Promising Young Woman.

I saw Promising Young Woman and it was really fucked up! And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it because wow, upsetting! Then I watched it again because I missed the first ten minutes the first time and because I convinced my boyfriend to watch it again with me. I was a little afraid rewatching it would refresh the fucked-up distressed feelings, but instead I was able to settle it better into my brain and I can now say that I find the movie really satisfying. I still can’t stop thinking about it, though, so I will try to articulate feelings!

Many spoilers obviously!

I am obsessed with how this movie treats both the fear/threat of gendered violence and, more indirectly, mental health stuff. One of the most compelling things about Cassie is that for the most part she seems utterly fearless in situations that women in our culture normally perceive as dangerous, because it is understood that men can be violent and scary. In fact, a person being subjected to unwanted sexual advances, especially one socialized to be polite and defer to others’ preferences, will often not risk escalating a situation by physically resisting out of fear that their (often larger/stronger) attacker will become more violent and the assault will be even more traumatic. This specter of potential violence helps facilitate less forceful rapes, which are much more common. From the beginning, the movie focuses on these more opportunistic rapists who are confident that they are morally in the clear just because they’re not using physical violence, just targeting women they think won’t/can’t resist. As we see in the scene with Neil, once Cassie reveals that she is not drunk at all, this type of dude backs ALL the way off. She is presented as having all the power in these situations, but it maybe goes against a viewer’s expectation of what “safety” or “danger” looks like, because on some level it still feels a bit like she’s playing Russian roulette and the next tally-mark guy might be the one who doesn’t back off and instead gets violent. On a first watch it seems reasonable to just go with the Female Empowerment! Revenge Thriller! vibe, but in retrospect I think her fearlessness is one of the reasons that she pings us early on as a little unhinged, and it’s worth revisiting that once we realize that the movie isn’t actually as crazy-slasher genre-stylized as it wants us to think it is at the beginning. (As we gather when it becomes clear she didn’t actually murder Jerry/mastermind any revenge rapes, etc.)

The fact that we are primed to see her as the one with the power and the men she encounters as comically pathetic makes it extra super shocking when she gets literally violently murdered! This is not the movie we thought we were watching at all! But actually there were cracks in her fearlessness earlier on as well. When she’s at the lawyer’s house, she flinches away when he approaches and grabs her hands to beg her to forgive him. And in the scene where she smashes the guy’s car with a tire iron (probably my favorite!), after he acts scared of her and drives away she is shaking and takes a minute to get a grip on herself again. So looking back, she is obviously trying to cultivate this image of herself as this untouchable angel of retribution, but she’s still a real enough person that her body sometimes betrays her and shows fear. This isn’t a Jessica Jones-style power fantasy where she’s literally a superhero who has nothing physically to fear, or even a stylized world where she has genre-armor, instead it allows her to be real enough to be actually vulnerable, which as a viewer I find so much more fascinating and sympathetic.

So by the time you get to the end, things have been recontextualized, and the more logical explanation for her behavior is that she’s just been a tad suicidal all along! The movie deliberately avoids, or puts off until the end, any explicit discussion of mental health (we never even get it confirmed that Nina killed herself!) and has everyone dance around it instead. Her parents do finally allude to it when they mention that she was recently “doing better” when they are filing the missing persons report, and we have the unsettling scene with the detective talking to Ryan and practically feeding him the lines about how “she may have wanted to hurt herself.” As she continuously asserts, she’s not crazy — maybe she just doesn’t have a lot to live for. (Sidenote: as a certified Depressed Person(TM), I have given some thought to how mental illness can be understood as the interplay of internal “pathology” (medical model) vs. external cultural/environmental factors, and there’s probably a lot of smart things one could say about that with regard to this movie and gender and stuff but I’m not sure what exactly so I will continue with where I was actually going.)

Anyway it’s obviously still really dark that her “victory” had to come at the expense of her life and I totally understand people having an extremely negative reaction, but there’s something really satisfying about it for me, especially on the second watch. The first time I was processing and trying to understand the character and worrying about her, but the second time, knowing that literally the worst thing happens but she plans for it and still comes out on top allowed me to enjoy how utterly badass she is and to make peace with the ending. In a fucked up way, being really attached to avoiding violence or even surviving at all would have weakened her and made her less effective, and she seems to reject that. Hell, from the very beginning she waits until the men who take her home actually assault her, rather than cutting them off earlier and giving them the chance to deny that that’s where it was going. It’s like she weaponizes the fact that she has a bit of a death wish in order to make the threat of violence irrelevant so she can just do whatever she wants without fear, even though she lives in the same world the rest of do where the danger exists. I just love that the movie didn’t shrug away reality in order for her to win, despite all the misdirection in the early parts. And I love the character that she ended up being, which wasn’t fully defined until we knew what kind of story she was in. The writers knew exactly what they were doing with this movie and I feel like the story they were writing couldn’t have ended any other way.

Also the soundtrack slaps.

Gender Balance Perception

My friend Lillian:

You once told me about a phenomenon where people perceive crowds as being gender balanced when they are about 25% female, and perceive them as female-heavy when they’ve 50% female. Do you recall the name of this or where I might find a citation?

After some investigation, the short answer seems to be that I was full of shit. My bad for repeating something I read and didn’t fact-check. Here’s my attempt to correct that.

So, I found a Reddit post asking basically the same question:

Every now and then I’ll see blog posts reporting studies like this:

“Also in a mixed-gender group, when women talk 25% of the time or less, it’s seen as being equally balanced. If women talk between 25% and 50% of the time, they are seen as “dominating the conversation.” “ (example source — the blog she is claiming to reblog doesn’t exist)

And:

“We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study, where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.” (source)

I’ve tried looking for those two studies without any luck. I want to know whether women share the same perception as men for these things. I also want to see the actual studies where they found these things — I want to be able to cite these studies legitimately rather than saying “so I heard this on the internet and there are no citations and I can’t actually find any evidence of these studies”.

Has anybody seen these studies or has pointers to similar articles? Thanks!

I definitely originally read about this in connection to studies about representation in film, so the original source seems to be this NPR interview with Geena Davis (also linked in the Reddit post). Here’s all the relevent text:

My theory is that since all anybody has seen, when they are growing up, is this big imbalance – that the movies that they’ve watched are about, let’s say, 5 to 1, as far as female presence is concerned – that’s what starts to look normal. And let’s think about – in different segments of society, 17 percent of cardiac surgeons are women; 17 percent of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isn’t that strange that that’s also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if we’re actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when you’re an adult, you don’t notice?

…

We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study, where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.

…

What we’re, in effect, doing is training children to see that women and girls are less important than men and boys. We’re training them to perceive that women take up only 17 percent of the space in the world. And if you add on top of that, that so many female characters are sexualized – even in things that are aimed at little kids – that’s having an enormous impact as well.

