the first time and by the end of the song, you feel like they're finishing your sentences. If I had that kind of connection with someone I met in the grocery store, I'd ask him for his number. But it's not like that. In swing dance, you just move on and then find the next person.
Frankie always called it, like, "3 minute romance". You're just gonna be in love with this person you're dancing with for 3 minutes and it's gonna be amazing, and then you do it again, and again, all night long.

I know that in some areas, the lindy hop community is pretty well saturated with polys and non-monogamists.

But not in all areas, and it doesn't work in reverse - there aren't many *poly* spaces that are saturated with dancers. If I go to a swing dance in the Pacific Northwest, I can be sure to meet a bunch of polys. But if I go to a *poly* meetup anywhere, I can't be sure that I'll meet other dancers, and if I go to any kind of partner dancing here in the South, I'm more likely to meet a bunch of conservative Christians than anything else. And also, lindy isn't the only (or best) style of partner dancing.

And that seems a shame to me because the nature of social partner dancing fits so well with the nature of poly communities. Especially if you expand to *all* forms of partner dancing, not just the acrobatic, elite level of swing dancing highlighted in the documentary.

There are even more elements that I find valuable, such as the reverence the social dance communities have for people of more advanced age that I so rarely see in other areas of society, and the wider community safety net.

So, go watch the show if you have access to it. Maybe it'll inspire you to learn how to dance, or maybe it will help you to understand why I love it so much. It's worth watching, even with the sprinkling of anti-technology sentiment thrown in there (ah, the irony of people who disparage the internet as a form of communication in a documentary that will be disseminated and spread through online viewing & social media, but that's another rant for another day). Roll your eyes at that part, but the movie is worth watching anyway.

www.polyishmoviereviews.com/show-notes/episode14-trois

Just a tiny bit late, but this month's episode is out! One of these days, I will plan my episodes to have better timing with milestones. This movie is perhaps not the movie I would have wanted to mark my 2-year episode. But here is Episode 24 none-the-less!

Content Note: This review contains the sardonic use of ableist language & possibly sex-negative sex worker language intending to mock the sorts of writers who use "crazy" as a scapegoat and their poor depiction of mental illness as well as their obviously one-dimensional and low opinion of sex work.

I am using the language to describe what the *writers* of these sorts of behaviours think and by using these words, I am intending to show my disapproval and contempt for this viewpoint in my tone. I apologize if my intention does not come across or if readers are unable to read or listen because of the language.

www.polyishmoviereviews.com/show-notes/episode23-sametimenextyear

New episode! This time I review the classic play-turned-movie Same Time, Next Year with Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn. Can a movie about cheating find a place on the Poly-ish Movie List?

If you subscribe to Poly-ish Movie Reviews on some kind of podcatcher or RSS feed, you probably already got this month's episode in your podcast feed. But the Show Notes & Transcripts page was posted late, so here's the new episode for this month!

Hey filmmakers! I know this is a complicated, nuanced concept that takes years of study in advanced academic institutions, but I'm going to spoil the ending for you now:

It is not only possible, but likely, that two people of complimentary genders can be thrown together in a situation and not want to have sex with each other.

I know, I've seen this happen. Like every single mixed-gender office ever. They don't all pair up, even if they're not already married. Even if they genuinely like each other as people. And sometimes, even if they are actually attracted to each other.

Now, some of y'all script writers appear to have advanced doctorates in Non-Trope Writing, because I've seen a couple movies lately where you didn't do this. And I appreciate you. But the rest of y'all need to get your shit together and get some schoolin' because the obligatory romantic subplot that serves to support the male character's story arc is boring, trite, lazy writing, overdone, and way out of proportion to reality. It's like watching a movie set in Harlem around the turn of the last century and seeing only 1 black face (of someone who happens to be in power during Jim Crow and yet not a main character). Like, do you even history bro?

The population is more than 50% "woman" - there needs to be more than 1 female character in a cast of dozens. When you add up all the various ethnicities together, white men are a minority - there needs to be more than 1 or 2 black dudes and possibly that 1 hot Latina in a cast of dozens. And I know that this one will be some seriously high level thesis work for you, but all those women and non-white people have their own stories going on that have nothing to do with supporting some white dude's personal growth, which even white dudes in the audience can relate to if you tell the story well (and if they don't just refuse to relate to on principle).

And when you look at all the times that people don't hook up with each other just because their genitals are complimentary, there needs to be more than 3 movies in the last 10 years that feature a mixed-gender cast that doesn't have the token woman character having sex with the lead male character or any sexual tension leading up to will-they/won't-they subplots.

Because it's totally possible to put an attractive woman and an attractive man* in a room together and have them not want to bone each other.

*I'm not even going to address the problem with body diversity or gendered double standards of age and/or "attractiveness" here - I'm mad enough already.

The more I learn about Moana, the more I like it.

I'm about to say a few things that I just learned about the film and the backstory that I like, which aren't *too* spoilery, but if you're really spoiler averse, you might want to not read the rest of the post. It's mostly about the background behind the movie and not so much about movie plot points.

First of all, I just learned that the production team recruited "experts from across the South Pacific to form an Oceanic Story Trust, who consulted on the film's cultural accuracy and sensitivity as the story evolved through nine versions." Seriously, more movies need to do something like this.

Next, I learned that one of those early versions had Moana as the only girl in a family of sons and her character arc was gender-based. Now, I'm usually all in for a good examination of how gender roles are expressed and inhibit characters, but something I've been really into lately is just having characters be fully fleshed characters that get into situations and who might happen to be not straight white males. MRA defenses of mostly white straight male protagonists include the justification that the story isn't *about* being a white male, so girls and POC should have no problem getting into the story because it could apply to "anyone". 1) Totally not true on pretty much every level of that assertion; 2) if they really could apply to "anyone", then it shouldn't matter if the character *is* "anyone", including non-male, non-straight, or non-white; and 3) yeah, having "white male" be the default setting where making a character not "white male" is a deliberate choice IS PART OF THE PROBLEM.

Ahem.

So, I really liked the fact that the story of Moana is not about her being "a girl". She wasn't prohibited from her dreams by her father "because she's a girl", she wasn't being forced into her traditional role "because she's a girl", and her story wasn't about either overcoming her gender or teaching anyone else to overcome gender roles. Her story was just an adventure story. That happened to happen to "a girl". The story could have been anyone. And I absolutely loved that she didn't have to "be a girl" and yet, she was one.

Next, I learned that the scene with Moana, Maui, and the ... well, I'll just say the "pirates" ... was a *deliberate homage to Mad Max: Fury Road*! Take that you fucking MRAs! Even Disney sees the financial incentive and storytelling value of Furiosa. Even "chick flicks" are fucking badass feminist action movies now. Because, here's a newsflash (and to blatantly steal from some other post I don't have the link to), women actually like action movies but particularly when the main character isn't a sexualized woman. Just tell our stories and we'll come see them. It's not that we don't like action films, it's that it's fucking lazy storytelling when the only women in the film are there to fulfill the (perceived) male audience members' wet dreams and we're *bored* and uninterested in lazy storytelling like that. The action isn't actiony enough to make up for the fact that your few women are cardboard flat and BORING.

There are legitimate criticisms about the film with respect to cultural sensitivity, and I was concerned about that happening when I first heard of it coming out and again when I saw it, but not being familiar with the communities of the people in the South Pacific (other than to know that there is no great controversy or ownership battle over who gets to use the term "poly" online and I refuse to White Knight them by making it into A Thing on their behalf), I was not able to anticipate or later to pick out what those criticisms might be.

So, as someone who is not disinfranchised by whatever gaffs the movie makes, the more I see, read, listen, and think about this movie, the more I want to include it in my top Disney favorites alongside Brave (my #1 favorite for the tomboy struggle), Maleficent (#3 for the lack of romantic love driving force and the nuanced look at a villain without ignoring her flaws) and Frozen (#4 for the lack of a husband and romance plot).

If I didn't list your favorite Disney princess movie, chances are it's because I either didn't like it or because I haven't seen it, so you don't have to ask me "have you seen...?" to find out why it's not listed.

I watched a movie the other night that I was surprised to find that I actually liked. It's a Netflix movie called Spectral that, I'll be honest, I was expecting to suck.

The description reads "We can't see them. Bullets don't stop them. The Army is no match for them. Time to try something totally different." The title screen graphics looked ... well, it made me assume that the movie would be a typical anti-science, heavy on the action, light on the plot, sci-fi flick. But

tacit seemed interested in the description and saw it had 4 stars, so we watched it.

I was pleasantly surprised. I ended up liking all the characters. I thought even the minor side characters had complex back stories and depth to their character that, even if we didn't get a lot of exposition about them, was clearly demonstrated in the dialog and in their portrayal of the characters. There really wasn't anyone who was a standard trope caricature.

In these sorts of movies, one can usually expect to find the following characters: The gruff old military leader who is either a total dickhead or a lovable but cranky career soldier; the token demolitions expert who is also "crazy"; the scientist who is either the evil guy because science or the wuss who complains all the time and gets in the way of the real business of kicking ass; the chick who is either a badass tomboy "chill girl" with no real personality or the girlie girl outside girl who is thrown in by circumstance and constantly needs rescuing usually involving strategically destroyed flimsy clothing but will likely be somebody's love interest; and the lead character who is physically fit, intelligent, has exactly all the right skills in every circumstance to lead his team to victory, gets the girl, and saves the day with either the smarts to outwit the dumb jarheads who are making things worse with their shoot-em-up mentality or the fists to beat up the wacky super-genius whose intellect is destroying the world.

None of those characters were in this movie.

The lead was a conventionally attractive, physically fit, and yet super smart white male, it's true. This wasn't a flawless movie. He was a scientist who invented a new type of goggles for DAARPA that gave our soldiers some kind of benefit in urban combat because it could see more on the light spectrum than the human eye can. Because of that, they were also picking up something unknown that the soldiers couldn't see naturally. So they send for him to explain what his invention is seeing (justifying his presence in a combat situation by declaring the data from the goggles to be too sensitive to just send back to him to analyze).

There was a lone woman in the movie, but she wasn't the token badass chick and she also wasn't the completely ineffectual girlie girl in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was one of the lead's obstacles, but her opposition to him was reasonable given her background and position (which is so often left out of movies - we're given opposing characters who seem to oppose for no reason other than to be obstinate and give our hero someone to argue with). She was also not a love interest.

Our military guys were angry at the non-military guy coming into their sacred space, but they were given reasonable motive for feeling that way. It wasn't just "grunt, grunt, we big army boys, you pansy ass, leave now!"

Our combat team leader was gruff and tough but also smart with tactical knowledge and good team-building, mediating, and interpersonal conflict resolution skills, as a successful team leader ought to be. Our team was made up of just a bunch of guys, not the Token Bomb Guy, the Token POC, the Token Sharpshooter, the Token I Made A Mistake Joining Guy, the Token Joined Too Young Guy, the Token Irish/German Jolly Drinker/Fighter Guy, and the Token Small But Wiry Communications Officer.

What really sold me on the movie was the commitment to science, critical thinking, and reason. Our hero consistently maintained a pro-science attitude, not a pseudo-science attitude. Everyone wanted an immediate answer to the problem and everyone had an agenda to get confirmation of a specific answer that they wanted from him, but he kept insisting that science (and solutions) required data and it was foolish to go off half-cocked on speculation and bias.

The movie had 2 major flaws. When they finally did the big reveal, everything they said was actually scientifically accurate as far as we understand the concept right now. Except for one thing, which I won't spoil. But it was the very premise from which all the other things happened. The Big Bad Thing is made of This and exists like This and does These Things - that's all true. But it only happens in a particular circumstance that was not present here.

The author of The Martian has been lauded for his adherence to scientific accuracy in his book, and again with the movie based on it. He crowdsourced the book to make sure it was as close to realistic as possible. But he had one major plot hole - because of Martian gravity, storms wouldn't happen like they did in his book, but without that storm, we wouldn't have a story. In an interview, he explained that he knew of this flaw, but that all sci-fi stories had one Gimme - one major plot device that was excused for the sake of the story because the story can't happen without it. As long as the story was internally consistent, that one thing, if handled well, could be forgiven and even overlooked with the suspension of disbelief. He made storms that don't exist on Mars because he needed a way to isolate his character on the planet. But everything he did afterwards conformed to physics as we know it.

So, this plot point - that The Thing only happens in This Circumstance in real life but doesn't have that limitation in the movie - I'm willing to write that off as a Gimme because they otherwise described it correctly and the movie remained internally consistent.

The other plot point is that the writers seemed to have spent all their time researching their major conflict and didn't spend any time understanding the difference between a machine that "reads" light (i.e. a spectrograph) and a machine that *produces* light. These are VERY different things and, generally speaking, you are not very likely to be able to convert one machine into the other.

This movie did have one typical thing that often annoys me - the manufacturing montage. Building things takes time. It's not very common to be able to outfit a squadron with all new weapons from within a combat zone using found items overnight. Not impossible because it depends on the weapons and the found items. Just ... unlikely. I mean, making a bunch of Molotov Cocktails can be done in a single night, for example. But Tony Stark inventing and building Iron Man by himself in a cave in the Middle East in a couple of days? Yeah, yeah, I know that they explained that away by having him be captured by a well-funded terrorist who magically provided all the materials necessary. Still. Welding and soldering complex mechanics takes time and skill, even assuming you're lucky enough to have the right kind of welder in your found items (which, to be fair, the movie did account for by giving an explanation for why they had the gear that they ended up with).

I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm saying that I've built shit. I've even built shit that I personally designed that never existed before because it came out of my head and I had to use unusual materials because the thing never existed before so the parts for it didn't either. I'm saying that prototyping takes time and untested mechanics rarely work right on the first try. As

tacit put it, movies make manufacturing look easier than it is. Not impossible, but it's harder than the movies make it look.

There was also one moment in the movie that broke me out of it; one phrase that made me roll my eyes and groan ... "there are some things that science can't answer." While this is *technically* true, this is almost always applied in movies to things that we can, in fact, answer. Often, it's applied to things that we *have the answer for right now*, but sometimes it's for things that are currently unknown but that doesn't mean that they're unknowable.

So, my conclusion is that, in spite of these criticisms, I felt that the movie was engaging and internally consistent (which is my version of "plausible" for movies - maybe it couldn't really happen, but given the pretend movie conditions it likely could), and I found the characters to have depth and understandable motivations and most of them to be likable. I would recommend this movie if you like sci-fi action.

However, as we learned with the next movie we watched, you shouldn't necessarily trust Netflix's star rating system. The next 4-star movie we watched was COMPLETE AND UTTER SHITE ON EVERY CONCEIVABLE LEVEL.

Some article somewhere recommended that if I liked some TV show that I do happen to like (and I forget which one), I ought to check out Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries from Australia. Then, after I watched a mini-series about an all-black jazz band in England during the 1920s, Netflix also recommended that I check out several other "historical" epic movies and TV shows, and included among them was Miss Fisher. So I did. And I'm loving it so far.

The article billed the show as a "feminist Sherlock Holmes" whose intelligence and civilian meddling solved crimes and who liked music, partying, breaking social norms, liquor, and sex, especially without monogamy. How could I not be interested in that?

In addition, as I learned from the first handful of episodes, she has no interest in religion (although they have not established whether she actually believes in anything supernatural, her lack of religiosity is established through snarky throwaway comments she makes here and there without focusing on her beliefs), strongly dislikes being around children (although will tolerate and even love certain specific children), is intentionally unmarried and plans to remain so, and also has sympathies for the working class (she is titled) and the alternatively gendered / oriented.

Episodes start right out of the gate tackling issues of abortion, Communism, rape, poverty, class warfare, religious corruption, drug addiction, homosexuality, and sexual freedom.

I wouldn't call her a "lady Sherlock Holmes", because he was a narcissistic, addicted genius who had little to no connection or empathy with other people. Miss Fisher is not a genius, she's just really smart and well educated. She's not narcissistic although she is confident and moves through life expecting things to go her way and people to listen to her. She very strongly connects with and has empathy for other people and that's what keeps drawing her into the various cases she gets entangled with.

The other characters at first seem to fall into certain tropes, such as the naive young constable who assists the more jaded and older detective, and the very naive and "pure" companion to Miss Fisher, along with her unflappable butler and her gritty working class henchmen, but over the course of the first season, those characters turn out to have their own depths of character and they grow along with their experiences. In particular, I really like how the lady's companion character is young, sweet, and almost annoyingly innocent yet turns out to be feminine and proper and also clever and courageous in her own way. She repeatedly steps up to the plate with her quick thinking and bravery at each new challenge without really losing that very prim and proper demeanor that characterized her in the first place.

The show is an episodic series of murder mysteries involving a police detective who is pretty good at his job and a civilian with some skills who keeps butting in and solving crimes with unorthodox methods that exacerbates the local law enforcement who are bound by the same law they are trying to uphold whereas she has no qualms about breaking the law for the greater good. That plot may get a bit formulaic, but it's a formula that I happen to enjoy so it isn't interfering with my enjoyment of the show.

