Janet Albrechtsen, feminism, film criticism, and a verbal stoning ...

(Above: a few cartoons to alleviate the tedium of what follows).

Oh dear. Film criticism and feminism.

The two "f's". Throw in 'fucked by stoning' and it's a triple 'f' rating.

Guaranteed to see Janet Albrechtsen disappear up a fundament of self-righteousness. Yep, it's a four 'f' fail.

Cop this inverted defence of Sex and the City 2:

When the same pert New Yorkers get a little older - Carrie worries about the monotony of monogamy and Samantha sits in her glass office, g-string around her ankles, applying hormone cream to her waxed vagina - the critics devote a zillion words to panning the poor girls. Sex and the City 2 is too self-indulgent, say the critics. They should know. Isn't it the ultimate Western indulgence to desperately seek out deep messages from a movie intended to be nothing more than fun?

Nothing more than fun? If that's Albrechtsen's idea of fun, book me in for a good stoning. Isn't it the ultimate Western indulgence to enjoy the tedium of a bad movie, and resolutely read Janet Albrechtsen in a futile quest for sense and meaning?

The only fun with the show has been picking out the critics with the cleverest put down lines. Oh dear, could Albrechtsen have been reading Lindy West?

In Burkas and Birkins, she updates us with news of Samantha Jones's 52 year old vagina:

Samantha's vagina is doing fine. She rubs yams on it, okay? She takes 48 vagina vitamins a day. It accepts unlimited male penises with the greatest of ease. Now let us never speak of it again.

Then she delivers a surprisingly gentle assessment of the show:

SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled cunt like it's my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. It is 146 minutes long, which means that I entered the theater in the bloom of youth and emerged with a family of field mice living in my long, white mustache. This is an entirely inappropriate length for what is essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls ...

By golly they like to play softball in Seattle ...

But then Albrechtsen is somehow under the delusion that the critics - as opposed to the punters forking over their cash - were enraptured by the first big screen outing of Sex and the City. Thereby proving conclusively that she doesn't read much film criticism, since the fluff of the first Sex outing was unlikely to go down well with critics lurking beyond the fringes of the tabloids.

See Anthony Lane's welcome for it in The New Yorker:

The film was always going to be predictable (that is part of its appeal), yet it feels too panicky to be stylish, and surprisingly tasteless: who could have foreseen that its humor would rely on a gastric gross-out? One small misstep of a movie; one giant leap backward for womankind.

Could it be - and this thesis can only be advanced with a far-fetched sense of humour, like a scientist searching for a quark - that Albrechtsen actually liked both the shows? Enjoyed their capacity for mindless stupidity in the quest for mindless fun?

Of course not. Albrechtsen is simply allocating to women the kind of movies they should like, as a way of berating feminists for not liking the kind of film they should like.

Does that make sense? Well as much sense as Albrechtsen dragging out feminists for a ritual stoning in A tale of two standards:

And while Western feminists navel gaze about their latest work-life imbalances and play games to decide whether they are more like Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte or Miranda, Islamic feminists have other things on their agenda.

Could we put that another way? While bitchy journalists of an embittered kind with an obsessive dislike of western feminists navel gaze about their hatreds in a well paid Murdoch column and play games deciding which stereotype they can trot out, about feminist in the embrace of Sex in the City, real women have other things on their agenda.

Because you see Albrechtsen has long running form, for those who can remember Feminists screwing it up for sisters.

“What the hell has happened to feminism?” grumbled the Herald Sun’s Jill Singer a few weeks back. Here’s an idea. Feminists are screwing up feminism. Take last week. No matter which way you turned, women, especially those who talk most about feminism, were proving that women are often their own worst enemy.

Or proving that Janet Albrechtsen is their own worst enemy.

But back to this week's failure of feminism and liberal left critics. It seems to be their fault that Sex in the City continues to attract box office support in its latest incarnation, while a show given an indie release, The Stoning of Sorya M only tickled the till for 115k on its opening.

The news turns Albrechtsen into a righteous if perplexed puritan. It seems this is the kind of movie we must pay to suffer through, to learn a valuable lesson.

I'm not sure why. After all, you wouldn't see me handing over my precious bucks to watch the endless violence on parade in show in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Oh okay I did spring for a two buck rental, but sheesh, do I wish that I'd downloaded it for free.

Gibson of course wanted us to know that being lashed and whipped could produce oodles of blood, and that crucifixion is an ugly way to die.

What a novel thought. Who could possibly have imagined that crucifixion might produce, as Slate's David Edelstein noted at the time, an extremely long snuff movie - the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre.

Albrechtsen seems to think that left liberal critics are in need of the same enlightenment - that somehow they lack the imagination required to understand that being stoned to death for an infraction of Islamic fundamentalist laws about sex is a tough way to go.

Be warned. Few details are spared from an extended scene where the mullah tells the menfolk they must restore their honour by stoning Soraya. The result is haunting. The sound of stone thudding against skin. The horror of two young sons reluctantly hurling rocks at their mother. "Go ahead, boys," the mullah says. "For God." The sight of a broken body, a white dress caked in blood and dirt.

