Friends With Benefits + The Kids Are All Right = Friends With Kids April 29, 2012
Posted by halberst in Film, Pop Culture.Tags: Breeders, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same, Designer Babies, Friends With Kids
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By Jack Halberstam
We all know that Hollywood movies emerge out of a, shall we say, limited gene pool of ideas; and when that pool runs dry, the stumped screenplay writers just shuffle the jigsaw puzzle pieces of accepted story lines around until they come up with apparently new narratives. This is clearly what happened with the recent Jennifer Westfeldt film Friends With Kids. Touted as an independent, edgy ‘ensemble comedy,’ this film actually shows what happens when very straight, very sheltered straight people get a hold of a few strands of rather radical queer ideas about love, intimacy and reproduction!
Touted by David Edelstein in a feature in the New York Magazine as “the best breeder movie in years” (we might also dub it the only breeder movie in years and hey, when did “breeder” become a part of the hetero lexicon?), Friends With Kids asks a question that queer people have asked often and with much more curiosity for years: namely, do people have to be married to have kids or are marriage and child rearing actually like oil and water, a recipe for a greasy mess with the capacity to neither lubricate nor hydrate!
This film comes up with a solution to the separation of sex and reproduction problem by offering us Julie (played by Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott), good friends who enjoy a wide-ranging and affectionate friendship with each other while dating others and watching their friendship circle drift off into marriage and child rearing. When neither Julie nor Jason falls in love with an appropriate partner at the designated time of life for such things, they watch with horror as their friends’ relationships fall apart and their sex lives wither on the vine under the pressure of child rearing.
One night, after a particularly unpleasant dinner party with their coupled and bickering pals, Julie and Jason ask whether it could be possible to have babies together without the intimacy, marriage and bickering. An idea is born and since they have affirmed many times that while they love each other, they are not attracted to one another, what could possibly get in the way of this perfect arrangement? They will get to date promiscuously but still have some stability in their lives; they will get the baby and the chance at parenthood without dragging the diapers and the spit up into their sex lives; they will get to have their cake and eat it too.
While this idea strikes Julie and Jason and their rather humdrum friendship circle as wild, original, evil and impossible, in actual fact the notion of the companionate marriage is as old as the hills. The reason it is on no one’s radar is because it is one of those many under-studied forms of lesbian sociality where we will find it under the heading of the Boston marriage.
The Boston marriage, which is essentially what Jason and Julie propose to have – was a term used in the late 19th century to describe households made up of women living together independently of men. Whether or not these relationships were sexual has been a topic of much debate, but they were certainly long lasting, amicable and they allowed women financial, emotional and practical independence at a time when middle class women were defined by their relationships to their husbands.
Because of the ways in which heteronormativity assigns credit for all things good to heterosexuality and blame for all things bad to the gays and lesbians and trannies, heterosexual marriage has been cast as unquestionably right and good, even when it lacks sex and includes 
physical violence, and lesbian companionate relations have been cast as unquestionably wrong even when they are sexual and stable. Also, as we saw in The Kids Are All Right, one of the formulaic films that provides plot pieces for this mash up of rom coms and social issues movies, when lesbian long term relationships lose their libidinal energy we talk of “lesbian bed death” (not just bed death notice, lesbian bed death), but when hetero couples run out of steam, as the Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig couple do in Friends With Kids, this is simply a failed marriage – leaving us with the impression that most marriages succeed!
Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig as Ben and Missy are actually the most convincing couple in the film – they enter the movie panting from mid-dinner coital exertions and they exit alone and bitter. Sounds like a Tennessee Williams play except that when queer relationships fail, even in dramas penned by queers, it affirms the essential corruption of the queers. When straight people fail, they are just not trying hard enough. And so, Ben and Missy, whose relationship falls apart with as many sparks as it initially came together (so to speak), are represented as a bad combination of the bitchy woman and the resentful male partner – that this combination is actually the foundation of most forms of domestic white heterosexuality is never confirmed by the film which wants to desperately hold on to the idea of a perfect union of man and woman, good and bad, black and white, domestic and wild.
