How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer: Rocky Road Of Latina Female Desire

By Prairie Miller

A tenderly spun tale of female sexual desire traversing three generations of Latina women in an Arizona border town, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer is crafted glowingly from a woman's point of view, and with supreme sensitivity, dignity, warmth, sadness and humor. Writer/director Georgina Garcia Reidel has woven together intimate homespun memories of the quirky and joyful Chicano culture surrounding her grandmother's home in rural Somerton, that takes everyone to task for their very human flaws. But nearly always with enormous affection and understanding, and turning the tables on redefining what is most erotic in a man that may have nothing at all to do with how good he looks.

Elizabeth Pena is Lolita Garcia, a lonely and frustrated, heavy drinker working mom. She lives with her hormone-challenged teenage daughter Blanca (America Ferrera), after divorcing a worthless spouse with 'the stink of women all over him.' Lolita also fusses over her seventy year old widowed mom Genoveva (Lucy Gallardo), who lives alone nearby. And she has her own eye on the neighborhood gardener, who has offered to teach her how to drive her new car, though she's never driven one in her life.

And while Lolita toils away miserably in the local butcher shop owned by a one handed butcher smitten with her, she is barely able to resist the advances of the town's notorious married hunk, Victor (Steven Bauer). Meanwhile Blanca wanders aimlessly around town with her girlfriends, dreaming about being sexually devoured by knights in shining armor, but settling for far less.

All these various romantic and lusty intrigues, including Lolita's special relationship with the vibrator tucked away in her bedroom dresser drawer, come to a head in spicy revelations exposing each of them, with more than a little help from gossip about this talk of the town trio. Eventually the three distraught females go their separate ways at one point, but end up hilariously in the same place, spilling out their respective sexual guilt in the church confession booths, including Lolita's request for forgiveness from the priest, about that vibrator.

And the nonstop satirical mischief includes a scruffy park bench Greek chorus of elderly gents. These still macho studs in their own minds - one nearly on life support as he clutches a portable oxygen tank - dispense questionable advice about the art of female seduction to one another, local slackers hanging out all day talking mostly cars and women, and often confusing their obsession about the two.

How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer is filled with a generous compassion for its characters. And at the same time a critical eye cast upon these females in their most private moments that is always caring and respectful, even when they engage in the most outrageous behavior imaginable. A euphoric journey into the soul, heart and sensibility of north-of-the-border Latino culture.

Maya Releasing
3 1/2 stars

Prairie Miller
TheRadioGoddess@gmail.com

Sex and the City: Will it be the Biggest Women's Movie Ever?

By Melissa Silverstein

Building on this thread over at cinematical Will 'Sex and the City' Quietly Become Summer's Biggest Hit?, I must respectful disagree about the word quiet. There is nothing quiet about this movie. People are going nuts. (Update- heard from the folks at Fandango and Sex is the top selling film, selling more tickets than Indiana Jones -- which comes out earlier -- and is the most visited page on the site.) In fact, they've been going nuts since the film was shot, where people were lining the streets during the shoot.

The only thing that's been quiet is the fact that none of the plot details have been revealed. I'm on the internet all day long and I have found nothing. I've never seen anything like it for a film about women. It's like people actually want this film to succeed. Writers like ones in the NY Post and the NY Daily News have written reviews without revealing anything; bloggers and who are usually so keen on breaking news about plots are not writing anything either. I bet that part of it is that the guy bloggers who are usually the news breakers really don't care much about the film film because it is well, about women.

The film is ironically being released by New Line which is going out of business and will be subsumed (after the requisite job losses) by Warner Brothers run by Hollywood's resident admitted sexist, Jeff Robinov (see my earlier posts on him: Do Women Matter to Hollywood?)

So I'm thinking, can this be the biggest women's film ever?

What's interesting to note is that in the summer one really big film opens on each weekend. Women's films are never considered really big, but this film is, because there is no real competition opening on its weekend. Granted, Indiana Jones opens the week before and there will be many people still wanting to see that film, but Sex and the City has its own weekend. That is a story in itself.

