Happiness is a burden plus AND GOD CREATED WOMAN (77)

I know that many of you think that my blog has suffered as of late because of swamped down with this new life I'm building down here and I'm just making paltry excuses as to why I can't watch Criterion films and thus can't write about them for you. To a great extent, this is very true, and I appreciate your derisive comments you judgmental assholes.

On the other hand I'm facing a bit of a problem. I'm a bit of cynic. A sort of part time pessimist who derives a lot of my humor from a sort of good-hearted need to jokingly criticize things. That's how I've always been and in a lot of ways, it's directly influenced my writing and my subject matter. Thus, for 100 posts or so before I moved to SF, I happily berated a number of subjects that strayed through my life, never fearing that I'd ever run out of material to lambast.

And then I moved to SF and I'm stunningly happy here. Not to say I wasn't happy in Sea-town, but I'd sort of nestled myself in to a cubby hole of contentment and from that vantage point I was able to see the frayed edges a bit better. Now, now I'm immersed in a new world, a lovely lady, a job I'm learning to enjoy, and seriously, no shitting you, I'm having a hard time writing. I've always scoffed at those Debbie Downers who claim that art is suffering and all that dried camel dung, but I'm a bundle of flavorless goo right now and everytime I sit down to write something, it's almost a struggle to find a target to aim at. I just dumbly smile at the screen, my eyes all glossed over and puppy dog and try to find an annoyance I have right now.

I know, pity me, I'm fucking happy. But seriously chums and chummettes, my work is losing its edge. I'm not crowing for change here, I'm just saying, your unimpressed stares are noted and I'm attempting to explain myself.

Maybe I'll go stand in the street and see if a car hits me, that might add a bit of flavor to this vanilla flavored weblog.

You know, I enjoy ogling a beautiful woman as much as the next completely-bereft-of-class individual and I certainly love a good French film as much as any self-respecting film dork, but there was something about And God Created Woman (77) that I couldn't get in to. That something was certainly Brigitte Bardot and her much-maligned slut character. The film follows Juliette (Brigitte Bardot), a beautiful woman on the tiny island of St. Tropez as she fucks and fights her way in to one shitty situation after another. I don't know if the term "home wrecker" existed before this film, but if not, here's your origin point dictionary writers. Juliette has no aim in life, no goal, she's just a stunning orphan (aside from this hideous coke bottle bangs) who wants attention, attention, and, well, more attention. She fixates on a family of ship building brothers and all but screws them to dissolution. For good reason, Bardot's Juliette reminded me of a brand of female I've known many times in my life, and, as a good character should I guess, it sort of grossed me out. There was a time, long ago, when this sort of attention seeking lady would draw me in, and eventually spit me out, and watching a 1950s version writ large, did nothing but annoy me.

A bit of twisted history about the film: Brigitte Bardot, when this film was made, was 18 years old just like her character. She was also married to the director, Roger Vadim, and had been for, yikes, three entire years. Thus, Bardot was married when she was 15 and cast as a teenage strumpet only three years later, by her husband. Seemingly, this wasn't a huge stretch for the attractive Frenchie, but jesus, if that's doesn't blur the line between art and reality as much as anything, I don't know what does.

There is something about Juliette in the film that drew me in though, which is the way Vadim balances her character as riding this fine line between child and adult. She's almost a woman-child in the film, a little girl who, and I think the film marks her role as an orphan as the cause, she's never experienced a true childhood. Instead of seeking that childhood though, Juliette abandons it, and instead pushes to become a woman. In a scene in her room, she saunters about whispering to her bunny and her bird and her kitten and the audience can't help but wonder how this little girl got so damn screwed up.

Before I go, I just want to belittle my brother a bit: he claimed that the sex scene on the beach was one of the more erotic in memory, and Alex and I were waiting to see just how hot this scene might be. But it came and went, and I felt as if maybe the DVD skipped, because what I saw was short and not stimulating in the smallest. I chalk this up to my brother's misunderstanding of the term "erotic". Don't judge him, he was a later bloomer. Love you brother!

By the way, if you want to read a fantastic essay about this film, please, go HERE, Chuck Stephens is as good a film writer as any and this is a fantastic break down of the sexual phenomenon that was Brigitte Bardot.

Wednesday: The Bank Dick (78)