Celluloid Brides

Oh dear, to talk and focus on just one fellow lady and what she means and inspires through her word or photo plays..

From locals Allison Anders or Amy Heckerling to foreign interpreters like Claire Denis or Deepa Mehta, we can see similar if not parallel universes like those imagined by Stanley Kubrick or Roman Polanski or what's his name.. All these girls and boys create visions of how the rest of us view these modern days that we call the present. From different modern ages and different experiences and cultures, the ladies mentioned can definitely attract both the attention of critics and audiences alike.

Hard to not be able to identify with at least one of the characters in one of the films written or directed by the women mentioned. From the confused and eventually sensible naiveté of 'Stacy Hamilton' in Heckerling's "Fast Times in Ridgemont High", who comes off being very eager to come of age, yet not very intrigued with the results that come in trying such fast lane living tactics. Similarly yet much more confined and roughly from the same generation, comes a different voice and an even more bittersweet version of life on the other side of the tracks in Ander's "My Crazy Life", where being a woman is the life to be lived, never being a choice of whether to live but more importantly the choice of how to live, crazy or not. 'Sita' in Deepa Mehta's "Fire" gives us a breath of life into how women feel and view themselves one to another, building and reconstructing relationships inbetween.

Regarding what audiences have said or felt about any of these films proves that in a relative way the same has been expressed by critics around the world. Some giving kudos while others gave demeaning scolds for more or less boldly going where no man had gone before; unfascinating that most of these were written by and with a male view. Easily identifiable are the merits of the films mentioned once presented, however depending on the narrator and the context behind these stories is how the viewer commits themselves to engage in the politics and aesthetics being presented. As we here now try to dissect these visionaries and their talking pictures, we should channel Bell Hooks as she writes in the introduction of her book "Reel to Real" and challenge ourselves to view films differently and understand the standpoint(s) expressed regardless how confrontational they are.