Girl Detective

More reviews from my self-imposed 50-Movie Challenge.

10. Bad Santa. 2003. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. So dark that it often goes beyond the reach of humor. Weird, uncomfortable, sometimes quite funny. Sad for John Ritter that this was the last thing he worked on, because the unfunny scenes with him and Bernie Mac were reportedly tacked on in order to extend to movie’s running time.

11. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. 2002. Directed by George Clooney. Sam Rockwell plays Chuck Barris, creator of cultural icons like The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and The Gong Show, who claimed in his autobiography that he moonlighted as a hitman for the CIA. Barris later recanted, and Clooney’s movie does an excellent job with this amibiguity. The casting of megastar Julia Roberts as a spy, along with interviews with former Barris associates, contribute to the “is it real?” vibe. The film also slyly reminds us that reality TV is not a recent phenomenon.

12. Mean Girls. 2004. Directed by Mark Waters. Had some good commentary on how girls undermine other girls. Avoided many cliches, and had some laugh-out-loud moments.

13. Destry Rides Again. 1939. Directed by George Marshall. Jimmy Stewart is charming. Marlene Dietrich is funny. Great catfight. Tons of fun.

14. Second Sight. 1999. Directed by Charles Beeson. Not a film, but rather a Mystery miniseries starring my boyfriend Clive Owen as a detective who is going blind, but trying to hide the fact to protect his job. It veers occasionally into the realm of cheese, but is overall a good story, well acted.

15. Sin City. 2005. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller. Dark with a capital D. A stunning visual adaptation of Miller’s graphic novels, but one that replicates their flaws: simplistic, violent, misogynist, and hyper-fetishized. Rosario Dawson is the only performer who falters. The others are able to bring some dimension to their reductive characters, all the more impressive since the movie was filmed almost entirely in front of a green screen. My boyfriend Clive Owen’s accent is flattened, but not obliterated.

I wrote previously here on why I blog. Simply put, blogging has enabled me to adopt a consistent writing practice. A tougher question, though, and one I didn’t become conscious of for a long time is this: why do I blog about those things about which I blog?

For the long time my topics were whatever leapt out of my head and onto my keyboard. Often, this was a hyper stream of consiousness, or worse, a daily list or diary without commentary or insight. Provoked by something I read at Mental Multivitamin, though, I took a long look at what I’d been writing about. Why was I making private things public? I reaped a benefit from blogging of writing practice, but what potential benefit to readers was some mundane snippet from my life?

I wrote at length here on my decision not to chronicle any further gripes about motherhood. Since then, I have become increasingly aware of mothers who use their kids as grist for their writing. Meg Wolitzer, who has a new book out, wrote on this at Salon here.

The notion of parents mortifying their children is nothing new… But the children of writers are given a mortification all their own. It reaches beyond the hokeypokey and deep into regions unfamiliar to the children of management consultants and travel agents.

In its most common form, the embarrassment occurs when a writer is simply doing his or her job: describing the world in an unflinching, candid manner, and casually borrowing recognizable bits and pieces from real life. Occasionally, a writer borrows much more than that. This was the case with A.A. Milne, who used his son Christopher Robin as a character without asking. The child grew up and was left to languish in bitterness, loathing the father who left him frozen in a kind of twisted, eternal moppethood. It seems clear that writers who use their children to advance their own work are guilty of some kind of unsavory pimping, and that those children — those trapped-in-amber, beloved figures from picture books and novels — have a right to feel furious.

While this quote has not scared me enough to stop writing about Drake at all, it did confirm that I can keep the grumbly bits, both his and mine, to myself. No need to immortalize those in ether. So writing in detail about my kid was no good. What, then, of my measly life was worth putting out there for public inspection? At this point, I was reminded of a story.

I was a junior in college, and begged my parents to let me have a car at school. They relented, perhaps based on the “it’s for my job” part of the argument, which was actually true. I drove that car hither and yon. After a while, its performance waned. I took it to a service station and received a call soon after.

Knowing how inadequate my answer was, I doubt I kept the upspeak out of my 20-year-old voice. “Uh, no one ever told me I had to do that?”

The spirit of that story is why I blog what I blog. I can’t know something till I learn about it. In the spirit of my girl-detective forebears, I like to follow clues and links. I blog about things that I find informative or interesting, in the hope that someone else will, too. I’m hardly an early adopter, so most of what I write here won’t be ground-breaking or trend-setting. Perhaps it will simply be one more small voice that helps you make a decision about what movie to watch, what book to read, or what have you. There is a danger, though, that I might state the obvious, which I’ll illustrate with another story.

I was visiting my sister Sydney some years ago. She had just gotten a kitten, sleek and black with bright green eyes. He zoomed about her house, provoking the dog and charming me by pouncing around my room and sneaking up into the box spring under my bed. I was impressed by how cute, spirited and clever he was. Later, I related his antics to friends of mine who have cats. They looked at me oddly. “Uh, Girl Detective? All kittens do that.”

Please forgive me, then, when I post something obvious. One person’s kitten is another person’s oil change.

I sit, frozen in front of the screen, careering around the internet, struggling to write a word. It has been some time since I blogged. I don’t know where I picked up the construction in the title, but it’s one of my favorites. I will state the obvious. Travelling can be difficult. But it is good to see family.

It is also good to be home.