The actual statistics about gender representation in film that she refers to are supported by studies by Stacy Smith at the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative,  including several that were “prepared for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media,” but, as costheta notes in the Reddit thread, the article mentioned “doesn’t actually talk about perception of over/under-representation of women. It’s an interesting article (how many women are represented on the screen, how sexualized they are vs. men) but doesn’t actually support the statement in #2 at all.”

Regarding the statistics about “dominating the conversation,” Reddit user Lil_Z comments that they may have been paraphrased from Dale Spender’s Man Made Language, but as it is not quoted directly and I don’t have the book, that’s as far as I went with that.

These claims about “perception” seem to just come down to anecdotal evidence of cultural norms and topics of discussion. The first and third paragraph of the Geena Davis quote, which claim that we see unequal representation as “normal,” are perfectly reasonable, it just doesn’t necessarily follow that we incorrectly perceive unequal representation as actually equal. In fact, one of the more relevant Stacy Smith studies, “Industry Leaders’ Perceptions of Gender in Family Films,” finds that content creators are absolutely aware of the gender imbalance, then goes on to investigate the perceived reasons for this. One study I found, “Rapid extraction of mean emotion and gender from sets of faces,” supports the idea that people can quickly and accurately perceive average gender breakdown of groups, and this press release on the article “Ensemble Perception and Threat Evaluations of Groups Varying in Sex Ratio” agrees and adds that a greater male-to-female ratio is perceived as more threatening. (Fun fact!)

Popular journalism on the subject helps muddy the issue, for example: “How 17 Equals 49.6: The Amazing Multiplying Women,” cites many different types of evidence, including complaints about a “female-biased” history podcast, an article that establishes common beliefs about language use using proverbs, an essay whose author seems to believe that more recent young adult fiction is targeted towards and features girls than boys, and the Geena Davis quotes. Virginia Valian, a professor quoted in the article, characterizes this disconnect between beliefs and reality as a “cognitive error,” but it’s not clear exactly what kind she means. Perception of the gender balance of a group of people you’re actually looking at is a very different kind of “perception” from that of a group of people you’ve only heard about, which is presumably much more susceptible to biases based on exposure and newsworthiness (for example: female CEOs in the world compared to male ones, perhaps).

It seems that people (like past me) making valid points about gender imbalances that are considered normal in our culture are (knowingly or not) overstating their case to make it sound more scientific. Probably people can judge the male/female balance of things just fine with direct evidence, it’s just that some of them think that even objectively less-than-representative numbers of women are still too many women, and we’re all trained to see numbers of women above a certain level as somewhat abnormal in many contexts. Most people making specific, incorrect claims about the numbers of women in things are probably just being disingenuous or lazy, with no cognitive errors in perception necessary.

Five songs I like, with a theme: “C’mon.”

Dear friends! Apparently it has been four years since I’ve updated this. Sadly, I will not be taking advantage of the time I have spent becoming wiser and (maybe?) less embarrassing, and will instead continue with a post I was planning to write a million years ago. Enjoy!

Given my feminist leanings, “trying to coerce someone into having sex with you” might seem like an odd theme for Songs I Like, but what can I say? They are all so upbeat and full of joy.

1. Only the Good Die Young – Billy Joel

So come on, Virginia, show me a sign
Send up a signal, I'll throw you a line
The stained-glass curtain you're hiding behind
Never lets in the sun
Darlin' only the good die young

Don’t be Catholic! Have sex with Billy Joel! Come on, the sinners are much more fun. Hell, I’m convinced, this is some quality music. But someone should probably tell Kenny Chesney from “I Go Back” that this song is not actually about someone dying young. Also all the Glee fans sad about Cory Monteith on Mark Salling’s cover of this song, which is actually pretty good, for Glee? But yeah, it’s about sex, you guys.

2. Come On Eileen – Dexys Midnight Runners

Come on Eileen, oh, I swear what he means
At this moment you mean everything
You in that dress, oh, my thoughts I confess
Verge on dirty
Oh, come on Eileen

So I linked the original, but the correct version of this song is of course the cover by Save Ferris. Which I was sure was in 10 Things I Hate About You, but apparently is not! Just some other Save Ferris songs and a bunch of Letters to Cleo, which of course also come highly recommended! As does 90s angry girl music of the Indie Rock persuasion in general. Confession: I sometimes sit down and listen to the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack. Anyway, where “Only the Good Die Young” is a little more subtle and thoughtful, “Come On Eileen” is pretty blatant and straight-up celebratory. Too ra loo rye ay!

3. Valerie – The Zutons

Since I've come on home,
Well my body's been a mess
And I've missed your ginger hair
And the way you like to dress
Won't you come on over
Stop making a fool out of me
Why don't you come on over, Valerie?

Wow, the original of this is wicked slow, I had no idea. Here’s Amy Winehouse, and I actually love Naya Rivera’s version (more Glee, not sorry). And just for fun, I’ll throw in some Louis Tomlinson from One Direction (more on them shortly). Here we have another song that’s way better recast with female vocals, sorry, it just is. Also weird songs with not particularly cheerful lyrics but cheerful music are my favorite.

4. C’mon C’mon – One Direction

Hey
I been watching you all night
There's something in your eyes
Saying come on, come on and dance with me baby
Yeah
The music is so loud
I wanna be yours now
So come on, come on and dance with me baby

This was my favorite One Direction song! In the early albums, they spend so much time being perfectly devoted teenage-girl-fantasy boyfriends that it’s nice to hear some pure bubblegum dance-pop where they callously ditch the girl they came with because you’re so hot (yes, you). I still like this one.

5. C’mon – Kesha

C'mon 'cause I know what I like
And you're looking just like my type
Let's go for it just for tonight
C'mon, c'mon, c'mon

Perfectly explicit about subject matter: check. Written from a female point of view: check. Incredibly weird music video involving rather more people in animal suits than I am strictly comfortable with? Check. I adore this song and Kesha is flawless. Questions?

Edit: Bonus country! Give In To Me – Leighton Meester and Garrett Hedlund

I'll use my eyes to draw you in
Until I'm under your skin
I'll use my lips, I'll use my arms
Come on, come on, come on
Give in to me

Message-wise, this song is technically really disturbing and creepy, but damn if those two don’t somehow make it sexy. The music, and a few moments of actual chemistry, elevate this disaster trainwreck of a movie up from complete trash to still complete trash, but I sort of love it anyway.

The Primer You Never Knew You Wanted on How To Tell Apart the Voices of the One Direction Boys

Fact: To the untrained ear, all of the boys from One Direction seem to have indistinguishable auto-tuned pop-clone voices.

