Here’s a link to a piece I wrote about the Oscars for the Decoding Media blog. If you’re not following their site, you should!
https://decodingmedia.wordpress.com/2017/03/30/hegemony-at-the-oscars/
I blame Timothy Dalton… and David Bowie. Definitely Harrison Ford and Charles Dance and Richard Chamberlain and Leslie Howard. And quite possibly James Spader, though I keep wavering on that one – I’m just not sure if he’s her father or not, so I need to reserve final judgement. But for the others, they were definitely highly influential.
Here’s why:
It was 1984. I was wee – seriously toddler-sized. Completely incapable of reaching up to turn the dial to change the channel (oh, yes, we’re talking about the early ‘80s Zenith tv model). PBS was supposed to be the “safe” channel. Apart from the death of Mr Hooper, it was child-friendly. It was all King Friday and Queen Sarah Saturday and Prince Tuesday and Mathnet. And yet, this was to underestimate the juggernaut in my house that was Masterpiece Theater. (Though, to be completely honest, Monsterpiece Theater was more of a favourite at the time.)
The first thing my father ever recorded from tv was The Prisoner of Zenda (BBC, 1984 version) and he either didn’t have the Beta-max on loan from his school that week or he and my mother hadn’t realized how absolutely stupendous the thing we were about to watch would be – for whatever the reason, I only remember flashes of the BBC Timothy Dalton version of Jane Eyre: Timothy Dalton sitting by the fire, Pilot at his feet; Timothy Dalton using the ‘old woman voice’ while telling Jane’s fortune; Timothy Dalton/Mr Rochester telling Jane she was to go to Ireland and how that knotted string under his ribs might snap because of the distance between them; young Jane being reprimanded by Mr Brocklehurst about how bad girls go to hell; Rochester/Dalton howling Jane’s name as she ran up the stairs; Bertha launching herself off the burning roof, with Rochester two seconds to late to stop her; the wedding-ceremonius interruptus…
That pretty much cemented the idea in my young, impressionable brain that a truly shippable romance involved torturous restraint, the overcoming of ridiculously cruel obstacles (perhaps with the use of magic or the supernatural), and a healthy age-gap.
Love wasn’t love without a good decade between the protagonists.
Over the years, the possibilities seemed to increase. Rhett Butler was that much older than Scarlett, while Henry Higgins (at last the 1938 Leslie Howard version) had a certain spark with Eliza Doolittle that made him dancing with her at the Ambassador’s Ball that much more special. Dancing, of course, brings up thoughts of Johnny and Baby, while real historical pairings like Cleopatra and Julius Caesar also tended to work well on screen (again, especially if Timothy Dalton was involved in the final casting choice).
This type of pairing, however, is one of those throw-down deal-breakers of pop culture. You’re either on Team A(ge) or Team B(arf). This can change over time, of course. I recently had a nameless dear friend admit to me that Giles had suddenly become so much more appealing than Angel upon re-watching Buffy so many years later. I fully concede, I did a victory dance around the kitchen when she texted that.
Still, if you find the following match-ups more of a squick than a sigh, that’s entirely your right. And I hope you enjoy your time with Justin Bieber.
As for me, on a Valentine’s Day evening like this when it’s bloody freezing outside and a multiple movie-night is already underway, these are the match-ups that make me think of true romance, or at least true shipperdom…
The link to my latest review — RTÉ’s Gallipoli Ireland website, published by Notre Dame’s Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies:
http://breac.nd.edu/articles/64213-remembering-gallipoli/
The Golden Globes will start later this evening, and the balloting phase for the Academy Awards has been over for two days. That gives me a limited window to speculate on who I think will at least get Oscar nods (if not the little man, himself) later this week.
There are a handful of races I have no idea about (hello, Best Actress!) and others where I feel I’m almost overly-emotionally involved (Best Supporting Actor). To be honest, I really don’t care if Leonardo DiCaprio wins for The Revenant — I thought the anonymous quote that, if he didn’t win, he’d be likely to attach electrodes to a very vulnerable part of the male anatomy was much more amusing telling.
So, as a brief break from grant writing, here are some of my picks for what might happen later this week. The ones I really care about will be the ones with commentary.