It is also well produced, well acted, and the wardrobe is a-mazing! I have all kinds of costuming ideas now because of this show. It lasted for 3 seasons and there is interest in continuing the series but nothing scheduled so far primarily because of the lead actor's schedule, I believe.

So, if anyone is interested in a female-led TV series with complex and nuanced characters and that doesn't apologize for the women having sex, having multiple partners, choosing their partners deliberately, disdaining religion, being in control of their own lives and bodies, being intelligent, and concerning themselves with social justice issues, based on a book written by a woman and produced by two women, you might want to check out Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, available on Netflix in the US, not sure about elsewhere.

"But Phryne [Miss Fisher] is a hero, just like James Bond or the Saint, but with fewer product endorsements and a better class of lovers. I decided to try a female hero and made her as free as a male hero, to see what she would do." ~ Kerry Greenwood (author)

And, if those two workshops weren't enough, in just 2 weeks from now I will be on a panel with Billy Holder and Tikva Wolf of Kimchi Cuddles and others to talk about poly in the media!

If you have any interest at all in polyamory in either news media or popular media & entertainment, you seriously don't want to miss this panel! Saturday afternoon at Atlanta Poly Weekend 2016, come out and see us!

PLUS!!! Sterling Bates will be back once again at APW to discuss how to use personality type systems to improve your relationship communication! This workshop fills up every time he gives it, and he also improves it every time as new research brings even more helpful ways of understanding ourselves and our partners and metamours. I've never missed one of his personality workshops and I learn something new every time.

He will be presenting FIRST THING on Saturday morning! Again, make sure you get your weekend or Saturday passes and check in EARLY so that you don't miss out!

Visit www.AtlantaPolyWeekend.com for the full schedule of all the awesome presentations and workshops next weekend!

http://www.the1585.com/dorksawaken.html

Important to read, but with spoilers mainly about the main villain. Although, this article is really more about nerd culture and entitlement, and how those two are linked together than about details of the film. It merely uses character analysis to explore those concepts. I usually copy passages from the articles I'm sharing that especially highlight the point I want people to take away from the article, but I'm finding that hard to do without including passages with spoilers.

So I'll pad this part of my explanation and include them below the cut, and a little out of order because there is a quote further down that isn't really spoilery. At least, I hope by this time it isn't a spoiler, since the potential spoilery detail is in the trailers.

( Quotes that highlight the point I want people to take away from this article. )

I don't have any kind of TV signal at my house, other than what my rabbit ears can pick up (and trust me, with the weather in Florida, that's not much). I have a shit ton of DVDs, access to Netflix and Amazon, and other entertainment-viewing venues, but not much in the way of "live" programming. And I like that kind of programming. I really enjoy just leaving my TV turned on all day and set to one or two channels that play sitcoms or sci-fi or whatever, just to see what comes on. It's the same reason I still like listening to the radio, even though I hate commercials on both.

One of the TV stations that comes through (barely) is a classic TV station - showing nothing newer than the early '80s and some stuff quite a bit older. Late at night, they stick mainly with the '70s. So I've been watching a show I had seen before but wasn't a major portion of my viewing rotation because I was just a bit too young to be really interested in the plot back then - One Day at a Time.

I really like sitcoms, but I'm kind of particular in my sitcom viewing. I like watching shows that are groundbreaking in some way and that are, by their very existence, social commentary. Whatever other flaws that show might have, it had an important message that shaped the society I grew up in.

This show is about a divorced mom trying to raise her two teenage daughters in a "liberated" society that she was never a part of. She grew up conservative and traditional Italian Catholic and married young. But her husband had an affair, so she divorced him - a radical enough notion at the time. To make matters even more shocking, she didn't go home to her parents to help her with the kids, she chose to get an apartment in New York and live alone with the kids - no man or family to protect her or help her.

That alone makes the show worth praising, to me. But every time I see an episode, I'm bowled over by the complexity of the situations and the nuance of the responses. It really was a terrific show. I'd like to sit down with the DVDs sometime and really do some thorough reviews on specific episodes, because there are some gems in there.

For instance, the episode I saw a couple of nights ago had the husband trying to back out of child support because he over-extended himself with his business and his new wife and was now facing financial trouble. This is a really easy situation to get black-and-white about - too fucking bad, it was your bad choices, you owe those kids their money because a single woman in the '70s with no college education couldn't get the kind of job to support the three of them without help, and it's your fault they're on their own in the first place.

To make matters worse, the father wasn't just facing financial hardship due to the economy or not making enough money from his company. He sold the kids' childhood home to buy a mansion with a pool and to hire a full-time maid to live in the lap of luxury. So it seems like a no-brainer that the dad is the bad guy and the solution is to sell the damn house, fire the maid, and live more frugally if he can't support his lifestyle.

Although these points are all made in the show, it doesn't stop there. In the course of the arguments over the child support, the mom figures out that the new wife doesn't even know about the financial hardship, and that the dad wants to quit child support because he wants to maintain his lifestyle so that his new wife never has to find out. The *reason*, he says, is because the new wife isn't "like [the mother]" and "can't handle it". She's accustomed to a life of luxury and wouldn't be able to cope with living a more meager existence.

The mom, here, has a perfectly justified opportunity to say "tough shit, that's part of what being married is all about". Instead, she stops her arguing, stunned that the new wife doesn't even know. She points out that the husband is being patronizing, and orders him to go home immediately and talk to the wife - to give her a chance to be an equal partner in their marriage and how to address the situation. Her sympathy in this moment, goes to the new wife, when the rest of society would have seen the new wife as a homewrecker and not deserving of sympathy.

Repeatedly, as the mom argues with the dad over the course of the series, she sticks up for the wife and insists that he treat her better than he ever treated the mom. She does not let him get away with being the same chauvinistic, overbearing, dismissive prick that he was to her.

And then the show goes one further. The daughters, when they find out all the details, turn to their father and say "Daddy, I know you want to support us, but you forget that we're supposed to support you too. That's what family is for. We'll work something out. Let us help you." Without compromising the kids' well-being or letting the father off the hook from his responsibilities, they insist on pulling together as a family, even though they're not a traditional family anymore. The support and respect isn't a one-way street. In fact, it's an excellent example of support through accountability without becoming a doormat.

In the end, there are no Bad Guys, just people who make mistakes and have messy feelings, who learn from each other and help each other out. The family is changed to match the needs of the people in it, and even though there are growing pains about it, everyone is better off living in a non-traditional family structure which gives each of them opportunities to be their best selves. And they consistently live up to that, stumbling and tripping along the way, but always climbing upwards.

I wonder, since these are the kinds of influences I had growing up, what our society might look like if we still made such programming. And I wonder, since I wasn't the only person to watch and be influenced by shows like this, why I seem to be one of the only people to have absorbed these kinds of lessons.

I find it interesting that the vast majority of the lessons that influence how I do poly and that form the basis for my various activisms, come from mainstream, monogamous, heteronormative culture. I recommend re-visiting these old sitcoms, or visiting them for the first time if you missed them back in the day. Many of them are partially responsible for the adult I turned into, with lessons in empathy and consideration and intentional family and non-traditional choices. Sometimes wisdom comes from unexpected places.

Hey Marvel films and other movie makers - the reason why your female-led action movies don't do well at the box office and the reason why women (who make up the majority of the gaming audience) don't much care for your movies and the reason why your attempts at giving your male protagonists emotional depth turn into SNL skits is because you're not Netflix original series writers.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed your fluffy romps with comic movies in the last bunch of years. But that's all they are - fluffy romps with little to no substance. They're trite and common. I'm not saying there's no room in the diversity of entertainment for trite. But if you want to increase your sales, then instead of "pandering" to your target audiences with naked hot chicks but no role of their own except to be rescued or fucked by the male protagonists, with the token female lab scientist or the token female ass-kicker, with dark and brooding action heroes torn up over the loss of their wife or child that shows their "sensitivity", start talking to the writers over at Netflix about how to show the humanity and complexity in a character that doesn't require lots of sex, lots of rape, lots of on-screen violence, or lots of dark, scowling white male faces contemplating the loss of loved ones.

And I'm not just talking about the action series either. Netflix is totally kicking ass at entertainment in general these days. Their series' present us with diversity in emotion, in response, in reaction. They don't rely on "something Bad happened, now the protagonist will sit, staring out at the moon or off in the distance while they prepare to make themselves into a bad-ass fighting machine for vengeance". They show anger. They show pain. They show walls. They show confusion. They show shame. They show remorse. They show internalized blame. They show characters bumbling around and making mistakes. They show lack of acceptance. They show redemption. But not all in the same character. Not even all in the same gender or race or orientation of character.

Sure, there are lots of things I could criticize about any given Netflix show - no media is perfect. But, just like the Bechtel test is best used in aggregate to show trends, looking at the trends of big box office movies in the last decade and the slew of Netflix originals coming out in the last couple of years, and it stands out in sharp contrast that Netflix has a handle on how to write interesting, complex, nuanced characters and plots whereas Hollywood is still leaning on tropes that should have been retired 30 or more years ago.

I think I might be zeroing in on why it pisses me off so much that people are defending 50 Shades. This is still rough, but I think I'm getting closer to what's wrong with these defenses. I've been spending a lot of time learning how to support abuse victims over the last couple of years. Over and over, the message to victim supporters is "just listen, and accept". Believe victims, listen to them, accept their story. You don't have to "take sides" by accusing the abuser or doing anything active against the abuser. You can even reserve some empathy and support for the alleged abuser. The important part is that you make a safe space for the victim to heal and to feel.

In all the various rants and criticisms of 50 Shades, what I'm hearing is pain. Sometimes it's from abuse victims being triggered, and sometimes it's from people who feel such empathy that they feel fear and pain on behalf of all the women who have been abused or who will experience abuse because of the rape culture that 50 Shades contributes to (or, as in the 2 articles I read recently, the abuse and murder of women that were directly linked to 50 Shades).

So, here I am, being told that we need to hear victims and to listen to people's pain and to support them, on one hand. But on the other hand, when it comes to 50 Shades, I hear "oh, lighten up, it's just a book!" and "geez, don't take things so seriously, it's FICTION for fuck's sake!" and "c'mon, nobody REALLY believes this, so just back off and stop making me feel bad for getting turned on by something that other people are afraid of" with a handful of Dear Muslima responses thrown in (in reference to Dawkins' famous reply basically suggesting that there are worse problems in the world so we shouldn't waste any time talking about the less-worse problems until the worse ones are solved).

In other words, all the defenses of 50 Shades sound exactly like rape apologism. But, more than that, there are people who are trying to say "this hurts me and this hurts others", and yet people, even those who are normally right there on the support-the-victims side, people are hearing those cries of pain and dismissing them out of hand.

As with polyamory, not having a One Right Way does not necessarily mean that there are also no Wrong Ways. Some things are morally wrong, some things are factually wrong, some things are less likely to succeed than other methods and therefore "wrong".

And a story that romanticizes abuse, as opposed to a story that simply tells of abuse, is wrong. So is opposing all those voices crying out in pain. It's OK to enjoy problematic media. It's not OK to silence and dismiss criticism of that media, and it's especially not OK to dismiss the cries of abuse that the media is triggering.

This is a comment I made on the FB post for this blog piece. I'm still trying to find the right words to express what's in my head about this, and the following comment got me another step closer, so I'm adding it to this post:

This revelation is coming from a different angle [from the usual criticisms that 50 Shades is how actual abusers break down their victims which is being touted as "romantic" instead of dangerous], and I'm still teasing it out. I'm seeing a lot of defenses of 50 Shades coming from people who are usually right there on my side in the domestic violence discussions. But when it comes to the book, they suddenly switch sides.

And I think what's niggling at my brain is that this is more than just the standard rape apologism rearing it's ugly head. This is the book itself doing harm, and the defenders aren't being rape apologists for real, but it's as if the *book* is the "abuser" itself and its victims are crying out through their book reviews and criticisms, and people who normally fight against rape culture are now defending *the book* as if the book was an abuser that they are desperately trying to ignore is an abuser simply because it's popular and they don't want to lose access to it.

Like, in the kink community when all those rape accusations started coming out a few years ago. A bunch of people defended the rapists because they were leaders in the community, and if you cut off ties to the rapist, then you couldn't go to the awesome bondage parties anymore because the rapist was the only one with a dungeon who threw parties. So people refused to "take sides" or support the victims, and defended the rapists because they stood to lose something socially if they did so.

The defenses of this book are feeling like the exact same thing. People who are totally in favor of SSC or RACK (Safe, Sane, & Consensual or Risk Aware Consensual Kink for those reading this & who don't know) nevertheless defended rapists in the community because the rapists provided stuff that the defenders didn't want to lose access to, so they did the usual sorts of rationalizations that people do when they're invested in a concept and need to hold onto it in order to protect their investment. I'm sure many of those rape defenders absolutely believed their own arguments, but they were still doing well-known and well-understood logical fallacies, rationalizations, and other mental gymnastics to avoid facing the fact that someone they knew, trusted, perhaps liked and probably needed for something, did a Bad Thing. It even has a name - the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

The defenders of this book, who are normally supporters of abuse victims, are defending the book in much the same way, where the book has "abused" people and the victims & supporters are crying out, but the defenders don't want to lose their precious jerk-off story or examine their own attachment to unhealthy relationship patterns, so they're dismissing the cries of pain from those who are feeling harmed by the book.

Hypothesis: Some defenses of 50 Shades may be an example of a Sunk Cost Fallacy, where people dig in their heels to defend something they are invested in, resulting in treating the book in the same way one might treat an accused abuser that one wants to deny is an abuser (usually when one receives something beneficial from association with the accused abuser, such as social status, access to social events, even love or a relationship) and dismissing claims of harm from its victims and victim-supporters.

http://www.mamamia.com.au/rogue/fifty-shades-of-grey-review-rosie-waterland/

I've seen a lot, and I mean A LOT, of strawman arguments that it's insulting and overly simplistic to claim that people are too stupid to realize that 50 Shades is fantasy and fiction and that we shouldn't be worried about its impact on society, especially considering the mountains of other material contributing to rape culture in our society.

First of all, it's a strawman because no one is saying that anyone is "too stupid" to know the difference. We're saying that it reinforces an already-existing set of cultural tropes that lead people into abusive situations because we are not told that these situations are abusive. One does not have to be "stupid" to find oneself in an abusive situation. One only has to be unaware of the warning signs, and that's most people. Even people who have been in abusive relationships don't know all the warning signs, and many think that their experience is the ONLY version that counts. I've seen a lot of abuse victims say "I've been in an abusive relationship, and this wasn't it!"

Hell, I've said that myself. Except I said that about a real situation. And that's exactly the problem. I was in an abusive relationship. So I thought I knew what abuse looked like. And when someone else's different abusive situation was presented to me, I, with all my sociology experience and alternative relationship experience and feminist views, I looked right at that relationship and said "I've been in an abusive relationship, and this one isn't the same, therefore it's not abuse." I am deeply ashamed of that now. I could have been a source of support. Instead, I was an enabler.

So, fuck you for saying this movie is no big deal. It is. Not because people are too stupid. Because abuse is that big, that complex, and that difficult to identify.

Second, the reason why we're singling this story out over that aforementioned mountain of material contributing to rape culture is because it's currently the one getting the most positive press, the most defense, and making the most money from deliberately obfuscating, dare I say "blurring the lines", between romance and domestic abuse. Unlike some other examples given, this one is being held up as something to aspire to, whereas most of the other examples (Game of Thrones, just to name one) are depicting graphic violence but not idealizing or romanticizing the graphic violence.

IT'S NOT THE GRAPHIC VIOLENCE that's the problem. It's the ACCEPTANCE of the violence as romance, as desirable, as masking it behind a subculture that already has trouble being understood and accepted in society that's the problem. Remember, I participate in consensual non-consent, and I do so without a safeword. I became a weekend sensation one year at Frolicon because of a take-down scene involving me and my two male partners trying to rape me in the dungeon, and I fought so hard that they actually couldn't succeed without my deliberate assistance. I've been exploring rape fantasies since before puberty. This is NOT ABOUT THE KINK, it's about actual domestic violence, manipulation, and emotional abuse.

"But I screwed up. I screwed up big time. I went into this film thinking it would be two hours of B-grade hilarity about bondage that I could make fun of. It was actually two hours of incredibly disturbing content about an emotionally abusive relationship that left me really, really shaken. And now I’m embarrassed that I ever joked about it."

"And my opinion was, well, if they’re two consenting adults, and being tied up and slapped is their thing, then what’s the big deal? But I had no idea that Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t just about the sex. It’s also about an incredibly disturbing and manipulative, emotionally abusive relationship."

"And let me be clear to the women who are incredibly defensive of the book that gave them a sexual awakening: When I talk about domestic abuse, I’m not talking about the sex. In fact, I considered the sex to be the least offensive part of the movie."

"Because as I was sitting in that cinema last night, I was completely floored by what I was watching. And by what millions of women had accepted as a relationship to aspire to."

