Pimp of the Week: Kathryn Bigelow Rocks It

I was delighted and dismayed to realize that Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman in history to win the Oscar for best director. 2010 strikes me as a late date to start recognizing the creative artistry of women in cinema, but such is life.

Kathryn Bigelow strikes me as a person with her head on straight. She makes ballsy action films, even in Jordan, and she doesn't preach about being a "feminist filmmaker." Maybe that's why she was the first woman director to be recognized by The Academy.

Never mind that she was married to a famous Hollywood director and womanizer, because Bigelow is just a woman with a talent for making movies, and she doesn't focus on feminine issues or designer shoe brands. But why is it so illegitimate/un-Oscar-worthy to make movies about 'female trouble'? A war movie about men deactivating bombs is considered serious, but a film about a divorced woman raising her daughter is labeled "melodramatic." Maybe next year a female director will win for making a movie about a girl who is fired from her day job when her boss finds out she is pregnant, forcing her to sell cupcakes door-to-door in order to save enough money to find true love. Wait--that cliché just got horribly confused.

Film Review: Chloe, The BPD Escort Girl

The new sexy psychological thriller Chloe subverts a few conventions of mainstream romantic cinema. The waifish blonde escort girl is played by Mamma Mia's doll-faced Amanda Seyfried, but instead of following around a married older male benefactor, her character follows around an older married female benefactor (who also happens to be a gynecologist, which seems like a crude coincidence to me).

Julianne Moore plays the gynecologist whose wanker-husband is flirting with his students and generally skipping out on his marriage to embrace a mid-life crisis. So the wife hires the escort girl to seduce the husband, just so she can verify that he is a cheater. The film tries to be edgy and psychologically circuitous in the vein of a Hitchcock great, but it falls flat and devolves into a good old-fashioned lesbian sex scene. I suppose some of you will go running to the cinema now that I have said that, but I'll take a classic S&M-inspired dark comedy over a maudlin pseudo-lesbian flick any day.

Pimp of the Week: Luca Bassani Antivari

In the Marilyn Monroe classic, Some Like It Hot, there were a few of my favorite things: train travel, cross-dressing, and big boats. But these days, not even a classic yacht off the coast of Florida satisfies the appetite of a high roller. And that's why the international yacht man du jour, Luca Bassani Antivari, has teamed up with Hermès fashion house to create a boat that is so big it's actually an island.

Luca Bassani Antivari is the president of the famous Monaco-based yacht company, Wally, and he unveiled his futuristic creation at the Abu Dhabi yacht show. Antivari says, "Everybody's dream is to live on an island, in complete freedom, without constraint." It sounds like the attitude of a pimp who likes to live outside the law and maybe even abduct some willing captives.

Pimp of the Week: Leonardo DiCaprio

I know I talk about him a lot, but Leonardo DiCaprio is something special. His charms are part-boy, part-man, which lend him the appeal of being both prince and pimp. As the apple of Martin Scorsese's eye, Leo stars in the new epic thriller, Shutter Island. The film takes place at a hospital for the criminally insane in the 1950s. As my father says, "It seems pretty heavy duty." But even with the strangely feminized French dubbing of Leo's voice, I was riveted.

Leo is not only a ravishing screen specimen, but he is also into solar roof panels and boats made from recycled plastic bottles. He promotes clean energy, attracts lovely women, gives away millions to worthy causes, has his own production company, and is on the cover of Esquire magazine smoking a cigar and splashing a low ball of scotch. If he's not a Pimp of the Week, then there's no hope for the rest of us.

The Pedagogue

There is a stereotype about The French that they only like to travel so that they can complain about how inferior every country is to France. But I recently read that some French travelers are searching for a genuinely thrilling experience in their next vacation: they are paying a minimum of $1,200 to Ultime Réalité for someone to kidnap and imprison them for four hours.

If they are true high rollers, then they'll opt for a package that is more expensive and custom-designed to their mental histories (and most likely, mental illnesses, considering that they are paying to be tied up, gagged, and carted away). It makes me think of Michael Douglas in the classic psychological thriller of capitalist malaise, The Game. The only birthday gift his brother can think to get him is the most elaborate "abduction package" money can buy.

Film Review: Valentine's Day

The new romantic comedy, Valentine's Day, is a rompish series of vignettes chock full of amusing stereotypes and clichés. Within the first ten minutes you get a glimpse of the bare legs and asses of most of Hollywood's hot actresses, but my personal favorite was the young starlet and country singer, Taylor Swift, playing the ditzy blonde high schooler who just can't get enough of her hunky boyfriend and the giant white teddy bear he gives her for Valentine's Day.