And so, to that end, we are offered an ideal couple in this not so romantic and not so funny rom com: Leslie (Maya Rudolph) and Alex (Chris O’Dowd). Leslie may be a tad bitchy and naggy but Alex absorbs all darts and arrows that she flings his way and does the manly thing – he fights fire with love and compassion. Because he yields and bends to her need to blame and nitpick, and because she accepts his limitations, ineptitudes and laziness, they are the perfect couple and they even have sex!
So, if Friends With Kids steals one set of narrative arcs from The Kids Are All Right – alternative domesticity, Boston marriage, the separation of child rearing from heterosexual domesticity—it steals another from Friends With Benefits. Another gay film masquerading as a straight film, Friends With Benefits asked whether two hot young things could have sex but not intimacy, a good time at night and beat a hasty retreat in the morning, blow jobs without blow backs…? The answer of course was…sure they can…for a while… and then guess what? Mother nature takes over and what man and woman has put asunder, nature will reunite – and so if Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis just want to roll around in their undies looking hot for and hour and 20 minutes, that is all well and good, but a rom com demands a marriage and so sex leads to intimacy leads to love leads to….
And so it goes in Friends With Kids – the couple with no chemistry, no interest in each other sexually, no grounds for love or marriage, the couple who were so cold on each other sexually that they knew they could raise a kid together without any complications…guess what…they fall in love! Despite having subjected the audience to one of the most awkward and therefore actually interesting sex scenes in cinema during their insemination romp, the couple who couldn’t suddenly become hot for one another, just like that! For the viewer who has suffered through long spans of dialogue offering up one watered down queer critique after another of domesticity, heterosexuality, long term relationships and nuclear parenthood, the resulting romance is offensive, insincere and totally unbelievable. And this, ultimately, is why straight people should leave the queer theory to the queers – once they have boarded the runaway train of alternative desire, they realize that they desperately want to go home and leave everything exactly the way it was.
Ok, so in a perfect world, where I had a sabbatical, time to spare, no deadlines, I would pen the perfect masterpieces: The Friends Are All Right and Kids With Benefits. In the first, a queer culture of friendship replaces domestic marriage and nuclear families and new experiments in social world-making pop up everywhere. Friends share space, homes, kids, resources, health care access and probably sex…And in the second, kids cease to be the precious and pampered pets that this society demands and produces and they fight for their independence from families! Or else we could just settle for Kids Are Ok, Friends Are All Right and Go Get Your Own Benefits, a rom com involving space aliens who settle on earth and try to date lesbians…actually that IS the plot of an awesome film I just saw titled Co-Dependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same by Madeline Olnek…try coopting that Hollywood!! Watch this space for a quick take on lesbian space alien films…coming soon. Peace out.
The Summer of Raunch July 16, 2011
Posted by halberst in Film, Pop Culture.Tags: Halberstam Bridesmaids, romantic comedy
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By Jack Halberstam
Did anyone else notice how comedies, I hesitate to call them “romantic,” let’s say “sex comedies,” have become absolutely pornographic nowadays? And I don’t really mean pornographic in a good way, as in “no holds barred, sexy, fun, overturn a few taboos and have a good laugh” pornographic. I mean teenage boy, obsessive dick humor with fart jokes, erection jokes, shit jokes and period jokes thrown in for good measure. While critics and bloggers are celebrating the new “bra-mances,” the female equivalents to the bro-mances that received a boost this summer with Bridesmaids and Bad Teacher, the bra-mances are as low as the bromances when it comes to sexual humor. 
Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not mounting a prudish objection to low, low-w-w-w, humor in general, I was as amused as the next dude by the penis sight gags in Austin Powers, the off-color jokes of Borat (“I want to have a car that attract a woman with shave down below”), even the hair-gel scene in Something about Mary tickled my fancy. But, in the genre of sex comedies, a little bit a raunch goes a long, long way. Nowadays, we have graduated from a few nudge nudge wink winks with a bit of how’s your father to a lot of fingering, blow jobs, cock rubbing and ball licking!
No doubt the Judd Apatow comedies are in part to blame for the new raunch and for the rise of the nerd as sex god. But there was something very sweet (if unbelievable) about 40 Year Old Virgin and at least in Superbad the adolescent humor belonged to adolescents rather than 40 year old men. But Apatow is definitely to blame for opening the floodgates from subtle sexual innuendo to all out porno-comedy.
