It's the triumphant (hopefully) return of Noir Monday! I intend to keep it going this time, ideally biweekly, but no promises. I have, however, decided to take the theme that naturally cropped up when I wrote these before - women in noir - and deliberately bring it to the forefront. From here on in, I'll only be covering films noir that have something in particular to say about their female roles. Feel free to suggest a future film.
The source material of In a Lonely Place is one of the most well-known pieces of hardboiled mid-century fiction written by a woman (Dorothy B. Hughes). I've never read it. I'm wary of doing so. I saw the film well before I was aware of the book, and it made such a profound, indelible impression on me that I wasn't ever sure I wanted to risk complicating it with other versions of the story.
As I explained last year when I did a similar list, this is not a "best films of the year" list. For all my film fascination, I don't make it to the theater for first-run features all that often. Blame the kid. But, in no particular order, here are my favorites from the films I did manage to see this past year, regardless of their particular release dates.
I mentioned earlier on both Tumblr and Twitter that the only holiday-themed film I'll admit to liking (because I'm generally a surly, Scrooge-like character) is Remember the Night, the 1940 Preston Sturges-written film starring Barbra Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. While that under-appreciated gem deserves all mentions it gets, I belatedly realized that comment of mine wasn't entirely true. There is another film that takes place during the holidays that I'll freely acknowledge I treasure: Kenneth Branagh's 1995 A Midwinter's Tale.
Every so often, the conversation about women in technology and computing - which grumbles on quietly and constantly in the background, even when the media isn't commenting on it - breaks out into mainstream reporting. The cycle generally goes like this: a new study or survey reveals the numbers of women in tech are consistently low or even dropping. People start wondering, in a concerned tone, why is this? Smarter people push the questions of what we're going to do about it. Then the backlash starts of why we have to treat the question of women in tech especially and that they're SO BORED with this same old conversation. And then the talk ebbs until it's, a few months down the road, dragged into the foreground again. But it will come back, because in all the years since the conversation was started, for all the talk, we haven't solved the problem and, worse than that, there's no clear indication we're even making any progress in making people understand what the problem is, or that there's a problem in the first place.
Chuck Jones is to me, first and foremost, two things for which he rarely gets much popular credit: a great film director and an astute, warm and stylish writer. He sometimes doesn't even get credit as an animated cartoonist - the ubiquity and volume of his creations eclipses the work he personally put into them. But while his name is familiar in the cartoon world, and will at least occasionally pop up in the positive opinions of someone who considers him a proper director, there is a decided, unfortunate lack of attention paid to his legacy of written wit.
After a couple of chance encounters with local independent filmmakers and a production company recently, I decided that I could do more to support and spotlight independent film in central Ohio. With first run of the Cowtown Film Series happening tonight, it seemed like a good opportunity to make good on that intent. So I got a hold of Peter John Ross, filmmaker and one of the main forces behind the series, to talk about not only this event but the independent film scene in Columbus.
There's a lot to recommend the ZOOM Family Film Festival this weekend, December 3-6, at the Wexner Center, and the fact that you're encouraged to show up Saturday morning in your pajamas for cartoons and cereal is the least of it. Well, you're encouraged if you're a kid. If you're not, you can still show up thus uniformed, but the results might not be as cute.
Sorry, Columbus - you haven't been bringing the crazy lately, so I've had to branch out to other Ohio cities' Craigslist boards. Consider this a challenge.
Like many another native northeastern Ohioan, even ones as young as I am, I have fond memories of Ghoulardi, one of the original television B-movie horror hosts. I of course missed his broadcast heyday (he was only on air from 1963-66), but his spirit, fittingly enough, has flourished far beyond that, and he's a permanent fixture in not only Ohio but cult movie history.
For years now I've been searching for a print of this rumored short film written and directed by Vincent D'Onofrio about the conception of Orson Welles's most famous line in the film The Third Man. It only screened on the festival circuit and wasn't available on DVD, so I had resigned myself to having missed this one for good. This morning, however, I finally stumbled across it online:
Over Labor Day weekend, I'll be attending Dragon*Con in Atlanta for the dedicated skeptic track, named, aptly enough, Skeptrack. Catch me with other Skepchicks Rebecca Watson, Maria Walters, A Kovacs, Carrie Iwan and Amy Roth for the "Women's Intuition and Other Fairy Tales" panel on Saturday at 2:30 PM. As the only Skepchick mom representative there, I'll have some things to say about skeptic parenting.
Not in town? No problem - all of the Skeptrack panels will stream live here. You can also follow Skeptrack on Twitter.
If you will be in the Atlanta area this weekend, however, Colin from the Science-Based Parenting blog (who gave a great presentation at last May's SkeptiCamp Ohio) is having a party for all the skeptic parents Friday night at 10:30 PM. See the details on that and RSVP on Facebook here.
If Don Draper has said it once, he's said it a hundred times: when it comes to marketing to women, focus on pleasing the men. Because that's what women want too, in the end. According to this advertising logic, a shrill, silly Ann-Margret type singing "Bye Bye, Birdie" in a commercial will sell diet cola to women, and, in the Sterling Cooper conference room, the men are already sold on the idea. Peggy, however, is disgusted at the suggestion that either women or men would be attracted to a woman whose shtick is to "be 25 and act 14," and her confusion and disagreement over how women are supposed to appear, behave and choose sets up the underlying theme in this chapter for many of the women in Draper's circle.
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