THE FOLLOWING THINK-PIECE IS FULL OF SPOILERS FOR STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS. YOU REALLY SHOULD HAVE GONE TO SEE IT BY NOW. READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL. OR, BETTER YET, JUST TRY WALKING ACROSS A BRIDGE TOWARDS A MAN IN A BLACK MASK AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT…
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If you are an architect on Bespin or the Starkiller Base or the original Death Star or, really, anywhere in the galactic leftovers of George Lucas’ imagination, I have a small request: install some frickin’ railings already! Those cavernous abysses you seem so fond of really are not safe for rebel or imperial alike. Someone could get hurt out there! In fact, someone did. Someone plunged to his demise… although, I suppose the lightsaber had already done its dastardly work.
But still, Chewie at least would have had a body to take home to Leia if you draftsmen had just done your health and safety check properly and made Supreme Lord Snoke or Sheev Palpatine or the Grand Moff or whothehellcares pay just a little bit more for a bit of bannister. There was no funeral at the end of The Force Awakens: no burning pyre or vanishing corpse. Just a body falling, falling, falling, with no handy garbage slide for someone to fall into, even if he had just lost his hand.
They killed my childhood boyfriend: Han Solo is dead. Merry Christmas.
Horrible things have happened tonight in one of my favourite cities. I was there this past July, having one of the most relaxing and romantic of times — as hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people do in Paris every year.
Over the next few hours and days, the exact picture of what happened tonight at the Bataclan and throughout the city will become more clear, but – for myself – I just need a few images of Paris as I know it and love it.
For me, Paris is Audrey Hepburn. It’s s’wonderful. It’s timeless.
Sex and the City Finale
For me, Paris is the target of a thousand annoying Hollywood clichés, but I also kind of love them all, too.
Credit: Travelpod’s Travellingross
For me, Paris is history. It’s medieval and Napoleonic and Art Deco and classical and has the best gargoyles. It just does. Don’t even try to argue. Best. Gargoyles.
Café de Flore
For me, Paris is sitting at the Café de Flore in Saint-Germain, having a coffee and a croissant and participating in the city’s favourite sport: people-watching.
And, as I wait for the 9pm headlines, which I’m sure will be very dire and depressing, this is all I want to hear, because it’s just the opposite:
Best scene of the film. If the news from France is making you low, don’t give in. You can’t if you’re listening to La Marseillaise.
#jesuisparis
Election night two weeks ago was like the Oscars for poli-sci junkies in Canada. Millions of us stayed up far into the night to see who would win, even though fairly early on in the night, it was kind of obvious which way all of it was going.
Now it’s a reverse situation: we get to guess at who the nominees will be, now that we know who won. Justin Trudeau will announce his cabinet team on Wednesday, November 4th and, judging from some Tweets coming through my feed and a website or two, there is at least a small crew of us who have been playing the Canadian nerd version of fantasy football with the potential names to fill the jobs. There’s also a bit of a guessing game in terms of which cabinet positions will still exist on Wednesday, as Justin famously promised to cut down the number of ministers and to have gender parity within his choices. The ballpark figure now seems to be in the high 20s, perhaps even as many as 30 cabinet members… time will tell.
And so, in the grand tradition of Siskel and Ebert’s “If We Picked the Winners” and office pool fantasy football teams everywhere, I’m going to have a crack at it. I have no idea how right I may be on some of these. I want Scotty Brison to be in the cabinet simply because I think he (and his accent) are so wonderfully Canadian. I can see him hanging out with Sir John A. and D’Arcy McGee and George-Etienne Cartier back at the Charlottetown Conference in 1864 and fitting in just as well then as he does as a notable Liberal face now.
The Charlottetown Conference – 1864 Everyone in this photograph is drunk. We have a country because a Scot and an Irishman crashed the party and got everyone intoxicated… except for George Brown, because he was a killjoy. My vote for best hangover photo ever (PEI’s Andrew Macdonald gives the game away with his jauntily-raised top hat).
So, here we go:
Prime Minister – Justin Trudeau
I am confident that this one will happen.
It’s October 31st and beautifully sunny. That means I can actually write this brief post without looking over my shoulder half a dozen times or panicking as soon as I hear an unfamiliar creek in the apartment.
Hallowe’en as an adult is funny. Facebook is full of friends and frenemies posting odd photos of their toddlers in humiliating costumes. People go off to dress-up parties — the best I ever heard of was a “before and after” event that had one of my friends arrive as Dirty Harry Potter. There will be bags of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on sale tomorrow morning and thousands of us will either be listening to Thriller or Rocky Horror or both before the night is done. I, myself, have an afternoon planned around Young Frankenstein… or maybe Red Dragon. Camp comedy or psychological thrillers are how I like to usher in the fall months these days.
