This just in via e-mail, director Dan Ireland's counterpoint to my Jolene review:

Subject: Lindy West's review of JOLENE

To the editor: Dan Savage

TITTY TITTY BANG BANG

Re Lindy West's vile hypocritical excuse for a review of my film Jolene... what can I do but laugh, and perhaps projectile vomit in her face at the same time. For you guys to keep such a lame brained single-minded, ill informed, frustrated moron employed says it all, anything for controversy, even at the cost of journalism. And we’re not even talking bad journalism here, but the word journalism itself. Sad state, but hey, what ever makes 'em read the papers, right, Dan? And she's your film editor? In a city like Seattle? You're selling your paper (and your audience) short.

More battle of the sexes (RAWR!) after the jump!

The producer of over-the-top movie spectacles died at age 91. He's responsible for good movies (Manhunter), bad movies (Dune), and King Kong Lives, the mind-bogglingly bizarre sequel to the 1976 giant-gorilla-on-the-World-Trade-Center remake of King Kong:

It feels like a certain kind of old Hollywood movie has died with De Laurentiis. He was responsible for the kind of quirky blockbuster that allowed for (often vapid) self-expression in the middle of all that big-budget schlock. It would take at least 200 Jerry Bruckheimers to make a single Dino De Laurentiis.

• This is Jolene.

For some context, here's how I felt about Ireland's last directorial effort, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont:

Mrs. Palfrey might be the chewiest, cheesiest corncake ever to hit the screen. Hey, Mrs. P, what about the things that matter in life? "Most of the things that mattered to me aren't around anymore. They live in here [points to head] and here [points to heart]." Hey, Ludo, what's it like talking to Mrs. P? "She danced around her memories with the agile step of a young girl." Hey, what's that in my lap? Oh, it's barf.

If I were old—which I'm not—I'd be offended by patronizing drivel like Mrs. Palfrey. Why do we pander to the elderly the way we pander to children? Aren't old people just young people who've been hanging around longer? Does the human animal biologically outgrow good taste?

I don't feel much better about Jolene. It has the same sugared, patronizing tone as Mrs. Palfrey, but the forcibly "empowered" female in this case is a youngster: 16-year-old Jolene (Jessica Chastain), nubility personified, a rosy-cheeked bumpkin and perpetual victim with a deeply malfunctioning creep radar. Based on a short story by E.L. Doctorow, the film might as well have been subtitled Creeps I Have Banged. Like most women (you know us!), Jolene's life consists of nothing but a series of shitty relationships. There's the idiot manchild, the predatory uncle (Dermot Mulroney), the downmarket Dave Navarro (Rupert Friend), the mobster-with-a-heart-of-gold (Chazz Palmienteri), the lesbian nuthouse guard, and the rich abusive freak (a horribly miscast Michael Vartan). Along the way, Jolene gets a new personality with each wardrobe change (because her actual personality DOESN'T EXIST), and Ireland treats the audience to a gratuitous five-minute stripping scene (that's in her down-and-out Vegas phase). Oh yeah, and also Denise Richards is in it.

This is a movie about Jessica Chastain's body. This is a movie made by a man. And I've read multiple blurbs by male critics fawning over Jolene: what a stunning breakthrough role it is for Chastain (and true, she is very lovely), how moved and inspired they are by Jolene's personal journey, how it's such a mighty shame that the film wallowed without distribution for two whole years. And I'm sorry, dudes, I'm sure you're all very sincere, but when I read these reviews all I hear is TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES!!!!!!!

I call bullshit. Jolene is paternalistic softcore porn for men who like to think of themselves as "sensitive," which means that they're too "respectful" of women to buy Girls Gone Wild Part 45: The Legend of Curly's Titties. It's a mediocre movie with a very nice central performance. But spending two hours shitting all over this dishrag of a character, only to have her "redeem" herself at the 11th hour with an absurd pipe dream about becoming a movie star (way to have options, women!)—that is not empowerment, it's exploitation.

So that's that. You can go see Jolene tonight or tomorrow, if you want.

