I am very short on time for reasons I will address more directly tomorrow. For now, let me just divert your attention with a placeholder post that also preserves a piece I’d like to remember.

I don’t agree with everything New York Times film writer Mahnola Dargis says, but I sure admire the intellectual perspective that she brings to her arguments, including a recent defense–which probably shouldn’t have been necessary–of Kathryn Bigelow. From that piece:

Unless they star Meryl Streep, movies about women are routinely dismissed because they’re about women, as the patronizing term “chick flick” affirms every time it’s reflexively deployed. But chick flicks are often the only movies that offer female audiences stories about women and female friendships and a world that, however artificial, offers up female characters who are not standing on the sidelines as the male hero saves the day. It might not be much and usually isn’t, at least in aesthetic terms, but it’s sometimes all there is. Ms. Bigelow doesn’t make those kinds of movies. (Her vampires don’t sparkle, they draw blood.)

The whole thing is worth a read.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)