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Okay so you know how I wrote that big post on whether I should try to outguess Netflix so it would give me better recommendations, and in that post I said this:

There is definitely a tone-deaf aspect to the way Netflix classifies movies. "Foreign" is one of the worst category offenders. There's a vibe of "if you liked Amelie, you'll like The Hidden Fortress."

So what does Netflix have for me now?

Based on how much I liked Eddie Izzard: Glorious (liberal standup by a transvestite Brit) and Throne of Blood (1957 Japanese masterpiece based on Macbeth), I will apparently like...

Long Way Round: A sort of The Motorcycle Diaries for the Hollywood set, this documentary miniseries chronicles the cross-continental adventures of actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman as they set out on their BMW bikes to travel round the world. Embarking from London and arriving 115 exhausting days later in New York, the duo tackles 20,000 miles of tough terrain, explores offbeat destinations and takes in colorful local culture.

Seriously, quoi? Why, because they're all not from around these parts?

In addition to trying to get my act together generally and accomplish Actual Life Tasks, I have also spent an embarrassing amount of time in the past couple of weeks on Netflix.com and IMDB.com. My pretense is that this is all research since Grace and I have started posting on Heroine Content again, but in reality it's just because it's cold and dark at night and I am easily addicted to rating things and making virtual lists. It's like shopping without spending.

I only started taking Netflix's recommendations seriously when Grace shared her Heroine Content queue with me and I was jealous of how interesting it was. Mine is composed of basically stuff I have already heard of, whereas she has added a ton of stuff to her queue that Netflix suggested to her either based on her ratings or on the "more like this" feature. So while she writes reviews of documentaries about women who box, I watch Catwoman. The Halle Berry one. This hardly seems fair.

Netflix is very keen to have you rate films, and I have humored them over 1,150 times now. I'm still a little unclear on whether I'm doing it right, though. Netflix's best guess on how I would rate Aliens was 3.3 stars out of 5.

I find this troubling.

Part of me wants to not think too much, kind of like when I took the SATs. I hated Catwoman, so I should rate it "hated it." I'm not interested in seeing Charlie's Angels 2 (especially if I already did and can't remember), so I should click "not interested." Right? The question becomes, do they know why I don't like it? Are they really going to look at my high ratings for Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life and Tank Girl and say "oh, well then, we'll show her recommendations for action films with female leads that don't suck?" Their prediction of my vote on Aliens says maybe not. "Not Interested means you aren't interested in this movie and movies like it," they say, so how do I indicate that it can stop recommending Charlie's Angels 2 because it sucks, but actually I am interested in movies like it, if by "like it" you mean action films with three female protagonists?

There is definitely a tone-deaf aspect to the way Netflix classifies movies. "Foreign" is one of the worst category offenders. There's a vibe of "if you liked Amelie, you'll like The Hidden Fortress." Maybe that's statistically true. Maybe they really can look at patterns within their bajillions of users and see that even though Amelie and The Hidden Fortress have nothing in common but subtitles, generally people who like one have a good chance of liking the other. Maybe they can pick up on the fact that I like Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life and Tank Girl for totally different reasons than a guy who rated both of those highly because of the cleavage.

(Heaven forbid I start allowing C-Man to rate anything, or I'll be deluged with anime suggestions.)

Then again, this is all based on the theory that I'm going to miss something good if they don't get it right. With 293 items in my queue and only a handful of them belonging to C-Man, it's not like I'm going to run out anytime soon, but quantity and quality are two different things.

Yes, I realize that in the time I spent writing this post, I could have contributed something meaningful to the world. Some thoughts must be let out of my head and organized, though, or they will NOT leave me ALONE.

In college and for a few years thereafter, I listened to Ani DiFranco. A lot. Call me a stereotypical liberal arts college student, but DiFranco's music was the soundtrack to my life. When I finally started to grow up, though, I found I didn't need such a dramatic and turbulent soundtrack. It didn't ring true anymore. In fact, I developed a slight aversion to hearing it, since it brought back some rather annoying memories of my own histrionics.