As you know, people who want to have sex with me are subject to an incredibly long wait list—I think I'm booked solid until August 12, 2019—however! Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis have a standing invitation to hop to the top of this list anytime they'd like. Weirdly, they have decided not to take me up on my very generous offer. Not that I'm offended or anything... I'm super busy sexing other people. Other SEXIER people. I just think if they were smart, and really cared about sexing, they'd be blowing up my phone right now begging to ride on Humpy's Boner Express.
ANYWAY! Here's the NSFW red band trailer for Friends with Benefits, starring nude JT and MK havin' poop-tons of romcom-style sex. Without me. (sniff) Idiots.

Couch Fest is adorable and awesome. You should go to it. I wrote about last year's here:

Couch Fest Films is an annual event (this was the second) in which intrepid, couch-having citizens invite other intrepid, butt-possessed citizens into their homes, to unite butts with couches and watch short films and be together in the name of awkward. Each house features a 30-minute- or-so program of shorts, repeated all day long. The films come from all over the world, with quite a few selections by terrific locals (Ben Kasulke, Brady Hall, Reel Grrls, the Beta Society). You sit on a couch, you meet some strangers, you talk about film, you eat a potato chip.

In the slightly drafty living room of the Documentary house, I ate a potato chip and met my first strangers. Aaron (laconic) and Keith (ebullient) were there "to meet people, do something quirky." We discussed Chuck Close, overhead projectors, cougars, the great Red Vines vs. Twizzlers debate), the even greater soda vs. pop debate, and The Stranger ("I look at it occasionally, if there's nothing else to read," Keith said, cheerily).

Click HERE to find all the information on where to go and what to bring and when and why.

(And for the record, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU TWIZZLER PEOPLE!?!?!? In what universe is stinky colored wax a viable foodstuff!? You should all be sent to an island or something. Woe betide you if I ever get a hold of an island!)

Olivier Assayas's Carlos is long but worth every minute. Édgar Ramírez plays the famous terrorist...

Life/election results/Four Loko hangover got you down? Go see Goodfellas, running tonight through Sunday at Central Cinema.

Here's the preview, which gets a lot of stuff right (the narration! the music!) but is still kind of annoying (that deep-voiced guy saying, "In a world where violence is a way of life..." makes my brain fall asleep.)

And those who might be seeing the film for the bazllionth time will want to read (or re-read) this amazing oral history of the making of the film published in GQ (previously discussed here).

What happens when your life is in someone else's hands...

The question is whether Perry—the creator of the horror that is Madea—is capable of bringing any nuance to the screen at all. He specializes in ham-fisted melodrama. As Seattle artist and writer Christa Bell puts it for Ms. magazine's blog,

It doesn’t make representations of black women any less abominable when they are brought to the screen by black people. Precious was directed by Lee Daniels and produced by media moguls Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey. Both Daniels and Perry have been accused of creating demeaning and stereotypical depictions of black women, a charge that suggests the internalization of phobic representations is a phenomenon that knows no gender or racial boundaries. As the proverb goes, when the ax came into the forest the trees said, “the handle is one of us.”

There are two other good pieces by Seattle writers on Ms.. From Seattle University scholar Mako Fitts's essay, "Can Tyler Perry Pull Off a Black Feminist Masterpiece?":

Black cultural critic Todd Boyd of USC argued that all of Perry’s films “demonize educated, successful African Americans,” which plays on longstanding issues of class conflict within the African American community. Many remember the infamous public feud between Spike Lee and Tyler Perry (Lee compared Perry’s films to Amos and Andy). But who are we—with our playa-hater degrees (PhDs) and elitist artistic standards—to judge what the masses find tasteful? We have to resist the temptation to form dichotomies between artists whose work runs the gamut from quality to coonery.

And C. Davida Ingram—artist, writer, and arts educator at Seattle Art Museum—provides grounding for those new to Colored Girls in her "10 Things to Know." (Check Helena Andrews on The Root to see the view of it all on The View.)

It also turns out that one of the original cast members lives in Seattle: Poet Nashira Priester (then named Nashira Ntosha), who'll be in the audience at the Egyptian tonight. That original performance took place in 1974 at the Bacchanal, a women's bar outside Berkeley, after which the play traveled to Broadway and then everywhere.