I've looked at the numbers of how other women's films have opened and I really think this movie can break the records. I think that the film (depending on how many screens it opens on) can open with 50 m.

The top grossing opening weekends of movies starring women are:

* Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - 47 m (Angelina Jolie)
* Charlie's Angels- 40 m (Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, Lucy Lui)
* Sweet Home Alabama- 35 m (Reese Witherspoon)
* Panic Room- 30 m (Jodie Foster)
* The Devil Wears Prada- 27 m (Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway)
* Erin Brockovich- 28 m (Julia Roberts)
* V for Vendetta- 25 m (Natalie Portman)
* Flightplan - 24 m (Jodie Foster)
* Mean Girls- 24 m (Lindsay Lohan)
* Double Jeopardy- 23 m (Ashley Judd)
* 27 Dresses- 23m (Katherine Heigl)
* Princess Diaries- 22 m (Anne Hathaway)
* Freaky Friday- 22 m (Lindsay Lohan, Jamie Lee Curtis)

So, as Oprah said on her lovefest for the film last week, (and she also said that she has never not shown the ending of the film to the audience) take your girlfriends and head to the theatres on May 30th.

Women will make or break this film. Because of the big buzz and hype this film can be a changemaker. We have the added bonus in that the film is supposedly really good.

I am psyched, a movie about women, the celebrates women, that's actually a good movie. Can't wait.


Stay tuned for part 2 - a discussion of Sex and the City and feminism

Melissa Silverstein is a member of the Women Film Critics Circle.

Melissa Silverstein
Women And Hollywood
Womenandhollywood.blogspot.com

VIVA; A SECOND REVIEW

Anna Biller


In light of an on going discussions with Anna Biller re: Viva, I have written a second review to reflect the exchange of ideas that have come to the fore.

The sexual revolution is the popularized phrase that denotes the emergence of women in the more wildly referenced women s liberation movement.
Viva as in (Viva the revolution) is an attempt to elicit popular viewing for the fundamental change that the women’s movement has brought to such vital areas as child birth, the assumed absentee super man father/husband, the end of the biological shackles of women to their husband’s/boyfriends( and to society due to the lack of readily available birth control and the illegality of abortion.

While capitalism( doctors and insurance industry) still keeps woman from their vital conscious promulgation of the specifies with their insistence on an exorbitant and life threatening cesarean birth to unsuspecting women and the unnatural view of “the breast” that encourages high school girls in disproportionate numbers to request and be given boob jobs upon graduation, ,there continues to be a moving forward towards a reasonable equality between men and woman and a fulfillment of the woman’s rightful place in society.

Women are reclaiming their bodies with home births done with hot tub, in living rooms or bedrooms with the midwife and most importantly the husband/man in attendance. And with the separation of the childcare from the maternity leave, men came into their own as care givers even to their infant child. The “stay at home dad’ is not uncommon.

What has not changed in this country is the prorogations of the Bra and the biological result of the curtailment of the breast in unnatural captivity compromising the muscular structure that supports the breast and the natural flow of blood through this organ. While the Barbi doll with her boobs and ultra thin body put the breast into conscious understanding of the female body, it gave a distorted view of this vital body part.

To bring this change of awareness to the fore,
Anna Biller films her own breast on screen in seemingly endless and uncomfortable duration that is in complete contrast to what main stream films display except during sexually driven moments.

If Anna Biller is setting a trend away from the Bra, the precursor of cancer, this is a good thing, though I personally found it difficult to endure. But I liked the natural bodies she used to show that filmed actors need not be limited to thin, well proportioned and heavily worked on bodies.

The additional strength of this film is in the use of color and scenery that electrifies the screen. This is clearly the result of the freedom of child rearing Anna enjoyed due to the Women’s Liberation and the freedom that parents and children all enjoyed as a consequence of the women's ability to choice when and if she would be a mother.

