"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Posts Tagged ‘Greta Gerwig’

Barbie

Friday, August 18th, 2023

I took my time writing about BARBIE, the smash hit pop culture phenomenon from director Greta Gerwig (LADY BIRD, LITTLE WOMEN) and Mattel Films (MONSTER HIGH, TEAM HOT WHEELS, MAX STEEL), so all the takes have pretty much been taken, and I’m sure everybody who hasn’t seen it has heard by now that many people love it. I’m another one of those people. I’ll try not to go on too long about it, but I want to pay my respects, and I promise some of the aspects I’m most interested in are not what most of the other reviews focus on.

In this time of Barbiemania I don’t need to go into detail about all of the movie’s joys, but indulge me on a few of them. First of all, I’m a sucker for a movie with this extreme of a dedication to creating a stylized, artificial world. It’s comparable to movies like POPEYE, SPEED RACER or BATMAN RETURNS in that respect. And what the hell, I’ll say THE FLINTSTONES too, though I want to stress that especially in that example I’m just talking about the heightened sets, props and costumes, not equating them in overall quality. (read the rest of this shit…)

Little Women

Friday, January 17th, 2020

Little women, walking down the street. Little women, bonding with their sisters but also struggling to establish their individual identities in order to find a path in life that brings them happiness

In her joyous new version of LITTLE WOMEN, writer/director Greta Gerwig (LADYBUGS) cleverly acknowledges that the book by Louisa May Alcott may be more appealing to (or more understood by) women than men. When freelance writer Jo (Saoirse Ronan, HANNA) sends stories about her and her sisters to her publisher (Tracy Letts, U.S. MARSHALS) he snidely dismisses them… until his daughters find the manuscript and freak out like it’s a new Twilight. The scene is inspired by reality: Alcott and her publisher didn’t really believe in her work-in-progress until the publisher’s niece read it and loved it.

What I’m saying is not that I, as a male individual, don’t get the appeal of this movie. I loved it. But Little Women is a “girl story” I never knew to open myself up to. I had never read or seen it, not even when it had Winona Ryder in it. I only did it this time because I loved Gerwig’s first film as a director, LADY BIRD (she didn’t direct LADYBUGS, I don’t know why I said that a paragraph ago, but it seemed amusing at the time). (read the rest of this shit…)

Lady Bird

Thursday, March 1st, 2018

Of all the stories we tell over and over, “coming of age” might be the most universal. I don’t care who you are, as long as you live to be a certain age, at some point you’re gonna come of some of that age. And when you see some fictional (or, let’s be honest, usually semi-autobiographical) character’s age coming of you can compare and contrast to your experiences. You see echoes of your own life, revive emotions that were so potent at the time, now faded, learn about other people who had it different. So I have not specifically experienced being a girl in a private school in Sacramento in the oughts, and I definitely have no personal understanding of how it feels to be someone who could identify a song as Dave Mathews and have an emotional response to it that involves embarrassment, nostalgia and personal meaning*, but I can also see those things on screen and have them feel familiar and real and relatable.

(*I did see him in public one time and I could tell he was famous by the women who started gathering around him but I had to ask somebody else who he was) (read the rest of this shit…)