Fact: If you listen to all of their songs on repeat enough times, you start to pick out the distinctions.

Hypothesis: This is a fascinating topic and everyone is eager to hear about my (purely impressionistic, utterly unscientific) findings, described without the benefit of hardly any technical vocal knowledge or vocabulary! (On the other hand, I could use technical linguistic terms. I just choose not to.)

Note: Initially I was considering diligently linking illustrative clips of every single claim I make here, but then I decided that was too much work, since I’m really just writing this to entertain myself. Hopefully it is entertaining, even for all of you not familiar with the source material. But if you would like to follow along at home, I have written a short guide that probably took more work than it would have taken to just link clips!

Short Guide

If you would like to try to replicate my incredibly scholarly research methods, I recommend YouTube searching “[1D song name] lyrics + pictures” a lot. The solos will be accompanied by the picture of the boy singing it, which unfortunately means you have to know which one is which, so I have helpfully provided the following sub-guide! Niall is the blond one, Zayn is the non-white one, Harry is the one with curly hair, and Louis and Liam look basically the same except Louis dresses more flamboyantly and doesn’t change his hair style as frequently. (Okay, you might have to just suck it up and google image search the last two. I’m doing the best I can.)

Since nothing is ever simple, the lyric videos are sometimes wrong about who’s singing, but in that case the comments are usually full of corrections, sometimes entertainingly accompanied by accusations about “fake fans” who can’t even tell the boys’ voices apart. Occasionally there’s so much disagreement in the comments that it’s impossible to tell whether the original video was right or not, in which case the only reliable method is to pick out who’s singing which part in a live recording, but that’s an advanced technique and probably not worth the effort.

I do have a few recommendations for songs to start off with, since some of them are more stripped-down and make it easier to pick out the solos. “Little Things” comes to mind first, but it’s also a ridiculous song with terrible lyrics. “Over Again” also suffers from shitty, awkward lyrics, although I do like the chorus. “Change My Mind,” “Truly, Madly, Deeply” (Gag. I know. I like this one though), “More Than This” and “Moments” are also pretty quiet, and therefore also unrelentingly sappy, so be warned if that’s not your thing. If you’re looking at it by album, their voices are on average less tinkered with on Take Me Home than on Up All Night, and Take Me Home has the added benefit of featuring everyone much more equally. (Louis and Niall actually get solos of more than two lines!)

On that note, no game of “Guess who’s singing now!” would be complete without taking into account how the frequency and placement of each boy’s solos can help you narrow down your options and improve your accuracy!

As alluded to above, Harry and Liam, followed by Zayn, get the majority of the solos on Up All Night, the first album. Statistically speaking, the first or second solo section of a song before the first chorus is also much more likely to be Harry or Liam (or Zayn) than Niall or Louis, even on Take Me Home, though the boys get a more roughly equal number of solos overall on that album. Harry also does more of the stripped-away breakdown repeats of the chorus than anyone else, Zayn tends to do bridges, and Louis and Niall solos are often next to each other, as are Harry and Liam solos. (It’s worth noting that in keeping with the generally unscientific spirit of this particular research project, all of my “statistical” analysis is super half-assed because I didn’t feel like actually counting how often everything happens. Probably still accurate-ish, though; I wasn’t kidding about listening to this shit practically nonstop.)

Harry

Harry is the adorable one with the sexy voice, which is working pretty well for him because I’m pretty sure more people are in love with him than any of the others. (No joke: on a live recording, one piece of evidence pointing towards a Harry solo is when the volume of the screaming girls goes up a notch). Basically, he’s got the rock-star voice. It’s the deepest and the raspiest, and it’s one of the easier ones to pick out, particularly when he’s scraping along near the bottom of his range. At medium-to-higher pitches it comes out a little more variable, and he can sound a lot like Zayn or Niall at times, but if you’re listening carefully there’s still a little Harry-specific grit in it.

Very occasionally Harry pulls out some nice crooning high notes as well, like in “Gotta Be You,” but in general falsetto is mostly Liam’s thing. There is some evidence that Harry’s voice overall has gotten deeper even just in between Up All Night and Take Me Home, which would account for some of the pitch-range variability that can make him harder to pin down. In any case, it’s all very swoon-worthy.

Liam

Besides his smooth-as-silk falsetto, which is very beautiful and tender and whatnot and a dead giveaway that it’s him, Liam has a really solid, really generically pleasant deep-ish pop voice that doesn’t vary much. It sounds a lot like Harry’s at medium-to-low pitches, only smoother. If something sounds really bland and featureless and you can’t place it because it sounds like it could be anyone, always guess Liam; since he has so much solo time you’ll probably be right. (On the other hand, if you can’t place something because it doesn’t really sound like anyone, I find it’s usually Harry.)

Even Liam’s little poppy breathy cut-offs sound conservative and kind of boring (particularly compared to Zayn’s dramatic flair). He doesn’t usually put a whole lot of emotion in his voice, but it’s not exactly that it’s particularly flat and unemotional either; he’s perfectly adequately expressive. In fact, it kind of feels like it’s just dead center on every possible scale. He has a really nice, very controlled voice, which sounds pretty but doesn’t have much personality.

Zayn

Zayn’s voice, on the other hand, is all over the place. Technically it’s fairly impressive, but it’s super showy and over-the-top and a little bit nasal and not really my thing at all. He’s always the one doing all the soulful riffing and a lot of the more obvious harmonies and dramatic flourishes. If Harry’s gritty, then Zayn is wobbly, which to me feels like a bit much for pop music. (Semi-related sidenote: I was once singing along to my music while driving cross-country, and I listened to Phantom of the Opera and a showtunes playlist immediately followed by a bunch of music from Glee, and I had to abruptly flatten my voice out and completely ditch the vibrato to mimic the poppy Glee deliveries after wobbling all over the place with Sarah Brightman and Co. It was super enlightening.)

Another thing that can help in picking Zayn out is that his accent comes through in his singing more than anyone else besides probably Louis. While Harry, Liam, and Niall could pretty much pass for American, Zayn sounds neither American nor quite like the most common (BBC-esque) representation of a British accent abroad, and I’m terrible at different British accents so I have no idea what it is (the internet says he’s from Bradford, so I guess it’s a Bradford accent), but in any case his vowel quality is different and he leans on the vowels a lot so they come out kind of diphthong-y, he fades on final consonants more than the other boys, and in general he realizes some of his consonants in ways that sound almost blurred to me.

Louis

Louis’s accent sounds more classic BBC to me, and it’s most noticeable to my American ears in the way he enunciates consonants, sometimes seeming to highlight final consonants by promoting them to the beginning of the next syllable. Occasionally he’ll come out with a really British-sounding vowel, as well, and his occasional -in’ endings (in place of -ing) and un-English-sounding pronounced r‘s often sound a little awkward to me, like he’s thinking about it too hard because it’s not how he naturally speaks.

