There seems to be a consensus across rightist on leftist lines re: The Iron Lady, to wit: Meryl Streep great, film mediocre, though the objections to the later come from different angles. For every complaint from the right that the film offers too much Thatcher in dementia now and not enough Thatcher in charge back then and that this is degrading, there's a complaint from the left that the film doesn't bother with politics at all, never offers reasons why Margaret T. was so hated and just namechecks various events of her reign era of goverment, instead using the dementia as an easy way to gain sympathy. The various reviews I've read offer variations of these positions, but no third thesis. Oh, and one review mentioned there was a montage in which the falling of the wall and German reunification is presented as part of Thatcher's triumphs. If that's true and Helmut Kohl ever gets to watch this film, he's likely to have a stroke at this point. (Between Thatcher's infamous cabinet meeting with lots of analysis of how it's in our national character to start the Fourth Reich immediately upon reunification and Churchill's dictum of having "the Hun" either at your throat or at your feet still applied, and Kohl's not that great sense of humour, that's a relatively safe bet.)

Now, when I reviewed the earlier Thatcher biopics, "The Long Road to Finchley" (young Maggie versus the boys' club of Tory inner politics; hint: she wins), and "Margaret" (Thatcher in her last year of power versus the boys club, take II: hint: she loses) , I noticed neither actually shows much of Margaret Thatcher having power. Gaining and losing it offers more of a natural dramatic arc, but I assumed The Iron Lady, covering more years, was bound to offer more on the ruling years, until I heard about the dementia frame. Not having actually watched the film yet, it's seems to me Phylida Law, the director, tried to have her cake and eat it: on the one hand, a biopic of a politician that covered much of its subjects life, but on the other, a narrative that did not have to bother with doing so in an in depth manner because much of the screen time is devoted to a point where you can only show the personal, not the political. One of the reviews, searching for a comparative loved/hated male iconic figure in politics to make a point about gender, wondered how the Americans would have reacted if an English actor had played Ronald Reagan in the firm grip of Alzheimer's while Reagan was still alive. I guess the the answer to this is much indignation, but then I'm not sure how much Reagan was hated by what passes for the left in US politics to begin with. Also I'm pretty sure Phyllida Law wasn't acting out of internalized sexism and/or hidden Thatcher resentment but because she found the idea that the one so powerful Margaret Thatcher is now steadily losing her mind poignant and thought it would make her easier to sympathize with across party lines. Would she have done the same in a biopic about a man? Would anyone? Hm.

Generally speaking, I think it's still easier for scriptwriters, actors and directors to present male characters in a critical yet compelling fashion while trusting their audience will be captivated even if it doesn't "identify with", whatever that means. I'm thinking of Capote a few years ago in which both script and central performance are not trying to milk sympathy for Truman Capote at all, on the contrary, they highlight his unsympathetic sides. (And they easily could have gone the other way - say, shown via flashback or Harper Lee conversations some bits of Capote's truly ghastly childhood.) Instead, they trusted that Capote and the story of how he came to write Cold Blood, the relationship to one of the two murderers that developed and its bizarre twist on the writer/muse tale would be compelling enough without the audience liking Truman Capote. I can't think of a comparable film about a real life female famous person.

Of course, if you tell the story of a woman and highlight her negative sides the way Capote did Truman Capote's, you have to deal with the added baggage of sexism through the ages - are you or aren't you feeding it, etc. Some of the Iron Lady reviews did some soul searching along the lines of "when X said that Margaret Thatcher was the one woman it was okay for feminists to hate, was that not mightily unfair?" and either decided that because Margaret T. never showed any interest in the cause or in female solidarity, she was not entitled to solidarity now, or decided that yes, in as much as she was a woman working her way to the top under hostile conditions, she also counts as a case feminists can be proud of. I'm always uneasy with such assertions as "the one woman it's okay to hate" anyway. Then again, I also don't think female politicians should be exempt from criticism. In the case of Margaret Thatcher, any fictional take on her that was neither a hagiography of the Sainted Maggie nor a Portrait of the PM As A Middle-Aged Demon was bound to be resented by one of the two main political camps, but I wish one could have been found that had the courage to do more than offer a spectacular central performance; a film which actually tried to capture some of the era its set in, some of the passions and politics, would be a start.

