Jennifer de Guzman » Movies

Lost in Austen and Not Sweating the Hard Part

Jennifer de Guzman — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:24:46 +0000

I recently watched the BBC series Lost in Austen, about Amanda Price, a contemporary London woman in love with the world of Jane Austen, who discovers, as it happens, she has a magic door in her bathroom that opens into the world of Pride and Prejudice. She and Elizabeth Bennet switch places, and soon Amanda finds herself fouling up the plot of her favorite novel, as her unconventional appearance and manners intrigue or infuriate everyone around her.

It was a frothy, enjoyable syllabub of an entertainment, a bit of Mary Sue writing on the part of Guy Andrews, taken up with zest by the cast. It’s like the make-believe games I played when I was a kid, inserting myself into my favorite books or moments in history. (Like Amanda Price, my presence invariably altered the way things were supposed to go — I think I once was an assassin who took out Octavius before he became emperor, thus allowing Cleopatra and Antony to win the war with Rome.) What was fun about this series was the facility of the plot: Andrews needed his heroine to go to Jane Austen land. A magic door to Jane Austen land appears in her bathroom. Why? Who knows. Turns out it doesn’t really matter.

It reminded me that I just need to push past the hardest part of plotting for me — getting the plot going. How will I set it all in motion? I ask myself. Will it be believable? I didn’t have qualms like that when I was nine years old and writing a story about my friends and I becoming invisible through the means of a batch of pancakes made from an improvised recipe. I can be a bit more sophisticated about it now, but what I need to remember is that the forward motion is what is important.

So now that I’ve finished the second revision of Sliver of Light, I’m going to try to plot out a graphic novel that has a premise that is a little unbelievable, just like Lost in Austen the stories I wrote as a kid. I’ve been stuck, but I’ll get myself unstuck and just get on with it already.

Praying Mantis Henchlady Will Slap a Bitch

Jennifer de Guzman — Sun, 24 May 2009 06:04:56 +0000

I was doing a little “research” for a Father’s Day “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” column, and when you have a dad like mine (he had his own kung fu school for a while, and one of my favorite things is a picture of him breaking a cinderblock with his fist), that “research” means watching old kung fu movies on YouTube. And that kind of research leads inevitably to this, from the 1978 classic Eagle’s Claw:

That’s sort exactly what I need in my life right now — so much so that I learned to make animated gifs from YouTube videos just so I could post this. It’s a skill that will no doubt come in handy should I want to waste time in the future.

I think I remember watching this movie with my dad. There’s a scene were the Praying Mantis sifu, a classic kung fu movie villain with long white hair and beard, is meditating on a bed of nails, and it is very familiar to me. It’s probable I did see this with him — we watched kung fu movies together a lot when I was little, and this would have been one I liked, since it has a couple of women who show off kung fu moves while wearing pretty outfits.

Eagle's Claw

Hypatia of Alexandria

Jennifer de Guzman — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:55:17 +0000

I’m excited about the new movie about Hypatia of Alexandria, Agora, starring Rachel Weisz and directed by Alejandro Amenábar. Here’s the teaser trailer (if you can’t see it, here’s the link):

The brief scene with what looks like Hypatia teaching is lovely — it reminds me of a J.W. Waterhouse painting. Also seen — the Pharos lighthouse, Christian mobs, female librarians scrambling to save the scrolls in the Library of Alexanria (which produces a visceral reaction in me — the idea of all the knowledge and literature lost made me cry when I first learned about it), and the toppling of a statue of Serapis (a syncretic god used by the Ptolemaic dynasty to unite disparate religious groups in Egypt).

Hypatia was the last head librarian of the Library of Alexandria, and the apocryphal story is that her father raised her to be the perfect human being — physically and intellectually. The IMDB listing for the movie calls her an atheist, but she was a Neoplatonist. In that philosophy God becomes a singular concept, which I find a bit similar to the tao of Taosim or what atheists like me half-jokingly invoke as “the Universe.” However, Neoplatonism allows for the existence of many gods and the belief in an immortal soul. So it’s not atheism as we would think of it at all. It actually is compatible with religious pluralism — but not so much with any religions that claim to be the one and only true religion. And thus the problem when Christianity came to Alexandria.

Though, interestingly, the Gospel of John begins in a clearly Platonist way: “In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And Hebrews 9:23-24 is even more blatantly Platonist in its understanding of Christ as one who communes on our behalf with the ideal world, of which our world is only a shadow: “Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.”

I’m interested in seeing how the movie treats this subject. The meaning I would take from a story like the destruction of classical Alexandria is that there are certain absolute stances that are incompatible with peaceful multicultural existence. It’s also a shame that the religious motivation for her murder has overshadowed the accomplishments of Hypatia’s life — she’s become a symbol, and I hope the excellent Rachel Weisz will make her a woman.

A biography of Hypatia:

Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr
by Michael A. B. Deakin

After Judgment Day

Jennifer de Guzman — Tue, 19 May 2009 06:13:30 +0000

In the post-apocalyptic world after Judgment Day:

Los Angeles is a barren wasteland.

San Francisco is home to evil technology and an apocalypse standard-issue ruined Golden Gate Bridge.

Women wear skin-tight jeans and have luxurious, full-bodied hair and perfect teeth.

But Bryce Dallas Howard is bogarting a stash of lip gloss and blush.

Everything is REALLY LOUD.

John Connor has a podcast.

And something so awesome happens that I involuntarily exclaimed, “WHOA!”

No doubt we’ll all enjoy this soon, now that SkyNet has been launched.

Tall, Dark, and Green-Blooded

Jennifer de Guzman — Sat, 09 May 2009 09:46:38 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen, we must discuss the most important question to arise from the new Star Trek movie:

Why is Spock so ridiculously hot?

Personally, I’m working with the theory that having (usually) superbly controlled emotions roiling beneath the surface is unfathomably sexy. A logical facade, in this sense, is no different from Byronic brooding. Why, ladies, why, will we always swoon for that?

There’s also the matter of Spock’s gigantic mind. Blogs and Twitter feeds (and everyone’s pants) are abuzz with mad Spock crushes, and it’s just more confirmation that, right now, an intellect is the ultimate in hot.

Or maybe it’s the sideburns.

And now for some under-the-cut talk with SPOILERS AHEAD.

I know J.J. Abrams has sort of shied from the idea that Star Trek is a commentary on or metaphor for the times, but creative works reflect the era in which they were made whether it is the creator’s intent or not. The alternate timeline of this Star Trek, in which Kirk’s tenacity and drive arises not from the encouragement of a strong father but by the absence of a dead one, in which the planet that represents the power of reason is destroyed out of revenge, only to emerge with renewed hope for the future is so much a distillation of where we are now in our country. Star Trek is not an intellectual movie, but it engages with our intellects anyway, all while showing us a good time.

…OK, not just our intellects.