Even accent aside, for me, Louis’s voice is by far the easiest one to pick out. It’s the highest, and it’s got a really distinctive kind of light, delicate sound to it. It’s one of those voices where you can practically hear him smiling, which I apparently go for (see Currington, Billy). The only times he doesn’t sound really immediately distinctive to me is when his vocals have been filtered and messed with a lot on the recording, and even then the only other boy you can really mistake him for is Niall, since they’re the two with the higher voices.

Louis also gets breathy or lets his voice crack (with emotion!) a lot at the top of his range, which Niall doesn’t do at all and which results in an endearingly whiny effect (full disclosure: I developed an embarrassingly massive crush on him, which I’ve since only mostly gotten under control). In conclusion: it is super adorable when he gets all squeaky and tries to sound emotional and also like he’s not British when clearly he is.

Niall

Niall has a high-ish, flat-ish, slightly gravelly voice with pleasingly clear, light overtones. He’s not at Harry-levels of gravel, although they do sometimes sound similar enough to mix up. He is also almost magical in his lack of affect and clumsiness of phrasing, which I don’t want to be the case because I really like him and I think his voice is pretty, but the boy is not a talented singer, technique-wise. He’s just not very expressive, and he lands the words right on the beats in a way that sounds very dutiful and correct and proper but so awkward, because they don’t flow naturally at all. Obviously he should channel all of his natural beat-keeping abilities into his guitar-playing, because I think that’s more his calling. (Also, incidentally, good for him for being the only one besides Liam who even plays guitar at all.)

It can be hard to get a sense of his voice because he has fewer solos overall, and his voice also seems to get fiddled with during production more on average than the other boys. (This is also true for Louis, but not quite to the same degree, I think.) His Irish accent is no help for identification purposes, because it doesn’t come through in his singing at all. And though there are plenty to go around, in my opinion his solos contain a disproportionately larger share of the more stupid lyrics, particularly when total solo time is taken into account. Poor Niall. So if it’s a dumb verse, delivered badly, it’s probably him.

Conclusion

You’re welcome.

Although if you’re actually using this as a pedagogical tool, you should probably know that I still mix them up or can’t place them fairly frequently, and I’m pretty much over the weird obsessive phase where I care, so maybe I’m not the most qualified teacher. But anyway, thanks for playing!

Bi-Mart Willamette Country Music Festival: Days Two and Three

Followup to this. Okay this one is going to be much less detailed because SIX MONTHS LATER. Oops. Also formatting will be different (read: lazier)! Deal!

So the church people found me in the car in my pajamas at about 7:30 am and were like, dude, private property, so I cleared out. The next night I found a much better spot, all hidden away and super secret. Go me. Not too long of a wait to get back into parking lot either day. By constantly walking back and forth between the venue and my car to get food all morning and afternoon (I think it was four times on Saturday?) I managed to only spend about ten bucks a day on dinnertime food, which was pretty sweet. I have fond memories of a couple of teriyaki chicken kabobs ($6 I think?) and a pulled pork sandwich ($9).

Saturday! Britnee Kellogg had a pretty but not super impressive voice, and her songs were also pretty but not very memorable. My favorite was “Home” (YouTube link!). Bomshel (singer + fiddle-player girl duo) didn’t grab me either, particularly. Kristy Osmunson did fiddle the hell out of a really badass cover of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” though.

The chairs started to fill up a bit more in time for Lee Brice, who’s at about a Rodney-Atkins level of exposure, I think. My main takeaways from his set were that (1) Women are crazy, and (2) Love is crazy. I feel like crazy is supposed to be a good thing, though? Either way, it’s absolutely a pattern for him, observe:

• Recorded “She Ain’t Right” (Crazy got nothin’ on her…she ain’t right, but she’s just right for me”)
• Co-wrote “Crazy Days” for Adam Gregory (“Come on baby take my hand, let’s find a way back to our crazy days”)
• Recorded “Love Like Crazy” (“They called them crazy when they started out…”)
• Co-wrote “Crazy Girl” for Eli Young Band (“Crazy girl, don’t you know that I love you?”)

It’s a little concerning.

But now Billy Currington! You guys, pictures of Billy Currington do nothing for me. As his set got closer and closer, the fangirl vibe around me got more and more pronounced, and I was just confused, particularly since I only had a vague idea of who he was or what songs of his I would recognize, and the ones I did know were his I didn’t even like that much. But then he got on the stage and it all made sense, because he was so much fucking fun. There is something really, really attractive to me about a performer who just looks like he loves what he’s doing and is having the time of his life every second he’s up there, so I formed my very own crush pretty fast and I haven’t looked back yet. Even his guitar-strap-shaped sweat-mark was endearing. After watching him sing his entire set barefoot and through a ridiculous shit-eating grin, I can’t even listen to his songs anymore without hearing the smile in his voice, and it is super cute and makes me smile too. I even found myself forgiving the totally clueless frat-boy-entitled vibe that pops up periodically (Really? You want me to love you like your dog, unconditionally and without ever complaining or disagreeing? Cute.), and thinking things that sounded worryingly close to “well, boys will be boys.” Yup, definitely a crush. So my opinions of the songs themselves still vary pretty dramatically, but favorites are “Good Directions” and “Love Done Gone” (I’m a huge sucker for people singing cheerfully about sad things).

I was actually kind of underwhelmed by Martina McBride, which I was not expecting. I guess Jennifer Nettles is a hard act to follow, even for Martina fucking McBride? I feel pretty confident that she has an unbelievable voice, so maybe it was just an off night. The other thing that made it a little less fun was that my knowledge of her music is mostly limited to Shine, which didn’t make much of an appearance on the setlist, so I didn’t know most of the songs. She did do “Wrong Baby Wrong” though, which I love, and I thought “Teenage Daughters,” which I’d never heard before, was actually really cute and fun. It did kind of get to the point where it was really late and I was tired and I wanted her to just sing “Independence Day” so I could go sleep. But since that’s one of the best songs ever, the wait wasn’t too much of a hardship and she did not disappoint when it did come. I still love you, Martina McBride.

Sunday, Jana Kramer! Who is drop-dead gorgeous, and who we know only and entirely from “Why Ya Wanna,” because it was playing on the radio constantly. Although apparently she’s also an actress. I do like that song, but I should have been able to predict from her voice on the recording that I wouldn’t be impressed by a live performance, and I wasn’t. See, at this point I was starting to get really nervous that I must have higher standards for female than for male vocalists, because the female ones kept disappointing me, so I was somewhat invested in finding a counterexample. Do I really expect all women to be able to sing like Jennifer Nettles? Do I just think all male country singers’ voices are hot, and their deep voices dull my critical faculties, or were they actually better? This is still kind of an open question. I really wanted to enjoy the women’s acts more than I did.

