women in music and danny boyles

Women in Music and Danny Boyle's Sunshine

Is it just me or have the past two years been really outstanding for

music made by women? In 2006 we had insanely great albums from Regina

Spektor, Camille, My Brightest Diamond, Kaki King, Christine Fellows,

CSS, Joanna Newsom, and Neko Case (not to mention Cat Power, the

Pipettes, and Karin Dreijer Andersson of The Knife), and this year has

already (already? the year's like more than half over, AF--ed.)

brought new stuff from Bjork, Laura Veirs, Amy Winehouse, Lucky Soul

(featuring the chirpily powerhouse vocals of Ali Howard), the Long

Blondes, Tracey Thorn, Feist, Polly Paulusma, and St. Vincent (who

comes the closest I've ever heard in contemporary indie rock to

emulating/channeling/updating the great Jackie Cain's playful yet

mournful yet musically sophisticated singing style). I have no

hypothesis or commentary about this or anything, I'm just sayin'. It's

awesome. (Alt: "I'm just saying it's awesome!")

One-liner of the [DEL: week :DEL] [DEL: month :DEL] [DEL: year :DEL]

decade? Be sure to explore his site for a bit while you're clicked

through, especially the running tally of films seen in '07. I couldn't

agree more on the point that the pleasures of Ocean's 13 (and 11 as

well, I suppose; 12 remains dead to me) are largely tangled up with

ideas of work. Of course, sexiness and silliness abound in these

trifles, but it's also nice to get lost in a place where people are

really good at what they do, confident in their abilities, eventually

rewarded for their effort, and surrounded by equally talented and

supportive associates. I mean, Vegas and Brad Pitt's bone structure to

one side, this is the dream, right? This is what we're all looking for

in one way or another?

Finally had a chance to catch Sunshine this weekend (the new one on

the spaceship, not the older one with Ralph Fiennes's soapy D).

Despite my affection for Danny Boyle, or maybe because of it, I'm

willing to concede it was a swing-and-a-miss. It was ambitious as

hell, which not enough movies are anymore (at least intellectually),

and I have a feeling a lot of the visuals are going to stick with me

for a while (esp. the many times we see the wonderful Cliff Curtis

standing in the observation room, silhouetted against the glowing mass

of the sun). But, the plot was giving me a serious case of the "huh?"s

(and not in the good way), especially toward the "climactic" ending,

and the script was laden with way too much dumbed-down exposition, a

fact which was not helped by the bafflingly miscast crew. Now, my

feelings about Cillian Murphy perhaps need not be stated, but come

on--he's the one you're going to choose as your shipboard physicist on

your suicide mission to the sun? Please. Likewise the rest of the

beefy, generically handsome dudes, especially Chris Evans with his

almost comically needless and situationally inappropriate perpetual

huffiness. Michelle Yeoh gets a pass because, well, she's Michelle

Yeoh, but the role was a joke and she was clearly doing everything she

could to redeem it, and Rose Byrne was essentially doing a pale

imitation of the genuinely sweet, smart strength of Jewel Staite as

Kaylee in Serenity/Firefly. I'm sure most of these actors have their

charms, but, on the whole, everyone was just too damn good looking. I

longed for the sight of a few of those gloriously lumpy Scottish mugs

in Trainspotting, or Brendan Gleeson from 28 Days Later. And while a

years-long mission through the solar system with a tiny crew in

constant contact and constant awareness of their own mortality should

have been a perfect vehicle to examine Danny Boyle's usual interest in

the ways that social groups break down under the weight of their own

entropy, there was nothing about the degradation of the crew's

relationships that seemed earned or organic. From the start, they were

nothing more than walking representations of the most sophomoric ideas

of character conflict, and without any lingering past affection

established between them at all (Yeoh's deep connection to the plants

in the greenhouse being the one possible exception; Murphy and Byrne's

sleepytime discussion of their surface-of-the-sun nightmares decidedly

not), there was no room to move within the realm of cynicism and

distrust. The rot had already infected everything on screen, and not

in an interesting or nuanced way, and so the only stakes left seemed

to be vague, lofty ideals about their duty to the rest of the human

race. Reverse those two, and then maybe you have a movie worth caring

about and not an inadvertent dramatization of our current

administration's rhetoric. Anyway, there's no way I'm giving up on