The new sex comedies are formulaic in every way (not in and of itself a bad thing) and they build on character archetypes, broad raunchy humor, bad guys and worse guys, bad girls and clueless girls, lots of drugs and alcohol and some kind of far-fetched scenario (guys wake up in Vegas with a tiger in the room; guys try to kill their bosses; girls try to engage in some female bonding; father in law inadvertently take a super-viagra drug etc. etc.) that allows everyone to engage in lots of extra-marital, perverse and often homo-sex before everything returns to normal again.
Every film in this genre has to build to a “laugh until you cry scene” that provides a payoff for the cycle of gross, porno jokes. These scenes have to be way over the top – they consist of envelope pushing scenarios in an extended play format, replete with bodily fluids and long gross-out sequences. Think of the nude wrestling scene from Borat as the quintessential “laugh until you cry” scene. And then look at its counterpart in Bridesmaids, which strove to be the mother of all gross-out scenes and but maybe went over the top at going over the top. In Bridesmaids, the gross-out scene played with the tropes of disordered female embodiment in general, and focused therefore on food, on binging and purging and with a kind of involuntary bulimia – following an ill-advised dinner for their hen night, the bridesmaids head for a dress fitting and in the pristine chamber of virginal white gowns, they, one by one, throw up and shit uncontrollably in the grips of mass food poisoning. While audiences busted a gut at these scenes of digestive mayhem, for me they were beyond grotesque and humiliating to boot. While there was lots to laugh at in Bridesmaids, this scene did not deliver for me on a comic level.
And of course, as some critics have already commented, the bra-mance is not exactly leveling the playing field of hetero-sex comedy. While the bromance is all about the bros being bros with their hos and not with their whiny wives, the bramance is also all about the bros – the ladies all talk about guys, whine about them, bitch about not getting laid, bitch about how they get laid and mostly, they bitch about each other. The bromance allows the guys to snuggle up together while figuring out how to get out of whatever dilemma confronts them. The bramance provides a stage for bride wars, for out and out girl hates girl battles with a few romantic interludes thrown in for good measure. Which is not to say that some of the bramances are not very, very funny; just that the humor continues to come at the expense of women and not men. And of course, as per usual, there is plenty of off-color humor in these films in the form of racial stereotyping (see the Jamie Foxx character in Horrible Bosses or the Asian gay hysteric in The Hangover) all of which adds to a kind of post-political correctness expression of gloves-off white male anger and disappointment.
So, in case you think I am being too easily shocked by the new raunch, here are a few lines from recent sex comedies:
Guy to friend: “you know what the best part about having gay dads is?
Friend: “What?”
Guy: “They are never gonna eat out my ex-girlfriends?”
Friend: “You and your dad are tunnel buddies, huh?”
Or…
Woman to Guy she is having sex with: “Your balls are so smooth…!”
Guy to Woman he is having sex with: “Cup my balls…oh yeah!”
Guy to Woman: “I made you this to help sooth your womb” – hands her a CD
Woman: “It’s a mix…Even Flow, Red Red Wine!”
Friend: “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.”
Woman: “You made me…a period mix?”
Friend: “That’s so romantic.”
Woman: “I am gonna suck your dick like I am mad at it!”
Guy: “I am gonna rock your vagina.”
Father in law to son in law: “Focker, there is no way I’m going into an ER room with this thing. Now you need to stick me and you need to stick me now! I’m having a dick attack! Stick me!” (Son in law sticks a needle into his father in law’s erect penis while watched by his 7 year old son who has come to see what is going on!)
It is not just that the material is crude and made for youporn, it is also that these new sex comedies imagine men as the victims of unwanted sexual attention from voracious women. And so, Jennifer Aniston recently played a sexual harasser in Horrible Bosses (“Come on, slap my face with your cock!”). Melissa McCarthy played a butch sexual harasser of men in Bridesmaids (“I’m glad he’s single because I am going to climb that like a tree.”) And when they are not playing sexual harassers, very hot women in sex comedies are begging for sex “with no strings attached” or playing “bad teachers” and begging for sex or being flattered into a quick hook up by guys who feed them outrageously flat lines like: “Are you a model?” It is as if we have gone through the looking glass here from a world where a wardrobe malfunction led to massive national paroxysms of outrage and horror to a world where a wardrobe malfunction will humorously lead to a lots of boob shots, a quick blow job followed by some anal and a few jokes about poop shoots.