Amy Clawson, who nobody has heard of because I guess she’s a super local country personality/singer, didn’t really help either. Her voice is better than Jana Kramer’s, but I still wasn’t that into it. She was also hosting the whole thing and had already been grating on me, particularly with the weird emotionally manipulative foster-kid thing on Saturday night, where they brought out a bunch of foster children onto the stage and she sang something really cloying that I’ve blocked out of my memory and talked about how the Christian thing to do is to take in foster children (I’m paraphrasing). So, yeah. I guess I hate women? (Also foster kids.)

I also kind of hate The Band Perry, who were next! Kimberly Perry, the lead singer, actually has a good voice though! So that was a relief, even though I hate all of their songs. Except “You Lie,” which I like okay. I actually didn’t even know that song was them at the time, but finding out didn’t really help them much. You can’t really recover from “If I Die Young.” Also they’re siblings, which is weird, and their fashion sense is like goth country or something, which is also weird, and they all have god-awful haircuts, especially the guys. But, um, where was I? I guess they put on a pretty decent show, if you like that kind of thing. (Naturally, it wasn’t until after I saw them live that they finally came out with a song that I genuinely like. Go figure.)

Last one! Trace Adkins! Oh my god, Trace Adkins, stop trying to be sexy, it’s so unbelievably uncomfortable. Also a lot of his songs are super creepy and weird. (“Hillbilly Bone,” anyone? Oh my god I did not know until I just looked up that video that that’s actually a Blake Shelton song. Ewwwwww. Okay that actually undermines my point. But Trace Adkins still collaborated.) Anyway! I have to say though, there’s only so much you can do when everyone around you is screaming and fanning themselves and then he sings “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk.” You just kind of go with it. So yeah, I started screaming too, and it was pretty fun. The power of live music! But oh my god stopping thrusting awkwardly, Trace. Please. I did really like “This Ain’t No Love Song,” which I’d never heard before. I’m such a girl.

And then we all hiked back to our cars and filed out of the massive parking lot and it took four million years and then I had to get gas and drive for two hours and I was so tired I felt kind of delirious and probably shouldn’t have been driving! But it all ended up okay and I didn’t even get too bad of a sunburn and also it was pretty awesome overall. The end.

Perrier’s Bounty.

Okay I have to update because I just saw an Irish dark-comedy-type Cillian Murphy movie that was actually any good, after a couple of pretty shitty ones, so I’m excited. On the Edge (2001, mental hospital romantic dramedy!) started out promising and got really predictable and bland, and Intermission (2003, ensemble crime comedy!) felt like a pointless jumble of unsympathetic characters doing stupid shit. Perrier’s Bounty (2009, more crime! more dark comedy!) was slightly cleverer and a lot more fun. I recommend.

Cillian Murphy plays rather similar self-absorbed, self-destructive little shits in all three movies, but this is the only one where I actually wanted him to get the girl. Suicidal Cillian from the first movie mellowed out rather abruptly thanks to an overabundance of nonsensical movie logic, and rooting for the couple felt like agreeing that beating depression is really all about the magical healing power of LOVE. Also she was basically the turned-on-by-her-own-blood instead of into-quirky-music version of the manic pixie dreamgirl. Post-breakup Cillian from movie number two, of the misogynistic rants directed towards his ex, was an irrational, irritating asshole for about an hour and a half, but he finally got over himself enough to say that he loves her and wants to be with her forever bleh bluh bloo so of course everything’s forgiven and she takes him back. You deserve better, girl who looked familiar for the whole movie but who I couldn’t place until I looked it up later! (Turns out it was Kelly Macdonald, the girl from Trainspotting!)

The Perrier’s Bounty version of Cillian Murphy is a fairly violent, insensitive fuckup with lots of pent-up rage and fear and probably a bit of a death wish, but his nastiness somehow seems at least mostly understandable, perhaps because it’s such a transparent front for the pissed off, scared little boy underneath. Also I’m a bit of a sucker for a (fictional) guy who can channel all of his not-giving-a-fuck into utter fearlessness; it kind of takes my breath away when shit goes down and all that courage and loyalty that was packed away, maybe under self-absorption or apathy or perceived powerlessness, comes out as OKAY, GO AHEAD, KILL ME. Cillian Murphy is particularly good at using his body to say both “I am a skinny, unobtrusive everyman-type” (sub-version: “I’m obnoxious and my anger is misdirected and ineffective, making me look silly and overwrought”) and “I am made of STEEL, what I’m doing is RIGHT, and even if you kill me you can’t beat me,” often with the same character. (See also: 28 Days Later, The Wind That Shakes the Barley). So yeah, I definitely buy into the whole self-sacrificial hero dude thing on an emotional level, even though intellectually I don’t actually think dudes should be treated as more expendable and I don’t think being a “hero” excuses being an asshole or makes you more valuable (which is a bit of a weird paradox anyway, given the expendable thing). And this is starting to sound familiar!

Anyway! Movie! Messed up, tongue-in-cheek, lots of fun gun violence, plotted up rather nicely with several genuine surprises, and the romance bit wasn’t overdone and was actually surprisingly sweet. Fun fact! Two Hands, with a super-young Heath Ledger, is basically the Australian version of this movie, complete with protagonist owing money to terrifying gangsters and fucked up violent humor! I also recommend. I feel like Hollywood is really letting us down by not producing more fucked up violent crime comedies. At least the rest of the English-speaking world is more on top of it.

Bi-Mart Willamette Country Music Festival: Day One

Preliminaries

• Drive Time: two hours
• Time spent waiting in the line of cars to get into the parking lot: about an hour
• Walk from parking spot to entrance: about 15 minutes, plus an extra 10 or so when I had to backtrack because I’d left my ticket in the car (later, knowing where I was going and walking faster without chair and backpack, it was more like 10)
• Arrival time I was shooting for: 1:00 PM (I thought that was when the first act started, but it was actually when the gates opened)
• Time I walked in the gates: 3:00 PM, just as Canaan Smith started his set.

Canaan Smith

I honestly barely remember his stuff. The impression I’ve retained is that the songs were pretty, but kind of boring. I feel like they were mostly about love? He had a nice voice, and he’s really attractive, in a V-neck-and-scruff, frat-boy-charming kind of way. I think I was paying more attention to his face on the screen than I was to the music, because it was very pretty. And I was mesmerized by his sparkly earring.

The saddest thing about the earlier acts was that there were rows and rows of chairs that people had brought in to claim their spots and then just left empty, because they were pretty much just there to see Sugarland. And the people like me who were there but didn’t have VIP tickets weren’t allowed ahead of the barrier that marked off the VIP section anyway, even though it was almost completely empty, so the poor guy on the stage must have felt pretty alone up there. There was barely any point in clapping or cheering, even, because he couldn’t hear you anyway.