The problem with the film is not the wealth of material presented, nor the unavoidable understanding that Anna is herself a product of the love and respect and enjoyment made obvious with her parent's inclusion in the film, But the superficiality of the characters and the frivolous nature of the film while only surface deep is such a distractions from the essence of the subject that I found it difficult to sit through the film once, and the second time was not any easier.

Viva is a statement, an important one, but it is not a plot driven film that we are used to paying money to see.


Women’s liberation clothed in mini skirts and nudity does not do it for me. But maybe for the young who need to know life before the legal victory of Linda Zises et al VS. The City of New York, the legalization of abortion and the availability of birth control, this film is a profound jumping off point for fruitful discussion


Linda Z(ises)
WBAI Women’s Collective

Beyond The Frame: Dialogues With World Filmmakers

Beyond The Frame: Dialogues With World Filmmakers
By Liza Bear

At 20 years of age Samira Makhmalbaf made “Blackboards” (2002), a film about the itinerant Kurdish schoolteachers of her native Iran who wander through mountains in search of students, unwieldy blackboards strapped to their backs.

It was her second feature. When “The Apple” (2000) was exhibited at Cannes the Tehran native was, at 18, the youngest filmmaker to show a feature film there.

Veteran Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira made his first feature in 1931 but had to wait until age 93 for “I’m Going Home” (2003) to become his first U.S. theatrical release.

These two filmmakers barely begin to suggest the range in ages, origins, styles, and circumstances of the interviewees in Liza Bear’s new book. The term ‘filmmaker’ in the title mostly means directors but also includes the occasional writer, actor, and producer. Superlative cliché’s like ‘cornucopia’ and ‘embarrassment of riches’ are difficult to resist in this instance, and not just because there are over sixty interviews of filmmakers from more than 20 countries on all six continents.

What’s most striking is how much these dialogues betray both the ear and the eye of a filmmaker, which -not surprisingly- Liza Bear is. Some are suggestive of little films in themselves, or rather of the sorts of screenplays that documentary makers write after their film is done.

The first interview, with Russian director Gleb Panfilov, begins:

“New York, September 30, 1987. 11 am sharp.

Location: The 27th floor of the St. Moritz Hotel, overlooking the dense green rectangle and the brackish waters of Central Park. On the horizon, a yellow-grey bank of polluted air caps the foliage.”

The talks are in chronological order and Bear conducted the earliest of them hot from the set of her own feature “Force of Circumstance”. Many of these pieces are as much genuine dialogues (like the title says) between filmmakers as interviews. The filmmakers relate to her as a colleague.

“Liza, tell me about your film” says director Atom Egoyan. “Did you like it?” asked Judy Davis about Peter Duncan’s “Children Of The Revolution” (1997) in which she starred. And it is precisely because of her passion for filmmaking as opposed to the gossip sought by ordinary journalists that Bear manages to elicit very personal shoptalk.

There’s this striking recollection from French actor/director Brigitte Rouan: “When I was younger I would regularly fall in love, not with my acting partner, but with the cameraman. It’s a very sensual relationship because they have their eyes on you eight hours a day”. It was one filmmaker to another when director Chris Menges advised, “Make sure that all the locations are within ten minutes of the hotel”. Jim Jarmusch goes into detail about the financial structuring that allows him full artistic control, commenting that “it’s shocking to realize how many people don’t have final cuts over their films –sometimes not even Scorsese”.

Collections of interviews with cinema directors are relatively rare, much less such interviews with the stamp of a Liza Bear on them. After all, her artist interviews in Avalanche (which she co-founded with Willoughby Sharp) were key to making that legendary publication the single most influential art magazine of the 70s. Now she’s done something similar for the cinema world, but for a wide variety of publications so that it’s especially important that these conversations have been gathered together. Some of the longer, and indeed earliest, pieces first appeared in Betsy Sussler’s ever-vital Bomb magazine where Bear is a contributing editor. Newsday, the New York Daily News and other mass circulation dailies are where quite a few of these intense little chats initially saw the light of day.