But Hallowe’en as a tiny tot was different. Not only because of the pressure any costume in Canada had to be both what you wanted and also functional under a snowsuit or garbage bag (October 31st is notorious as having either the first snowfall or a well-timed thunder-storm as soon as the kids get outside), but because there was a lot of creepy shit available to youngsters. And I’m all for it. I think children should read the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales and feel frightened in order to figure out what is good and what is bad. Lots of people think that way. So the following list is not a condemnation by any means, but more of a personal recitation of the things that really, really scared me before I had the words (or dry, sarcastic wit) to know what to do next.
If you weren’t ready for it, Hallowe’en could truly terrify you as a little person — and it had nothing to do with watching The Exorcist.
Experts tell us that children before the age of 6 are the most impressionable. No bloody kidding…
It might be the most famous rejection in literary history. Aware too late that she has made a horrible mistake for the past dozen years, Scarlett O’Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler runs through the mist to tell Rhett that she loves him. And he, exhausted and jaded, tells her that’s done.
In 2005, the American Film Institute announced that “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” was the greatest line of dialogue in the history of the movies, not only for its dramatic importance, but also because of the struggle off-screen simply to have it said.
The Hays Code had been adopted in 1930s and truly enforced as of 1934 under the guidance of Will H. Hays, the one-time U.S. Post-Master General and a man who, in the immortal words of Gore Vidal, “looked not unlike Mickey Mouse.”[1] There was nothing short of a full-scale epistolary war in order to convince Joseph Breen, chief enforcer of the Production Code Association, that the famed word ‘damn’ from Rhett Butler was, at the most, a “vulgarism” rather than true profanity.
Scarlett’s reaction to the ultimate put-down is just as well-known. She summons up images of Tara, her family plantation that has survived despite the horrors of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and declares that, “After all, tomorrow is another day.” However, what wasn’t apparent in the film’s sweeping Max Steiner score or on Vivien Leigh’s face, are the words Margaret Mitchell wrote that immediately precede the novel’s final sentences:
“With the spirit of her people who would not know defeat, even when it stared them in the face, she raised her chin” (Mitchell, 959).
These words are not about Southerners who have been broken by the war and still cling to illusions of moonlight-and-magnolias or the mythology of the ‘Lost Cause.’ As she had done since the novel’s earliest pages, Mitchell once again was underscoring Scarlett O’Hara’s Irish heritage as the key to her American/Southerner identity.
We might think of Scarlett as the ultimate icon of the antebellum American South, but she is, just as much if not more so, the relentless heroine of the Irish Diaspora. As a personality, she is complicated, frustrating and even despicable at times, but she also stands as an irrefutable success story of gumption and survival that mimicked the lives of tens of thousands of Irish migrants arriving in America and their descendants throughout the nineteenth century.
A week from now, we might have a new country.
Well, okay, not a new country, but certainly one with a different outlook for the future. The federal election is set for October 19th and for weeks the pollsters have indicated that it is far too close to call. The Nanos numbers today suggest the Liberals might be pulling ahead, but there have been major surprises before.
Perhaps because of the tight race, the headlines on the news this past weekend were full of stories about long lines at the advance polls. The most recent findings I saw from Elections Canada state that 2.4 million of us voted over Thanksgiving weekend. Some people waited hours to cast their ballots – in a Canadian election – more than a week before voting day.
This is not the norm.
The turnout for the last six federal elections was fairly pathetic: around 60%. That might sound large enough, but consider that this means a political party can win a “majority” mandate from the country with less than 22% of the electorate.
We Canadians are a fairly apathetic bunch when it comes to our political convictions. We value our freedoms, but we’re hardly marching in the streets to protect them. I polled one of my classes the other week, asking how many of them had ever marched in protest, or demonstrated in a public place. The result was minimal: maybe half a dozen out of a class of nearly 60 students.
Like a good sex scandal, getting all up in arms over politics is really not a very Canadian thing to do.
Or, at least it hasn’t been for a long time.
There was a time when elections in this country meant one thing: violence. Lots and lots of violence: riots; brawls; fisticuffs; arrests; even the odd murder or two or three (though, sadly, still no sex scandals).
Yes, we literally used to kill each other over politics in this country.
There was even a time when marching in protest wasn’t enough: we needed to burn things.
Mid-Atlantic Musings 