James Wesley

Deeper voice, squarer jaw (not really my type, incidentally), more songs about pick-up trucks and churches etc. He was also trying really hard to banter with the fans and be likeable and put on a good show with personality, and I suppose it was admirable that he was making the effort despite how small the crowd was, but it didn’t really work on me. If the music is good enough and my mood and the energy is right, I will cheer right along when they talk about god and real men and not give a shit that I don’t buy into any of it, but it takes quite a bit of charisma for me to turn my critical faculties down like that. James Wesley didn’t quite have it.

Rodney Atkins

Rodney Atkins’ songs sound almost exactly like James Wesley’s, and he’s cultivating an almost identical persona, but he’s had a nice handful of number-one singles that get tons of radio play, so the crowd was bigger and we knew the words to sing along, and it was easier to imagine he could actually hear us when we screamed. It’s hard to say whether he’s actually better at the stage-banter or whether the larger audience just makes it feel more legitimate and less awkward, but by half-way through his set I was pretty into it. “Cleaning This Gun (Come On In Boy)” is a really fun song (despite the terrible implications for gender relations, of course), and I’ve heard “Take a Back Road” approximately four million times and I still don’t hate it, so he could be doing a lot worse. Recommended if you like songs about America, farming, and being a dad. Oh, and according to Wikipedia he was arrested last year (and later cleared) for allegedly assaulting his now-ex-wife. CUTE. Perhaps I will not be rushing to join the fan club.

Sugarland

Jennifer Nettles is six months pregnant and she put on a fucking unbelievable show. There’s no need to tweak her vocals in studio recordings to make them sound better, that’s for damn sure. She has such an amazing voice, and she completely nailed this one. She chatted with us a bit as well and was plenty charming, but mostly she let the music speak for itself. One of the things I really like about a lot of Sugarland songs is how sassy and unapologetic they are, and she just had so much fun with them, it was infectious. I was more or less grinning like an idiot for the entire show, and I and everyone around me were standing up for the whole thing too, singing along and frequently screaming like crazy people. It made me wish I knew every word to EVERY SONG, instead of mostly just the choruses of the hits. I did get to belt along to all of “Baby Girl,” though, and they closed with “Something More,” which was a beautiful and transcendent experience filled with relief (I was actually starting to get anxious, irrationally, that they wouldn’t do it) and joy, because it is one of my favorite songs ever. I also really like “Stay,” which I (oddly enough, since it shows off her voice so much) didn’t even realize was a Sugarland song . Also Jennifer’s white coat with the rainbow angel wings on the back was super stylish and awesome. And PS I love you too Kristian Bush, you are great.

In Summary

• Trips back to the car for food: One, and my timing was terrible, trying to get back in just as the crowds of people who had worked on Friday were arriving to see the bigger acts. I heard later that it took people 45 minutes to get through that line, so I would have missed almost all of Rodney Atkins if I hadn’t talked my way into the VIP entrance (through a combination of genuine ignorance initially, persistence, and winsomeness). For the rest of the weekend I didn’t leave the venue after about five or six just to be safe.
• Money spent: $35 for a cowboy hat, which after some deliberation I decided to just go for, because even if I never wear it again it kept my face and neck from being burnt to a crisp for three full days, and looked stylish all the while; $3 on a macaroni salad that I immediately regretted buying because it was gross. I threw most of it away.
• Time to escape exit traffic: only about 15 minutes, since I lucked out by having been parked right near the exit when I arrived.
• Where I parked illegally to sleep in my car: in some grass in the shadow of a bunch of trees behind a church parking lot, about ten minutes from the festival site.
• Was I caught: tune in for the day two summary to find out!

Country songs that reference sex in cars: an incomplete, annotated list.

Tropes in country music are the best ever. So comforting and predictable! Although it escapes me why anyone out of high school would ever CHOOSE to have sex in a car (the fact that it’s usually the back of a pickup explains it a little, I suppose, but not entirely). But apparently it happens all the time out in the country! And these are pretty much just the songs with this trope that I’ve heard on the radio in the last few months, you guys, so this is only the beginning! Contributions are welcome!

1. “Red Ragtop” by Tim McGraw

We parked way out in a clearing in a grove
And the night was as hot as a coal-burning stove
We were cooking with gas
Knew it had to last
In the back of that red ragtop
She said please don't stop

The classic example, as far as I’m concerned (keep in mind that I’m young and shortsighted and this list is very much of the moment; I honestly have no idea how common this is in older country music). Also a fantastic song. It talks unapologetically and realistically about an abortion, which is pretty significant considering the political leanings of your average country fan, and about a relationship that isn’t perfect and doesn’t last forever, nor does it devolve into a love-hate dramafest or life-destroying tragedy, which is uncharacteristically understated for country. It just feels real and a little sad. Good stuff. Also fairly circumspect about the sex itself, which is a theme we will return to later in the list. But I’m going to get the really blatant ones out of the way first. Warning: this is the only song on the list that I could summon any thoughtfulness for, so prepare for irreverence and snark from here on in.

2. “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” by Big & Rich

(Imma just copy&paste the whole verse here, since the context is all RELEVANT to the discussion)

I'm a thourough-bred
That's what she said
In the back of my truck bed
As I was gettin' buzzed on suds
Out on some back country road.
We where flying high
Fine as wine, having ourselves a big and rich time
And I was going, just about as far as she'd let me go.
But her evaluation
Of my cowboy reputation
Had me begging for salvation
All night long
So I took her out giggin' frogs
Introduced her to my old bird dog
And sang her every Willie Nelson song I could think of
And we made love

Here it’s unclear whether the “making love” happens in the truck or not, since the frog-gigging (what?) and the dog-meeting (and the Willie Nelson renditions, though that wouldn’t have required leaving the truck) happen in between. “Going just about as far as she’d let me go” definitely does happen in the truck, though, and although it’s unclear exactly what happens, it sounds pretty racy and I’m not about rigid definitions of sex anyway, so I’m counting it. Similarly:

3. “Beers Ago” by Toby Keith

(I can be more concise here; the relevant line pretty much stands on its own)

Made a lot of almost love in the bed of that truck

Perhaps if Toby Keith had sung more Willie Nelson and less Jerry Jeff he would have been able to seal the deal? (Side note: a list of country songs that reference other country artists would be pretty epic. I’m tempted, but what a project! I don’t know if I’m qualified.)

