The Departed
Friday night, as I sat in the movie theater watching The Departed and becoming increasingly disappointed with it, I kept thinking, "I have to blog about this." It wasn't until the next morning when I realized that blogging or thinking about blogging or thinking about the world in terms of blogging has become a daily occurence for me.
Funny, you know, how your blog insidiously creeps into your every day life, your mundane thoughts and routines.
So, the movie: Contrary to apparently 93% of critical reviews, The Departed is not a very good movie. Pardon my language, but it was a cock movie, one of the biggest cock movies I've ever seen. I'm fully aware that there are better, more intellectual words for this. I could call it a hypermasculine narrative or say it was celluloid drenched in testosterone, but when the film is rolling, the phrase "cock movie" just fits so well. By that, I don't mean it's a male movie or a movie about men or male relationships or a masculine quest for power. I'd have nothing against that. I mean, The Departed is one of the most sexist, "phallocentric" films I've seen in a long time. In it, uniquely female things (menstruation, female sexual pleasure, female genitalia) are disregarded, degraded and used as insults in casual conversation. Not to mention, there's only one female character, a Harvard-educated psychologist, who could have been a positive representation of women had she not slept with both of her male patients and passively accepted that there are some things her boyfriend does that she's just not meant to know.
I understand that most people probably won't walk away from the movie with this impression or be to bothered by it, which is fine, but it's not a very good movie even if you were to remove all of that. The performances were great, but everything else was just sort of...tepid. I wish I went to see Running With Scissors instead.
There, that's my review. I'm really going to get on with the whole "ethics of blogging" business now, I promise.
Funny, you know, how your blog insidiously creeps into your every day life, your mundane thoughts and routines.
So, the movie: Contrary to apparently 93% of critical reviews, The Departed is not a very good movie. Pardon my language, but it was a cock movie, one of the biggest cock movies I've ever seen. I'm fully aware that there are better, more intellectual words for this. I could call it a hypermasculine narrative or say it was celluloid drenched in testosterone, but when the film is rolling, the phrase "cock movie" just fits so well. By that, I don't mean it's a male movie or a movie about men or male relationships or a masculine quest for power. I'd have nothing against that. I mean, The Departed is one of the most sexist, "phallocentric" films I've seen in a long time. In it, uniquely female things (menstruation, female sexual pleasure, female genitalia) are disregarded, degraded and used as insults in casual conversation. Not to mention, there's only one female character, a Harvard-educated psychologist, who could have been a positive representation of women had she not slept with both of her male patients and passively accepted that there are some things her boyfriend does that she's just not meant to know.
I understand that most people probably won't walk away from the movie with this impression or be to bothered by it, which is fine, but it's not a very good movie even if you were to remove all of that. The performances were great, but everything else was just sort of...tepid. I wish I went to see Running With Scissors instead.
There, that's my review. I'm really going to get on with the whole "ethics of blogging" business now, I promise.
Labels: Film
