My mental circus, inside and out.

Emma's browser is set to load MSN as her homepage, and she has just never gotten around to changing it.   So today, there is a story on "actors who improve with age," with thirteen photographs:  Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, etc.  Of course, there is not a single woman in the set, or any matching story about women who improve with age,  because hey . . . media culture just can't get its mind around that.  We have only been able to come up with a very few women who are allowed to act at all after 40, much less have it be said of them that they improve with age.

And let's face it, whatever you think of Hillary, she's rowing upstream against this.

Yesterday, Emma was chatting with a friend who is a novelist.  She has been trying to get a novel published but has failed many times, and when she asks agents what publishers want, they say "boomer romance for women."  We laughed and laughed. We laughed because, in terms of a plot, we couldn't think of a single boomer romance in our social set and, given what we have witnessed over lo these many years, concluded that a boomer romance was akin to a horror novel.  Or maybe the fantasy genre.

The word "boomer" is a funny thing since it refers to the time when we were all babies.  And now we are like, old.   And just when we are getting to the stage when we are tolerable, or even wise,  the body betrays us.   If we lived in the world of nineteenth century novels, where beauty represented goodness, intelligence, and grace, we'd all be absolutely gorgeous!  (Well, some of us anyway.)

Posted by: EmmaPele at January 25, 2008 19:23 | link | comments (1)

Emma, idly reading Henry Jenkin's blog on a controversy over a new documentary about video games and violence.  At issue are gamers who objected to the documentary as being "anti-game":

"When I spoke with Spencer Halpin a few weeks ago, he defended the preview but conceded it was not aimed at getting gamers into the theater. As he put it, he wanted to reach '42 year old women', who were concerned about the impact of violent video games on their children but who had only a limited understanding of the underlying issues."

Ah, 42 year old women.  So stupid and out of it, right?  Thank goodness there are guys with social projects like this to get them up to speed so they don't spoil all the fun.

 

 

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at January 16, 2008 21:31 | link | comments (1)

Emma watched Shadowboxer, with Cuba Gooding, Jr., and Hellen Mirren,  the other night .  It's an odd little movie in which Mirren plays a former 60s radical, turned assassin for hire,  who has had a long affair with her step son, played by Gooding.   She's much older than he is, and is dying of cancer. Their relationship is  explained in the film as the result of a trauma in Gooding's childhood, but Emma won't give it away.  So, once again, proving limine's point that Mirren is somehow able to act as a powerful, sexy, older woman despite Hollywood's entrenchment.  This is not a British film.

Posted by: EmmaPele at January 14, 2008 02:03 | link | comments

Emma just watched all of Showtime's  first season of The Tudors, so now she is thnking of all the iterations of King Henry VIII's wives and all the versions of King Henry VIII from Laughton to Burton and beyond.  For our purposes, the key figure here is Catherine, the senior wife whom Henry leaves for Anne Boleyn, launching a chain of momentous events.   Catherine has received short-shrift in most of these interpretations, passed quickly over for the glamorous, sexy, younger and excitingly threatened Anne Boleyn.  Catherine is portrayed as plain, old and boringly pious: no wonder Henry, the passionate  "young lion,"  would leave her, all perfectly understandable.  And how many times has this been repeated in account after account. She receives somewhat better treatment in the Showtime version.  Still portrayed as pious with her sole reason for existence to "fill her womb" and pursue her man,  she at least has moments of dignity and intelligence.  In many ways, she comes off as more honest and morally superior to Anne Boleyn, and to Henry himself, thus getting our sympathy vote.   Part of the reason is that Maria Doyle Kennedy's acting is superior to both Jonathan Rhys Myers as Henry and Natalie Dormer as Anne.  Of course, this is a British production, so despite its gestures to Hollywood style, it can still treat a figure like Catherine well.

Posted by: EmmaPele at January 11, 2008 19:49 | link | comments (1)

Yeah, Helen Mirren is fabulous.  What is her secret?  What has kept her working so long in film?  She's not classically beautiful.   And especially, what is her cross-over appeal to America?  In Britain, it's more understandable. If you watch British TV and movies, you'll find a much greater tolerance of different "looks" both in men and women, much greater diversity.  Older women are not disparaged.   Think Judy Dench, Vanessa Redgrave, Maggie Smith, or even Emma Thompson (though notice how she has been getting the eccentric roles--like Nanny McFee--despite her prowess as a dramatic actor).  Maybe this is because they are so established as icons in British theater and cinema before coming to Hollywood.  Emma thinks that Europe, in general, has much greater appreciation for aging in women.  In fact, living over there showed Emma just how bad it is over here.

Posted by: EmmaPele at January 08, 2008 08:12 | link | comments