4. “Eight Second Ride” by Jake Owen

So we headed out to Old Tobacco Road
Put the tailgate down and we made love

This one’s very much in the spirit of “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” and continues the trend of referencing other country music (Hank Williams, Jr.’s “Country Boy Can Survive,” specifically), with the overlap of the also music-related trope wherein the female love interest knows all the words and sings along to the music, which is how he knows she’s the one for him (naturally). Usually this happens while they’re riding in his truck, as above (“And I knew then that she was my kind of girl ’cause she was singing every single line”) and in “I Don’t Want This Night To End” by Luke Bryan (“You got the radio on / You’re singing every song”), but in Brantley Gilbert’s “Whenever We’re Alone” (“Radio’s got her favorite song on / And man she’s singing right along”) it’s in their bedroom. Then there’s a variant in “Summertime,” by Kenny Chesney, where they’re both singing along instead of just her (“Perfect song on the radio / Sing along ’cause it’s one we know”). In a truck, of course. But returning to our main topic now.

5. “Dirty Kinda Country” by Brian Davis

Get down in the bed of my truck
We do our own thing

I actually had never heard this song until I stumbled over it lyric-searching for something else and youtubed it. This shit is everywhere, seriously. You can tell that Brian Davis is a little rougher around the edges than those other guys because he doesn’t “make love,” he “gets down.” Take note, ladies. This is also now the third song in a row to mention chewing tobacco. This was not on purpose; I actually only noticed after I’d finished the entire list, and it was too good not to come back and add a note. Truly, country music is a thing both mysterious and powerful.

6. “Something ‘Bout a Truck” by Kip Moore

Something 'bout a kiss that's gonna lead to more
On that dropped tailgate, back behind the corn

We’re starting to shade slightly more subtle at this stage of the list. I actually hate this song a lot, and I’m grateful that it’s no longer being played every twenty minutes on country radio. It’s just not melodic enough for me, man.

7. “This Ole Boy” by Craig Morgan

We park in a hay field, fog up the windshield
My kind of killing time

Mine too, Craig Morgan, mine too.

8. “Farmer’s Daughter” by Rodney Atkins

So we'd hop in the truck and get all tangled up
Every chance we got

Note: this song does a pretty good job keeping the progression of the lyrics at a steady clip on the way to the all-important wedding bells, but there’s nothing for first-kiss-to-married whiplash like Thompson Square’s “Are You Gonna Kiss Me Or Not.” Seriously, it’s a work of art, give it a(nother) listen.

9. “Take a Back Road” by Rodney Atkins

Maybe it's that shady spot
Where we park the truck when things get hot

And we close with another entry from Rodney Atkins, which also takes the prize for “most oblique.” For those keeping count at home, that makes seven pickup trucks (truckbed specified for five), one ragtop, and one unspecified Ford (although the fogged-up windshield rules out a truckbed). In terms of location, we’ve got one clearing in a grove, three back (country) roads (I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that Old Tobacco Road qualifies as such, and furthermore add the caveat that one of these is specifically a SHADY SPOT on a back road, which arguably constitutes its own separate category but which I will nonetheless lump in for convenience), one corn field, one hay field, and three that COULD BE ANYWHERE, although further research suggests that “across the railroad tracks” might be a good place to look in one of those cases. This is a preliminary survey, of course, and far from definitive. Additional data is always welcome.

Stay tuned for updates, and for our next study, “Country songs that name-drop the city of Amarillo, Texas: seriously, why is this so common?”

(I may or may not actually do this.)

UPDATE:

10. “Speed” by Montgomery Gentry

I'd like to trade in this old truck
'Cause it makes me think of her and that just slows me up
See, it's the first place we made love 
Where we used to sit and talk on the tailgate all night long

And a brilliant contribution brings our total to a satisfying ten! We now have four uses of the phrase “made love” and an overwhelming 8:2 ratio of trucks to not-trucks! This is a pretty fun song, too.

Magic Mike.

Observations on Magic Mike:

Holy shit, Channing Tatum can dance. And he has a really nice body. And he did a pretty good job with the acting, too! It’s like a win-win-win.

Cody Horn reminds me a lot of Anna Kendrick, except, you know, blond. The resemblance may have primed me to like her more, since I like Anna Kendrick. But anyway, I thought she was pretty good, particularly with the comic stuff. And the last scene gave me warm fuzzy feelings. Good work, team!

Alex Pettyfer was passable! There were only a couple times when I got tired of watching him act. And the script, while mostly excellent, was probably least kind to him out of everyone. So good work, dude! Also he is pretty. I’m guessing this movie will give his career a bigger boost than anything else he’s done lately, which is utterly unsurprising and also not bad for a stripper movie.

I’m not sure I trust myself to be objective about Olivia Munn, because if I dislike her I feel like I’m caving in to hateful internet peer pressure, and if I insist on liking her it feels fake, like I’m overcompensating to be contrary, because she is admittedly pretty annoying. But I’ll try. I really liked her in the opening scene with Channing Tatum, because it was funny, but when she got all awkward-face I-have-a-fiance later on I liked her less. This is probably revealing any number of horrible biases on my part about how women should really be fun all the time and up for sex with Channing Tatum, and stop having needs and lives and psychology degrees, but I can’t help it. I got sick of her face. No, kidding, I just don’t think she’s as good a dramatic actress as a comic one. Except also the face thing, a bit, to be honest.

And speaking of women being for sex, holy shit, the scene with Matt Bomer’s character’s wife was both funny and incredibly disturbing. Like, both Matt Bomer and Alex Pettyfer were treating her like this thing with boobs, which Matt Bomer owned and could give out passes to. Seriously: “Go ahead, she likes it,” “Thanks, man! I love you!” with no acknowledgment that she is a human being. Creepy as fuck.

If I wanted to be kind, I suppose I could credit the movie with making the girls Channing Tatum interacts with real people and the ones Alex Pettyfer does not so much because that’s how the characters see them, but that would be pretty subtle, dudes. On the surface, a women being treated like a barbie with no agency is still being played for laughs. We are of course encouraged to take the Channing Tatum view and eventually reject this drug-addled, dehumanizing approach to intimate relations, but not before we enjoy the ride a little, and share in Alex Pettyfer’s extasy-enhanced boob-inspired awe, unsullied by having to consider the boob-bearer a person. Come on, you have to admit you’re a little jealous, even as you judge him and insist that the movie doesn’t condone that, it just presents it. And maybe that’s true, dudes. It’s a complicated thing.

One thing I think we can agree on, however, is that overall Matt Bomer was criminally underused. Pretty good movie, though, other than that.

Daydream Nation.

I watched Daydream Nation with Kat Dennings and Reece Thompson and I thought it was lovely. I’ve seen them each in two other movies besides this one, and I thought this was in some ways a pretty neat culmination of themes from the previous ones. If you can in fact draw themes from the movies that not-exactly-household-names actors have been offered and accepted for whatever reason. I choose to. They are all high school movies, because both actors are at a cast-as-high-school-students age (that is, early-to-mid twenties).