These films raise a lot of questions for me: have we gone too far? Are they funny? Do heterosexual people really talk like this on a regular basis (“your balls are so smooth!” really? “I am gonna rock your vagina!” Vagina?? “I’ve made you a period mix…” Awesome)? Is Hollywood, in a last ditch effort to reach the much desired 15-25 year old males group, manning its script writing sessions with 15-25 year old males? While the gays are getting married, singing duets to each other on Glee and other mainstream TV shows, the straights are telling each other about how they want to “hit that,” and dumping marriage for some lost weekends with foul-mouthed sluts. It’s a topsy turvy world and while I am all for some raunch, for lots of raunch even, is it too much to ask something be left to the imagination?
Frida and Anita May 20, 2011
Posted by Tavia in Film.Tags: anita berber, berlin, frida kahlo, queer, trans
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by Tavia Nyong’o
Frida & Anita from Liz Rosenfeld on Vimeo.
Frida & Anita, the new film by Liz Rosenfeld, had it’s Berlin premiere last night at Moviemento, to a packed house of friends and fans. The 20 minute short, which stars Les Margeaux and Richard Hancock as its respective titular stars, is a queer reverie of an imagined romantic encounter between Frida Kahlo and Anita Berber, one that never happened and perhaps couldn’t have, but which, in its very impossibility, illustrates the performative premises of all nostalgia.
Rosenfeld draws her viewer in with the devices of silent film, like jerky intertitles, which are coupled with luscious technicolor cinematography (by Samuel Maxim and Imogen Heath). Frida and Anita meet in a Weimar-era lesbian nightclub that is also a present day queer bar, habituated by many of the actors themselves. As the film progresses (or, like night and day in bohemian Berlin, ambles) the period frame shifts and dissolves, as the characters Frida and Anita merge with their present day incarnations in Hancock and Margeaux. The two (or is it four?) trade philosophy, politics and sex in three languages.
Margeaux is positively the döppelganger of the teenage Kahlo, in the days before her accident, strolling around in her father’s suits with an air of proletarian insouicance. Hancock conjures Berber out of thin air, literally, drawing upon the most subtle of movements to evoke her presence, not on the basis of gender imitation, but rather through a kind of queer transubstantiation.
The screening was a community event, with many of the cast and crew in the audience. It was accompanied by a variety of shorts by those who had contributed in some way to the film. Highlights included Screen Tests by Sam Icklow, which featured the filmmaker romping around in various post-Warholian scenarios with bosom buddy Eric; Imogen Heath‘s meditative The Poetics of Porn which seemed, among many other things, to be a paean to dendrophilia, Tom Weller‘s witty Maikäfer flieg, in which the filmmaker documents the fluctuations in his vocal range over the two year period that he was taking testerone and gender transitioning by singing the same children’s song about a “Cockchafer fly”; and original contributions from Leila Evenson, Christa Holka, and Hancock himself.
Frida & Anita is the first of a trilogy of films about Weimar and queer nostalgia. The second is already in the can, and the final one will be shot this coming summer. DIY filmmaking at its finest, and, at this pace, its fastest!
The Bully Awards, 2010 February 15, 2011
Posted by halberst in Film, Pop Culture, Uncategorized.1 comment so far
And the Bully Goes To…2nd Annual Bully Awards
by Jack Halberstam
Yes folks, it really is that time again. It is time for the second annual Bully Awards for the best and worst in motion pictures for the past year. I know there has been a lot happening in the world recently, what with so much commotion and upheaval, so many upsets and ousted leaders…and that was just at the Grammy’s. But now that Gaga is out of her egg, 
Mick Jagger is out of his retirement home and Justin Bieber is out of short pants, let’s turn to an adult level awards show…the Oscars. This year, as you know, the sacred ceremony is to be hosted by Ann Hathaway and that learned English PhD scholar, James Franco. Yup, all around the country, English departments are congratulating themselves for being cool, for finally being the right discipline at the right time and for providing a home for aspirational actor/academics.