In a phone conversation last night (after having dressed up as "a depraved ballerina" the night before for Halloween, because "every self-respecting ballerina needs a little depravity"), Priester said she's got lots of questions for the movie tonight, and lots of hope for the talk afterward.

She didn't want to deliver a judgment on Perry's work up to now. But she did say of For Colored Girls, which is the name of the film, "He's taken the rainbow and the suicide out of it, so that already kind of purifies it. ... I'm sure he's looking for hits. Everybody's looking for hits." "When it comes to class," Priester continued, "I don't think he gets it. I don't know which class he's in, and I don't think he's doing an authentic portrayal of either one."

When Priester met Shange, Priester was already a successful radio broadcaster, co-founding KPOO-FM community radio in San Francisco, the first black-owned radio on the West Coast. Priester was part of the Third World Women's Collective, and she gave the great name to Jessica Hagedorn's West Coast Gangster Choir (the name came to Priester in a dream).

In Priester's view, the substance has been sucked out of American political life in the years since the Vietnam War. "Everyone passionately believed we didn't need as much war, we didn't need as much male oppression," she said. "You could pretty much turn to the woman next to you and find some cohesion. Now, you just sit on your hands, because you might turn around and find Christine O'Donnell."

Priester's description of Sarah Palin goes like this: "She is patently insane, or not a student. These people don't read."

Last night, I attended one of Disney’s special “Tron Night” sneak previews at the Boeing IMAX theater, where they screened twenty-three minutes of the new film Tron: Legacy (which apparently is not pronounced Tron: Lagasse and has nothing to do with Emeril. Go figure).

But before I could get my first glimpse a film for which I am mildly enthused, Disney’s Scary Men in Black Suits made me check in my phone—a typical precaution at an event like this, but one which made the long wait in line, by myself, interminable. For entertainment, I had only the reverent waxing nostalgic of the die-hard Tron fans in front of me. One of them talked about recently repurchasing the entire Tron trading card set from 1982, and his buddy recounted—in a rendition overstuffed with personal backstory—the time he first saw Tron when he was twelve years old. He then went on to discuss his early attempts at Tron cosplay (legwarmers and socks apparently played a huge role).

The theater was hardly packed—I’d venture to say its 405 seats were maybe only one-third full. Kind of surprising, as it’s hard to imagine a better venue for this glitzy, 3-D pixel-porn tentpole. The footage was preceded by a text scroll—credited to Tron: Lagasse Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinski—explaining how to wear and use our freshly bleached, lice-free 3-D glasses, and how the footage we were about to peep was just random, disassociated scenes.

A good chunk of the footage was taken up by the necessary introductory real-world sequence, where it was established that Sam Flynn, son of Jeff Bridges’ character from the original, is living in a sweet studio apartment/storage unit down by the docks in Vancouver/wherever Tron is supposed to be set. Bruce Boxleitner, the OG Tron himself, comes across like a total champ in this sequence, acting circles around lightweight male lead Garrett Hedlund, who has the stiff, mannequin-like demeanor of a sex-changed Malin Ackerman.

The obligatory scene of him checking out his Dad’s dusty old arcade (“What the hell, I’m supposedly a little drunk on two beers”) felt like more tedious blue-balling before things finally switched over to the stylized, eye-catching Tron world (“Might as well pop a quarter in this old Tron game, what’s the worst that could happen?”), but there was at least one fun touch: when Sam flicks the switch and all the games come glowing to life, the sound system starts blasting one of the Journey songs (I think) from the original Tron soundtrack. As Sam explores the secret passageways underneath the arcade, the music gets all faint and reverbed-out, which sounds especially cool when the track switches over to the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”

ANYWAY, Tron land: Sam shows up, is captured by a giant glowing red staple, and mistaken for a program. They send him to a room full of fembots (the script refers to them as “sirens”) that live in white wall-mounted coffins, just waiting for sexy mannequin men to show up. They all walk in lockstep unison towards Sam, disrobe him using special laser fingers (“There’s a zipper,” he quips), and then give him some sleek new Tron duds (part of this scene is visible in the “Derezzed” music video excerpt that recently debuted online). Then they’re like, “Peace,” and go back to their coffins.

More thoughts after the jump.