There is an ultimate scene of romantic revenge, in which the sweet girl-next-door humiliates her cheating wanker boyfriend in front of his wife during their fancy Valentine's dinner. And perhaps the most cinematic incident of the film involves an 18-year-old boy in the nude, his guitar, and his girlfriend's mother, but I'll leave the rest to your wild imagination. I also enjoyed that they cast funny boy Ashton Kutcher as a florist.

The moral is: romance can be charming, but love is messy -- love is torturesome ... and you're lucky to find someone honest who is enjoyable to be around for more than seven seconds, so grab on tight (and pray that their mother doesn't walk in on you naked).

A Somnambulist

I recently attended an AIDS fashion couture gala in the Bois de Boulogne, a scenic area of Paris currently famous for its prostitutes and formerly famous for the opening scene of Gigi with Maurice Chevalier.

At this particular champagne-soaked evening there was a striptease spectacle involving men in hot pink Lycra and transvestites dressed as geishas. I have always had a penchant for beautiful drag queens, so I felt in my element, sporting a mink stole and gold leggings, which would be considered gauche in any other venue.

Surrounded by fashion designers, dapper gay men, and their fancy ladies in waiting, I decided that my favorite character of the night was a sixty-year-old man from the Great American South. He became a modern dancer and directed fashion shows in 1970s Paris. Now he leads a gospel choir and writes operas. When he returns from a nightclub or party, he makes a wistful comment about how 'things are not like they used to be, at Studio 54.'

Pimp of the Week: Owen Wilson

Owen Wilson dazzled me as a pot-smoking male model (mimbo to the max) in Zoolander. And then he stole my heart when he co-wrote and co-starred in the eternally iconic film, The Royal Tenenbaums. And now Owen Wilson is rumored to be starring in Woody Allen's next movie with French first lady and anti-monogamist, Carla Bruni.

Wilson calls himself a bad boy, and, like any proper pimp, he knows how to turn nothing into something. At age 16 he was expelled from his straight-laced Dallas prep school. But then he found a way to make a career out of dicking around with his best friend, Wes Anderson, and his brother, Luke. They turned 5 million dollars of Texan petty cash into the well-reviewed, poorly received film, Bottle Rocket.

By some ignorant film-goers, Owen Wilson is known for his distinctive nose, which was been broken many times, but I think it's just another sign of a life lived to the max.

Film Review: It's Complicated

The Nancy Meyers film, It's Complicated, is the story of a typical American family: a husband and wife have three beautiful children, they live happily ever after in the upper-class tranquility of Santa Barbara, and once the kids reach adolescence, the husband and wife are fed up of each other and go through a messy divorce ... then the husband remarries a high maintenance and physically fit thirty-year-old ... meanwhile, the middle-aged wife's baking career thrives (in the vein of the Ina Garten empire) and she spends her nights alone.

Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin play the estranged couple still forced to see each other on graduation and wedding days. But they manage to take another stab at it, as they find themselves having a passionate affair, thereby turning the whole familial dysfunction in a whole new direction. Steve Martin is splashed in for the amusing romp, which includes an unfortunate incident between a Skype camera and Alec Baldwin's 'bald win,' so to speak.

No matter how Technicolor and Hollywood it gets, It's Complicated rings at the truth of divorce: for a while it seems tragic to all parties involved, but once people move on, the family can never go back to those fond memories of childhood vacations and cozy movie nights. The love is still there -- it's just different.

"a reformed rake"

The lovely indie-chic romantic comedy, 500 Days of Summer, tells the story of a male 20-something phenomenon: the guy who is desperate to settle down to one woman and only one woman. He is the prince in this modern Los Angeles anti-fairy-tale, instead of the emotionally unavailable wanker so prevalent in popular films and everyday life. Unfortunately, the boy falls for the female twenty-something phenomenon: the girl who is desperate to remain "casual" and never commit to one guy. She is the princess in flight.

The disarmingly disgruntled leading man realizes that he is not the prince to his princess. Romantic relationships are so often littered with this imbalance of expectations -- one person wants to have a baby, and the other person just wants to go to happy hour at a karaoke bar. You could call it "bad timing." But for the ones who want to have a baby, it's more like an extended mourning period of bleak wandering in streets that are haunted by the girl who liked to sing karaoke.

Sex & Surrealism at Centre Pompidou

Centre Pompidou's recent exhibition on Surrealism, La Subversion des Images, is a glamorously curated look into the sexy 1920s art world of understanding dreams and rejecting bourgeois rationalism.

The exhibition included a secluded black chamber where viewers could watch a "sexually explicit" film by Man Ray entitled "Cinematic Experiment: Two Women." Once inside, I witnessed some vintage hardcore lesbian strap-on pornography. But because the Pompidou Center is a very French museum (and not at all Puritanical in nature), there was only a measly warning sign: "The following film may offend sensitive children."