While this time last year, we were bemoaning apocalyptic pics (2012), bromances (I Love You Man!), gay films masquerading as straight films (A Single Man and Up in the Air) and chipmunks (Alvin and the…) this year we witness a return to the quote unquote smart film, talky pictures with lots to say – smart films about fast talking guys at Harvard changing the world (The Social Network), slow talking kings in the British Monarchy saving the world (The King’s Speech), chatty hiking nerds (127 Hours), mouthy fighters (The Fighter), garrulous toys (Toy Story 3), expressive dancers (Black Swan), hell we even had a film about conversational bourgeois lesbians (The Kids Are Alright) and an animated film about super intelligent beings (Megamind). All in all, the films this year were smart, dark, darker, and downright depressing.
While last year the mood was goofy (Brüno), mock serious (Avatar), mock goofy and chirpy (aforementioned Chipmunks), this year, there was little humor to leaven the slide into bankruptcy, chaos and death. Last year’s animated winner was Up, which pretty much summed up the overly optimistic late-decade predictions about the economy, this year’s sure thing is Toy Story 3, a dark film about redundant toys put out to pasture, abused old toys, sad Big Baby toys abandoned at birth, bitter toys that try to crush each other. Last year, James Cameron created a 3-D world in Avatar in which blue indigenous peoples crushed white imperial forces, this year David Fincher in Social Network created a virtual world in which pricks from Harvard fought over millions of dollars while bonking stupid girls and showing not an ounce of social responsibility. Last year Brüno stuck his fist up various arschholen on screen, this year James Franco in 127 Hours stuck his fist in a rock and could not get it out again. 
And just in case you thought it couldn’t get any worse, Javier Bardem, who two years earlier had won an Oscar for the deadpan depiction of a Latino serial killer of white people, this year in Inarritu’s Biutiful, dies a slow painful death from cancer while his ex wife goes crazy and his kids look on in horror. Oh and never let it be said that the English don’t know how to do misery – Another Year by Mike Leigh brilliantly depicts the breakdown of human sociality facilitated by the imperial domination of the intimate form popularly known as “the couple.”
Yup, it’s cold out there and getting colder. Even the comedies were dark in 2010 – did anyone see Cyrus? Whaaaat? Mumblecore my ass – this was Oedipus wrecks, a wretchedly weird film in which Marisa Tomei is romanced by the singularly unappealing John C. Reilly only to be thwarted in her sexual escapades when her twenty-something son expresses his Oedipal objections to the match. In a romantic comedy with few jokes, little romance and a massive incestuous “ick” factor, so little was appealing that the reviewers tried to rescue it by inventing a new genre to explain this and other navel-gazing not very funny rom-com, sex-with-mom, ho-hum films – mumblecore? No, I don’t think so, try Dumbocore – dumb films pretending to be smart films, but what these films really do is provide a justification for a new form of parasitical masculinity.
The Mumblecore films by the Duplass Brothers (Cyrus), Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha), but also inspired by Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) give this Mumbler guy meaning – yes, he may be a loser, may lack a job, a purpose in life, ambition, charm, likeable qualities, this may all be true, but Mumblecore imagines beautiful women throwing themselves at these men not despite their shortcomings but because of them. If there weren’t plenty of evidence in the real world for this phenomenon of smart women/ slacker men couplings, Mumblecore would be truly offensive. As it is, the films are depressingly accurate and we can expect many more of the same.
Well forget mumblers then, what about stutterers? The King’s Speech has won the hearts and minds of many an anti-monarchist on account of its whimsy, its humanization of the sovereign and the arch acting skills of one queenly Helena Bonham Carter. But is this really the right film for our times? Do we really need to cathect now, at this moment in history, on to a story about a soon to be monarch who has lost the confidence of his people and who allegorizes the faltering of sovereign power and then its recuperation on the verge of World War 2? Right now, as dictators begin to fall in Tunisia and Egypt, we cleave to a narrative of good monarchy, kind and gentle, frail and vulnerable monarchy; we apparently want the story of the good king, the sweet king who finds his voice and leads his people out of the darkness…plus, there is not a little hint of mumblecore/stuttercore here in the tale of male incompetence propped up by female ambition…
And speaking of female ambition…How about those Black Swans? Darren Aronsky gives ballet the same treatment he applied to wrestling in The Wrestler a few years ago. In both films, the protagonist sacrifices his/her body to the call of the discipline but Black Swan has the added, horror element of the toxic mother-daughter bond. Barbara Hershey plays a creepy Tiger mother to Natalie Portman’s anxious over-achieving daughter and the two drag each other down into the muck of estrogen fuelled competitive destruction. In fact this was the year of bad parenting as The Kids Are Alright, Toy Story 3, Megamind, Biutiful, Black Swan and Winter’s Bone proved; but at least heterosexual films about bad parenting actually admit that the whole enterprise is fucked and wrong. The lesbian bad parenting film had to try to salvage something good and meaningful from the failing family unit. Even Toy Story 3 had the decency to toss the bad parent, Lotso Bear, into the incinerator at the end. And at least Black Swan, for all its mother-daughter drama, had a tremendous lesbian sex scene between Portman and Mila Kunis.
