Joshua misses his weblog
Joshua:
I just noticed you gave _Mona Lisa Smile_ the same number of stars as _28 Days Later_? Are you serious?Me:
... about 28 Days Later. I was mean to it because I seriously disliked the ending. Don't sell me a dark movie and then give it a hopeful happy ending. ALL of Europe had to be reeling with violent zombies, not just England. That's just status quo.Joshua:And I was overly nice to Mona Lisa because I hate the way critics automatically slam movies about female teachers.
So both reviews were biased, I admit it. Just in opposite directions.
On 28 Days and Mona Lisa Smile—me:I'm not sure the rest of Europe *did* need to be overrun with zombies, just because Britain's an island and the onset of the zombie virus happened so quickly that it would be hard to transmit over water. So it's not like someone could have a latent infection and make the journey over the channel. All the continent would have to do once they realized there was a problem in the UK would be to seal off the tunnel (the only route from the UK to Europe that a zombie could travel on foot) and the problem would be effectively confined to the island.
The thing about Mona Lisa Smile is that it was just so… fantastically irrelevant. I mean, it's a movie about the expectations placed on rich young women 40 years ago. Most young women today face a completely different set of expectations and there are about five times as many young women growing up under the poverty line (then and now) than there are going to private schools. Yet it never seems to occur to anyone to make a movie about a teacher in a public high school who teaches poor girls to overcome the (infinitely more repressive and violent) sexism that exists in the poorer parts of American society—to use birth control and go to college and dump guys who won't drop. So, to my experience, the insult of Mona Lisa Smile's self-congratulatory preachiness was compounded by its glaring failure to interrogate its own appallingly class-based assumptions about who's going to qualify to be "tomorrow's leaders, not their wives".
(1) There are many stories that should be told but are not.(2) There are other stories that may be over told from some perspectives.
(3) There's really no such thing as an overtold story. There's a badly told story, sure. But that's as far as I'll go.
Women of my generation, women like me -- definitely did not grow up middle class or above, but have got there by hook or crook -- need stories like Mona Lisa. It reminded me that I'm fortunate, and why, and about the women who paved the way. Corny, maybe, but nonetheless: true.