I sold my albums, deleted the album copies from my computer, and moved on.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer doesn't yet annoy me, but I'm finding that like DiFranco, it no longer rings true to me. It's not a story that touches me anymore. It's something that a former version of me was connected to, like a shirt I wore in high school that is familiar, but I would never grab it out of the closet and actually wear it.

When C-Man and I got together, I embarked on an ambitious plan to socialize him in all of the television shows I grew up with - and by grew up, I don't mean the shows of my childhood. I mean the shows that got me through the transition between adolescence and adulthood: Buffy, Babylon 5, Farscape, Space: Above and Beyond, Millennium. I wanted him to get caught up on where I was coming from. Buffy should have been the key, it was the most charged with emotion.

We haven't finished it.

And I'm just not motivated to make sure we do.

Part of my disconnection from Buffy is undoubtedly the lightening process I've been going through lately, where I'm keeping the things that mean something to me here and now - not just as an echo of the past. Part of it also springs from my deep disappointment with later seasons. Knowing that it's all going to go badly downhill sucks the joy and hope out of rewatching the early days. When I watch Buffy, I remember that it used to mean something to me. I remember the almost visceral pain, the emotional shocks, the tears, the anxiety, the delight, and the soaring feelings of triumph that I felt as the characters went through their lives. I don't feel it any more, though.

I have confidence that if I ever want a blast from the past, Netflix or something similar will be able to hook me up. But I don't need Buffy around as a safety blanket anymore, connecting me to a past self that I've outgrown.

So the DVDs are on their way out the door.

Bye bye, Buffy. Thanks for everything you did for me.

1. Home Fries (1998): Advertised as a light romantic comedy with Drew Barrymore, turned out to be a vicious black "comedy" full of people being awful to each other.
2. Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas (1998): Why did I think that a movie about people being on drugs would be entertaining for me, even though I find drunk and drugged people quite annoying in real life?
3. Secret Window (2004): You know I love me some Johnny Depp, so it's odd that two of his movies are on this list, but I actually put down my popcorn and walked out of this one... and all the way home, since at that time my apartment was walking distance from the theater. I don't know how to be more specific about why I disliked the movie, but it was like nails on a chalkboard.

This movie was bad even by Christopher Lambert direct-to-video standards.

Writing decent movie reviews is harder than it looks. I have some favorites among the ones I've written so far on Heroine Content. I feel like they're insightful, but also fun to read. Unfortunately, there are also a few that I find as entertaining as chewing on cardboard. When I'm ranting here about The Dog being a pain, it seems relatively easy to whip out a few funny sentences. When confronted with the task of writing a Serious Review that Raises Important Issues, my writing often comes out stiff and flavorless. And it can be hard not to get a little clumsy when you're trying to introduce character names as well as actor names while describing the plot.

However, I don't think I've written a sentence as bad as this one from Richard Schickel's review of Breach in Time Magazine:

Who knew how entertainingly, if sometimes scarily, bent Hanssen — brilliantly played in director Bully Ray's film by Chris Cooper — was?

How many minutes did it take your brain to put that sentence back together in a reasonable order?

A couple of days ago I read a review of the Bollywood movie Fanaa on the blog Kashmir. I started thinking about how much "information" I accumulate from films and television, especially with popular entertainment from other countries where I don't have any context for those narratives.

If I had caught Fanaa when it screened in Austin, I would have come away with images of the political situation in Kashmir that may or may not be accurate. (I haven't researched beyond that blog post, I don't really know whether the film is anywhere near reality.) I don't think I would have started applying to history departments to teach the history of Kashmir, but I can't imagine that these images wouldn't influence me - especially if I never gave them any thought. I don't have any information that would lead me to notice discrepancies, so I might have just carried those images around for a while.

