Films

[redfiona99]

Okay, films seen recently round-up.

Secretary - Mostly I totally now see why topknot didn't like this film. Me, I'm not sure how I feel.

Because yes, they do portray the two people in the slave/master relationship as being deeply messed up. But at the same time, so is everyone else in the film. James Spader is good in this, because at the start he makes me feel even more awkward about watching his character, than I did with Maggie Gyllenhaal who was supposed to be the awkward one, which I think managed to remove one of the layers of power imbalance, re: boss sleeping with his subordinate.

Magie Gyllenhall may have been even better, and I think she should really consider begging the make-up artist and costumer from this to help her out in the real world because they make her look awesome, especially at the end, and it's such a change from how she looks at the start.

I'm still trying to figure out what the take-home message was from this; possiblities include 'accepting who you are makes you feel better' and 'sleeping with your boss might get you the house of your dreams'.

A thing I did like was how all the characters got to develop (with the possible exception of Peter), including Lee's mother and father and the paralegal. I also liked that the film was both sensible and not serious about sex, which makes a change from most films, which treat "normal sex" with a terrifying po-faced seriousness and "not-normal" sex as a joke. This film doesn't fall into either trap, although prescence of my housemates was definitely detracting from any attempt to watch it properly.


Forbidden Planet - which I had seen half of already. The SFX are still class even at 50 years remove. Robby is still every bit as awesome as I remember him and I still worry about Cookie making it off the planet alive. It's a strange sort of scary, and the music is fantastic, very electronic/futurey, in that strange way that films nowadays don't seem to manage (am willing to be corrected if someone has examples). The acting is a little hammy but such is life. It's still totally worth a watch.

I still don't get the comparrisons with the Tempest though.

Comments

things i liked about secretary

[wishtheworst.livejournal.com]

I think the messed up-ness didn't bother me because as you say, everyone was messed up. There wasn't one "normal" character who "fixed" a flawed one. And while it's been a while, I remember thinking well, they're still awfully messed up, they're just going to be messed up together. I didn't think there was an apparent take home message either, but maybe just that it was a love story and as such didn't necessarily need to be interrogated or meaningful in a way that vanilla and/or het love stories often aren't.