"It’s emotional abuse disguised as a ‘naughty sex contract’. It’s domestic violence dressed up as sexy fantasy.

And it’s a genius, subtle move. Putting this kind of controlling, emotionally abusive relationship in the context of a sexy billionaire who just needs to be loved, makes it ridiculously easy to convince audiences the world over that this kind of behaviour is okay. He’s not some poor drunk with a mullet, hitting his wife for not doing the dishes. Christian is classy. Rich. Educated. He’s not what most women imagine an abuser to be, and his kind of abuse is not what most women would immediately recognise."

"The blurred lines in this film mean any kind discussion about abuse can be easily shut down by those determined to be obtuse because they like the sexy blindfolds.

But there is no doubt in my mind that the film I watched last night was a disturbing and clear depiction of a controlling and emotionally abusive relationship. This was domestic violence. I don’t care how many women learned to embrace sex because of Fifty Shades of Grey. THIS WAS DOMESTIC VIOLENCE."

"This was domestic abuse marketed as Valentine’s Day fun."

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1517177/ - IMDB
http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/3/70151000?trkid=5966279 - Netflix
http://amzn.to/2vOuSL4 - Amazon

I've updated my Netflix queue with poly movies so long ago, I can't remember anymore which movies were added because I saw them on a poly movie list somewhere and which were added because Netflix recommended it to me based on some movie from a poly list that I had just added. So I have no idea where this "3" came from. The Netflix summary reads:

Berliners Hanna and Simon, a couple in their 40s, have grown comfortable in their marriage. Independently, each meets and romances Adam, a handsome younger man. When Hanna becomes pregnant, all three must face what they've tried to ignore.

This has every element of a movie I will hate - infidelity, secrecy, Relationship Broken Add More People, and babies as plot devices. This movie isn't going to get a Get Out Of Jail Free card on these points. But I actually liked the movie anyway.

First of all, the description isn't exactly accurate. It's pretty close, certainly closer than Sleep With Me was. But Hanna and Simon aren't exactly "comfortable". They seem fairly happy, if settled with each other. I mean, sure, they do seem comfortable with each other, but the description would seem to imply the use of the word "comfortable" as a stand-in for bored or in a rut. This couple still has an active sex life and still expresses affection and love for each other. Their relationship isn't broken and neither of them go out looking for something to fix it, or their lives. They seem more or less content with their lives, although they experience some tragedy early on in the movie. They are "comfortable" if you use the definition of your favorite blanket that you curl up with to watch your favorite movies with.

So, they have a fairly happy, long-term relationship that experiences some stress that just comes from life. Then they each independently meet Adam. The description seems to suggest that each half of the couple were the ones to pursue Adam, but I got the impression that he's the one who put the moves on the couple. Adam is, apparently, bisexual and fine with casual flings. He has interludes with Hanna and Simon, and then goes about his business. But Hanna and Simon keep thinking about Adam and seek him out for more (which he is certainly amenable to). And yet, Hanna and Simon still seem happy with each other, and they're still both sexually active together.

So, as the summary gives away, Hanna discovers she's pregnant and doesn't know who the father is. So, like in Cafe Au Lait, the infidelity is revealed and they all have to deal with it. And this is where I have to give away the ending in order to explain why I think it's a poly-ish movie. I do wish I could start finding some poly-ish movies where the polyamory is the plot (or just another element in the story) and not the conclusion.

( Anyway, here goes. )

This film was more artsy than I generally prefer, but then most foreign films are (this being a German film). It did have some gorgeous scenes, including a beautiful dance between a woman and two men that was fairly blatant foreshadowing. But for once, I didn't find the characters hard to relate to. I found Hanna to be the most disagreeable, but she was intelligent and knowledgeable and she liked to argue politics and she was involved in media. Her husband was quiet and passionate and artistic with a soft heart, filled with compassion. And Adam was a brilliant scientist trying to save the world in spite of the public's Luddite fears holding back his research. I think it was obvious why each of the characters liked the others, whether I liked them or not. They were nuanced and complex, and that always wins big points with me.

So, yes, the story starts out with an infidelity. Unfortunately, so do many poly attempts, which means that we will have that plot represented in our media. And yes, they added a baby. But it wasn't a cautionary tale, there wasn't any hypocrisy really, and no one was rewarded for truly evil behaviour. I found myself drawn into the story and I would recommend watching it.

Oh. Gourd. This movie. There's so much to hate about this movie. Where to even begin? First start at the beginning. And when you come to the end, stop. Scratch that. You'll probably be asking me to stop much sooner than the end. Anyway, here goes.

This movie stars an all-B-lister cast, with the likes of Jason Alexander and Jonathan Silverman and Patrick Dempsey and Angie Everhardt, so not terrible actors. We meet the 3 main couples in the first scene at a dinner party. There's the feminist man who's hopelessly devoted to respecting his pregnant fiance and she's characterized by her absolute trust and faith in him. They have this pleasantly, non-threatening sort of progressive relationship that's all liberal, but in a quiet, unassuming sort of way. He spends most of his time trying to distance himself from the asshole Neanderthal men around him.

Next is the ball-busting, opinionated photographer and her husband. Most of what we see of her is her neuroses. More on that later. He doesn't seem to have anything redeeming about himself to make him stand out in my mind, other than "her husband". I'm not even sure what he does for a living. Finally we have the Jewish attorney who cheated on his first wife with his current wife, and the current wife who, in spite of once being someone's mistress, is naively in love with the idea of monogamy and fidelity and Twue Wuv.

To stir up the pot, the lawyer invites a writer who is a client of his to his little dinner party. Jason Alexander shows up playing the role of cynical misanthropist to shatter the illusions off the happily monogamous couples, named Art. His character really pisses me off because he's the role that someone like me would be in at a real dinner party, except he's written by someone who hates him and so portrays that role as a misogynist Radical Truther asshole. He pulls out the usual tropes, such as "dogs don't have the artificial restraints put on their biology that people do," and he coins the phrase "The Monogamy Denial" which is the title of his book, stating that all people are inherently non-monogamous but men especially are because evo-psych biological urges, must hump everything, reasons. Blegh. My sweetie watching this with me curled his lip at the character and called him "smarmy". Art is everything I detest about the circles I run in - skeptical, atheist, non-monogamous, alt-sex lifestylers basically using pop evo-psych to justify being shitheads and walking all over people's dignity in the name of "honesty" and "nature".

Remember, this is the opening scene. Things go downhill from here. So Art starts spouting his "monogamy is unnatural" bullshit (and I say that as someone who doesn't believe that the human species is inherently monogamous even if some individuals are), and immediately, I mean, with no lead up, the photographer lady gets righteously pissed off, saying "are you insinuating that we are not monogamous, what the hell do you know? Fuck you!" So everyone tries to calm her down and change the subject, but Art keeps pushing the issue, and the party breaks up early. Each couple goes home ruminating about his "truths" in their own fashion, some wondering if men really are inherently non-monogamous (men, not people, men), some angry at the implications, some taking pity on him and trying to armchair psychoanalyze him as having some sort of pathetically bad experience to make him bitter.

Next we're introduced to a whole supporting cast of detestable characters designed to support Art's position. The lawyer's brother, for example, is a chubby-chaser - a guy who fetishizes fat women - with an anger management problem. He manages to make a totally reasonable position of someone who relishes the physical experience of sex with different body types and still come off sounding like a disgusting creep. He is also opposed to marriage and believes that monogamy is unnatural. Of course.

The feminist man, Sam, is a chef in a restaurant who has a coworker of some sort who fulfills the role of the misogynistic guy who believes women are just cum receptacles there for his pleasure. Sam is, to his credit, outwardly and outspokenly appalled at misogynist's behaviour. But when a feminist woman coworker pops her head in to complain, she has to be written as a bitchy feminazi who disapproves of both men and yells at both of them even though Sam was clearly and verbally opposed to Misogynist Man's behaviour. Then the writers reduce her to a sex object by having her stomp off in a huff, still mad at both men, while Misogynist Man leers at her butt and comments on it, and Sam can't help himself from gazing at it walking away either. Yes, I said "it" and not "her". Because the camera zooms in on her ass.

The rest of the movie is a series of scenes of the men being unable to remain fidelitous to their wives in various contexts, each one questioning whether or not this really "counts" as cheating. Does it count as cheating if he masturbates to porn and goes to blue movies? Does it count as cheating if it's a happy ending handjob at a massage parlor? Does it count as cheating if you pick up a hot chick at a hockey game and take her back to her house and loudly fuck her while your buddy sits in the living room with her friend in awkward silence?

The entire movie is nothing but a reinforcement of gender role bullshit. But, remember, the original premise was that monogamy is unnatural for everyone, so the women don't get away scott-free either. It's just that men, apparently, are more likely to cheat and to do so for purely physical reasons (as we're reminded continuously from the justification monologues throughout the film) and women have more complicated reasons for cheating or not cheating. So, enter the wives.

Claudia, the photographer, waits until nearly the end of the movie to seduce Art. Remember, the woman who blew up with no build-up at even the insinuation that she wasn't monogamous? Specifically at the same guy she is now fucking? So Art asks her about it, and she admits that she and her husband have a DADT arrangement. He comments on the hypocrisy of her defending monogamy at the dinner party and she just says that her sex life is no one else's business. Then we learn that Art doesn't actually believe any of the stuff he was spouting at the party, he just said them to see what the reactions would be for research for his next book.

The lawyer's wife (and former mistress), the one who seems like a freaking Disney character with her big innocent eyes and adamant attachment to fidelity and Twue Wuv, develops a crush on her professor in med school and they have an affair. Meanwhile, the lawyer is wracked with Jewish guilt over the happy ending at the massage parlor and the handjob from the friend while waiting awkwardly for his buddy to finish having sex in the next room. So he tells her about it, she freaks out, he reminds her that she wanted complete honesty, and she graciously forgives him while warning him how difficult it will be to gain her trust back. She never once admits to her infidelity, which was "worse" because she had sex but was somehow justifiable because it involved "feelings". Or something.

Sammy, the pregnant fiance of the feminist chef Sam who likes porn, meanwhile finds one of his videos and completely freaks out thanks to her man-hating sister who was cheated on once and now thinks all men are pigs and will cheat. The sister convinces her that porn automatically leads to real sex. So Sammy hires a detective to follow Sam around and discovers his penchant for blue movie theaters. Convinced that he must also be having sex with women all over the place, they set him up with an "operative" who is "prepared to go all the way" to get the evidence for his cheating. But, as Sammy watches from the surveillance van down the street (seriously), Sam proves himself to be worthy of her love and doesn't bow to the seduction, confessing his devotion and love to his beautiful pregnant fiance.

This movie reinforces gender roles, evo-psych justifications, a cynical view of love, and yet still manages to also reinforce monogamy and social expectations. All the couples remain in their couples, only with lies and secrets and guilt between them, and they all end smiling at Sam & Sammy's wedding in a veneer of happiness with the implication that all is as it should be - cheating husbands and all.

I think the best summary for this movie was given by my sweetie when I asked him what he thought. He said, "It was almost a good movie. It had a budget, it had decent actors, it had locations and nice sets, it had some funny moments. It was almost a good movie except for that bit in the middle. Where they talked."

~Reviews by Joreth - I watch the crap so you don't have to.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattortile/hello-my-name-is-fabulous

So this has been floating around my Facebook feed in the last week. I'm re-posting it, not because I agree with every one of them or because I don't think the show has valid criticisms, but because some of the lines are actually really good advice.

The show has a lot of problems with it, I'll be the first to admit. I believe it's important to be able to admit the flaws of the media we like. We don't have to wait for the Perfect Media, we can like stuff with flaws. I just think we have to be able to admit and accept those flaws for what they are.

But I think this show is also undervalued by a lot of my progressive circles because of those very legitimate flaws. And I see most of the devaluing of the show from people who have never watched more than a couple of episodes.

The power of this show is that it highlighted a segment of the population that does not often get highlighted, let alone celebrated. This show celebrated the single, adult, independent woman. Yes, it showed them searching for love and relationships, but even single, adult, independent women often search for love and relationships. These are not mutually exclusive traits.

Over the seasons, as the characters age and continue to date as single women, the show addressed the concepts of aging, of female independence, of designer relationships, of the fairy tales, of social pressure and the expectations of womanhood, of class warfare, of alternative life choices, of dealing with death and mortality, of reconciling poor choices, of introspection, of introverts vs. extroverts, of communication, and of parenthood vs. non-parenthood and the validity of options.

I'm not saying that every episode was gold. I'm also not even saying that I agree with the conclusions they reach on any of those subjects. I'm saying that they introduced the topics to a mainstream audience when those topics had previously gone unstated or under-discussed. Much like The Golden Girls brought to every American living room the idea of seniors having sex and the challenges faced by single women as they age, this show eschews the standard formula of happily married but quirky heterosexual monogamous couple raising children in the suburbs.

It's not very realistic in that it does retain many of the other most-common sitcom (yes, I know it's not a sitcom) tropes of hip, attractive people living in one of the most expensive cities in the world and somehow managing to, not just survive, but thrive with enough expendable income to wear designer clothes and attend fabulous parties searching for love in all the wrong places and hilarity ensues. But it doesn't cover it in the young, early-twenty-something way as those sitcoms; it tells the story from the perspective of women who have "passed their prime", who have reached and passed the age at which they should have overcome their silly, young faux pas and found The One already and settled down into that married-with-children sitcom storyline. It tells the story of trying to find love while one's ability to have children becomes compromised and the effects of aging are just beginning to be seen and dealt with.

It tells the story from that in-between stage, where the women are no longer the hip, young people we can excuse from making the mistakes they make because they're young, and the older people who have already reached the stage where aging is a given and now they have to deal with that class. The process of coming to terms with aging, and of aging in our appearance-obsessed, monogamy-and-love-obsessed society is a process rarely examined.

As I do with any serial or episodic form of media in which there are good episodes and bad episodes, I like to take certain episodes that cover certain topics and examine that single topic on its own merit. I might have to provide some long-term context of the characters to explain why they react or behave the way they do, but the episode itself is being addressed as a stand-alone for the message. Even when the characters reach a conclusion that I disagree with, I find it to be a valuable teaching tool, discussion starter, and illustration of important or complex points.

I have a series of clips taken from a few different episodes that single out certain topics and points that I've uploaded to YouTube, and I post them occasionally when the comments threads are relevant. Maybe someday I'll get around to starting up that blog series on this show. It'll be in the Media Reflections tag here in my LiveJournal, if anyone is interested.

I agree with Felicia Day about how changing a character's appearance through casting is not about sticking to canon. In addition to all the other things she says about diversity and minority representation, for me, when I get upset about changing a character's appearance through casting or when it's OK with me has to do with when that character's appearance affects the character development.

Take Annie, for example. That was a story about an unwanted, forgotten child who struggled with adversity in the lowest class of person there was. In the era it was written in and for, being poor and red-headed was the lowest a person could be (because being a person of color was *not* actually a person, and the predominantly white audience could not relate in any way to a black protagonist; just look at the names given to Warbuck's ethnic servants). But today, who better would understand the trials of being in the lowest economic class, hated and distrusted based on appearance alone, with little-to-no options for improving one's station than a little black orphan girl? Changing Annie's appearance from a red-headed white girl to a black girl does not change her character. In fact, one could argue that it enhances exactly those character traits the character was written around without the embedded racism of the early 20th century.

But remember the debacle about princessifying Mierda from Brave? All they changed about her was her clothing, and that sent fans into an uprorar. Why? Because the whole fucking movie was ABOUT her resistance to being princessified. And she WON that battle. That's why we loved her and that's what her entire character was about. Changing her clothing is literally the same as changing her very personality and her whole story. But you could make her a different ethnicity and still tell the same tale.

Most white characters are written as white straight males out of default, not because there is anything inherently white, straight, or male about their characters. There was that article I passed around a while back that advocated to parents that, while reading your children their bedtime stories, try changing up the gender pronouns. It turns out that telling most stories with white male protagonists as female, especially those written for children, doesn't typically alter the story in any way. It's totally believable because the stories aren't usually written AROUND the experience of being a white straight male. They're just stories that white straight males have adventures in. And when that's the case, pretty much anyone can have those adventures.

But when a writer creates a minority character, that writer has to deliberately make an effort to point out that the character is a minority. They usually only do that when they have a reason to do it, such as the experience of being that minority is what results in the character as we eventually meet them. I'm going to overlook for the moment the fact that most minority characters are either poorly written, written flatly, or written to represent or convey a stereotype and just address the fact that they *are* written, but are written for a reason. So to cast that character with a white actor pretty much erases the entire reason for that character having been written as a minority in the first place. Very rarely are minority characters put in a story just because the author felt like describing someone who looked different without those looks being some kind of commentary or effect on who the character is.