I’ve seen Kat Dennings in Charlie Bartlett and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, both a while ago, so all my impressions will be based on vaguely-/misremembered details! You have been warned! Anyway, both movies are quirky and both star Kat Dennings as THE QUIRKY GIRL who is conveniently on hand to sweep the hero away on a voyage of discovery. In Nick and Norah, that was literally the entire plot, so the movie kind of sucked. My clearest memory of it is that I thought the sex scene was a little too cute and coyly filmed. According to my two minutes of internet research to try to remind myself what happened, some people thought it was sweet that it was all about Kat Dennings’ character getting off, or something, because Michael Cera (I’m going to go ahead and equate the actor to the character, here, since he always plays the same one anyway) is such a generous, caring guy. Apparently I was not charmed.

Charlie Bartlett is pretty quirky too, but in a slightly darker, weird way, and Kat Dennings’ character gets to be a little more interesting, I think. Maybe. I don’t actually remember that well. In all likelihood she was really mostly there just to relieve the title character of his virginity (which I do remember), and I’m being too generous in my mental reconstruction of the character from vague memories because I thought the movie was actually quite good, and I liked Anton Yelchin in it. But moving on.

While Kat Dennings seems to swing quirky and her better movies are a little darker, of the two other Reece Thompson movies I’ve seen, Rocket Science and Assassination of a High School President, the former, which is more sort of quirky-sad than it is dark, is better. In both, unpopular High School Reece Thompson is hit on insincerely by hot High School Anna Kendrick or Mischa Barton, respectively, for their own nefarious purposes, and angst ensues. He’s also definitely a virgin in Rocket Science and I’m almost positive he is in Assassination as well, which brings the count of Kat Dennings And/Or Reece Thompson Movies That I’ve Seen in Which the Main Dude Character is a Virgin to 4/5, with 3/3 for Reece Thompson. Anyway! Rocket Science did a nice job building its atmosphere, which I would describe as a sort of melancholy mixed with determination, and it struck me as very honest in its open-endedness, instead of being neat and boring. And that’s actually all I’m going to say about it because I saw it ages ago and remember very little besides my emotional reaction.

Assassination (like Nick and Norah in that its title is too long; that’s right, you heard it here first, better movies have shorter titles), I saw more recently, and it isn’t a terrible movie, it’s really not. I enjoyed it quite a bit while I was watching. It just feels confused, like it’s not sure what its focus or who its audience is. It’s obviously trying for high school noir, but it doesn’t blend the two aspects very well. The mystery plot feels a little too mechanical and everything gets tied up a little too neatly in the end in a way that skews the movie a little too high-school-formulaic. As if to balance that out, the sex and intrigue is pretty over-the-top and twisted, with the result that the movie just feels like it’s trying too hard. For some more successful high school noir (I think it still has a hint of the same problems, but they’re mostly avoided by going much more noir than high school), go with Brick instead. I sort of hate that movie anyway because of the way it treats its female characters (what are you gonna do, it’s noir, of course they’re all vamps or victims, I guess), but it’s quite well done.

In Daydream Nation, Reece Thompson is once again a virgin, and once again jerked around by a girl who doesn’t feel about him the same way he feels about her, but this time (and unlike all four of the above KD or RT movies) the movie is about the girl! Yay! She gets to be independent and confused and manipulative and sympathetic and it’s done brilliantly and I love it. The dude who wrote and directed the movie (Michael Goldbach! You’re cool, Michael Goldbach) even explicitly calls out the trope where an annoying man-child projects his own fantasies on a woman he barely knows, and gives Kat Dennings a pretty sweet line about how she’s the main character of her life, dude. (The actual line doesn’t say dude. But you get the idea.) Regarding lovely character development, I particularly liked the bit where she starts in on the second recitation of her speech about how pathetic the girls in the town are. Although she already showed plenty of vulnerability earlier when she broke down in private, I found the later scene even more striking for its sublety in showing the way she had built up the persona and was using it as armor.

On the quirky-dark scale, this movie ranks as pleasantly twisted, in a way that feels nicely cathartic. There’s a serial killer in town and the teenagers do lots of drugs to deal with the combination of boredom and all the fucked up things that happen, which include the things that happen as a consequence of doing lots of drugs, so they’ve got a nice little cycle going. (Drugs, as you might imagine, are another theme that comes up in their collective filmography of quirky/dark high school movies, though it’s not nearly as widespread as the virgin thing.) I can’t watch flat-out horror movies, but there were bits in this where I really was afraid something horrible might happen to a significant character, even though this isn’t really that movie, and I liked the edgy feeling of it. It did wrap up pretty neatly, but the fact that the movie overall was so refreshing made it satisfying instead of annoying. Which is the goal!

My only real complaints were about the very last scene (not even what happened, just the technique) and Andie MacDowell. Andie MacDowell came so close to pulling off a barely-competent performance, just good enough that I could overlook it and not pick her out specifically as a low point, but NOT QUITE. Which was sad, because the guy who played Kat Dennings’ father did a really nice job with very little, and his most prominent scene was with her. Even surrounded by actors to play off of who were doing a lovely job embodying their characters and making it not look like acting, Andie MacDowell could not manage to look natural at all, and it was super distracting. Thankfully there was not a whole lot of her, and she could have been even worse, I suppose. Josh Lucas was great, though, and the gym teacher was good, and the little sister was very cute and perfectly serviceable.

The last scene made me sad because it was touching and sweet and all those good things and also REALLY OBVIOUSLY GREENSCREENED. It was distracting and I was disappointed that my very last impression of a movie I really enjoyed was of the bad effects. And now it seems I am doing something similar by saving all the negatives for the end of this entry. That was not my intention! Honestly, besides some nitpicks about the editing in like, two scenes, those are literally the only negative things I can think of to say. (The scene where KD + RT are MAKING LOVE was cut a little too artsily for me, and near the end when everyone’s driving fast or partying or being seduced or whatever, all the cuts between the different characters were starting to give me a bit of whiplash, but the movie had earned so much good will from me that I DON’T EVEN CARE.)

I also don’t care that KD + RT are basically playing versions of the same characters they’ve played in every movie I’ve ever seen them in, because these versions were really beautifully fleshed out and compelling, and also I have a bit of a crush on Reece Thompson and a bigger one on Kat Dennings. (I love love love that she’s not thin.) As far as I’m concerned, they could play versions of the same characters forever (except not really, because people age, boo) and I’d probably keep watching, because they’re really good at it. I don’t even care that this movie is sort of a thematic mash-up of their previous movies, because again, it was really well done and had a really lovely feminist sensibility, which set it apart from the rest. I loved it.