Peeking into the rock

My stepmother Moher took me to see "I love you man," because everything else that was playing was brutal (except a couple which took themselves too seriously for the moment).

It's shockingly good. I expected to have that men-are-pigs lie rubbed in our faces over and over, and there were a few men who used it to structure their lives, but it was celebrated as just one of the ways people lived in the movie. It was sort of a lovesong to a certain upwardly-mobile community in LA (people I personally don't often like in life but who deserve their own movie), not the ones who make their living in Hollywood, but minor realtors in major firms, personal trainers to the middle-level and lower-level businessmen, investors who don't live in big glass houses on obscure canyons, and so on. The women were their own real people, and they had that look of women who have swallowed the fashion magazine standard of beauty, or more importantly, who think their men have: but they didn't look like actresses in a movie dressed and made up fashionably, they looked like realtors and beauty parlor managers and lower--level businesswomen and yes, I noticed that I said the women looked like they sat exactly one rung below the men, and I think it's interesting and lifelike.

The main thing is that the men were all different -- and out poor protagonist who is trying to make friends so he'll have a best man on his wedding day meets some very different men who have very different understandings about what their doing. I remember getting in an online argument years ago about this very thing in whih some men got very heated defending the men-are-pigs lie (though I really gathered that most of them didn't actually live by that lie, they just wanted it in readiness to fall back on if they felt they needed it as an excuse), insisting that all men are alike and they would all do the same things that they have been taught are reprehensible, vulgar, selfish, or dirty if given the chance. The obvious rejoinder is "what's stopping you then, Mr. I can can do anything I want because I'm a libertarian?"

What's stopping them is that enculturation is actively participated in on both sides by men as well as women. It isn't just women and girls putting pressure on men and boys to believe and act certain ways. It's also men and boys developing their own patterns of thought and behavior, thankyouverymuch Mr. Piaget for articulating it so clearly.

The man who articulates the "men are pigs" theory in this movie glories in it. He's pretty vulgar. He does some things you wish he wouldn't. But -- and if there is a point to the movie, this is part of the slope that goes to it -- he's in many ways (though not as many as the people in the movie come to believe) a pretty good guy and a loyal friend.

So there are other pretty good guys who live by other beliefs. There's a couple of actually nearly evil guys in the movie -- one you get to see his meager redemming features in a way that lets you knoiw he's still a pig, very nicely done, all around, that guy. Another is a kind of a cartoon, but it's a clown shoes movie in a lot of ways so it's appropriate.

I'd go on but Truffle is letting me know she needs to go out right now.

Go see it.

It's even better than the books: the addition of motion and shifting perspectives does a lot for the art.

Here are two of the ways that education dramas can be done:

"Inexperienced white teacher saves the brown children through sincerity and unconventional methods and in opposition to experienced teachers and thugs." I'm not going to see "Freedom Writers" because I'm sick of these. I want brown teachers, I want experienced teachers, I want cooperating communities of teachers. Okay? Any single one of these white-teacher movies might be very good and well-meaning and affirming, but a huge pile of them accumulates to produce a message that brown children are doomed until the callow white teacher frees them with their innate superiority, that brown teachers are unthinkable, that no teacher ever learns their craft: either they're magical or their burned-out.

"Undisciplined but genius brown child prevails through accepting brown traditional values, especially discipline and teamwork, under the sometimes harsh but loving tutelage of usually brown mentor" ("Drumline," "Akeelah and the Bee," "Stomp the Yard") These are going to fester and shred soon, probably, but for now they're very cool. But -- here's a note for the next "historically Black college" movie -- can we please have enough of the princess-prize young woman whose only function in the movie is to give the young man something to strive for? Could we please have the next one of these center on a young woman and her group? And if we do get this, can she be elevated and saved by something other than percussion, rhythm, and sexy moves? For example, maybe, lab science. You can have that whole individual genius versus discipline and teamwork dialectic in the lab, too. Her cohort could discover a way to cure sickle cell anemia or something.

All that being said, go see "Stomp the Yard." Do not be taken aback by the first ten minutes of intense, violent "dance battle" in the abandoned warehouse district of LA. Hang in there. You will be rewarded.

I didn't want to see "Flicka" because I'm not a horse girl and I'm not crazy about horse movies. But we had seen everything else in Watsonville that either of us would be willing to see, so we went.

( can you spoil a remake of an old movie of an older book? )

I wish that "Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles" hadn't already left the Nick: I'd have driven into Santa Cruz for that.