The intersection of pornography and high art has such a rich history that it is difficult to imagine one without the other. What would the Louvre Museum have to display if not for the idealized body of a naked woman?

Film Review: He's Just Not That Into You

The recent romantic comedy, He's Just Not That Into You, was an unexpected burst of truth on contemporary dating in an age of Facebook, email writing, and text message disasters. Gigi (played by the adorable Ginnifer Goodwin) waits at the phone every night for her crush to call her. She fails to see the difference between a. men who are flirting with her at a bar because they are drunk, b. men who want to date her, and c. men who never want to see her again.

The manager at Gigi's local bar lets her in on some heterosexual man insight: "If a guy is into a girl, then he will make it happen, so if he hasn't called her or asked her on another date, he's just not that into her." Women often give bad advice to other women: for example, if a girl is desperately in love with a guy for a period of many years, then her female friend might say to her, "He's definitely gay, and that's why he's dating that incredibly masculine girl." Alternatively, she might say, "Men are like pears -- they have to ripen in a brown paper bag before they are ready to commit to the one they really love. He just needs another 2-12 years to really ripen!"

Gigi ends up converting the wanker-commitment-phobic-barman to a prince who is ready for a real relationship. Moral of the story: miracles can happen in fictitious versions of Baltimore that are populated by incredibly attractive people.

Pimp of the Week: Hugh Grant

Hugh Grant is apparently quite the "Renaissance man," as he is proficient at both golf and tennis, buys paintings, is reasonably literate, and even dabbled with novel writing. Since Did You Hear About the Morgans?, a new romantic comedy premiered last week, USA Today did a little interview about the wonders that make up Hugh Grant. His "rakish" persona has charmed me ever since I saw him acting like a complete wanker in Bridget Jones's Diary. He cozies into, and perhaps even invented, the 'emotionally unavailable men' roles.

In the USA Today interview, Grant, admitted to the dangers of vanity: "I stopped Googling myself. Life improves exponentially. I think the same thing applies to reviews." He also confessed to his penchant for showering girls with expensive accessories and shopping at Chanel. But I think it is mostly because he loves the way the salesgirls make him feel about himself.

"of no education"

The Fellini exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris gave me a glimpse into the sexy film sirens who ignited the Italian director's alleged womanizing personality. But in reality Fellini remained devoted to his wife, distinguishing him from many of the wankers I encounter in everyday life. Fellini even considered his classic "Casanova" character to be incapable of truly loving women, since Casanova was obsessed by a fantasy idea of the female sex. Fellini was a bit of a "men expert," obsessed by the pretty things in the world: the circus, breasts, asses, movie stars, parties, Dionysian Ecstasy, excessively large hats, etc.

In Fellini's 1965 film, Juliet of the Spirits, the pimp of cinema puts his feminist ways to the test by illustrating the complicated dreams and psychic energy surrounding a frustrated Italian housewife, Juliet. She lives a terribly traditional New England existence devoted to her philandering husband, and enters into the surreal world of her hypersexual champagne-drinking prostitute neighbor. Juliet finds herself climbing into orgy-laced tree houses and being propositioned by a young Adonis. She struggles through a chaotic game of understanding dreams and being haunted by emotionally unavailable men.

But once her husband elopes with a perky young model, Juliet realizes that her life will be better off without him and that she is finally liberated. Juliet of the Spirits is like a revolutionary lush decadent surreal version of Under the Tuscan Sun.

Francis Bacon Paintings

Pierrot Le Fou is a garishly sumptuous New Wave French film featuring the studly Jean-Paul Belmondo, as Pierrot, and the angel-faced Anna Karina, as Marianne. Pierrot begins in the throngs of a boring bourgeois party and quickly skips out on his wealthy Italian wife to sleep with the gamine babysitter, Marianne. But her apartment is a crime scene of smuggled weapons and ambiguously bloodied Algerian gangsters.

So Pierrot and Marianne make a chaotic game of road-tripping it to the French Riviera, to escape the terrorists and live as outlaws in the pleasure of their youthful good looks. But life on the beach soon turns to ennui: after Pierrot made the mimbo-wanker move of dropping his real life for fantastic escapedes with princess in flight Marianne, he becomes just another one of those emotionally unavailable men and takes to reading philosophy books and writing diary entries. Not even the vivid pop art colors and Mediterranean journey to nowhere can save this tragic couple.