In these talks she enables these interviewees to lay aside their public personas, get past the media-induced burnout, and on to a shared level of pleasurable enthusiasm. In these talks they’re not promoting product. They’re discussing problems, revealing obscure sources of inspiration, musing on the nature of creativity. The last interview, with Yacef Saadi, the “Battle Of Algiers” producer and ex-revolutionary on whose memoirs the film was based, ends with this unusual exchange:

LB: “Is it harder to make a film or to win a revolution?”

YS: “It’s harder to make a good film. You can kill someone, but to educate him, that’s something else. And during the war we destroyed. There was an enemy and we killed him. Creating something is very difficult”.

Many of the films discussed in Beyond The Frame have a political dimension to them. Whether implied or overt, the political isn’t exactly difficult to find within the history of film. Filmmakers, like fiction writers, tend by nature to grapple with larger societal issues and injustices through their characters, grand themes expressed through particular and often rather ordinary lives. Sometimes, as with scriptwriter Shawn Slovo (A World Apart, 1988), the grand theme is dramatically thrust upon one as when her mother, an anti-apartheid activist in South Africa was killed: “It was my mother’s assassination on the 17th of August in 1982. She was assassinated by a parcel bomb.” Some of these filmmakers, like Romanian director Lucian Pintilie’ (An Unforgettable Summer, 1994) have had problems with ‘the authorities’ even when they weren’t trying to be controversial: “These bureaucrats live in a completely false world. They think that any fragment of text refers to them”.

Beyond The Frame offers many pleasures for aspiring filmmakers and aficionados alike. For one thing it’s a crash survey course on many of the more interesting filmmakers of the past twenty years and could profitably be utilized as such by academia, by film clubs, or by ordinary citizens at home who want to know about wonderful, often neglected, movies to watch from China, Argentina, Senegal, or the good old U.S. of A.

I think I’ll let the 22-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf have the last word here since she does a pretty good job in her own way, referring to those big blackboards, explaining what being a filmmaker is all about: “Knowledge can be a heavy burden to carry. In this film there’s a thin line between the imagination of art and the reality of life. To me, when reality and imagination make love, that’s the moment that art or metaphors are born. The reality in this film is smuggling, poverty, wandering, being a refugee. But my choice as an artist is to show them visually and beautifully. Art is imagination.”

Atanasio di Felice’s essay “Renaissance Performance” is included in the EP Dutton anthology The Art of Performance. He is a cinematographer for, and appears in, the upcoming HBO documentary (about artist Chuck Connelly) “The Art of Failure” scheduled for broadcast on July 7th. He is currently writing a novel inspired by three years spent traveling in the Andes.

312 pages. Praeger Publishers

Review by Atanasio Difelice

More information is online at: http://lizabearmakingbook.blogspot.com and
http://squaringoff.blip.tv.

Liza Bear has written film articles for Indiewire. She is a member of the Women Film Critics Circle.

Viva Filmmaker Anna Biller Critiques Critical Women Review

Dear Linda,

Your blog about my film VIVA was really strange and illogical. You are right that I have a fascination with glamour images of women, but that does not come from an obsession with Barbie dolls, but with classic cinema and photography. On the one hand you complain that I idolize Barbie dolls for their figures, and on the other hand you complain that I include body types you don't want to see (meaning, regular people who don't look like Barbie dolls). Which is it, sister?

And who are you to call me a "fat Barbie doll?" Do you have a problem with women who are above a size six? (I wore a size eight in the movie). Have you considered the visual and ethnic differences between myself and a Barbie doll? Do you think I'm like a doll because I'm wearing period makeup and clothing? Do you object to self-adornment, or is it just that you don't like clothing and makeup from that period? Does your dislike of this type of look constitute a critical film review?

I thought women's communities were supposed to support other women. Your "review" of my film is not a review, it's a mirror reflecting your own narcissistic likes and dislikes. This is the type of uncritical and emotional writing that gives women a bad name.

Respectfully yours,
-Anna Biller