Movies

While Wonder Woman's Hot Topic makeover took center stage last week, another superhero fate was being revealed. This week it was announced that Andrew Garfield will assume the role of Spiderman in the upcoming reboot of the franchise. The sweet faced Garfield, despite being an accomplished actor, isn't exactly a household name. His nascent acting résumé includes the films Lions for Lambs and the eagerly anticipated The Social Network, slated for release this fall. While there is certainly an audience hungry for more Spiderman, I can't escape the feeling of annoyance at another action franchise that marginalizes women.

“I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

To be fair, based on the above image alone, I did not fully appreciate the outrage. It appeared Wonder Woman's ass kicking capabilities did not seem diminished despite the lack of star spangled panties and glamorous accessories. However, when I saw this picture of the new costume, then the ire made a lot more sense. The new Wonder Woman looks like an extra on the 90s version of Melrose Place with her small hair and velvet choker.

Helen Mirren keeps popping up in my daily conversations and I am doing my best to resist this wave of Helen Fever. I had a strain of Helen Fever in 1995 (while sick with an actual fever and accompanied by marathons of Prime Suspect) so I felt this time around I was somewhat immune.

At least I thought I was.

I love movies, and I am more than interested in politics. So it behooves me to think about the sizable overlap between the two. One of the things I love about political movies (and heck, political television shows, too) are the tropes they include and play to, especially as tropes reveal something about an era's ideology around politics. There's something different in the feel and mood, for example, in the original and remake of The Manchurian Candidate that goes to the heart of 1962's understanding of the Korean War and the just-after 9/11 tragedy zeitgeist's take on the first Gulf War, respectively, but both take on conspiracy theory and the presidency.

Whenever I am asked to name a film whose female actor's performance lifted me out of the recliner I immediately think of Angela Lansbury's chilling turn as Eleanor Iselin in the 1962 John Frankenheimer film The Manchurian Candidate. (Don't bother with the soggy 2004 remake, which is awful in every way imaginable) The Manchurian Candidate is a palate cleansing suspense thriller worlds away from Lansbury's sweet, meddling mystery writer J.B. Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote.

At some point between the release of 1996's Mission: Impossible and Jerry Maguire I discovered I could predict future Tom Cruise trends based on what I knew about his upcoming releases. Granted, I could not give pertinent details such as box office grosses or where he might holiday with his family, but I could predict things such as potential co-stars (I had Thandie Newton as his M:I2 co-star before I'd even left the screening of the first installment of the franchise) and general trends. I have always believed Cruise's persona was carefully constructed in a way that is much more sophisticated than many stars' audiences are used to. Personally, I don't think any incarnation of Cruise's persona is in fact representative of Cruise himself, but I do think they tend to represent areas of concern he opts to explore on screen.

"I took a stress test and they said [State Department] I was way too liberal in my thinking." - Three-time Oscar winner Thelma Schoonmaker pictured with long time collaborator Martin "Marty" Scorsese

Meanwhile, hundreds miles away, Thelma Schoonmaker sat in her own bossy chair editing the landmark American film Raging Bull, for which she earned an Academy Award. Like cohort Dede Allen's collaborations with Sidney Lumet, Schoonmaker's editorial relationship with Martin Scorsese has created some of the most iconic film imagery in history.

The genesis of my cinema love affair can be traced to two films: The Wiz and Serpico, both directed by Sidney Lumet (father of Jenny and Amy Lumet and son-in-law of the incomparable Miss Lena Horne) Despite being two decidedly different films, they share a lineage and many visual stylistic elements, which tends to make a double-feature of them oddly harmonious.

I feel geeky admitting that each major crew member of The Wiz had a corresponding Cabbage Patch Doll, imaginary friend or personal effect named in their honor. My typewriter was named "Joel Schumacher", my Fisher-Price record player, "Quincy-Vandross," (of course!), and my Fisher-Price camera was named after trailblazing film editor and personal bad ass chick hero: "Dede Allen". Allen died this past April, leaving a legacy of iconic film imagery and countless imitators.