Then again: I haven't watched it yet. Maybe the reviews are wrong and there is something of that there. I guess I'll have to find out.

The microsoft instructions seem to have worked. Of course, I feel completely at liberty to curse them into oblivion if I'm proven wrong a few days from now.

Anyway, computer trouble always sends me into a small buying frenzy, so I decided to spend some recently earned money on Frida, the DVD of which just got released in this part of the world. If you've watched the movie already - the DVD is so worth aquiring. Audio commentaries by director Julie Taymor and composer Elliot Goldenthal (two separate tracks), long interviews with Salma Hayek who doesn't "just" play Frida but was the one who tried to get this project going for almost a decade, the special effects people, singers Lila Down and Chavela Vargas (who isn't just a Mexican musical legend but was also one of Frida Kahlo's lovers).

If you haven't watched Frida in the cinema, it's about the life of painter Frida Kahlo. Now making a movie about an artist is a tricky subject; a great many biopics suffer from overly respectful "worthiness". I remember watching some TV film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono which committed the dreadful mistake of making him into the nicest lad ever top pick up a guitar and her into a misunderstood saint. In the process removing not just flaws but any vivacity, and say about Lennon and Ono what you want, they were (are, in her case) two very charismatic, spirited people. Apparently whoever made it believed the only way the audience was going to identify was if their heroes were never, ever to display any unkind behaviour. (Case in point: Lennon's first wife, Cynthia, in real life came home to find him and Yoko Ono having breakfast, Yoko in Cynthia's bathrobe. This was John's way of telling Cynthia the marriage was over. Then he wanted to sue her for adultery. In said TV film, he very gently breaks the news to her, who is depicted as extremely dull and narrow-minded so that nobody could possibly blame him for leaving her anyway.)

Of course, the other extreme would be biopics where the subject is depicted as so spectacularly unpleasant that you wonder why you should care at all. (I can't think of any examples right now, but I'm sure there are some - after all, there are also these types of biographies.)

In either case, the picture faces the additional challenge of having to show the audience something of what the artist in question created. If this is a writer, it becomes really troublesome. The Hours, both book and film, solved this by being a meditation on a novel of Virginia Woolf's anyway. Wilde, another well-done biopic, had the advantage of a subject who excelled at bonmots anyway, so could use lots of Wilde quotes, but it did more than that; it worked in several important motifs of Oscar Wilde's oeuvre visually. And then again you get something like Lust for Life, the film version of Stone's novel about Vincent van Gogh. Where Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh suffers, and suffers, and suffers. He also carries paintings around. Of course, we know he is A Misunderstood Genius, but if we didn't know this already before watching, the film definitely wouldn't be enough to convince - the excitement of somebody's vision becoming reality is lost among all the suffering.

Frida Kahlo definitely had a tough lot in life as well. Dreadful accident as a young woman in which her torso was pierced, resulting in a crippled body breaking down slowly during the rest of her life, a miscarriage, a (loved) husband who cheated on her on a regular basis. But neither scriptwriter Edward Norton nor Julie Taymor make this movie into The Sufferings of St. Frida, though Frida's pain certainly comes through loud and clear. But so comes her zest for life, interest in people, her sexuality, and most of all her imagination. This is the one movie about a painter where I really feel taken inside, and it manages to make me thrilled about Frida's art as much as it makes me interested in her life. She's not depicted as a woman who happened to be a painter and whose greatness we're to take for granted because the movie tells us so; she's shown as a painter, creating and transforming the world inside and outside of her, and we're in her head the entire time.

