I am not uniformly convinced by the genius of Tim Burton, particularly with regard to Johnny Depp.  I tend to think they do extremely well together in the melancholy range.  Both Edward Scissorhands and Sweeney Todd are absolutely magnificent, but I found his anticness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory offputting.  I’d been turned off by the early trailers for Alice in Wonderland, which put Depp as the Mad Hatter firmly back in that antic, high-pitched, eccentric range.  But the most recent trailers have finally convinced me to be quite excited about the movie:

I really like the idea of giving Alice agency, and of giving her a backstory.  The idea that Alice is coming back to Wonderland (though is she, really?) is an intriguing continuation.  But I also really like the idea of Wonderland as a destination, an escape from the stultifying possibilities of marriage in Victorian England.  The gentry who are lined up, blocking Alice’s escape, waiting for her response to that marriage proposal, look like the Red Queen’s troops.  But in Wonderland, Alice can take up arms to oppose them.  I like that.

I realize this Vulture slideshow rating various “crazy” things in popular culture is meant mostly as a joke, but I think it’s an interesting illustration of the tension between actual mental illness and loss of control that people find exciting, or sexy, or impressive for some reason.  Actual mental illness is profoundly unsexy, and un-fun.  It’s usually only fodder for popular culture if the person who has it is either a genius or talented in some way that makes their descent into illness tragic, or if they’re able to overcome it in some way that reduces mental illness to another movie obstacle; or if it’s the genesis for the creation of a super-villain, in which case it never really gets investigated because we’re never as interested in the origin stories for villains as they are for heroes.

I’m totalizing, of course.  There are a lot of movies out there about many kinds of mental illness (I am highly entertained that the second two Lord of the Rings movies are listed under dissociative disorder).  But I think it’s fascinating that “crazy,” which is, of course, is a colloquial rather than clinical term for mental illness, shows up so often in popular culture.  Perhaps using that word, pop culture lets us engage with the idea of losing control without forcing us to grapple with the actual consequences of permanent loss.  It’s a way out, a dodge.  I’m not sure I think it’s dangerous or generally obscuring.  But I do think it’s interesting.

I like this post from Feministe on The Family that Preys for a lot of reasons, among them for its demonstration that the Bechdel Test, which states that a movie is only worth watching if a) it has at least two women in it, b) who talk to each other, c) about something other than a man, is incomplete.  Or at least no guarantee that a movie will be decent, since of course (and this should be obvious to everyone) that movies solely about women and their relationships to things other than men can be awful, dumb, mean, or have terrible values.  I like the spirit of the Bechdel Test, and I think Dykes to Watch Out For is well worth reading (and Alison Bechdel’s forays into other graphic novel work have also been wonderful).  But I also think that for the Test, it’s worth remembering the context in which it originates.

For example, the Test would disqualify a viewer who relied on it from watching The Hurt Locker, a magnificent movie about the relationships between men, which does have two women in it, but separates them by continent and language.  Is it any less worth watching for that? Absolutely not.  Ditto for Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, which is chock-full of women, but because they’re mostly discussing their lives in relationship to and in the context of several men, most importantly their father, might also be disqualified by  a strict interpretation of the Test.  But it’s also a fantastic movie about women, family, independence, money, careers, sexuality, and sisterhood.  Yes, I realize those are indies.  And yes, a huge number of movies made about women are awful, frustrating, offensive, and contentless.  But that doesn’t mean movies that are primarily about men, or that are about women figuring out their relationships to men, aren’t worthwhile.

Unlike Haiti, where I have no particular knowledge, insight, or right to speak, I’ve spent some time in Chile, and my family has developed some strong ties with folks down there.  I’m waiting to hear back to make sure that everyone is okay.  I’m wondering what happened to the ELEMENTAL public housing project in Renca, which was a neighborhood made out of shipping pallets and the occasional permanent building on contaminated land when I visited there in 2004.  It sounds like Santiago is functional, but there’s been severe damage to major buildings and highways.  I hope the Central Market and the train station are safe.  And I wonder what’s happened to La Serena, the provincial capital my father I flew to before driving up into the Andes to visit a major astronomical observatory, and to the telescopes and astronomers there.  I’m still doing some research, but once I figure out the best ways to donate, I’ll try to make some suggestions here.