I'm In

No One Could Have Anticipated

Season of Misogyny.

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Looks Good

More info here and, esp., here.

NPR's not-too-enthusiastic review is here. (I am still waiting for NPR to EVER like an even vaguely feminist film.) The film fares better here.

You Should Go

All About the Archetypes

Can You Spot Them?



Persephone? Demeter? Hecate? Hades? Neptune?

Some things that you don't think you're going to enjoy, you enjoy. That's what makes it all interesting

G/Son's Going to Like This

Go Hermonie!

I've always longed for the sequel in which Hermonie discovers Wicca, applies all that she learned at Hogwarts, and does, indeed, become "quite the brightest Witch of her generation."

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Can't Wait to Take G/Son

More here.

Such A Geek

I'll probably go.

More here.

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We All Need Role Models

Have I mentioned that I totally adore Helen Mirren?

More here and here.

/hat tip to Mrs. F. in comments at Eschaton.

Fashion Statements

The witch's hat that Margaret Hamilton wore in the Wizard of Oz is going on sale and expected to sell for six figures.

It IS a great hat. I've never found a really good explanation for why witches are thought to wear pointy hats, but I do have a witch's hat, a gift from my creative friend K, that I wear at least on Samhein.

Do you have a witch's hat? What's it look like? Where'd you get it and when do you wear it?

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Agora

NYT gives Agora, opening today in NYC, a good review.

It's got to be better than SitC III or Prince of Persia.

This Cannot End Well

Demonizing witches. Gee, what a creative concept.

Maleficent

I am so there.

[T]he wickedest witch of all is coming back in a big way. And we don't just mean her penchant for supersizing. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Tim Burton is finally giving "Sleeping Beauty" baddie Maleficent the spin-off that's been in the works for a long time.

Oddly it is the success of another Disney enchantress -- The Red Queen -- in Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" that finally got the film some traction. "Alice" screenwriter Linda Woolverton was just hired to pen a script that would take a "Wicked"-like look at what gave Maleficent such a nagging need to always snag an invite to the King's parties. "Carrie"-like prom, perhaps?

Growing up I actually had nightmares about her. In fact, my most enduring memory involves seeing Maleficent's face in a giant mirror as the pool I was swimming in turned red and began to boil. So needless to say, I'm shaking in my jammies about how dark this version will be.

If "Maleficent" is successful (which it will be, let's face it), more bewitching origin tales could start bubbling up. The one I want to see is, "Ursula: How A Poor, Unfortunate Soul Rose To Power!"

Maybe that one can explain why male power (the mermaid's father, quite the unreasonable tyrant) is always legit, while female power is always evil.

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I'm Waiting Till It Comes Out On Netflix

More here

Oh, This Should Be Interesting

A British film competition will include an examination of the life of "Arthur Uther Pendragon."

Kyoko Miyake, 33, concentrated on Arthur Uther Pendragon, a motorcycling druid whose real name is John Rothwell. Mr Rothwell claims to be ‘the living embodiment of King Arthur’ and is preparing to stand in the general election in Salisbury. He lives in a caravan near Stonehenge paid for by supporters.

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Any Movie With The Line: "The Gods Are Real," Is On My List

Looks like a must-see.

More about how Hera is portrayed here.

Avatar: Is It A Pagan Movie?

This is an interesting take on the impact of the movie Avatar, not the least because it accepts the views of Australia's catholic bishop.

Other commentators have complained that Avatar promotes a leftist or greenie agenda but Cardinal Pell knows where the real danger lies. He is an expert on the activities of pagan propagandists. In 2001 he warned: "We must not allow the situation to deteriorate as it had in Elijah's time, 850 years before Christ, where monotheism was nearly swamped by an aggressive paganism, by the followers of Baal." (Baal was a Phoenician fertility god.)

Now it would seem that Baal is back, in the person of the writer-director James Cameron. Cardinal Pell is disturbed by Cameron's speculation that a planet might function as a giant organic computer into which all living things are connected.

Reviewing Avatar in The Sunday Telegraph last weekend, he wrote: "Worship of the powerful forces of nature is half right, a primitive stage in the movement towards acknowledging the one: the single Transcendent God, above and beyond nature. It is a symptom of our age that Hollywood is pumping out this old-fashioned pagan propaganda."

Love the conflation of all Paganism w/ Ba'al ( a deity with whom I am personally unacquainted). Not really.

What's really interesting to me is how threatened xians and conservative writers are about a film that shows how satisfying and profound it can be for people to have a relationship with their landbase, planet, natural world (and, no, those of us in such relationship don't regard our Planet as a super computer.) It's that element of Avatar that seems to be attracting huge attention (and pissing off Sullivan).

I also object as strongly as I know how (one of my favorite movie scenes is the one where, in A Few Good Men, Demi Moore objects, is overruled, and then "strongly objects") to the old notion that monotheism and a "transcendent" (aka broken relationship with nature) deity is a "step above" Paganism. And, the notion that Paganism is "old-fashioned."

And, I'm not going to bother with the notion that, until Avatar's ticket sales surpass those of The Sound of Music (a film released years and years and years ago) it's a flop. I could make, in about ten minutes of billable time, a damn good argument that The Sound of Music, with its focus on family, landbase, freedom, the overthrow of a patriarchal family regime, and underground movements, is a Pagan movie.

The article discusses Monbiot's points that Avatar reflects Europe's actions in America (and I'd argue in all of not-Europe, see, e.g., India, Africa, Asia, etc.). Yeah, that's the part of the movie that my brilliant friend E called "anvils" -- it hits you over the head. But Monbitot, who is far more brilliant that I can ever hope to be, misses the point. The point is that people who invade don't have the same relationship with the landbase/plantet/etc. as the people who have lived there forever. So it's a lot easier to strip resources, denude forests, kill off "natives" if you're doing those things to someplace "other" than if you're doing it to your own landbase. A movie that posits a relationship with an entire planet makes that process, absent instellar travel, a lot more difficult.

Finally, this article has has the regular capitalization problems and a problem with calling the movie "propaganda." Was Mel Gibson's movie "propaganda"? Have all the movies that adopt a patriarchial, xian approach to the univers (aka 98% of them) propaganda?

Lately, I'm thinking more and more about how the Na'vi "ground" by inserting a portion of their bodes into the planet. I may have more to say about that later.

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Frigg

I've adored Renee Russo ever since her role in the remake of the Thomas Crowne Affair and I can't wait to see her as Frigg.

I Told You It Was Going To Drive The Wingnuts Batshit Insane.

But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, “Avatar” is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.

You can read the whole petulant tantrum here. It looks pretty standard to me, but you never know what will set the fundies off.

Alice

I am so there.



More here.

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