I originally wrote "never" instead of "very rarely", but then I remembered modern vampire romance novels (sorry, but Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton write romance novels. They just do. Disclosure: I like modern vampire stories and I read romance novels. I stand by my assertion that they are one and the same). I believe that the minority characters in those stories really could be replaced by white actors and it would not significantly change the characters in any way. I think that these authors threw in minority characters simply to give themselves more adjectives to describe a cast of several dozen that all have six-pack abs, piercing eyes, honey-voices, and long flowing hair. Eventually you run out of ways to describe bulging biceps unless you throw in ebony skin or perfectly symmetrical faces with full lips without adding almond-shaped eyes, but there's nothing fundamentally "ethnic" about these characters that isn't simply "exotic objectification". But I digress.

Does the arrogance and selfish entitlement of Captain Hammer still work if we make that character a black man? Or a woman? Or a disabled person? No, Captain Hammer works best as a white male precisely because of the arrogance and entitlement of the character. He is, in fact, a commentary on the perception of heroes and making him a minority would hurt that message. But there is nothing about the Human Torch that is inherently "white" that a black man couldn't also play.

There is, however, a problem with casting a skinny model as a character who is the very embodiment of physical activity, martial arts, and ass-kicking skills even though both the actor and the character are white women (although a woman of color could easily play her character too). The character represents strong, independent womenhood, while a conventionally attractive female with no muscle definition does not convey that same message. She conveys the importance of beauty over strength and unrealistic ideals of the female body, which directly conflicts with the character's traits. Wonder Woman is an Amazon written by a man who is actually a "misandrist" - he actually really and truly believes that women are the better gender. She does not work as a skinny, conventionally attractive, small woman. She is supposed to be bigger and stronger than men. That's her THING.

Tonto cast as a white actor? Tiger Lily cast as a white actor? Aside from the original racism inherent in writing those characters in the first place, those characters *are* their ethnicities. To cast white actors in those roles is to further the erasure of those ethnicities and to erase their entire motivation for being in the story in the place where they are. If we tried to tell the Color Purple with white actors, we would be erasing the whole reason for that story existing in the first place. If we were to tell The Secret Garden with an Indian protagonist, we would be erasing the whole reason for that story existing in the first place. The whole reason the characters have the adventures they do and the personalities they do is *because* they are wealthy white children in colonial India.

The point here is that my upset or lack thereof when it comes to casting an actor of different ethnicity or gender or orientation than the character has to do with how that character's appearance changes the character's development, traits, and skills, not whether something is canon or not. Did the author write that character's appearance that way for a reason? What does that appearance do for the character's development? Is there another way to accomplish that development? Is that the *best* way to accomplish that development? Does that development or does that appearance represent stereotyping, outdated cultural influences, bigotry, or prevent more complex dimensional characterization or does it instead enhance or explain the character or highlight/comment on the culture's stereotyping, outdated cultural influences, bigotry, or prevention of character advancement? In other words, is that character poorly written because of its appearance, or do the ethnic/gender/orientation limitations placed on the character actually serve a larger social commentary purpose?

I don't want to stick to canon for canon's sake. Sometimes authors make mistakes or write something less well than it could have been written. Doesn't mean I don't like it, just means it could be better. What purpose does this element serve? Do I like that purpose or can the spirit of the story survive with a different take? Can that purpose be served by a different element? Those are the questions that ought to be asked when casting choices are made and plot changes are made going from one medium to another.

Replacing minority characters with white actors is racism because of the larger social issue of diversity representation and because the minority part of the character usually is an important character trait. Occasionally casting white characters with minority actors is NOT racism (or "reverse racism") because there is almost never anything fundamentally "white" about a character that could not exist if a minority actor portrayed that character and because of the larger social issue of diversity representation.

Racism is what happens when someone of an already disadvantaged racial class is disadvantaged or discriminated against. By definition, it is not racism when an advantaged racial class has to share some of the privileges with disadvantaged racial classes, even when sometimes "sharing" means you get those privileges just a little bit less often. That's called putting on the big boy pants and not hogging the spotlight so that others get a turn too.

http://amzn.to/2vTjqvW - Amazon
http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Hyde-Park-on-Hudson/70243444 - Netflix
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1477855/ - IMDB

This movie was recommended to me by several people, many of whom are not poly. When that happens, I go into the viewing with a dubious mindset. Most of the time, people who are not poly don't really understand what polyamory is, so when they identify something as "poly", it's not really. I was aware of 32nd President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's affairs. Not in any detail, but as a critic of American politics, I am superficially aware that many of our past politicians' indiscretions were more or less common knowledge but ignored, as the public focused on how they performed their jobs and not what they did in their bedrooms. I am aware of that because of the stark contrast for how we treat today's politicians and celebrities. But that's a rant for another time.

This movie is from the perspective of Margaret Suckley, commonly called "Daisy", who was a sixth cousin* to FDR and a regular companion during his time in office. It is more or less a biography of FDR while he was president of the United States prior to his involvement in WWII and seeks to show him as a relatable human, rather than an impressive government official and leader of the Free World.

It has been established that FDR was married to Eleanor Roosevelt, had a long-time affair with her secretary, Lucy, another two-decade-long affair with his own secretary, Missy, and rumors that are accepted as probably true about an affair with Princess Martha of Sweden while she lived at the White House during WWII. It is also "common knowledge" that these affairs killed the emotional connection between FDR and his wife Eleanor, who remained married to him as a political partnership until he died. Rumors of illicit affairs with the owner of the New York Post, Dorothy Schiff, and the main character, Daisy, are controversial, to say the least.

With this kind of history, I had a few preconceptions going into the film. I thought it would be just another movie about cheating, which is pretty common. Many movies that get suggested to me are nothing more than movies about cheating. Occasionally the cheating is the result of a loving relationship and not just about sex, but it's still nevertheless about cheating. Every once in a blue moon, I will accept a cheating movie as a poly-ish movie if I give it a pass for the era in which the movie takes place if the story feels like it would have been the version of polyamory that I recognize had it not been for some heavy social penalties. In other words, it was as close to polyamory as a non-monogamous relationship could get given the circumstances.

This is what I feel that Hyde Park On Hudson is. From here I will be discussing the movie itself, with complete disregard to the question of historical accuracy. In the context of my Poly-ish Movie Reviews, I care less about the liberties a director takes with historical facts and more about how well the movie answers the question "is this a movie about polyamory or that has polyamory in it?"

In this movie, Daisy is a sweet, naive girl who falls in love with a powerful older man because he invites her in to his heart and shows her the human being he is, not the political office. He is caring and compassionate and frail and vunlerable. She knows that he is still married and she does not harbor a belief that he will leave his wife for her. She has heard the rumors that they have a loveless marriage, and usually that is enough justification for a mistress to accept the role. But Daisy observes the spouses together and believes that they still share an emotional connection. This observation does not seem to provoke any jealousy. She just seems to accept that her lover still loves his wife.

But soon enough, Daisy learns that Franklin is having sexual relations with his secretary, Missy. Missy runs after the fleeing Daisy to confront her and explain the situation. Up until this point, I still felt that this was a cheating movie, just one of those that included emotional connections and not just sex. Missy drops more bombs on the shaken Daisy when Missy reveals that Franklin is having other affairs too, and that Missy knew about Daisy from the moment their relationship began and accepted her. Missy insists that Daisy must accept that she will have to "share" Franklin. Daisy says that can't, but Missy tells her that she can.

So, I could have included it on my Poly-ish list at this point because Franklin has what appears to be loving relationships with multiple women who know and "deal with it", but it would have held a wobbly position on that list. It's the next part that makes me feel that this is a poly movie.

Eventually Daisy forgives Franklin and they begin seeing each other again. Simultaneously, Daisy develops a friendship with Missy. The two women become very close, deliberately using their mutual connection to a lover as the springboard from which their own relationship blossoms. Daisy comes to admire and rely on Missy. Missy often fetches Daisy when Missy believes that Franklin will benefit from her presence. The two women do more than reach a truce regarding their respective roles; they forge an alliance. And both women have a somewhat more distant relationship with Eleanor, but a relationship built on respect and admiration nonetheless.

Eleanore has a separate home, but she is a constant fixture in the scenes in the movie. So the image that is portrayed to us is one of a loving family with Franklin, his smart and savvy political wife, his lover and assistant, and his companion, as well as his mother who appears to know all about who is sleeping with whom. His mother and his wife butt heads, naturally, but everyone seems to get along and to accept or cherish each other's roles in Franklin's life. Franklin's mother and secretary, for example, both "severely criticized [him] for not inviting [Daisy] to dinner" on the night that the White House hosted the King and Queen of England - the first time that British royals had ever set foot on US soil. After Daisy learns that she is not the only one and is pressured into attending another social political function while still sulking about it, Missy is the first to approach Daisy and welcome her to the event. Franklin even publicly declares that Daisy belongs at VIP table, where everyone who is important to him ought to be, along with the royals, his wife, and his other mistress.

This movie is not solely about FDR's romantic life. It is also about the friendship forged between the US and England in the tenuous days before WWII, it's about the pressures of political life on an ailing man, about the effect of foreign wars on domestic issues, and about the dichotomy of being a private person in the public sphere. The movie included stellar acting and touching peeks into complex people in complex situations. I have to say that, although I knew that Bill Murray was a good actor and I've always loved his films, this was the first movie I've seen of his where he wasn't "Bill Murray" in it. You know how there are some actors that, even while they're good, you still know that they are who they are? Gary Oldman is the opposite of that. He's an actor that I usually make it halfway through the movie before I even realize that it's Gary Oldman. Leonardo diCaprio is one of those actors that, even when he's doing a good job, he's still always Leo.

But Bill Murray's performance in this role thoroughly distracted me from my jewelry-making (I often do physical projects while watching movies - my brain can't focus on a story alone without my hands doing something) because I kept watching in fascination at a face that I just knew belonged to Peter Venkman but there was nothing of Dr. Venkman or Phil Connors or Frank Cross, or even of Bill Murray himself as seen in interviews in that face and in that body. I saw FDR, as I knew him from recordings and film reels. I heard FDR in his voice, I saw FDR in the tilt of his head and the way he held his hands. When I can't see Gary Oldman, I really can't see Gary Oldman. But to physically see Bill Murray and still not be able to "see" Bill Murray was disconcerting and wonderful and I am charmed by this film apart from its poly (or not) leanings.

So I recommend this movie. I thought it was an engaging film that I was willing to enjoy as a narrative and not insist that it be taken as a biography, and I felt that the relationships portrayed in the film represented what I recognize as polyamorous - loving, consensual, accepting, family - in spite of the lack of intentional communication and apparent deception that I feel was characteristic of the era regarding romantic liaisons. Although the modern poly movement of the last 30 years prioritizes communication above all else (and I happen to agree that it is a necessary element to healthy poly relationships), people are still the products of their times and cultures. So a movie set in another time and culture will necessarily have a different perspective on appropriate and effective communication. I may still disagree with them, but I believe other elements are more important to classifying a relationship as poly than whether or not multiple adults sat down around a large table with health reports, spreadsheets, and Google calendars to discuss the future possibility of taking a new partner.

There are many different ways to do poly. Some of them are wrong, some of them are right, some are healthy and some are outright abusive, but what makes it poly is that there are multiple, they are loving, and there is acceptance. It is not poly if there are only two partners & that is the preferred state. It is not poly if it is purely based on sex with no emotional connections and that is the preferred state. It is not poly if there is deception maintained throughout (and if that is the preferred state). It is not poly if the participants feel forced into the situation and begrudge the arrangement. Deception and poor communication certainly exist in poly relationships. But it's what the movie says about deception or communication, or how it's dealt with, that changes it from a movie condemning non-monogamy to a movie that merely presents one example of a loving relationship that happens to have some flaws.

*Sixth cousins are really only barely related. It means that they shared a common ancestor roughly 6 generations in their past. So, in other words, you add 5 "greats" before the word "grandparent" to come up with "sixth cousins". The "once removed" bits in relationship taxonomy refer to whether or not the cousins are in the same generation as each other. So first cousins have the same grandparents. Second cousins have the same great-grandparents. First cousins once removed is your first cousin's child - you and that child have your grandparents (their great-grandparents) in common and are in different generations from each other, hence "once removed". None of this has anything to do with the movie. It was common both in the era and within the Roosevelt family itself for non-first cousins to marry or be involved and Daisy's "sixth cousin" status was completely irrelevant to her romantic relationship with Franklin. It was really only relevant to mention because it was her connection as a relative who had grown up as a child with the Franklin that excused the President of the United States' mother for inviting a nobody like Daisy to the White House to attend the President when he fell ill. But I find genealogy interesting, and I know that a lot of people don't know how all those second/third/eigth cousins twice removed labels actually work, and I also know there are a lot of knee-jerk reactions to the idea of relatives having sexual relationships with each other. So I thought I'd mention it in a footnote.

Some time ago, I had the occasion to connect with Michael Chapman, filmmaker and creator of the movie The Ledge. Because of that connection, he started following me on Facebook and has seen me rant about the 50 Shades of Grey ~~pieces of shit~~ er, I mean novels. Now, it turns out that the actor who played the lead in his movie, The Ledge (alongside Liv Tyler), has been positioned to play the lead character in 50 Shades, Christian Grey, in the upcoming movie version of the book. So Chapman has even more of an interest in the new movie. And he asked me my opinion on whether or not the new movie has any hope of being good.

Flattered that an actual filmmaker would seek me out for my opinion on the subject and kind of shocked that he was even aware I had one, I thought about it, and wrote him a long response, trying to summarize my feelings for this book and its sequels into a single email. It's a lengthy response, but I still think I only barely scratched the surface of what I was trying to convey.

Nevertheless, he liked my response so much that he asked if he could publish it on The Ledge's Facebook page. Naturally, I said, of course! I hadn't written it with a public post in mind, so it's clearly an email response to a question, but he was welcome to post it if he wanted. So, he did, and it has now been read by over 6,000 people all around the world (The Ledge apparently has quite the international following, considering it's a movie with an atheist protagonist and a Christian is the bad guy, and theism vs. atheism is a big part of the conflict). This is the largest platform I've ever had for one of my opinions. So I'm pretty stoked! If you're on Facebook, you can see the post and like it and offer your own perspective: https://www.facebook.com/theledgemovie/posts/598254666879883. If you're not on Facebook, here's what I wrote:

I think the only way a good movie can come out of that book is if it keeps just the title in common and basically becomes a whole other movie, without the author's "creative" input. There are no redeeming features of that book.

Now, whether it will make *money* or win the cast and crew some acclaim is a different story. But the very premise of the story is that it romanticizes abusive relationships and reinforces the "if you love him he will change" trope, all with very boring, unkinky sex and a lot of really bad writing. It's Twilight fan-fiction for fuck's sake.

It's very premise is flawed, and if the story foundation is bad, there's nothing you can do to dress it up and make it better. Keeping the title and changing everything else about it is common in Hollywood, but it might piss off the book fans. The best thing that anyone in the kink community can say about that book is "at least it got mainstream people talking about BDSM, and maybe, because of their interest, they'll research the healthy ways to do kink." I think my favorite criticism I've heard so far was "It angered both the librarian and the pervert in me", but I don't know who said that.

I think anyone involved in filmmaking as an artform would do well to pay attention to the BDSM community's view on the book. If they are part of a film for the art of it, then 50 Shades is not a good choice. But anyone wishing to earn a little notoriety and be shocking would probably get something worthwhile out of being affiliated with the movie, because it will get attention.

The "big strong domly man trains a submissive woman who just doesn't know she's submissive yet" storyline is one of the most common kink storylines ever. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of books with that same plot. Any of them is going to be better written than 50 Shades, and at least some of them are going to be written by people who actually have some experience in the kink community, unlike the author, James.

In fact, I'll recommend one right now. It's called The Training of Eileen and it's available on Amazon - Elicitation is the first book in the series. It's the same plot - rich guy finds innocent young wife and trains her to be his sex slave. But the difference is that he wasn't abused and raped as a child and who now takes out his sociopathic rage towards women on his partners. This main character is caring and loving - he does what he does because *the submissive likes it*.

It uses the "she just doesn't know it yet" trope, but in this case, it's not a rapey excuse, it's that he paid attention to her early on and detected submissive tendencies in what she revealed about herself. In this story, it's all about giving the submissive what she wants and giving her permission to want it. In 50 Shades, it's all about what the dom wants (to beat women) and the power struggle between him and his girl who wants to "fix" his broken kinky ways.

So, my opinion is that there is no salvation for this movie. It cannot, by virtue of its source, ever become a good movie without doing the Hollywood bait-and-switch - capitalizing on the name but completely rewriting it from the ground up. But it *can* become a money-maker and it *can* catapult the cast and crewmembers into some measure of fame by association. The question is, is that the kind of association one wants to be known for? The kink community does not support the book, except to for those who welcome *any* conversation-starter, even bad ones. Since I have enough trouble getting trapped by men (as I am a single heterosexual female) who think that "coercion" is merely another word for foreplay, to say that I am not one of those who even welcomes it as a conversation starter is an understatement.

