Today is a news day!

1. I have a story in Wilful Impropriety, a Kathy Sedia anthology of YA Victorian fiction featuring some amazing TOC-mates! My story, “The Dancing Master,” follows a young woman’s preparation for her first Season, and actual quotes from Victorian etiquette manuals that dispel any mystery about how hard the Victorian era wanted to stifle its ladies, because YIKES. (More on this later.)

2. Speaking of YA, I have a story in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s After (full TOC well worth looking over, I lucked out again in the TOC)! “The Segment” is about how the evening news gets made, and features a bear suit. (As happens.)

3. Thirdly, I am among some excellent company on this year’s Locus Recommended Reading List for both Mechanique and “The Sandal-Bride”. I’m honored and pleased.

There will be more catching up next week, especially a very belated return of Alan Alda, and with any luck, I’ll be talking about a very special Harry Potter knockoff. (Hoo boy.)

Liam Neeson’s Wolfpunch: The Motion Picture came out last weekend. The ad campaign is really pushing the fact that this is a film about a bunch of dudes stranded in the wintry woods and pursued by wolves, largely because I imagine a campaign to sell it as a movie about the failures of airplane engineering was a non-starter.

However, in a group interview with Movieline, Dermot Mulroney reminds us all not to forget that the heart of this film is the man on man on man on man on man action that cinema so desperately needs:

Dermot Mulroney: “I loved Jaws and Aliens and…Deliverance. So to me it read like those, I thought I’d like to be in a movie like that once, that’d be amazing. I’ve made a lot of movies that had both men and women in them, a lot of movies that were dominated by the woman’s storyline. And in this case it was a very different experience making the movie and enjoying the movie, when it was completed, because of the fact that there are no women in it… It was like thank God, I get to do a movie with just guys.”

Let’s get it out of the way that anyone referring to “actor” Dermot Mulroney needs to include those air quotes, so for him this quote stops, for all intents and purposes, at “thank God, I get to do a movie.”

Let’s also get it out of the way that Deliverance is a very…interesting film to reference in the context of two other films in which non-human monsters literally rip people to shreds.

Let’s also also get it out of the way that Aliens is, in fact, a movie about a woman who teams up with a small squad of Marines that includes two women to investigate an alien-riddled colony of which the only survivor is a young woman, and then proceeds to nearly-singlehandedly torch alien ass into oblivion.

I can’t help but picture Dermot Mulroney, sitting in the house that playing second fiddle to a bunch of vaginas all the time has bought him, wrinkling his nose and holding up scripts with two fingers as he deposits them carefully in a box labeled STORIES ABOUT WOMEN and a frowny face on them. He’s tired of it, don’t you see? He’s had to be billed under Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson, Emily Mortimer, and Glenn Close, and he BARELY edged out Anne Bancroft and Alfre Woodard that one time, and just a bunch of other bitches, all right? God, why is Hollywood so deluged with stories about women? Everywhere you look it’s just thoughtful, respectful, non-objectifying stories about the deep conflicts of women in a variety of situations that are never sidelined or belittled as being domestic or romantic, and Dermot Mulroney is TIRED OF IT. “Why can’t there be a movie about MEN, and THEIR concerns!”, Dermot cries, checking his junk casually just to get a look at some man-stuff before the day is over. When will Hollywood realize that men could be bankable, too, if only someone would give them a chance? Why won’t they give men leading roles? Why won’t these boardrooms packed full of women making all the key financial and business decisions that dictate the market and its gender attitudes finally stop asking for him to talk to women already? WHY?

No, seriously though, why.

The most awkward awards name of all (close second to the Golden Globes) happened last night! This is the one where stylists don’t have to worry about dressing anyone except the actors, which sounds like a gimme, but when an actor is wading through a sea of people trying to Make These Borrowed Clothes Look Awesome, the stakes are high. It’s not the same danger as the Met Costume Institute Gala, when they’re competing against models whose ONLY job is Make These Borrowed Clothes Look Awesome, but there is an occasional pose that is trying waaaay too hard, some of which didn’t even come from Lea Michele.

I am pleased (?) to report that the Bafflement Trend of 2012 is still going strong. As usual, some people got the memo about it and some people just chose to look amazing, but that means there’s something for everyone to make faces at one way or the other, which is what a red carpet is all about.

Let’s open on a Full Baffle:

Kristen Wiig deftly avoided the choker+low-neckline Saloon Girl ensemble mistake (recently made by Jennifer Lawrence, sartorially breaking my heart every time she leaves the house). However, she instead chose a lovely dress with a neckline so high that it bangs against the choker when she walks, which has to be a red flag that you have chosen the wrong accessory for your dress. But that’s putting aside the even bigger flag that, amidst all the ’90s trends that are coming back, the choker is not one, for a very good reason, and that is because LOOK AT IT, KRISTEN. LOOK AT IT.

Moving on.
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So, largely thanks to Jennifer Lawrence practicing her hostage face this morning, the Oscar nominations are out!

What a shithole.

Shame, which I thought was an obvious awards contender for both quality and General Awardnesness, was utterly ignored. Drive has it even worse, with one piddly nomination for Sound Editing. (Shame at least got a nice clean cut direct; the Academy walked past Drive, turned around, came back, and flicked it right in the nose. That’s why Ryan Gosling’s face looks like that. That shit stings.)

In other news, we live in a world in which Puss in Boots is up for consideration for Best Anything, and Jonah Hill can now put “Oscar Nominee” in front of his name forever. Didn’t they understand what that means? You can’t take them back! No amount of 21 Jump Street can ever take that away! THE OSCARS INVITES YOU TO 21 JUMP STREET, OKAY? THAT IS WHERE WE LIVE NOW.

But that horror aside, the dual snub of two of the best films of the year seems especially cruel since the new 10-slot Best Picture slot had plenty of room for the appalling Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the Are You Kidding Me With This The Help, and the middling Midnight in Paris, and still had a slot left over. They only used nine out of ten, and STILL wouldn’t nominate Shame or Drive. That’s sort of when you know that you’ll be in for an evening of watching Steven Spielberg and/or Martin Scorsese repeatedly take the stage and pretend like either of their nominated movies is anywhere close to their best. And that’s if you’re lucky. (Also when you knew that: as soon as those movies were announced. Be real.)

Amid rare victories (If a Tree Falls gets rightly nominated for Best Doc), there are other small outrages (Rooney Mara and not Tilda Swinton? I see), and some all-around sighing (so, we can nominate actresses of color…as long as they’re playing maids, I see, yes, that is an excellent thing to reinforce, thank you, definitely we should have more of that), but honestly, the movie that annoys me most in terms of the accolades being showered upon it is The Artist, because seriously.

Here’s why; very vague spoilers under the cut. Continue reading

For a movie that doesn’t try to be anything more than solid, slightly pulpy fun, and that succeeds in the execution, there is a lot being said about Haywire. (Don’t all get surprised at once!)

That seems to be largely because its star is MMA all-star Gina Carano, who does her own stunts, and who is under the sort of scrutiny most male action stars never see. (Among some bizarre pearl-clutching about her fight scenes, her acting ability has been repeatedly questioned, which is strange, because I do not remember a lot of interviews asking Jean-Claude Van Damme how his workshops with Meryl Streep are going.)

We live in a world that makes it impossible to leave discourse at the door about this kind of thing, and means that the movie hits theatres under a lot of baggage it doesn’t deserve. But Haywire itself seems to be blithely unconcerned about it all. Instead, it focuses on turning in a slick action movie that can be boiled down to Vasquez: The Motion Picture, and is exactly as fun as that sounds.

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