Popular Politics

Detail from a painting by Dana Bhatti, a painter prominent in the 19th Century court of Maharaja Man Singh, part of the Treasures of a Desert Kingdom show at the Royal Ontario Museum 

I made an uncharacteristically substantial commitment to popular culture this past week. For example, I've hand-peeked my way through two seasons of Stranger Things (more about which later) and, because there was nothing else to watch and I could get the tickets for free, Bruce and I went to Late Night with Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling.

Late Night's positive reviews helped me overcome my usual misgivings about going to see situation comedy movies. But, having seen the movie, I can say my misgivings were right. Emma Thompson will always be great, but the movie was not. Finding it hard to put my dissatisfaction into words, I took another look at the less positive reviews of Late Night and found one that summed up my feelings about the movie. This is by Louisa Moore writing for Screen Zealots:

...“Late Night,” [is] a disappointing, tepid film... It’s great that Amazon Studios took a chance on a comedy that conveys a minority woman’s point of view in a male-dominated world, but... the scene where Molly is hired on the spot by an older, white male simply because she’s brown-skinned, happens to be in his office, and can fill a diversity quota, is offensive.

The film wants desperately to be more relevant, witty, and meaningful than it actually is....The supposed insights are inauthentic and forced, and the characters are either under-written or outrageous caricatures..... Kaling and Thompson are well cast, but they have little chemistry. Everything about their relationship is off-putting at best and disingenuous at worst.

I went back to the positive reviews, too, and found in them an inclination to praise the film because of the strong female presence in its writing, direction and performances. 

Women are making inroads in the lucrative and culturally influential realm of popular movies. That's amazing. And they will well and truly have arrived when they are called out for their poor efforts as much as praised for their great ones.

Hurry Up and Wait

The Ontario legislature has been recessed until after the federal election.  The reason for this extended vacation has to do with the fact that the government worked through most of last summer. But, the timing is awkward, so assertions abound about how the Ontario conservatives want to free up their schedule to help Andrew Scheer win the federal election in the fall. Either that or stay out of the papers so as to not screw up Scheer's chances for a win, though I doubt the Toronto Star will support them in that plan.

Whatever the reason, there's not a lot going on at Queen's Park right now. Everyone who had been scrambling now has the mixed blessing of more time to actually think about what they are doing. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen