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Aug. 10th, 2006 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickOkay. Movie reviews.
Probably everyone on the planet but me has seen Ocean's Eleven but it's a good heist film. It's got pretty people and a suitably convoluted plot and some pretty sharp dialogue that only improves on rewatching. I was only disappointed that the tiny little asian guy with the million-watt smile didn't get to say more things in what was probably some flavor of Chinese. He was pretty. It was a fun movie. I wouldn't call it great art, but it was very enjoyable and an excellent popcorn movie.
The other was, well, full of young cute people. It promoted gender-normative behavior, which isn't really a surprise. Nobody really wants to see women dress up like men and take jobs from men and actually be as qualified as men because then there would be nobody left to stay home and have babies. *sigh* I'm being snide. It was a cute film. There's nothing much wrong with it. The actual brother was a hottie. They admit to ripping off most of the names from Twelfth Night and named a pet spider Malvolio because obviously that's a name that absolutely nobody in these our modern times would actually have. (Though perhaps I shouldn't be too hasty -- we have a tenant child named Trunks. -- That's as in DragonballZ, mind.) I've got to say that I rather liked the end to Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment a lot better.
I guess my primary difficulty with women-dressing-in-drag movies is that they end when the girl takes her hair down and admits she's a girl and the guy is suddenly won over and everybody can relax and be happy because the man shall have his mare again and all will be well. It's a formula that has worked since the sixteen hundreds. *sigh* Comedy stretches things so that they're funny and then puts them back at the end.
And every damn girl-in-drag movie has the girl entirely suck at dressing up like a guy. I gotta say, I never actually *tried* to convince anyone that I was a guy, but I spent most of my life from when I was thirteen to when I was sixteen (at which point my ass said loudly enough that I was a chick that it didn't matter what the rest of me looked like) being called "sir" in stores. It was never particularly difficult for me to pass... and I wasn't working at it. Ever. I had short hair because my dad was constantly like Get your hair out of your face every time I wanted to let it grow out. I didn't wear makeup because, d'oh, I didn't like it. I still don't wear makeup. I wore jeans and a lot of grey and navy and black and maroon. That's still how I dress. I bought my shoes in the men's department because they fit better (and still do, for the same damn reason). I was just me, being me, and people called me "sir", rather a lot. This was after I had as many tits as I was ever going to get and after I bled regularly. (Have since stopped. Yay hysterectomy, making my life easier every single damn month. Man, is that the gift that keeps on giving!) These days, my hair is down to my ass and I've got the pushing-forty broad beam thing going on, so I don't get called sir anymore. These days people just think I'm a dyke. But back in the day, I passed without trying. Maybe it would have been more difficult if I'd been like movie-star pretty with smaller shoulders and bigger tits... but the way I was built, it wasn't any big deal. It was dead easy.
Probably everyone on the planet but me has seen Ocean's Eleven but it's a good heist film. It's got pretty people and a suitably convoluted plot and some pretty sharp dialogue that only improves on rewatching. I was only disappointed that the tiny little asian guy with the million-watt smile didn't get to say more things in what was probably some flavor of Chinese. He was pretty. It was a fun movie. I wouldn't call it great art, but it was very enjoyable and an excellent popcorn movie.
The other was, well, full of young cute people. It promoted gender-normative behavior, which isn't really a surprise. Nobody really wants to see women dress up like men and take jobs from men and actually be as qualified as men because then there would be nobody left to stay home and have babies. *sigh* I'm being snide. It was a cute film. There's nothing much wrong with it. The actual brother was a hottie. They admit to ripping off most of the names from Twelfth Night and named a pet spider Malvolio because obviously that's a name that absolutely nobody in these our modern times would actually have. (Though perhaps I shouldn't be too hasty -- we have a tenant child named Trunks. -- That's as in DragonballZ, mind.) I've got to say that I rather liked the end to Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment a lot better.
I guess my primary difficulty with women-dressing-in-drag movies is that they end when the girl takes her hair down and admits she's a girl and the guy is suddenly won over and everybody can relax and be happy because the man shall have his mare again and all will be well. It's a formula that has worked since the sixteen hundreds. *sigh* Comedy stretches things so that they're funny and then puts them back at the end.
And every damn girl-in-drag movie has the girl entirely suck at dressing up like a guy. I gotta say, I never actually *tried* to convince anyone that I was a guy, but I spent most of my life from when I was thirteen to when I was sixteen (at which point my ass said loudly enough that I was a chick that it didn't matter what the rest of me looked like) being called "sir" in stores. It was never particularly difficult for me to pass... and I wasn't working at it. Ever. I had short hair because my dad was constantly like Get your hair out of your face every time I wanted to let it grow out. I didn't wear makeup because, d'oh, I didn't like it. I still don't wear makeup. I wore jeans and a lot of grey and navy and black and maroon. That's still how I dress. I bought my shoes in the men's department because they fit better (and still do, for the same damn reason). I was just me, being me, and people called me "sir", rather a lot. This was after I had as many tits as I was ever going to get and after I bled regularly. (Have since stopped. Yay hysterectomy, making my life easier every single damn month. Man, is that the gift that keeps on giving!) These days, my hair is down to my ass and I've got the pushing-forty broad beam thing going on, so I don't get called sir anymore. These days people just think I'm a dyke. But back in the day, I passed without trying. Maybe it would have been more difficult if I'd been like movie-star pretty with smaller shoulders and bigger tits... but the way I was built, it wasn't any big deal. It was dead easy.
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Date: 2006-08-11 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-11 11:06 am (UTC)That said, I don't think you've ever seen pictures of what I looked like back in the day because there aren't very many of them and the ones that there are, I keep out of the light of day. It's quite possible that I didn't look like a boy and that literally hundreds of people who didn't know me guessed wrong on that most basic of questions... but usually people bat a higher percentage than that in the gender game.
Also, I note with interest that when a friend's kid Katie was three and I was much the same as I am now, she asked me with all seriousness if I was a boy or a girl.
Note: I discovered that "What do you think?" is not an approved answer to this question. Neither is "Why does it matter?" It irritates the owners when you play mind games with their three-year-olds.
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Date: 2006-08-11 11:47 am (UTC)She also had a full-on psychotic break from the strain of lying about her identity. Something about disassociative disorder.
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Date: 2006-08-12 01:43 am (UTC)I, too, spent the majority of my life (and still am) mistaken for a man.