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Male Gaze, Female Snooze: A Review of ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’

Adele Exarchopoulos Lea Seydoux


Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)
Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
Screenplay by Abdellatif Kechiche & Ghalia Lacroix
Adapted from the comic book ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’ by Julie Maroh
179 min.

Spoiler-free.

As a jaded New Yorker, I typically don’t drool over well-reviewed movies on principle. I’m skeptical of ‘buzz’ and ‘hype’ of any kind, and this overhyped movie in particular seemed to be generating some intriguingly divisive opinions. Between the overwhelming amount of reviewers (largely male) heralding it as “breathtaking,” and the author of the original graphic novel, Julie Maroh, calling it a flat-out straight mens’ porno fantasy, I found myself reading articles about the controversy before I even knew it was a movie slated to come out.

Now call me biased, but I’m going to trust the lesbian author over the male French director when it comes to who really “gets” lesbian love and sex. And as such, I did what any dismissive, self-respecting woman would do and wrote it off as something to miss. But eventually, the whole fantastic vs. awful rhetoric—plus some light peer pressuring from a coworker—finally got me off my ass and into the theater to give it a fair shot. Hey, we already know I’m down to make myself miserable when it comes to movies, so why not?
Continue reading Male Gaze, Female Snooze: A Review of ‘Blue is the Warmest Color’

A (Reformed) Lost Girl’s Take On ‘Tiny Furniture’

lenachloe


Tiny Furniture (2010)
Written & Directed by Lena Dunham
98 min.

About a year ago, the editor of this site wrote a scathing critique of Lena Dunham entitled The Empress, Quite Literally, Has No Clothes.  A few months before reading it, I’d made the transition from engaged college student with supposed direction to a member of Lena’s target demographic—single, 20-something, stagnating in a “post-graduate delirium” as she puts it, working a minimum wage job and living with a single parent.  A “lost girl”, as Cody puts it in his piece.

Until very recently, I’d avoided watching Tiny Furniture because I didn’t want to deal with any of the three possible outcomes of me doing so:

  1. Liking it, and being berated by my peers.
  2. Disliking it, and being annoyed that I wasted my time.
  3. Hating it, and agreeing with Cody that it is in fact detrimental to its audience.

I didn’t need any of those stresses in my life, especially when I was so busy having such a “hard time” trying to “figure things out” (as she puts it, over and over). But after a year of being in the position that the film attempts to depict, the subject matter and controversy finally seduced me and, with the aid of a few beers, I jumped into bed with it.
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I Hate Metascores, And You Should Too

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Metascoring, in case you aren’t aware, is the process of gauging a movie’s quality through aggregating lots of different reviews and spitting out a score based on the percentage of positive reviews it’s gotten. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are two very popular websites that metascore, and you’ve probably visited one or both at some point in your life.

The entire concept is bunk.

Even just the idea of applying a ‘score’ to a movie is stupid, and yet it’s become customary for critics to tack them on at the end of their reviews for some reason. We’ve all seen the five-star system, the four-star system, the percent-out-of-a-hundred system—or out of ten, but with decimals—or maybe the most offensive, the A to F grading, which treats the film as though it were a High School essay on Wuthering Heights rather than a comprehensive piece of art.
Continue reading I Hate Metascores, And You Should Too

Fuck the Third Act of ‘On The Waterfront’

waterfront

Fuck it right to hell, man. I don’t even.

On The Waterfront (1954)
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Budd Schulberg
108 min.

Very mild spoilers ahead.

Of the three acts which make up the three act structure, the third act is really the only one which has the ability to fuck you in the ass. You’re watching a movie, you’re digging it, you’re having a good time, you feel safe, and then all of a sudden it’s forcing itself into your butt. We’ve all been there.

A movie is like a penis, basically, and you are like a vagina. When you a watch a movie, you’re letting it inside you, and there’s a certain degree of trust which goes along with that. ‘Don’t hurt me, or at least, if you do hurt me, hurt me in an enjoyable way’—that sort of thing. And if a movie tries to fuck your ass in the first act, you can stop it before the tip is barely in and put on some other movie. Same goes for the second act. But when it fucks you in the ass in the third act, you’re in shock—it goes in and you can’t even believe what’s happening and you just have to lay there as it tarnishes the relationship you had built with it up until that point. And then when it’s done, you don’t know how to feel about it anymore. You remember the good times, sure, but the bad is fresh in your mind.

I had this very experience with On The Waterfront last night, and my booty hole is still twinging with pain.
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10 More Must-Read Smug Film Posts (We’ve Reached 150 Posts! Woo!)

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While y’all are recovering from food comas, why not catch up on your Smug Film reading? This week, we reached 150 posts, and chances are, you haven’t read all of them. Back when we hit the 100 post mark, we made a list of 10 Must-Read Smug Film Posts, so if you haven’t read the ones on there, definitely do so. And if you have, here’s 10 more, culled from our 50 posts since then:
Continue reading 10 More Must-Read Smug Film Posts (We’ve Reached 150 Posts! Woo!)