Yep, it's the oldest routine in the book. Pile on the blood and the horror, and interweave it with a social message, and amidst their retching, the audience can reach an ecstatic level of purified understanding.

And having been moved, Albrechtsen demands that everybody else be moved in the same way, and waxes indignant at critics who've found the result boring or problematic (and not just because the producer is Steve McEveety, a devout Catholic who produced The Passion of Christ, and the way Jim Caviezel from The Passion turns up briefly as a crusading French journalist).

Left-liberal critics have derided The Stoning of Soraya M as a message movie. Too close to "lurid torture porn", Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. Local echo Tim Elliott at The Sydney Morning Herald dismissed the film as a predictable message movie where the men are "leering archetypes of Islamic patriarchy".

Yes, but in much the same way as it's redundant to watch a movie that takes two hours to tell us crucifixion is a hard way to go, is it necessary to watch a show that takes twenty minutes of our lives to understand that stoning a woman to death is a bad, sorry and ugly thing?

Sorry, I only need a minute to get that message ... Come to think of it, I don't even need a minute.

Sure there's a theory that training a dog by rubbing its nose in its shit is ultimately rewarding, but I've moved beyond being a trained dog.

The point, in the usual way of Albrechtsen, is to maintain the rage about political correctness.

Well after she watched the movie, and wrote a column frothing at the mouth, and banked the cheque for the column, what did she do next for Iranian women? In a practical way? With all that righteousness and indignation?

Let they who are without sin throw the first stone.

As for her actual understanding of how audiences respond to movies, she needs to move beyond the simple-minded, reflex, knee jerk reactions on display here. Spending twenty minutes on a stoning doesn't give you a 'get out of jail' card when it comes to plot, character, structure, style, and meaning. Except if you're Albrechtsen:

This is the ugly result when political correctness and cultural relativism meet movie critic. Their Goldilocks critique goes something like this: if you're Al Gore talking about climate change or Michael Moore dumping on capitalism, then your message is just right. But a movie with a message about Islam being co-opted by men to denigrate, violate and kill women is, yawn, just too much message. "I know stoning is bad, but I want a movie about it, not a sermon," Elliott wrote.

Where to start? Could it be the lumping together of responses to Al Gore's PowerPoint doc? Or Michael Moore's gradual tailing away in the market place? Or the notion that somehow a movie about stoning might somehow avoid ennui simply because it's noble and about the way Islam is co-opted to justify stoning women to death?

The immortal Sam Goldwyn - he of the saying 'an oral contract is worth the paper it's printed on' - once famously observed that pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.

It's no news to anyone that stoning is fucked, and that Islamic fundamentalism is similarly fucked. You don't need to sit through a two hour show of "The Tortures of the Inquisition" to understand that once upon a time Catholic fundamentalism was similarly fucked, and worse, in a position of power with which to enact its state of fuckdom.

But you might want to watch Arthur Miller's The Crucible because of the way it detailed the persecution of the Salem witches.

Meanwhile, as a critic, Albrechtsen proceeds to jump the shark with a serious of fatuous fatuities:

So movie critics want some nuance in their stoning movies. Let's see how that works. If Soraya were guilty of adultery, do we have some interesting moral confusion about the rights and wrongs of stoning? Nope. Let's make her a bisexual who pole dances in the local tavern when she's not engaging in group sex. Does that work? No. Lazy with the housework, then? No. It turns out stoning is abhorrent any way you cut it. Unless you're a movie critic trapped in the mindset where it's only acceptable to make stark judgments about Western culture. In which case, you get a little queasy about a movie that speaks with moral certainty about the evils of Islam being used to stone women to death.

WTF? Who on earth said that stoning isn't abhorrent. What on earth does she inhale before embarking on a column? Does she have any understanding of how easy it is to cross-cut between Sex and the City and a stoning to death in Iran, to produce a faux meaning that is in the end completely incomprehensible?

Actually the only one trapped in a mindset here is Albrechtsen, who seems to think that western critics are somehow in the thrall of making stark judgments solely about Western culture. While she scribbles about a US film by an American director born in Boulder Colorado, based on a 1994 book by a French journalist! Which er, actually means the critics are making a judgment on an artefact of western culture! Now there's a case of knockdown reflexiveness for you ...

In this particular case, critics are making a stark judgment about the art on display in a specific movie, and in this particular case Tim Elliott's review The Stoning of Soraya M is unexceptional:

The excellent Shohreh Aghdashloo (House of Sand and Fog), is strong as Manutchehri's feisty aunt, but even she struggles to emerge from caricature. Message movies like this always divide along predictable lines. The New York Times hated it, while The Australian Jewish News called it "a must-see for anyone with a social conscience". But predictability is boring. I know stoning is bad; but I want a movie about it, not a sermon.

The job of a reviewer is to give a tip to the audience. Based on Elliott's review I probably would have lined up in due course for a two buck rental, in much the same way as I looked at Gibson's film about Christ, and then resolved not to worry about watching Apocalypto, his subsequent adventure in sado-masochistic torture porn. I like a whipping but I like it without all the blood ...

Thanks however to Janet Albrechtsen's touting of The Stoning of Soraya M, I've decided to give it a miss. I'll head down to Western Union, and send a telegram instead ...

And now for a decent stoning ...