I'll leave you with some chapter-by-chapter reviews of the book, if you're interested to hear exactly what is so wrong with it and why:

http://collegeatthirty.blogspot.com/search/label/fifty%20shades%20of%20grey
http://jennytrout.blogspot.com/p/jen-reads-50-shades-of-grey.html
http://zephyrscribe.tumblr.com/tagged/50+Shades+of+Grey
http://theramblingcurl.blogspot.com/2013/02/need-more-evidence-that-50-shades-is.html

Current Mood: accomplished

http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/dirty-dancing-is-a-subversive-masterpiece-and-here-are-four-reasons-why

OTG YES! Dirty Dancing is such a complex, multi-layered piece of art that had such a huge impact on me and several facets of my various world-views that it's hard for me to emphasize its importance enough. This article only addresses 4 points, but I think that's just a starting point, although a very strong starting point. The article covers having an awkward heroine who never turns into the "beautiful, popular girl" to win the guy, having a "hot guy" like the awkward heroine for who she is as a person without being blind to her until that magical "ugly duckling" transformation, giving "the sheltered 17-year-old all the sexual agency", class politics, and illegal abortion. Set in 1963.

It's not a "chick flick" or a rom-com, or even your typical "coming of age" story. It's a sociopolitical commentary on class struggles, women's rights, sexual agency, gender relations, communication, trust, and personal growth. Baby remains one of my all-time epitomal characters that helped to define who I am, and Johnny remains the ideal romantic partner to whom I compare all my potential partners. It's not just because he has a nice ass and abs, it's because of his integrity, his character, his personal struggles, and his values.

Dancing, to me, is not just a fun physical activity. It is a vehicle through which we can achieve personal growth and relationship enhancement, as well as a story-telling device that we can use to address controversial and taboo subjects. And this movie combines everything that I find valuable about dance - the fun, the storytelling, the catalyst for growth, the beauty, the pain, the personal expression. I don't think it's even possible to truly "get" me without understanding this movie. That doesn't mean that you have to have watched it in order to get me, but that you would have to be the kind of person who *would* understand this movie if you saw it in order to understand who I am as a person. But watching it helps.

Maybe, in my copious free time that isn't today, I'll write my own full post enumerating the points and analyzing the movie the way the article does.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9BbUqHrWFI

"Dirty Dancing - Time of my Life (Final Dance) - High Quality HD" (Watch on YouTube)

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Three/60030021 - Netflix
http://www.amazon.com/Three/dp/B004VZWE4A - Amazon
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169320/ - IMDB

There are several movies by this name. Every time someone recommends a movie to me called Three, I go to look for it on Netflix and half a dozen movies pop up, and I can't tell which one is which. So it wasn't until about 10 minutes in that I realized I had already watched this movie. But I haven't reviewed it yet, so I guess it wasn't a total waste of an hour and a half.

I'll be honest, from the Netflix description, I didn't have high hopes for this movie. The very summary makes it sound like a torn-between-two-lovers-and-forced-to-make-a-choice movie. And that's what it was. But the title screen on the DVD is incredibly misleading. It shows a FMF threesome that never happens in the movie.

The movie was interesting, and it certainly had a lot to say on the subject of homosexuality and coming out, so I might recommend it on that basis. But it wasn't poly. Tito and Elsie are unhappily married. Tito is an arrogant, entitled, selfish asshole and Elsie is incredibly fearful - she moves through life on the path of least courage. Tito is screwing a collegue, Susan, who is desperately trying to steal Tito away from Elsie, even though Tito has never given her any reason to think he would leave his wife (I think he's getting off on the idea of cheating even more than the sex itself, and leaving his wife for her would take that away).

Before Elsie married Tito (at her mother's insistence), she had a secret lesbian relationship with Alice, the "tomboy" next door. Elsie couldn't handle the idea of her mother finding out or experiencing any sort of cultural shame for being gay, so she bowed to pressure and broke up with Susan and married Tito.

But Alice has cancer and wants Elsie back - not just because she wants her hot lovin' but because Alice very strongly believes in personal authenticity and coming out and being true to oneself. She worries that Elsie will never come out and will continue to live a lie, unhappy in her marriage until she dies, if Susan doesn't inspire her to be more courageous.

But, just to add another layer of complexity, Susan has been living with another lover (whose name I never caught) who stays with her through everything, caring for her, giving her the shots & IV drips, even being with her on her deathbed and yet is tossed aside as soon as Elsie walks in the door. When Elsie leaves her husband for Alice, she manages to live with Alice and her now-former lover for 9 months before even bothering to ask the lover who she is to Alice or what their relationship was before she came along.

So, there's no polyamory happening here. Tito cheats on his wife. His wife leaves him for her ex-girlfriend. The ex-girlfriend dumps her own partner to get back together with the wife. Everyone is contemptuous and disrespectful to the poor ex-lover still living in the house, caring for her terminally sick love.

And the story is told from her point of view.

There were some really interesting bits about Tito getting over his homophobia, coming out to Elsie's mother, raising a child in a gay community, parents who don't love each other trying to co-parent and live together, courage, fear, and personal growth. Anyone interested in movies on these kinds of subjects might want to check out this movie.

But I didn't like any of the characters, and as regular readers of my LJ might know by now, if I can't empathize with the characters, then I have trouble enjoying the story. At least this time there was a reason for putting together the main couple when they didn't actually like each other. Usually movies do that and expect us to just accept that they're in a happy relationship that we should be rooting for (or that they're not currently in a romantic relationship but that we should be hoping that they get into one in spite of not liking each other). So I didn't have any trouble wondering why they were together since they didn't like each other. I just thought that everyone did really stupid things and it was completely obvious to me why everyone was unhappy. Somehow, that made it much easier to sit through than movies that give happy endings to people who totally fuck up their own lives or who villify or sacrifice those who do something contrary when they should have been happy.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219965/ - IMDB
http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Bandits/60021636 - Netflix
http://amzn.to/2vOvGQd - Amazon

It's past time that I did a review of Bandits, but for some reason I keep putting it off. This is a quirky story of 2 mismatched bank robbers and the woman who comes between them. And it's a poly movie, and one of my favorite movies, poly or no.

Bruce Willis plays a gruff, stoic, spontaneous bank robber with a temper problem named Joseph. We first meet him in prison, where he's shackled to Terry (played by Billy Bob Thornton), a neurotic, hypochondriac, obsessively compulsive thief who can't shut the fuck up. Joseph wants to escape, but being shackled to Terry necessarily requires Terry's cooperation. One day, in the prison yard, Joseph spontaneously makes their escape, much to over-planning Terry's annoyance. But escape they do, and they continue their bank robbing career once on the outside.

But then Terry starts running the numbers, and decides that the risk of being re-captured is not worth the traditional bank jobs that they usually do. So he comes up with the idea to visit the bank manager's house the night before, and then enlist the manager's unwilling cooperation when he opens the bank the next morning, before the customers or any employees arrive. This works out so well, that it earns them the moniker The Sleepover Bandits.

During a nearly botched escape, Terry ends up running into Kate ... or rather, Kate ends up running into Terry. Literally. Kate is a flighty, also neurotic, lonely housewife with a mischievous streak who is fleeing from her loveless marriage when she stumbles upon the exciting life of the notorious bank robbers.

And so follows their tale, as Kate gets to know the two men independently, and each of the men gets to know her, and all their respective relationships flourish and flounder amidst the backdrop of their turbulent career choices.

It's a really interestingly shot film, with a mixture of classic action film sequences, "buddy robber" scenes, romance scenes, and "mockumentary" scenes with footage from an interview that the Sleepover Bandits give to a journalist about their fame and exploits intermixed among the regular movie scenes. The characters seem superficial and one-dimensional, but I think we get to see a little depth as the plot progresses, and I, at least, started to care about the characters about halfway through (although it was hard for me to empathize much with them - Terry just bugs the shit out of me).

I was already poly by the time this movie came out, but I did not realize this was a poly movie before I saw it. I think I was actually a bit trepidatious about seeing it, because I don't tend to go in much for artsy, indie films and I think I had the impression that this was that kind of movie. But I ended up really liking it in spite of myself, and I liked the strain that Kate found herself under as she realized that she loved two men who were very different from each other and gave her very different kinds of relationships - relationships that she could not possibly have with the other one and relationships that both brought value to her life for their uniqueness and individuality.

It would be very nice, though, for a movie heroine caught between two lovers to not declare that, mixed together, the combined men make up the perfect man. I really don't approve of the Frankenboyfriend sentiment to polyamory. But I think her point is that each man is unique & she can't get from one what she gets from the other, and I think that point comes across clearly.

I recommend watching this movie. We've already shown it at our OrlandoPoly Poly Movie Nights, and it was a big hit with the whole audience.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118743/ - IMDB
http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Blood-Oranges/1180875?strkid=1845016849 - Netflix
http://amzn.to/2if9s51 - Amazon

Husband and wife Cyril and Fiona explore new ground and new relationships when they take a vacation in the tropics. While on holiday, the pair meets another couple, Hugh and Catherine, and their three children. Relationships become intertwined when Cyril and Fiona lose their inhibitions and seek sexual intimacy with Hugh and Catherine in this erotic drama.

So Netflix says. It sounded pretty promising, and yeah, I think this fits under the "poly-ish" heading. Cyril and Fiona are clearly in an open marriage with both of them openly supportive of each others' interests. Honestly, though, I was surprised to see that this movie was made in 1999. It just felt like another '60s sexual revolution type of film, not the least of which was a slightly predatory personality from Fiona and a pseudo-sex cult leader attitude from Cyril, but also it just kind of looked like it - the cinematography and lack of a soundtrack, I think.

Here's what I liked about the movie:

An attempted quad instead of unicorn hunters looking for the hot bi babe
The newbie love interest struggles with deeply indoctrinated beliefs of fidelity & ownership
Neither the polyamory nor society around them was responsible for ending the relationships
How non-traditional parental relationships affects children old enough to have internalized society's messages about relationships
A couple not letting their pre-existing relationship make the other relationships "secondary" and doing what's best for the family instead of "protecting" their couplehood at all costs

Here's what I didn't like about the movie:

The characters

I like serious dramas, but I'm really picky about them. I don't tend to like movies that I describe as "very French" - filled with unnecessary angst and smoking and existential ennui and desolation. Unfortunately, in movies that explore alternative sexuality, if it's a drama and not a comedy or something uplifting, I too often find it's one of these types of dramas. Such was this movie for me. I didn't like the movie, but that's based solely on personal taste. One might say that I have no taste, since I'd rather be watching cheesy '80s sitcoms, so there you go.

I'm extremely character-driven in my entertainment preferences and I just didn't like the characters. I found Cyril to be pompous, elitist, and blind to his own privilege, even if I happened to appreciate his understanding that possession should not be part of interpersonal relationships. I thought Fiona was selfish, predatory, and naively idealistic. Catherine, I just felt sorry for and wished she would grow a backbone.

And Hugh! I have no idea why anyone liked Hugh. He was controlling, possessive, self-righteous, arrogant, dismissive, condescending, and filled with disgust. There is one scene in particular (that I won't describe so as to not give away spoilers) where he is such a hateful asshole that I immediately disliked every other character just because they overlooked Hugh's behaviour and attitudes. Even after he did something that I would have found unforgivable, it was everyone else's primary desire to make him feel better and keep him a part of the family.

But they were trying to build a strong family, and for that, I have to give this movie credit ... or at least say that it's a poly-ish movie. Cyril and Fiona were not the typical movie couple, where the guy wants some hot chick & talks his wife into it. They both seemed equally enamored of the other couple & welcomed them and their children into their home. Cyril in particular tried very hard to reach out to the children and soothe the oldest, who noticed something going on and seemed resentful. Cyril and Fiona both did everything in their power to help Catherine during her own time of emotional crisis without putting their own relationship above everything else.

So, I'd recommend this movie if dramas are your thing and you want to see a poly movie that doesn't end with polyamory destroying everyone's lives and, in fact, the polyamory is beneficial to providing an emotional support structure in difficult times.

Sometimes I think that maybe I'm actually speaking a different langauge from everyone else, and maybe I have some kind of universal translator or babelfish so that I can't tell, but that the translator is buggy or slightly off in some ways. Because people don't seem to use words in the same way that I do. Even with a dictionary, people use words differently, and I find that I am constantly having semantics arguments because we can't discuss a topic until we are all on the same page about what the words we are using mean.

One of those words is polyamory. I'm a pretty big proponent of using the definition of a word that the person who made up the word uses. In some cases, I think the Argument from Authority is a good one. If you invented or coined a term, then you get to decide what it means. This is even more important, to me, the younger the word is. And if the word was invented or coined within the same generation (i.e. roughly 30-ish years) and the coiners are still alive, then there shouldn't be any debate about "living languages" and so forth.

So, to me, polyamory is about having or wanting multiple simultaneous romantic relationships in which all parties consent to the arrangement. That means that they both know about it and agree to it willingly, not grudgingly. If you don't say yes, it's not consent. If you are coerced, it's not consent. If someone uses their position of authority over you, it's not consent. If you are not aware of any other options, it's not consent. If you are not allowed the opportunity to back out, it's not consent. And so on. Polyamory is also, to me, more about building intentional families (even if some of those relatives are "extended" relatives) than in experiencing sexual encounters (also explicit in the definition - a word's definition is not necessarily limited solely to it's literal translation, the intent and cultural context of a word is also taken into account).

So when someone suggests a movie to me that they claim has polyamory in it, I am now highly dubious about that claim. I have been recommended all manner of cheating and swinging and other non-monogamous movies, but very rarely do I find actual polyamory in these films. Every so often, a cheating movie might make it into my Poly-ish Movie List because I believe from the context of the story that it would be polyamorous if not for the circumstances, like the era or culture, that prevents the characters from openly declaring their relationships that are, nonetheless, loving (like Same Time, Next Year) - I basically feel that the characters are poly but possibly trapped somewhen/somewhere that they can't express it properly. Many times, it's hard for me to really quantify why a particular borderline movie is poly and why this other one isn't. It usually boils down to tone, and a vague sense of "moralizing" that I may or may not get from the storytellers.

This was the problem I had with The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I kept getting told that it was a poly movie, but there was just something wrong with its tone. Tomas is a philanderer who seems to be afraid of committment and keeps his emotional entanglements to a minimum. Basically, he has sex with lots of women a few times and drops them when they start becoming "serious". Except for one woman, Sabina, who basically seems to have the same outlook as Tomas, in that she hightails it outta there as soon as a guy starts getting "serious" about her. They appear to have a mutual respect in addition to their mutual attraction and mutual passion because of their shared interest in not letting anyone get close to them. Ironically, that barrier that they both erect to keep people out is what ties them together.

Along comes Tereza, an innocent young girl who manages to, as far as I could tell, guilt her way into Tomas' life. She shows up on his doorstep with no place to stay, and so breaks his rule about kicking every girl out before morning. After a whole bunch of these mornings, he finally ends up marrying her.

This is yet another case of a couple who don't seem to have anything in common and don't seem to like each other very much. At least, the director and/or screenwriter didn't establish their relationship very well. We know what Tomas likes in Tereza - she's female - but we don't really see what brings the two such different characters together. She's young, naive, innocent, apolitical, and extremely jealous and insecure. He's worldly, sophisticated, educated, a bit misogynistic, contemptous of most people, and a horndog. Other than the fact that their bits fit together, I couldn't understand their relationship at all.

Tomas continues to cheat on Tereza throughout their relationship, and every time Tereza catches him at it, she throws a huge fit that borders on emotional blackmail. I think she's probably depressive to the point of suicidal. Not that I'm defending Tomas either - Tereza doesn't consent to an open relationship, so he's cheating. Period. She deserves better.

There is only one scene that could even possibly be confused for a pro-poly scene. And I have to say that I didn't even interpret the scene this way until someone else suggested it. I still don't see the scene this way, but I can at least see how someone else might.

Tereza suspects Tomas of having an affair with Sabina, who has been introduced to the new Mrs. Tomas as his friend & occasionally socializes with them. So Tereza, who is told to get into photographing naked women if she wants to be taken seriously as a professional photographer, approaches Sabina to be Tereza's first nude model. Sabina, a confident, sexually liberated woman in the '60s, is the only person Tereza knows who might even consider the proposal.

So we have a scene where Tereza photographs Sabina, and eventually Sabina (who is also a photographer and artist) talks Tereza into posing nude for her in return. The two women, who have before been very awkward together, gain some sort of comfort and familiarity with each other through this mutual nude photography session.

I didn't see how this was poly, really. The argument was made that it was basically two metamours who had finally reached out to each other and were able to get past the jealousy to see each other maybe as how their mutual partner could see them. The reason why I didn't interpret the scene this way is because Tereza had only suspected Sabina as being Tomas' lover (he never confirmed) and neither woman spoke of anything relationship-oriented at all. So maybe they did get past some of their jealousy and learned to see each other as people, and maybe this was a bonding, and even a learning moment for both of them. But it was still cheating and still a secret and Tereza still never approved of Tomas' philandering, and the two women never saw each other again on screen.

