Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Good-Bye Bret

Have you read this interview with Bret Easton Ellis. I don't even know where to start. Maybe with this or this or this.? Oh well Bret, I guess this is good-bye. Can womankind make some sort of pact so that he never gets laid again?

Also, I just realized the only one of his books that's ever been made into an actually good movie is American Psycho directed by Mary Harron.
As for his male directed movies : The Rules of Attraction was an okay fun college movie but The Informers and Less Than Zero were sad butcherings of the books. So what is he even talking about?

here is the full article
http://www.movieline.com/2010/05/bret-easton-ellis-on-american-psycho-christian-bale-and-his-problem-with-women-directors.php?page=all

What are your thoughts on women directors? After you saw Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank, you tweeted that you might have to reevaluate your preconceived notions about them.
I did. And after I saw [Floria Sigismondi’s] The Runaways, too.

Really?
I loved it.

I wish I’d loved it.
Well, I wasn’t looking forward to it. I avoided it, and then I was with some people and they said, “It starts soon at the Arclight. Let’s go.” So yeah, I do have to reevaluate that, but for the most part I’m not totally convinced, [except for] Andrea Arnold, Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola…

Not Mary Harron?
Mary Harron to a degree. There’s something about the medium of film itself that I think requires the male gaze.

What would that be?
We’re watching, and we’re aroused by looking, whereas I don’t think women respond that way to films, just because of how they’re built.

"Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn’t a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg?"

You don’t think they have an overt level of arousal?
[They have one] that’s not so stimulated by the visual. I think, to a degree, all the women I named aren’t particularly visual directors. You could argue that Lost in Translation is beautiful, but is that [cinematographer Lance Acord]? I don’t know. Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn’t a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don’t know. I think it’s a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility. I mean, the best art is made under not an indifference to, but a neutrality [toward] the kind of emotionalism that I think can be a trap for women directors. But I have to get over it, you’re right, because so far this year, two of my favorite movies were made by women, Fish Tank and The Runaways. I’ve got to start rethinking that, although I have to say that a lot of the big studio movies I saw last year that were directed by women were far worse than the sh***y big-budget studio movies that were directed by men.

Which are we talking about?
I mean, do I want to say this on the record? Did you see The Proposal? Anyway, whatever.

1 comment:

Gypsymade said...

I love that you tagged this "Losers who suck". Hahaha. I am defriending him on Facebook.