Julie Taymor's audio commentary, like all the interviews, still echoes with this excitement. It's also very interesting if you're curious about the creation of films. For examples, she remarks on the different ways of depicting nudity. When Frida's cast comes off for the first time after the accident, Salma Hayek's naked body isn't supposed to come across as sensual but as vulnerable and bruised, and so it does. On the other hand, when filming Frida and Tina the photographer dancing the tango, she wanted Hayek and Ashley Judd to come across as extremely sensual, and so the camera stops just this short of giving their flesh a soft glow. During the early scene with young Frida and her boyfriend Alejandro having a quick groping tumble in the closet, Julie Taymor also points out that sex scenes all too often are shown with a leaden seriousness completely ignoring the funny, absurd side sex can have. (Incidentally, C.S. Lewis said pretty much the same thing in The Four Loves, which is an odd coincidence.) And then again you can achieve eroticism sometimes much better through hints; when we get to Frida's and Diego's first night together, she says originally she had shot a longer scene but then decided that just showing Diego kissing Frida's scar and her melting, falling back towards him, came across as more tender and erotic than said longer scene would have done.

She tells us they had two teams of artists for the movie, one recreating Frida's paintings at various stages and one Diego Rivera's, and that these teams had to be separate because their styles were so very different. Taymor speculates that one reason why the marriage survived was that Frida and Diego never competed as artists - she was a minimalist, painting none-too-large oil portraits, he was a maximalist, painting murals. They were too different to be held against each other. The New York episode, showing Diego's rise and fall in the US when Rockefeller gives him the commission for the large fresco which then gets destroyed because Diego included Lenin was apparently critizised for being too long in some quarters, since Taymor becomes a bit defensive about this, saying it was crucial for the ensuing strain in Frida's and Diego's marriage as his depression about the whole affair feeds into his sleeping with her sister, the one thing she can't forgive him for. Since they didn't have the budget for shooting in New York (or Paris, which Frida visits later), Taymor hit about the ingenious device of showing these scenes almost entirely through a montage of postcards and cutboards which bring across Frida's sense of alienation, as well as providing the genesis for some of the paintings we later see.

As I had first seen this movie dubbed, I have to say that the small but important part of Trotzki, the one extramarital affair of Frida's the film lingers on (the others both with women and men are shown through very brief scenes), definitely improves when you hear Geoffrey Rush's own voice. (Include here another bout of admiration for Australian actors.) The guy dubbing him in German sounded pretentious; Rush sounds intelligent and intense and, when the occasion calls for it, haunted and sad. Incidentally, personally I liked that the film expected me to know who Leo Trotzki was because I don't think an exposition scene briefing the audience about his career would have worked (they did include the crucial information that Stalin wanted him dead in two earlier scenes before we get to meet him, though), but I'm curious what impression somebody watching the movie without any idea about the man's life got. Taymor also praises the actress playing Trotzki's wife Natalja, saying that though she doesn't get a single line of dialogue (that the audience understands - we do hear her talking in Russian a bit), her eyes and expression convey superbly that Natalja realizes her husband has an affair, and the pain this causes her.

Of course, Salma Hayek's great performance is the heart of this movie. No matter whether it's as the young carefree Frida, or as the woman who after her miscarriage paints with the foetus in the same room after she fought to have it, her face absolutely blank, or as middle-aged Frida imperiously ordering everyone to carry her bed so she can attend her first Mexican exhibition, she always makes me feel for Frida Kahlo.

Lastly, completely unrelated and courtesy of hobsonphile:


You are Season One- a prologue for the larger
Babylon 5 story. Your primary purpose is to
introduce the characters and races which live
in the Babylon 5 universe, though you also
manage to insert details and moments of
foreshadowing that are fulfilled in later
seasons. Although you were not very popular at
first, the fans have come to appreciate you in
hindsight.


Which Season of Babylon 5 Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla


I think I can guess what caused this result - my unabashed peacenik tendencies.