This movie was not about a poly vee. This was a political commentary on the war in Europe and the Soviet invasion of Czecheslovakia, using the characters as vehicles for the commentary. The movie was brilliantly made, using real footage and photographs from the invasion itself, as chronicled by art students at the university at the time, and staging the characters on the sets to flip back and forth seamlessly between the real archival footage and the movie. This was the first and best comprehensive collection of the record of the invasion ever made.

This movie was based on the book by the same name, which is also widely touted as a brilliant piece of literature. It was critically acclaimed, although, like any book-based movie, many were disappointed with the conversion to film. So I recommend this movie if history and foreign films and high-brow media are your thing. I just didn't feel that it was particularly poly.

( ***SPOILERS*** (but not all of them) )

This is one of the few artsy-foreign films that I didn't dislike for being too artsy & foreign, and I'd like to read the book. I might have liked the movie better if I had just come across it on my own instead of having it recommended to me as a potential poly film, because I watched it through a filter of hopes and expectations of poly content. I will not be including this on the Poly-ish Movie List, but it was an interesting movie and I'm glad I saw it.

http://www.savagesfilm.com/
http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Savages/70221488 - Netflix
http://amzn.to/2wcEnEF - Amazon
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1615065/ - IMDB

I think this is the first time I've ever seen a movie that was purported to be a poly movie while it was still in theaters. So I figured I'd go ahead and skip out of order and do a review of it while ya'll still have the chance to see it too.

I knew very little about this movie when I went to see it. A friend of mine texted me with "want to go see the movie with triad?" I thought "wait, who do we know who's in a triad? Everyone we know are singles, couples, or extended networks!" So I asked her to explain & she told me that there was a new movie opening up in theaters the following week that featured an MFM triad. So I said "hell yeah I want to see it!" So we made it a group event for our local poly group.

I'm going to answer the three big questions right up front, and then I'll talk a little about the movie itself. First of all, it is poly. Second, I liked it. Third, I liked the polyamory IN it.

Now, I do have a few little quibbles about both the polyamory and the movie itself, but c'mon, I was a pretentious film student in college and I work in the entertainment industry now. I'm always going to quibble about SOMETHING. That doesn't mean that I also don't like the movie.

For those who haven't heard, the website says: Laguna Beach entrepeneurs Ben, a peaceful and charitable marijuana producer, and his closest friend Chon, a former Navy SEAL and ex-mercenary, run a lucrative, homegrown industry - raising some of the best weed ever developed. They also share a one-of-a-kind love with the extraordinary beauty Ophelia. Life is idyllic in their Southern California town ... until the Mexican Baja Cartel decides to move in and demands that the trio partners with them.

When the merciless head of the BC, Elena, and her brutal enforcer, Lado, understimate the unbreakable bond among these three friends, Ben and Chon - with the reluctant, slippery assistance of a dirty DEA agent - wage a seemingly unwinnable war against the cartel. And so begins a series of increasingly vicious ploys and maneuvers in a high stakes, savage battle of wills.

I liken this genre to the modern day western. There are clearly "good guys vs. bad guys", even though the good guys are often doing something bad, and there is violence, and it's "dirty" (like, with people getting blood and dirt all over them), and it often ends up in Mexico, or the US' modern equivilent of "lawless land", somewhere in the Middle East. Think, Three Kings, with jump-zoom camera moves and handheld camera work, and that yellow-orangey filter that makes everything look like it's hot and sweaty. Oh, and graphic violence with guns and blood and death. Yeah, there was that. But, I thought, just enough to make it worthy of the genre but not what I might call gratuitous violence or gore, again, considering the genre.

So, if you like that kind of movie, you'll probably like this one. But the poly stuff ... that's where this could have gotten tricky. Now, we know before even going into the movie that they are in a threesome kind of arrangement, and right up front, the girl tells us in a voice over how she loves them both and they love her and she doesn't care if you think she's a slut because it's a thing between them. Here's one of my quibbles - in the beginning, where she's describing how her relationships with the each of them work, she compares and contrasts them. I actually liked that part because it emphasized that they were not interchangeable, that she loves them for their uniqueness and that her relationships with the two men are different from each other.

But then she has to go and say that the the two men are more than just different, they're basically opposites, so together, they make up the perfect man. I REALLY really hate that line of thinking - that Frankenboyfriend version of polyamory. But whatever, it was a single line and the trio are clearly happy together.

What I particularly liked about the poly aspect of the movie was that the polyamory was never the problem. "Sharing" a girl wasn't a source of contention for them, there was no rivalry, and there was no social pressure either. It was just a relationship, like any other. There were some confused and even digusted reactions from other characters, when it came up, but the polyamory was not the source of conflict or the plot device.

From the trailer, we know that the Cartel uses the girl against the boys. But this isn't any different from any other "nice guy gets in over his head and has his wife or girlfriend used against him by the bad guys" plot. Again, the polyamory itself was not a plot device. The love story was, but it was the love for the girl, not the fact that there were 2 guys, that was used, and that's so standard that it's cliche. In most of these kinds of movies, a badass, or a guy who used to be a badass, or a guy who isn't a badass but becomes one in a montage, has his girl kidnapped or threatened or killed, and he goes and gets all badassey on them, somehow having exactly the right skills at any given moment to triumph, with maybe a backup guy who can run the intelligence or who gets him the guns or something. In this movie, "all the right skills" get to be divided up between the two men, which, in my opinion, is actually more realistic. And, at least, they made the one guy a former Navy SEAL who did 2 tours overseas to justify the crazy violence they get into during the film.

I had a couple of other little quibbles too, but they give away too many spoilers, so if you see the movie and want to talk to me about it, look me up online (or in person if you're local). But this movie definitely deserves to be on a Poly Movie List, and I actually enjoyed watching it. The graphic violence was just right, in my opinion, for the style of movie, the plot didn't have so many twists and turns and holes in it to make me feel like I was being insulted, and the polyamory was done well. I got the feeling that the writer was poly, or knew someone who was poly and grasped the concepts just well enough that it wasn't a slap in the face to the poly community the way 50 Shades Of Grey was to the kink community.

Now, you could argue that this trio was dealing drugs and got into a Mexican shootout, and that only that kind of low-down, dirty scum would get into something as freaky as a threesome. You could argue that, but I think you'd be wrong. I've talked about "tone" before, and I did not get the idea from this movie that the tone was yet another "polyamory is bad, here watch this trainwreck to see why" kind of movie. I did not get the feeling that we were being moralized at by this film or that the polyamory was being used as another example of their deviance. To me, it just seemed like any other relationship, almost incidental. They could have told the exact same story using only a monogamous male-female dyad and it wouldn't have been significantly different. You could say that the trio is what makes this film stand out from all the others in this genre, so maybe they were selling the trio like beer and car commercials use hot chicks to sell beer and cars. But I'm still not sure that's any different from any other romantic hook in an action film.

And I particularly like knowing that a mainstream, regular box-office movie featured a male-female-male trio in a way that made it seem normal, like, just another relationship and not something to make a big fuss over. That's what I want to see more of and that's a sign, to me anyway, that polyamory has a chance of lasting far into the future. It's just not fussed over the way it should be at this point in its history, like other alternative communities. I might like to see a movie that addresses polyamory itself sometime (in a healthy way, for a change), but I'd rather see movies that have polyamory in them just as naturally and casually as they have monogamy in them.

Also, smokin' hot surfer dudes and ex-military men in very little clothing! Almost makes me miss my teen years growing up in California with the abs and the saltwater-and-sun highlights and the tight little swimmers' asses. So I say: go see this movie!

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/She-s-Gotta-Have-It/60034929?trkid=1525591 - Netflix
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091939/ - IMDB
http://amzn.to/2vOnoI4 - Amazon

There's something about student films and classic French movies that just do not work for me. Maybe it's the penchant for black and white even in a color era, or maybe it's the frequent complete lack of musical score or soundtrack, or maybe it's the excruciatingly slow pace and shitty acting, or maybe it's all those years I spent as a film student, forced to watch the painfully "artistic" films by my peers and dragged to pretentious indie art houses to see confusing avant garde movies. I don't know, whatever it is, they're just not my cuppa tea. And Spike Lee's debut movie fits squarely in the middle of that je ne sais quoi that makes my eyes glaze over. But you might have different tastes.

She's Gotta Have It is another Netflix recommendation that I was expecting to be misleading at best. Plus, the black community, at least as it's portrayed in pop media, has never been sympathetic towards multiple partnerships, especially if it's the woman with the multiple partners.

Nola is in love with 3 very different men. At first I thought it would be another cheating movie where the girl would eventually find The One (who, of course, was not one of the guys she was fucking, because sex is dirty, or something). But then I discovered that she was honest about her "friends", as she calls them, so I thought it was more like Cafe Au Lait, complete with detestable characters who didn't actually seem to like each other.

It did feel a lot like a Brooklyn version of that movie - none of the guys liked each other, I didn't like any of them, and no one had any redeeming features to make me understand why she liked them or why they liked her. I kept waiting for her to get pregnant so they could have a Dysfunctionally Ever After ending.

But then I noticed something. I noticed that the arguments the guys used to try and convince Nola to be monogamous were the exact same shit I got over the years from cowboys. When you're not monogamous in a monogamous world, and you don't know anyone else like you to date and can only draw from the mono pool, this movie is exactly what you might get.

I'm having trouble categorizing this one. On the one hand, she's honest about her multiple partners and claims to love them. On the other hand, they hate each other and are all competing to be "the winner" - the sole object for her affection. On yet another hand, this is very much what it feels like for some of us to be poly (or something not monogamous) without a community or support or understanding from anyone since no one else is like us. On the final hand, it was yet another movie with characters who didn't really like their dating partners.

I think I want to include this on the Poly-ish Movie List because I think a lot of polys go through similar arguments before they find a community, and I think it's a valid part of the broader story of what it's like to be poly. But this was not a story of a poly relationship. If anything, it was the story of a poly-ish woman stuck in a mono world.

I added this to my Netflix queue because it was either on a poly list or Netflix recommended it to me when I added some other movie that was on a poly list. I can't remember. I was pretty sure there wasn't any polyamory in the show, but I had heard about the famous Belle and her blog-then-book, so I thought I'd at least check it out.

I've only watched 4 episodes (the first disc of season 1), so I'm not prepared to declare yea or nay to the poly question yet, but I did want to mention two things about one episode.

In the 4th episode, Belle discovers one of her regulars is into S&M, but she has no idea what it's all about. Curious, she seeks out lessons with a London Domme and learns how to be a professional bitch.

I say that, because it seems that if television is your only resource, you'd think that the only thing to BDSM is hot chicks in black latex & corsets ordering fat old white men in thongs to clean the toilets with their tongues, stepping on them with high heels, and then beating the shit out of them with riding crops. Also, doing so in a "I'm pissed off at you" or "I'm bored" voice seem to be the only options. If you think that's all there is to fetishes and BDSM, please visit www.xeromag.com/fvbdsm.html

Anyway, there were 2 parts in particular that I liked. In the first one, Belle mentions that she wants to learn about S&M because a client has expressed interest. She explains that the client is married & the wife doesn't know about his interest. The Domme says "well that's a shame" and when Belle looks at her questioningly, the Domme continues "so many secrets!" Later, it comes out that the Domme is married and her husband knows. In fact, he is often at home during the sessions - not participating, but puttering around the house, making tea, watching TV, whatever. Belle expresses a wistful sort of envy at having someone to share her job with, not necessarily to do it with him, but someone she can confide in, who knows who she is. The Domme's attitude is that honesty is not just the best policy, but a given. When Belle says how nice it sounds, the Domme says "well, it's a marriage", implying that, of course they share these parts of themselves with each other, as if it never even occurred to her that she wouldn't.

I really liked that honesty-is-a-given attitude, and from the character that the mainstream audience would think of as the most deviant. I really like when the "deviant" characters are the moral centers of a show.

In the other part that I liked, Belle takes a few lessons, then immediately redecorates her entire "professional" apartment as the kind of dungeon that non-fetishists think a dungeon looks like - dark red walls, black plastic over the windows, elaborate black candelabra stands with a dozen thick candles, and a professional, leather-covered "chair" of sorts whose only function, it seems, is to look as unlike any other normal sort of furniture so that you can't pass it off as something else (i.e. it's not a chair and it's not a massage table, but something in between).

So she invites her client over for an S&M session instead of their usual sex. She orders him to strip, put on a thong, and kneel. Then she addresses the audience (this show regularly uses the broken 4th wall tactic) to explain that everything has been pre-negotiated, and she means EVERYTHING, right down to the insults that she will use. She says "yes, even the insults I will use".

I really, really liked how they made a point to emphasize the negotiation part of BDSM. I don't think that can be stressed enough. When people first start out, if they have any exposure to a fetish community at all, they know all about negotiation and rules, but it takes experience for it to really sink in just how much negotiation is required. Even people who have done this for years can find themselves in situations where they forgot to cover something and get surprised when something happens (or could happen) that they didn't negotiate for.

And, here's the thing, it's not just about thinking up every possible scenario and every possible activity and then laying a bunch of rules down about it. Sure, within BDSM, rules can actually be a healthy and important part of the dynamic (unlike in relationships in general, but that's another rant), but just making a list of rules isn't sufficient. What's important is to understand why those rules are necessary, so that you don't have to think up a million specific activities. If you know that condom use, for example, is for disease control, then you know to be careful about fluid transfer in general, which means no semen in the mouth, wash the floggers carefully & pay attention to blood, etc. But if condoms are for birth control only, then an accidental or non-pre-negotiated semen in the mouth might not ruin the scene.

Now, a lot of people get overwhelmed at all the talking & negotiating that goes on in poly & kinky situations. "It's not romantic or sexy if it's not spontaneous! All this planning just seems cold and calculating, it takes all the passion out!" Well, I have a bit of a surprise for you then. All the planning & talking & negotiating is what allows for the spontaneity and surprise and wild passionate abandon. Once you've taken care of all the logistics, you can just let things happen when the mood strikes you, if you want. Because, if you've done it ahead of time, then you don't have to stop a scene to say "oh, wait, is this OK?"

I mean, you do want to check in with your partners and make sure everything is OK but a check-in is not the same thing as a "we didn't talk about this before so I have no idea what you're feeling or how you're going to react, and I'm not really sure I can trust your decisions because you might feel differently about this once the endorphins wear off". It's also not the same thing as being surprise-penetrated*, thereby being dragged completely out of the fun fantasy into the real world as it suddenly hits you what all the implications are to this thing that you forgot to talk about and now you have to do a whole bunch of quick calculations in your head to figure out how this will affect you now, in an hour, in a day, in a week, in a year.

Plus, it can be extremely liberating to go into a situation where you already know what's off the table, what's definitely on the agenda, and what things you can decide on the spur of the moment to try. There's no more guessing, no more wondering "am I really going to get laid tonight, or are we just making out & I'm going home with blue balls", no more "I really wish he'd just try this thing already!", no more "oh for fuck's sake, if I fake it maybe he'll hurry up and finish", no more "I think he's hinting about this and I don't want to, but if I tell him I don't want to, he might leave and never call me again", and no more "if I try this, will it freak her out & send her running, leaving me alone tonight / forever?"

The outcome is never guaranteed and you can still go in unplanned directions. But with a trusted partner in a scene that you have pre-negotiated, I know that this thing that I really, really like - he's gonna do it, and this thing that turns me off every fucking time - he won't do it. I know that when I'm in the mood for rough, that's what I'm going to get because that's what we agreed on. I know that when I'm in the mood for soft and romantic, that's what I'm going to get because that's what we agreed on. I know that this time, I'm in charge and I already know in what ways I can hurt him that will make him happy with the scene and in what ways I can't hurt him without ruining the scene. I know that next time, I can give up control and let him take care of me because he agreed to only doing the sorts of things that make me feel safe when I'm not in control and he won't do the sorts of things that make me feel unsafe.

Because we have talked. It's sex and it's kink and it's pain and it's mind games and it's all sorts of naughty fun, and the reason it's fun is because we talked first.

*People not part of the fetish community, and even people who are but who don't talk about this topic, might be surprised at just how often "surprise penetration" happens. It's a serious problem, one that we need to shed more light on and work to eradicate from our communities.

http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Mentalist/70155590 - Netflix
http://www.amazon.com/Mentalist-Complete-Second-Season/dp/B002N5N4NA - Amazon
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1196946/ - IMDB

Here's a new one! I find poly movies to review by one of 3 ways: 1) It's on a poly list somewhere on the internet; 2) Someone learns that I review poly movies & suggests a movie to me; 3) Netflix suggests a "similar title" based on me adding known poly movies to my queue. What has never happened, to the best of my recollection, is me stumbling upon a poly show completely by accident.

