Skiing is beautiful

The movement is beautiful:

The technology is beautiful:

Every moment is beautiful:

I feel pretty

One of the most famous shopping scenes in cinematic history is Julia Roberts going from streetwalker to chic walker in Pretty Woman. It epitomizes the goal of every clothes-shopping experience: feeling special, feeling pretty. Any retailer who lets the customer feel less than beautiful is making, as Ms. Roberts would say, a BIG mistake.

The Pianist

The Pianist is one of my all-time favorite movies. Partly it’s because Chopin is my favorite composer, and many of the pieces featured in the film are ones I’ve learned. But mostly it’s just for this one scene, which feels so true, and so painful:

Teachable moments in film

Some of the best teachers in history are fake ones. Real teachers don’t spout out inspirational wisdom in every class, but movie teachers seem to. They always struggle to connect with their students at the beginning, but soon win them over with strange tricks/accents/costumes/martial arts, and then the students eventually stand up for themselves and/or their teachers at the end. Now that’s an education. Check out how the following teachers motivate their troubled charges.

Michelle Pfeiffer gets street in Dangerous Minds:

Stand and Deliver shows the benefits of girlfriend math:

Robin Williams makes a young Ethan Hawke yawp in Dead Poets Society:

Rotten Tomatoes sums it up nicely:

Magnificent men in their flying machines

Thinking about aviation this week brought to mind an old tune that I couldn’t place at first: Those magnificent men in their flying machines, they go up uppity up up…  Google to the rescue. This is the theme song from an old British movie I watched at my grandparents as a kid that I surely never would have remembered otherwise.

The movie’s full title is Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, Or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 Hours and 11 Minutes and features an international flying contest, replete with cliched characters from Italy, France, Britain, the US, Prussia, and Japan who play out in microcosm the tensions of pre-WWI Europe. Now that we have such a standard model for what a plane should look like, it’s fun to see the varied concepts that were featured in this movie:

Magicians of war

What is the purpose of magic? When purely a stage show, magic is meant only to entertain, but some forms of deception have real-world functions and consequences.

I recently read the first part of a book called The War Magician: The incredible True Story of Jasper Maskelyne and His Magic Gang by David Fisher. The writing style is so overly embellished that I couldn’t finish reading it; I wasn’t surprised to find out that the factual accuracy of this account is in question. Yet, the story is fascinating. If Fisher is to be at all trusted, Maskelyne, a British stage magician descending from other famous stage magicians, volunteered to join the army after WWII broke out, and was deployed to North Africa. There, Maskelyne joined a group called the “Magic Gang,” which included such varied specialists as an architect, chemist, electrician, and art restorer. Again, if Fisher is to be believed, the Gang was able to conceal Alexandria and the Suez Canal from German bombers using mirrors and lights. They also convinced German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel that the British attack would be coming from the south by building a vast army of fake tanks complete with fake construction sounds and fake radio conversations.

Deception has long been a part of war to confuse the enemy. One of the most famous examples comes from Virgil’s Aeneid, in which he depicts the fall of Troy. This, of course, happened after the Trojans pulled a large wooden horse filled with Greek soldiers inside their city walls. The rest of the Greek army had sailed away during the day and then sailed back under the cover of night. The well-placed intruders opened the gates for their brethren, who came in and ransacked the city.

My favorite contemporary allusion to the Trojan Horse comes in the 1999 version of The Thomas Crown Affair. An actual horse statue is delivered to the Metropolitan Museum in New York early in the film carrying several burglars inside, who steal a Monet painting. The climactic scene at the end of the movie, in which Crown arrives at the Met to “return” the Monet, is another allusion to the Trojan Horse and a grandly orchestrated illusion. The magic in this scene is not meant to baffle the detectives, but make them realize that the sleight of hand, the trick, the deception was always in full view.

 

 

 

Belle’s library

When some people think of paradise, they picture golden sand beaches and calm blue waves. My idea of paradise has always been something like this:

Madam Librarian

With all that talk yesterday of my heroine Marian (why didn’t Harold use that rhyme?!) I thought I might as well share the video. Delightful!

Spy v Spy

Who do you think would win in a match-up of spies with the initials J.B.? James Bond:

Jason Bourne:

or Jack Bauer:

Disney’s dead mothers

Disney loves the evil stepmother

When Snow White enters the Dwarves’ house she is shocked by the messiness.  Saddened, she utters, “Maybe they have no mothers.”  This being the case, the Dwarves are in good company at Disney. Snow White herself does not have a mother (only an evil step-mother), and neither do the princesses Cinderella, Ariel of “The Little Mermaid,” Belle of “Beauty and the Beast,” Jasmine of “Aladdin,” or Pocahontas.

I started looking into this topic for a Women and Gender Studies course in college and found some interesting research. In 2003, researchers coded twenty-six classic Disney films for their portrayal of families. They found that mothers are often marginalized and that love at first sight is a very prevalent theme. Love at first sight occurs in eighteen of the twenty-six films, and Mulan is the only “princess” who develops a friendly relationship first with the man she later falls in love with (and that only happens because she disguises herself as a man–heterosexuality is the unquestioned norm in Disney). Only five of the twenty-six films showed mothers as both primary caregivers and protectors, these films being “Dumbo,” “Bambi,” “101 Dalmatians,” “The Lion King,” and “Tarzan.” Interestingly, or perhaps startlingly, this means that only animal mothers are depicted as being strong influences in their children’s lives while human mothers, when they are present, are somehow flawed.

Tiana, the first Disney princess who's...black?

Disney seemed to take note of these and other criticisms when it came out with 2009’s “The Princess and the Frog.” Tiana, the eponymous princess, garnered excitement for being the first black Disney princess, but she is also the first princess with a living mother and a dead father. But how far has Disney really come? Tiana spends much of the movie as a green frog, a fact that was widely lambasted, and her dream of opening a restaurant is based on her dead father’s dream–thus, even though he’s deceased, her father is arguably a stronger influence on Tiana’s future than her living mother.

As I mentioned yesterday, Disney princesses are the primary idols for young girls in American society. These princesses, though, are forever inscribed within the male hierarchy, as they lack female role models themselves and are only saved from their often pitiable conditions by kisses from princes. What does it do to our daughters to continually expose them to the themes of impotent motherhood and male saviors?