Oh well, onto the predictions such as they are for the 2011 Bullies/Oscars:
Best Actress: I predict that everyone will want Annette Bening to win best actress despite her cringe-inducing, potentially career-ending improvised Joni Mitchell number in the lesbo-phobic The Kids Are Alright. But in the end, the historionics of Natalie Portman in the creepily awesome Black Swan will and should win. The Bully goes to Portman for going over the top and reminding us that inside every good girl is a black swan.
Best Actor: And while Javier Bardem should add another gold man to his collection, for his harrowing depiction of a dying, desperate man, this year our academy voters will go for heartwarming over heart stopping and the stuttering king, played by Colin Firth, will win best actor. But the Bully goes to James Franco for giving the best castration performance of the year – the gruesome amputation of a vital body part with a small knife was a perfect metaphor for the process of getting a PhD in English at Yale and no doubt his experience there really helped him with this role…
Best Director: Probably will go to David Fincher, The Social Network or Tom Hooper for The King’s Speech but who cares.
Best Animated Film: Of course, the best animated film Oscar will and should go to Toy Story 3, a dark parable about the dangers of aging in a world committed to the young, the new and the expendable. But keep in mind the wondrous lessons of How To Train Your Dragon and Megamind: namely, dragons are pretty nice actually, as are blue men with big heads, not to mention Vikings, but beware of heroes in tights, especially if they sound like Brad Pitt.
Worst Film of the Year: And the Bully goes too…well, it is a toss up actually. I really hated Sophia Coppola’s continued and extended meditation on male boredom inSomewhere. I disliked the durational shots of male fatigue, the quick takes on male inertia, the lingering shots of Stephen Dorff falling asleep during sex, during conversations, during life. But I also really hated Cyrus, not sure if you got that from my comments on it above. Both of these films are actually Mumblecore, although Dorff mumbles more than anyone in Cyrus. Yogi Bear and Furry Vengeance are of course in contention for this coveted award but with no mumblecore elements anywhere to be found they cannot seriously compete. Plus I did not see them… This bully (did you ever doubt it?) goes to Cyrus.
Best Film: The Oscar will continue its love fest with the royals and give the award to The King’s Speech, I think. I could be wrong and it could go to The Social Network, for making Americans look smart at a moment when the education system goes belly up. But the truth is—Hollywood, are you listening?—talking fast does not equal intelligence! The worn out trope of the nerdy white guy dropping everything to rush off to his computer to type away at high speed while chatting at an even higher speed needs to be retired after this film. And by the way, the representation of Harvard as a world where smart chatty guys date dumb silent women returns us to Mumblecore but makes me think again about how much I preferred watching Franco self-amputate over Jesse Eisenberg self-pleasuring by writing code frantically.
No matter, the Bully goes to Never Let Me Go – the other British film of the year, which, along with Mike Leigh’s Another Year, eschews royals and high society in favor of the dirty little secrets of a British post-empire, post-life, post-war landscape. In this deeply affecting, flatly melancholic film, the eugenic imperative of neo-imperialism finds its fullest expression in the children who, like the toys in Toy Story 3, realize that they are expendable, that their organs will be harvested and that their “completion” represents the darkest conclusion to the dark ages we have now entered.
Runners Up: Four Lions – under appreciated British comedy about terrorism without Mumblecore story line; I Am Love – under appreciated Operatic Italian drama with Tilda Swinton mumbling in Italian about Oedipal love (Mumblecore Italian style?); Mother – Korean mumblecore; Red – Helen Mirren with a machine gun, say no more – the right response to mumblecore…