The closest I've come is watching movies or TV shows that are strong poly analogues - shows that are not explicitly poly, but, other than the sex, they might as well be. For example, Sex And The City (the TV show, not the movies), a story about 4 female, non-sexual (with each other) best friends who are actually each others' soulmates and form an intentional family of sorts between them. Think of cunningminx's recent Poly Weekly podcast episode about "What Would Monogamists Do?" where her basic premise is that, what we do isn't all that different, and if you're stumped for how to deal with a situation, just ask how you would handle it if you were monogamous, and the answer will probably be very similar. I say all the time, "that's not a poly problem, that's a people problem."

But I'm getting off topic. Stumbling across actual polyamory in popular media with no notice, right.

As regular readers undoubtedly know, I am also a skeptic. In addition to my collection of poly media, I am also building a collection (mostly an online list, but I will slowly collect the physical media too) of skeptic media - movies, music, podcasts, books, etc. I like lists and categories, and just like the poly community, the skeptic community suffers from a lack of specific-to-us art & entertainment. Much like the poly community, the skeptic community not only suffers from a lack of art, but is drowning under a deluge of "art" that promotes the antithesis and even outright reviles everything we stand for.

What both the poly and the skeptic communities have in common, is that they are both subcultures struggling to find a toe-hold in a society that has built into its very institutions, its foundations, a support structure for mindsets & philosophies that are both opposite and intolerant of the subcultures themselves.

But again, I'm getting off topic.

All this is to say that I've been watching The Mentalist from Netflix. It's a TV cop drama about a guy who was a con artist using the label "psychic" to bilk people out of money by making shit up about their dead relatives, and other related cons, until he offered his "psychic services" to the police on a serial murder case. In his arrogance, he did what media-hungry con artists (*cough* Sylvia Brown *cough*) do, and that was to spout off on television about his "work" on the case, insulting the serial killer and pissing him off.

So the serial killer, Red John, targeted Jayne's (the "psychic") wife & daughter, and made damn sure that Jayne knew who had done it and why. Now we come to the actual start of the series, where Patrick Jayne works as a consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation, not as a phony psychic, but using his skill and expertise in deception to help catch criminals. Although he closes cases left and right and has been a tremendous asset to the CBI, his sole motivation for working with them is to get close enough to the Red John case that he can find Red John and kill him, and the other closed cases are merely incidental. He knows that he will go to jail, and possibly get the death penalty, but revenge is what drives him and helping people are a side effect.

Patrick Jayne is an atheist and a skeptic, and every episode highlights, not only the kinds of things that people do to trick other people, but also how we can fool ourselves. The character states outright, unashamedly and in no uncertain terms, that there is no god (episode 2), and there are no psychics, faith healers, people who can talk to the dead, none of that (almost every episode). He is James Randi, Jamey Ian Swiss, Penn & Teller, and Joe Nickell, all wrapped up in a slick, charismatic, borderline sociopathic, TV protagonist package*. With expensive suits that include suit vests. You can see why I might like him, yes?

( So what does this have to do with polyamory? Read on for some plot spoilers, but not the final conclusion of the episode. )

( And I do recommend watching the show. Here's a bit more about the series itself. )

*I've heard that this show is merely a knock-off of Psych, and, supposedly, a pale shadow compared to the ever-observant Sherlock Holmes. I don't care. I've never seen Psych, but I have read all the original Sherlock serials. There are some similarities, in that people who are skeptical & hyper-observant do come across as arrogant and cynical to others, and since the writers of both are not skeptical & hyper-observant, it's to be expected that the characters are written as arrogant, cynical, & loners. Because who would be friends with an arrogant cynic who sees everything & is always right? Skeptics & pedants never have friends, do they? But, aside from both being arrogant and both being detectives, they're not the same story at all. Psych, I'm told, is more buddy-cop comedy than cop drama, and whose main character actually does try to pass himself off as a psychic. One reviewer said that, to say The Mentalist is a rip-off of Psych is to say that Grey's Anatomy is a rip-off of Scrubs because they both follow medical interns into their residency. But, of the one trailer I've seen for the show, the audience knows he is not a real psychic, so I may watch it some day to see if it has any good skeptical value.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1487166/ - IMDB
http://www.3dogpictures.com/ - Streaming
http://amzn.to/2vT05uY - Amazon

I've posted about this show before, but I haven't done an official review yet. First of all, it's poly. It's about as poly as you get. Second, it's funny and weird. Third, I liked the first half better than the second half, but I liked it in general. Mostly it was just a couple of episodes in the second half that threw me off.

Family is the brain-child of Terisa Greenan, a polyamorous filmmaker in Seattle, WA. The show follows the lives of Ben, Gemma, and Stuart, a live-in triad (I get the impression that it's sexually a Vee, but they all consider themselves equal family, so that makes them a triad) that is very loosely based on Terisa's own life.

Each episode is roughly 7 to 10 minutes long and posted on YouTube, although there are 2 or 3 "uncensored" episodes that are posted elsewhere that doesn't have YouTube's ridiculous nudity taboo. We start out by just meeting the three main characters and getting a feel for how their family is arranged. My favorite episode is the second one, where the triad goes to a poly meeting. If you've ever been to a poly meeting and have a sense of humor about yourself, this episode will have you laughing out loud at the caricature painting of poly people.

The entire series is available as a DVD, and watching all episodes one after the other is about 3 hours, and worth the watch. The show covers things like adding new partners, getting along with metamours you don't like, meeting the "in-laws", dealing with conservative neighbors, and even dealing with the media.

About halfway through, though, the show takes a turn for the weird. It introduces some pretty bizarre characters and some of the plots have less to do with polyamory and more to do with just having strange people squatting in your garage, with a bit of psychosis-masquerading-as-woo thrown in for flavor. But it doesn't leave polyamory completely, and the series finale brings it back with a very serious issue that our main characters have to face together as a family.

The production quality is pretty good, and although the acting is a little wooden, it's not so terrible that it distracts from my enjoyment of the show in general. Really, the crazy characters starting about 8 or 9 episodes in was more distracting than any less-than-stellar acting.

I definitely recommend watching this show and, like Summer Lovers, no list of poly movies would be complete without it.

Someone recommended this movie to me as a poly movie, and I can see why he did, but I have to disagree. I don't think this was a poly movie. I think this movie had a poly character in it, but the movie was not polyamorous. As far as enjoyment goes, my tastes run towards the banal and crude - I like action flicks and screwball comedies. I've written several times that I just don't get artsy films or foreign films made during the sexual revolution when things were all experimental and everything looked like the writers and directors were permanently on LSD.

So you might like this film if your tastes differ from mine - don't avoid seeing it on the basis of my personal enjoyment if you happen to be into artsy or foreign or '60s movies. And as far as artsy or foreign or '60s movies goes, this wasn't even all that horrible. It didn't have the bizarre music or jump cuts of A Woman Is A Woman. But, probably because of the difference in cultures, I just didn't find this movie very interesting or the characters very compelling. I know, there's irony in that statement after admitting that I like movies like Caddyshack. But it's the truth, I found the movie just kind of blah. However, I can see other people enjoying it. I have lots of friends who like lots of movies that I don't enjoy, and I can see some of them really liking this film.

As for the poly stuff, the plot is about a married man who loves and adores his wife and kids, but who falls in love with another woman. According to my movie guidelines, cheating movies do not get added to the list, but a movie where the cheater genuinely loves both of his partners and there is some outside constriction preventing them from living honestly (such as social taboos) may be exempted and be added to the list.

Francois loves Therese, his wife. He's very happy with his life, content. But then one day he meets Emilie. And he falls immediately in love. This was his first strike against him, for me. I don't much hold with the love-at-first-sight bullshit. I believe people can have instant attractions to each other, and then sometimes, by coincidence, they are attracted to people who happen to also be compatible to them, so the attraction-at-first-sight can blossom into a true love, and it is when that happens that people think they fell in love at first sight. But we don't hear epic tales of attraction-at-first-sight that then turns out poorly. It's a matter of confirmation bias, or the Fake Boob/Toupee fallacy (I can always spot fake boobs/toupees because they look fake, except when they don't and I can't). Love at first sight is real, except when it isn't.

Anyway, so Francois falls in "love" with Emilie and immediately begins an affair with her. As I said, cheating movies don't make the list, but loving both partners might exempt it, so this movie could have been added to the list. The reason why it's not is because of the ending, which changes the whole tone of the movie into "multi-partner relationships are Wrong and Bad", and which I'll go into under the cut.

( ***SPOILERS*** )

Although Francois said a lot of very good poly lines, this movie had that elusive and hard-to-quantify tone that implies, to me, that non-monogamy is bad. As I said in the guidelines, it's not whether a movie ends happily or tragically, or whether a multi-adult relationship breaks up or stays together - it's what the movie says about non-monogamy that puts it on the poly-ish movie list or not. And, in spite of the main character clearly being about loving multiple people, this movie said to me that non-monogamy is cruel and wrong and that a happy nuclear family is the goal.

I think one could defend some ambivalence in the message, with Francois being written sympathetically and not as a villain, so I don't actually recommend that ya'll avoid seeing this movie. It may be worth your time. But I think that the way things were wrapped up, ambivalence aside, the message was more pro-nuclear-family than pro-consider-alternatives, so I will not include it on the list, but I will suggest that people might want to see this movie if they're into French cinema or if they want to hear a protagonist defend the idea of loving two women at the same time.

I think this is one of those movies that Netflix recommended to me based on adding some other "similar" movie. I wasn't even entirely sure, with a title like that, if the movie was on the list to review for polyamory or for skepticism. But with the happy surprise of the last movie, I was actually kind of hopeful about this one. It was the story of two young men who were best friends as kids, growing up to become a Jewish rabbi and a Catholic priest, and the tomboy who was also their best childhood friend coming back into town as a successful, beautiful, corporate CEO. Because it had big names in it, the movie was most likely to be not-poly, but the setup had some potential.

Unfortunately, it flopped.

Not that the movie wasn't good (that's debatable, based on whether you like romantic comedies and movies that involve secrets), but it wasn't poly at all and it should have been.

These two men love this woman - she was perfect for them both. But because the rabbi is allowed to have sex (and because he is being pressured to find a wife before he becomes head of his church, or whatever), he immediately acts on his crush when the priest does not because of his vows of celibacy.

So the girl spends about half the movie developing a romantic relationship with the rabbi, but keeping the priest safely in a box labeled "do not touch". And as anyone who spends any time in the world of the Monogamous Mindset knows, when a girl puts a guy in the Friend Box, he's stuck there for life, no matter how strong her feelings for him ... those feelings are just very strong "friend" feelings.*

So, anyway, by the time the priest confesses his love and he has just about talked himself into leaving the priesthood for her, she is already thoroughly immersed in her relationship with the rabbi and totally oblivious to his growing attraction to her. So the priest has to swallow his embarassment and go back to thinking of her like a sister.

Now, you might be able to put this movie in the poly analogues category, because the three of them remain a strong group throughout the whole movie. The priest somehow manages to only be angry at having their relationship hidden from him, but he doesn't seem to feel any major jealousy. Well, there is the one fight where he gets drunk and yells at the rabbi that the rabbi stole his girlfriend, but mostly the priest seems to recover from his one- or two-night bender and move right into compersion for his two best friends, only nursing the hurt feelings of being lied to (which, frankly, I can totally understand).

****SPOILER ALERT****

The movie ends happily ... for a monogamous movie ... with the rabbi and the girl back together and the priest happy for them both and everyone is one big happy (monogamous & platonic) family. So it might fall under the category of poly analogues, where the only difference between them and us is that the girl would be sleeping with the priest too if it was us.

But the reason why I didn't like this movie is because I get upset at plots that put a convenient excuse in the way, blocking a poly relationship from happening. Usually, it's death, but in this case, it was vows of celibacy.

See, in the world of the Monogamous Mindset, a person can only romantically love two people at the same time if one of them is dead. It is only acceptable for a woman to say she loves two men if she is referring to her dead husband and her new husband whom she met a safe time-distance after the death of her first husband. So most MM movies conveniently kill someone off to allow the person torn in the middle the freedom to love them both and to force her to make a choice (Pearl Harbor).

In this case, the priest's celibacy interfered with his ability to pursue a relationship with the love interest and his religious faith gave him something to hold onto after he was rejected and allowed him to remain in the picture. Whereas with most romcom love triangles, when the love interest rejects one guy for another, he just disappears somehow (maybe he's a bad guy & goes to jail, or maybe he's a good guy and walks away voluntarily, whatever). But because this is a Catholic priest, he is safe enough to keep in the picture and safe enough for both the rabbi and the girl to continue loving because his faith and his vows make him a non-threat. In any other movie where he isn't a priest, the "other love" has to disappear because you can't have the "other love" hanging around your new wife. Or something.

This kind of thing can often be more tone than something specific. It's not very easy to quantify why some movies that end with a dyad still make it to the poly list but other movies don't. It's something in the way the actors and the director interpreted the lines that affect the tone of the movie. These movies never have a bit of dialog where someone says "Whew! It's a good thing my husband was killed in that war, so I can safely love you now without falling out of love with him or having to choose!"

So, in the last movie, where one partner had a serious illness that sort of forced the characters into a position where a love triangle could happen, the tone of that movie didn't strike me as negative. It suggested, to me, that these are people who live in a world where nonmonogamy was Just Not Done, so they needed some kind of extraordinary circumstances to leave them open to the possibility, to give them the impetus to even consider something outside of the norm.

But this movie just didn't have that same feeling. The way it was portrayed suggested more of a situation where three people happened to love each other in a world where they shouldn't, so they wrote the circumstances in such a way as to give them a monogamously acceptable way to do that.

Basically, they had to neuter one of the characters in order to keep him in the picture, which isn't the same as killing him off, but it belies a tone sprung from the same well.

I would love to see this movie re-written, where the priest and the rabbi are forced to re-evaluate their religious faiths in light of their growing love and attraction for the same woman (of no particular faith). Where the priest and the rabbi both decide that their mutual love for this woman is incompatible with what they have been taught about religion, which then makes them question everything else about religion, and which leads them to the realization that they have always been a happy threesome so there is no reason why they can't continue to be a happy threesome in a much fuller sense of the word. I'd love to see this movie where the woman does not put one of her best friends into the Friend Box, but allows her love for them both to flourish, and where she comes to the same realization that they have always worked best as the Three Musketeers, and breaking off into a dyad + 1 would change the dynamic in an unacceptable way.

Unfortunately, that was not the movie I watched.

*Once again, the Monogamous Mindset is a particular set of beliefs and viewpoints about monogamy that create the society in which I live. It does not mean that everyone who happens to be monogamous has this mindset, nor does it imply that people who are non-monogamous are automatically free of this mindset. MM is a set of rules and boundaries and mores that dictate how relationships ought to be, many of which are inherently contradictory, selfish, and harmful. One such set of contradictory MM rules is the rule that you are supposed to marry your best friend, but you're not allowed to be involved with your friends because that would ruin the friendship.

And that's the one I'm referencing here. There is this weird rule out there that people, women especially, can't get romantically involved with their appropriately-gendered friends because that would automatically (or could most likely) ruin the friendship. Men's magazine articles and lonely guys online like to lament about the dreaded F word - "friend". Being called a friend is like the worst thing a woman can do to a man who is interested in her, because it means he will never have a chance.

Of course I know this doesn't always happen and that there are exceptions, which is why I speak so condescendingly of the MM and of this rule in particular, so please don't leave a comment like "but I married my best friend and it's the best relationship I've ever had!" I know, that's what makes this rule so stupid. But it's out there, and it permeates our society, and is quite possibly responsible for a significant amount of unneccessary heartache.

http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/A_Strange_Affair/60030242?trkid=2361637 - Netflix
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116586/ - IMDB
http://amzn.to/2vT1uBA - Amazon

The Netflix summary reads:

"Judith Light stars in this sexy made-for-TV drama about a married woman who discovers that her husband of 23 years has been unfaithful. Just as she finds passionate love in another man's arms and prepares to divorce her husband, he suddenly has a stroke and becomes physically incapacitated. Will she move back in with her husband and take care of him ... even though she may risk losing her new lover?"

When a movie arrives in my mailbox, I don't always remember if I put it in my queue because it was on a poly list somewhere or because Netflix recommended it to me as "similar" to the poly movies I just added to my queue. Judging by the summary, I assumed this was one of the latter types of "poly" movies. I sat down with this movie with the lowest of expectations, prepared to hate it for yet another cheating drama that would probably end with some kind of choice being made, and possibly even a choice I would think was stupid.

I couldn't have been more wrong. And I love it when I'm wrong about things like this.

First of all, the Netflix summary gets the order of events wrong, which is partially why I had such low expectations. Lisa is married to Eric, a charismatic, charming film maker who hasn't made a film in 7 years and spends his time gambling with the money he steals from his wife and fucking his secretary. We are introduced to this plot by meeting a loan shark's thug who has come to intimidate Lisa at work in the very first scene. Eric is the kind of guy I loathe - an idealistic dreamer who has absolutely no connection to reality and thinks his charm entitles him to break the rules and treat everyone around him like shit.