With that in mind, I was concerned to read a blog post on the Carribbean Amerindian Centrelink Review about the new Pirates of the Carribbean movie. It calls for a boycott due to the film's portrayal of the people indigenous to the area where the movie is set, whom the CAC blog identifies as Caribs:

Let us keep in mind that such depictions were used to enslave and murder the ancestors of today's Caribs, there was never anything innocent or "fun" about these portrayals. In addition, generations of Carib descended school children in the Caribbean have been taught that their ancestors were savage cannibals. Shame over ancestry was inculcated as a matter of routine. In my own field research experience, I have encountered individuals in their forties and fifties who told me very directly that the main reason they did not wish to self-identify as Caribs is that people in the wider world see Caribs as cannibals, as inhuman man eaters, and they found the stigma unbearable.

This portrayal of a fictional event set against a historical backdrop should have been easier for me to identify as a problem. As a resident of North America, I should be very familiar with cultural images of people of African descent that portray them as "less than civilized." But honestly, I don't know if I would have picked up on it without reading this blog post. I did notice it in King Kong, but would I have caught this one? Or would I have been swept along in a story I enjoyed, with actors I enjoy?

That, my friends, is one of the ugly privileges of being white. You don't have to think about race.

You have to make the choice whether to hold yourself and your culture accountable for racism.

Thursday, Friday, and Sunday, the Paramount Film Series is showing the original version of the 1954 Godzilla.

I'm really excited! My mother, in addition to being a devout Methodist Sunday school teacher and gardener, is also a fan of monster movies. Mothra was a staple of my childhood television viewing. Godzilla came later, and now I am working my way through the Godzilla films to build a list of personal favorites. (So far, Godzilla v. Gigan and Destroy all Monsters join the Mothra films as my top picks.)

The New York Times had a good piece on how the restored film differs from the version that was originally made available to American audiences.

As the historian William Tsutsui reminded us in last year's cult classic, "Godzilla on My Mind," the 1954 movie was a dark, poetic production that dealt openly with Japanese misgivings about the nuclear menace, environmental degradation and the traumatic experience associated with World War II. [...]

The American company that bought the rights to distribute the film in this country cut a large chunk from Honda's original film and rearranged the plot. The biggest change involved splicing in Raymond Burr, who played an American reporter chronicling the devastation for the press. Dialogue that dealt heavily with human suffering, the morality of all-out war - and the temptation to play God with weapons of mass destruction - was left on the American cutting room floor.

I love watching Gojira stomp on tiny tanks, but I also like a little substance with my smashing. Thanks to the Paramount for such an opportunity!

Don't watch Law and Order with a law student who hates television shows.

*I learned this yesterday, actually, but then the computer had frozen up by the time I went to blog and I was too tired to reboot, etc. I hope you understand.

I saw Blue Car (2002) on DVD. The DVD box (left) pissed me off more and more as I watched it, since the main character, 18 year old Meg, NEVER wears an outfit like this - and the only sexual encounter shown in the film is extremely difficult to watch because it's such a betrayal.

Check out the original movie poster (right), from the Miramax website for the film. Apparently it wasn't thought sexy enough to coerce people to rent DVDs.

It's an interesting film, though, and despite some of the more harrowing moments I did enjoy it. I'm enjoying small films more lately - films that follow a small number of characters and no buildings blow up.

Casa de los Babys (2003) fits that bill. It's a drama about American women waiting to adopt babies in a Latin American country. In contrast to the comment at IMDB, the actor interviews in the extra features on the DVD contend that director John Sayles isn't trying to preach any particular viewpoint on international adoption, childbearing, etc. He just follows the lives of a group of women in this situation and several people who actually live in the country, for contrast. You're allowed to draw your own conclusions.

Sayles's comments about casting in the DVD extras really struck me. He said that since the majority of female actors in Hollywood over 30 are unemployed, he knew he could find a great cast. Bonus for him, I'm sure, and for me since I enjoyed their performances, but a sad statement. Lili Taylor, Mary Steenburgen, and Marcia Gay Harden should be difficult to book.

Steamboy (2004) had only one major female character, who was irredeemably annoying. It was also a bad movie. The End.