A Man of Convenience

The Children's Hour is an old-school Audrey Hepburn film with Shirley MacLaine, based on a classic Lillian Hellman play. I was naturally inclined to attend a midday screening of it, because the story takes place at an all-girls New England boarding school in the 1950s and takes the central theme of The Crucible (vicious gossip) to a lesbian level.

Hepburn and MacLaine play the headmistresses who develop an unhealthily, codepent, platonic love for each other. A naughty young pupil tells her grandmother that the teachers are engaging in (debaucherous) lesbian acts. The rumor spreads, the girls are removed from the school, and the two women become social pariahs trapped alone in their drafty farmhouse-boarding-school.

MacLaine realizes that she is actually a lesbian, and the film ends with her suicide. Meanwhile, the dashing local doctor pines away after Hepburn, and watches her from behind a tree as she visits her best friend's grave. The film's message is both progressive and 1950s in nature: homosexuals are shamed to seclusion by the ignorance of society; homosexuals die of shame, at the end of their ropes (to put it gauchely).

"Chicken Cooked In Coca-Cola"

In a surprise birthday party for a ravishing French-Italian woman, the sangria and champagne cocktails flowed, her husband presented her with some lovely diamond-sapphire jewels, and her two pretty pre-pubescent children looked on at the spectacle. For the Spanish-themed soirée I wore a bolero-inspired sweater and red tights, so it was a bit of Almodovar in Paris. We ate delicious tapas (sardines, octopus, peppers, meatballs, and manchego abounded), and then there was the requisite dancing portion of the night.

I put my red tights to the test and did a few jump splits. The more middle-aged women were aghast, and perhaps a bit put-off by my limber dancing habits. But when I exited the party, the hostess/birthday girl was delighted: she thanked me for "l'ambiance."

For a good social atmosphere, it is necessary that everyone let loose and open up a bit. I just hope that by the time I turn 30-something, my husband and kids will be there watching me eat meringue-filled raspberry-chocolate cake and observing as my friends do ridiculous things on the dance floor.

Settle The Tab

In New York City there is a well-kept secret for young women in need of low-rent accommodations. At The Webster Apartments you can have a single room, two hot meals a day, and maid's service for a mere 250 dollars a week. The only catch: no males allowed.

There is a night watchwoman who patrols the corridors, making the social scene at The Webster reminiscent of a woman's ward in a mental institute circa 1960. But in all seriousness, I have applied and been accepted to The Webster on two separate occasions in my life. But my rent-free maid's quarters (storage space) on Park Avenue proved a better deal.

But The Webster is populated by more than 20-something unpaid interns and aspiring actresses. A recent article described a middle-aged resident who was living at The Webster after a messy divorce. She went from suburban splendor to urban nunnery. But hopefully she will revenge her wanker-husband and stow away a fetching young guy in her closet to conceal him from The Webster's boy-patrol.

"Is that real snakeskin?"

I recently went to the cinema at noon, because it is cheap at that time of day, and because Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience was only showing once a week in one movie theatre in all of Paris. Sasha Grey, an award-winning 21-year-old porn star, plays Chelsea, a high-class Manhattan call girl who manages to keep a boyfriend while seeing her various clients.

The film has a pseudo-documentary style, outlining stories of Chelsea's life: the brands of her high heels, the types of alcohol her clients offer her, the astrological numbers of her week. And then there are scenes of some rich New York City republican wankers jetting off to Las Vegas for a boys' weekend. They gripe about the economic crisis and the 2008 presidential election, and then one of them proclaims that all women are evil, blood-sucking psychopaths.

The Girlfriend Experience is sort of like a dark, soporific, new millennium version of Pretty Woman, with a porn star instead of Julia Roberts, and an infinite Manhattan bleakness instead of a happy ending.

Perfect Empathy

Through an anonymous exchange of phone numbers at a classic Parisian club, I recently met a minor French TV celebrity. That is to say, he intrigued me, so I scribbled my cell phone number onto a slip of paper and 'dropped' it into his hand while leaving the lounge. This sort of behavior is typically labeled as "forward" or "desperate" or "gauche," but sometimes you meet someone and you don't want to risk never seeing them again.

I struggled through a prolonged series of textual exchanges with Le Papillon du Soir ('The Butterfly of the Night," aka. the mystery man's nickname from the French press). While he seemed like a nice, well-educated, charming little French man from a vaguely Catholic and vaguely aristocratic family, it turns out that all he wanted was one thing from me ...

When I asked him why he was so fixated on playing out a sexual scenario involving masks at midnight and a minimal exchange of words, he replied with the following Wanker of the Week text messages:

1. "Cause I love sex and friendship not more darling!"

2. "Why? I just like sex but I want to stay alone darling..."

Moral of the story: 'Butterflies of the night' are similar to vampires, so be careful where you 'drop' your phone number.