But he's charming, and a lot of women find themselves in love with charming users like this. And once you're in love, it becomes all too easy to overlook, to excuse, to rationalize, until you are trapped - held hostage by your own emotions.

But Lisa finds her spine and prepares to leave now that both of her children are out of the house and in college. Except that the day she actually gets the courage to leave, she gets a call from her daughter saying that her husband has had a stroke. So Lisa returns home to care for her husband.

What I really like about how the writer treated this situation is that he made no secret of the resentment that Lisa feels at being trapped again, by her love and her responsibility to Eric. She moves back home to care for him, but she is also excrutiatingly honest when she tells him that their marriage is over and she is only there because her conscience won't let her abandon a dying man who is also the father of her children.

The rest of the movie follows Lisa as she attempts to recover from the financial ruin her husband has put her into with his gambling while now being financially responsible for his medical care, and two people with a painful history learning to live together with a debilitating and life-threatening illness.

Now for the poly stuff.

Enter Art, the mechanic who takes pity on Lisa when her car breaks down and she tries to work out a payment plan because she can't afford to pay the bill. Art starts doing stuff around the house for her to make her life a little easier. And in the process, he falls in love.

I won't give away the ending or the details, but what transpires is a very touching story of a woman who learns to fall back in love with her husband while discovering love with someone new. And, even more touching is the story of a man who loves his wife but who is ultimately selfish who is then forced to re-evaluate his priorities and deal with the fact that she loves another man. This is also the very touching story of a man who falls in love with a married woman, who shows us what true love is - the desire to see another person happy and to facilitate that happiness, whatever it means. If she still loves her husband, then her husband must be kept around and must be honored as the man she loves.

I think this is a good example of the kinds of situations that people can relate to - a bridge between the poly and mono worlds. It's not really a poly analogue because she flat out says that she is in love with two men. We see the tension between the metamours, we see the disapproval of the children and the neighbors, we see the resentment of being held back, and the loving amazement when poly works well. It's just a story told within the framework of a situation that non-polys might be able to sympathize with ... a setup that puts a monogamous person in a very difficult position where things are no longer black and white.

What do you do when your husband & father of your children is an asshole but you still love him? What do you do when you are trapped in a marriage that is over but love finds your doorstep anyway? What do you do when you are financially strapped and alone and someone offers no-strings-attached help simply because he thinks you could use it? What do you do when you fall in love with someone you are not supposed to love?

This was one of those poly-ish type movies - a situation that lives on the fuzzy borders of what is and is not polyamory. But the tone of the movie, the scenes between the metamours, the complexity of emotion, the selfless version of love, all make me feel that this movie fits quite squarely into the polyamory category in spite of any debate over which configurations really "count".

I recommend this movie, both for the poly-ish movie list and to watch.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1003010/ - IMDB
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Fling/70111321?trkid=2361637 - Netflix
http://amzn.to/2ihbRfu - Amazon

This movie caused me quite some consternation because it had equal parts of "include" and "do not include" on the Poly-ish Movie List. In fact, it was so ambivalent that it prompted me to write the Guidelines post, to help me decide whether or not to include it. I have decided that it should be included on the list, but I am very torn about that decision.

This movie started out as the very first "include" criteria - which is a relationship that appeared happy and functional between two people who enjoyed additional sexual partners besides each other. This movie ended with a tone that seemed to me to be suggesting that the only people who would be interested in open relationships are people who are immature, selfish, users, and afraid to commit. The big problem I had with the movie is that the first half and the second half didn't mesh well. It almost seemed to me as though it was written by someone who knew people in happy and successful open relationships, who wrote the characters faithfully and well, but who had a personal belief that open relationships were wrong and so wrote an ending that he believed people in open relationships ought to have.

Naturally, in order to explain, I have to give spoilers. But I'll leave a good deal of the details out so you can watch the movie without feeling as though you've already watched it.

Mason and Samantha have an open relationship and have been together for several years now. We start the movie with the two of them living together and getting ready to go to a wedding. At the wedding, both of them hook up with other wedding guests and then come back to their hotel room together, apparently totally comfortable with the fact that they were each with other people. They told each other everything and they fell asleep in each other's arms.

Later, Samantha starts dating someone (as opposed to fucking someone) and she has to explain how her relationship with Mason works. I think this is a very valuable couple of scenes. Samantha is adamant that she is happy, that her relationship with Mason is secure and functional, that she is not a victim and chooses her life, and that jealousy is a symptom of insecurity. She faces someone who is disgusted and contemptuous of the idea of a woman having multiple sexual partners. I think she adequately defends her position and I think it is important to see the reception that people in open relationships receive when they admit to being in open relationships.

Meanwhile, Mason also has a friend who is completely disgusted and contemptuous of their relationship, to the point of appearing personally offended and violently angry about two people insisting that they are happy fucking other people even though he is not involved with either of those people. Again, I think it is important to see this kind of reception. Mason is not quite as good at defending himself, he mainly deflects the questions and accusations in an attempt to remain friendly with his buddy.

The assumptions from the opposition are fairly common - that the only reasons to get into open relationships are: 1) fear of commitment; 2) fear of being alone so willing to put up with being "cheated on"; 3) selfish; 4) using others for sex; etc. Mason and Sam do not appear to be these kinds of people. Their love for each other, their dedication to honesty, their obvious acceptance of each other's other partners (Mason gives a guy tips on how to hit on Sam when the guy comments about not having any luck without realizing that Mason is Sam's boyfriend / Sam reassures Mason's new girlfriend that it's totally OK to be at their house & to have fun together), their defense of their choices, their declarations that they are each confident in the other's commitment to them - all suggest that this is a happy and functioning relationship.

Then the movie goes off the rails. Both of the main characters make decisions that seem totally out of character for the confident, happy people so far portrayed. Mason keeps a secret from Sam, and since Sam actually knows about it from the beginning, she lets Mason keep the secret, which poisons her own feelings about him to the point that she chooses her other boyfriend - y'know, the one who looks on her in disgust and contempt whenever he is reminded that some other guy puts his cock in the same place he does.

Mason is constantly accused of being a user and of being afraid to commit, but, as

emanix pointed out to me, that only makes sense if your definition of "commit" is "committing to be monogamous only, and to be idiotically jealous and controlling of your partners", since Mason seems disinclined to leave his relationship with Sam. In fact, there was a scene where everything could have been resolved in a happy poly way, and given what I thought I knew of the characters before, I would have believed the movie if it had taken that direction, and I did not believe the characters choosing the other path.

The implication is that yes, Mason really was a selfish user who was afraid to commit and Sam really did want a traditional life. The problem is that I just didn't see them that way.

So, I have my guideline that says "if the moral of the story is 'polyamory is doomed to fail, here watch this train-wreck to see why' then it doesn't go on the list". But the main relationship in the movie wasn't a train-wreck. It was a pretty realistically functional one, IMO, until the two characters made, what I consider to be, out-of-character decisions that ultimately led to a train-wreck. So, I refined my guidelines to include movies that offered scenes of valuable situations, like coming out to family, introducing new partners to the concept of open relationships, discrimination, etc., all of which were in this movie, since a happy ending was never necessary to be included on the list. We do see a coming out to family scene; we do see an introduction to a new partner scene; we do see the negative reactions and assumptions of people about open relationships in several scenes; we do see a couple who defends their relationship choices in positive terms, such as being attracted to others not changing the love they feel for each other and feeling secure and confident about their relationship, and all of these feel fairly realistic.

Basically, this movie could be summarized as "this is what non-polys think of polyamory and open relationships, and how things are supposed to end for us". But that means that there really was a poly-ish relationship in it, which means it should go on the list. It also means that, if this is the case, then this movie would be valuable to the poly community to show what non-polys think of us and other non-monogamists.

I reviewed a couple of movies that fell into a grey area, in terms of my guidelines for poly movies, and the most recent one was really tough to decide. So I felt that I ought to clearly list my guidelines, both for my own use when I find a grey-area movie, and for others who might be wondering why some movies make the list when others don't.

Here are the guidelines for what makes it to the Poly-ish Movie List and what doesn't:

Movies That Do Go On The List

Movies That Do Not Go On The List

If the movie has a functional, happy relationship that includes more than two people, even if they are not main characters, it goes on the list.
- If the relationship is 3 or more people (i.e. Whatever Works), it's poly
- If the relationship is a core dyad that is "open" to the members having additional sexual or romantic partners (i.e. Belle Epoque), it's poly-ish
If the movie has a relationship that includes more than two people, and may not appear to be "happy" or "functional" because of viewer's subjective definitions of "happy" and "functional" but still gives the characters a "happy" ending / implies that they are happy with their choices and is clearly a multi-partner family group (i.e. Cafe Au Lait & Rita, Sue & Bob Too), it will probably go on the list.
If the movie is a documentary or TV interview showing real people in consensual, honest, loving multi-partner relationships, even if the relationship ends poorly, it goes on the list (Three of Hearts & Cat Dancers).
If the movie has a poly or poly-ish relationship that ends due to outside pressure or personality conflicts, but seems to be an otherwise functional and happy relationship and it was not the polyamory that caused the breakup (i.e. Paint Your Wagons), it goes on the list.
If the movie shows positive and/or realistic scenarios of poly issues & situations, such as coming-out conversations, dealing with discrimination (i.e. Esmeralda Comes By Night), overcoming jealousy, reaching out to metamours, etc., it goes on the list.
If a movie ends on an ambiguous note that can be interpreted by the viewer as leading to a happy poly family (i.e. Kiss Me Again & Micki & Maude), it will probably go on the list.
If the movie shows a clear and unambiguous multi-adult intentional family, regardless of who is having sex with whom (The Wedding Banquet), it will probably go on the list.

If the movie has a dyad that tries a threesome, and it goes horribly wrong because someone is psychotic (i.e. Trois), it does NOT go on the list.
If the movie has a relationship with two or more people who cannot communicate, who are jealous, or who otherwise demonstrate or imply that open relationships are impossible and doomed to fail (i.e. Sleep With Me & Portrait of an Open Marriage), it does NOT go on the list.
If the movie makes any character choose one partner over another, and especially if it implies that choosing one makes the protagonist happy in spite of the jilted lover being a decent partner (i.e. Sweet Home Alabama), it does NOT go on the list.
If the movie shows one character in love with 2 or more others, and the only possible resolution is to kill one off to justify loving more than one (i.e. Pearl Harbor - it's OK for widows to love current & former partner) or make one totally unsuitable and therefore an obvious Bad Choice (i.e. Carolina & pretty much every romantic comedy), it does NOT go on the list
If the movie is a clear example of why we have the phrase Relationship Broken, Add More People, and why that is a sarcastic and derogatory phrase implying a recipe for disaster (i.e. Sex And Breakfast), it does NOT go on the list.
If the movie is all about having lots of sex with lots of partners, and there is no love among the partners (i.e. Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Story of O, & Farinelli), it does NOT go on the list.
If the movie seems to be written with a tone that implies that open relationships cannot work, it does NOT go on the list.
- i.e. the monogamous characters are the sympathetic protagonists / poly characters are the "bad guys" / antagonists
- i.e. the poly characters' decisions only make sense in the context of a writer who doesn't understand polyamory

Caveats:
Cheating - movies about cheaters and cheating do not go on the list, but there are some circumstances that may exempt a cheating movie.

Exemptions

Non-Exemptions

If the cheater(s) comes clean & they attempt to switch to an open and honest relationship (i.e. Summer Lovers), it might go on the list.
If the cheating involves more than sex and/or loving feelings for both the spouse & secret OSO, and there is some kind of social constriction, such as a historical era or a conservative culture, that prevents the characters from being honest and having a happy ending while still being realistic, the movie might go on the list if the tone is compassionate and sympathetic and not condemning (i.e. Same Time Next Year).

If the cheating includes justifications, selfishness, lack of empathy or concern, and those things last for the duration of the movie with no change in position or a refusal to acknowledge the hurt being caused, the movie does NOT go on the list
If the cheating includes a psychopath, like the cautionary threesome tales, the movie does NOT go on the list.

Open Relationship vs. Polyamory - movies that are all about lots of sex partners don't go on the list, but if a movie is particularly ambiguous or ambivalent about the presence of love among the partners such that it rides that fuzzy line between polyamory and other types of consensual non-monogamy, it might go on the list. If the lessons and morals of the story are particularly true or important for poly relationships, that might tip the scales in favor of the list, such as a movie about swingers that emphasizes honesty, communication, and compassion and/or that develops loving friendships between the extramarital partners (i.e. Swingtown).

Non-Sexual Intentional Families - it is usually assumed that "romantic" relationships have some element of sexuality in them to make them "different" from platonic friendships. There are some movies that may be exempted from that assumption. In the case where there are clearly more than 2 adults who are in a family that, for all intents and purposes, looks like a "romantic" family, even if some members are not having sex with each other, it might go on the list. If there are, for example, 3 people who choose to raise children together and live together, even if 1 member is not sexual with the other 2, as in The Wedding Banquet, if the "family" is emphasized strongly enough, it might make the list. Films from other eras or cultures that have a stronger taboo against non-marital sex may include a multi-adult family without sex and yet still have the tone and feel of a "romantic" family, such as Design For Living.

Breakups & Death - movies that have the relationship end with a breakup or death do not generally go on the list, but there are some circumstances that may exempt a movie with a sad or tragic ending.

If the breakup has nothing to do with the polyamory, but has to do with outside influences, such as the country going to war & separating people, or the pressure to conform to social standards is too great (usually due to the era), the movie might go on the list (i.e. Head In The Clouds & Paint Your Wagon).
If the movie has other valuable elements in it, such as examples of common and important conversations (coming out, discrimination, overcoming jealousy, etc.), or is a true story of an actual poly family, such as a documentary (i.e. Three of Hearts), then even a relationship that ends poorly may be added to the list.
Movies where characters die are not automatically excluded from the list - it depends on what role that death plays in the story. If the death is just a part of life in the story, and not the sole justification for someone loving more than one (i.e. Carrington), it might go on the list. But if one character is torn between two others, and the only way the character can justify loving them both is to kill one of them off (i.e. Pearl Harbor), it does NOT go on the list.

I think I covered everything. If someone has a question about why a particular movie did or did not make the list, or someone knows of a movie plot that is questionable and doesn't see a guideline for it here, let me know and I'll attempt to refine the guidelines.

Profile

Joreth

The Inn Between

Page Summary

Love And Leashes (a Netflix movie review)
Ms. Marvel: A Review (no spoilers)
#ThingsIWantToToon: Wait ... Don't ... Go...!
TV Show Recommendations
Review: Cobra Kai - Season 1 (no spoilers)
Movie Review: Cuties
A Lukewarm Review Of 50 Shades Of Abuse The Movie vs. The Book
When Racism In TV In The '60s Didn't Suck
I'm Mad Because You Made Me Lose You By Making Me Mad At You
The Terminator Franchise Is A Chick Flick (review of T1, T2, & T6: Dark Fate)
Crazy Rich Asians Movie Review #GoldOpen
TV Show Review: The Mentalist
A Responsible Rom-Com Plot?!
Short TV Show Review: The Punisher (no spoilers)
The Clinton Body Count - The Movie
Disability Does Not Have To Be Excused In Movies
Watch Alive & Kicking If You're Into Polyamory Or Dancing Or Both
New Poly-ish Movie Review Episode - Trois
New Poly-ish Movie Review Episode - Same Time, Next Year
Newsflash: A Woman & A Man Get Stuck Together And Yet Don't Want To Have Sex!
Where I Learn More About The Making Of Moana (no major spoilers)
Movie Review - Spectral on Netflix
A Must-See Feminist, Sex-Positive, Blasphemous Flapper-Era TV Show - Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Poly In The Media And Using Personality Type Systems In Poly Relationships At #APW2016!
The Dorks Awaken, Hopefully - Why The New Star Wars Film Is Very Important For Geekdom
Learning Lessons One Day At A Time
Hey Hollywood, You Are Getting Your Ass Kicked By Netflix
Why I Get So Angry At 50 Shades Defenses (aka You People Should Know Better)
"And Now [That I've Seen The Movie,] I'm Embarrassed That I Ever Joked About [50 Shades]"
Poly Movie Review - 3
Poly Movie Review - Something About Sex
Samantha Jones Inspirational Posters
Actors And Characters And Canon
Poly Movie Review: Hyde Park On Hudson
50 Shades Of Fucked Up - The Movie
Dirty Dancing Is A Subversive Masterpiece
Poly Movie Review - Three
Poly Movie Review - Bandits
Poly Movie Review - The Blood Oranges
Poly Movie Review: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Poly Movie Review: Savages
Poly Movie Review: She's Gotta Have It
Movie Review: Secret Diary of a Call Girl
Poly Movie Review: The Mentalist
Poly Movie Review: Family
Poly Movie Review: Le Bonheur (Happiness)
Poly Movie Review: Keeping The Faith
Poly Movie Review: A Strange Affair (aka A Husband, A Wife, And A Lover)
Poly Movie Review: Fling
Poly-ish Movie Review Guidelines

August 2024

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