In Which Not Even John Legend Is Tall Enough For Her

I Love Jazz

by ETHAN PETERSON

La La Land
dir. Damien Chazelle
128 minutes

Did you have a deep curiosity in your heart as to what white people will be able to rely on emotionally for sustenance in this new and place? Mia (Emma Stone) is at a party and a guy shorter than her makes the mistake of talking to her about "world-building." She is disgusted on three levels:

- he uses words she does not understand
- she looks down on his head
- he seems vaguely ethnic

Ryan Gosling is just slightly taller. He pretends to play the piano in La La Land, which I suppose is meant to make him likable. It does not – he is just as miserable a person as the type of woman he attracts. Then comes the dancing: La La Land opens with a musical number on a Los Angeles freeway, heading to Van Nuys, where people of all different races and colors dance around Mr. Gosling and Ms. Stone, as if to accentuate their whiteness as part of a tapestry.

This holds a dubious moral meaning. The last moment it was so key to be a white anglo saxon protestant was a century ago, when the influx of Italian and Irish immigration made it very important to distinguish one sect from another. A word kept reoccurring to me as I watched the dancing of La La Land, which is not only not terribly exciting at best but actively boring at worst: caste.

Welcome to this awful place of Los Angeles, where a woman who fucks Ryan Gosling and is not overly effective as a barista has the teremity to complain about her existence. Director Damien Chazelle sets a lot of the action on the Warner Brothers lot, which mostly closely resembles Heaven in The Good Place or alternately the most dull aspects of Epcot Center.

Stone spends a series of interludes in auditions for other, better movies. This is a cliche so old that it predates the concept of American cinema itself, and her overly broad performance of a performance is too showy to be either entertaining to humorous. She might as well be loudly shouting, "What an actress I am!" Stone's Mia is intensely conceited, speaking at length of how she used to be a writer and everyone loved what she worked on. This is reminiscent of the early praise given Patty Hearst, and we all know how that went.

Actually, maybe we don't. La La Land pretends that there is no history. Gosling takes Stone to an African-American club where he explains jazz to her. His story of it is completely erroneous, but who cares? Any other culture simply exists to be abrogated into this one, which will be somewhat improved for it. (Naturally, the authenticity and quality of the original will be destroyed completely.) Gosling's dream is to hire a bunch of black musicians for his own club, but in the meantime he takes his new girlfriend to see Rebel Without a Cause, the only older movie he knows.

Eventually, as this film lingered on and on long past its welcome, I wished that I was seeing Rebel Without a Cause so that I could watch something with actual characters. Going back in time is a disturbing feeling. Nostalgia is fine when we decline to omit the more serious, disturbing elements of the past. Instead Gosling dances with an elderly African-American couple on the marina – he has no way of actually talking to anyone outside of his caste, so he is forced to communicate through the medium of dance.

Later Gosling joins John Legend's band, but he is still completely unhappy. Is this really the appropriate moment to play pretend? It takes a good solid hour before anyone even touches Ryan Gosling, and he never shows his penis at all, suggesting that we may not be good enough to see him on display. La La Land is thus a highlight reel of what were are permitted to view of our betters, and what a sickening display it is.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which We Only Have Sex In Montage

The Boyfriend Experience

by JESSICA RIONERO

Friends With Benefits
dir. Will Gluck
109 minutes

I used to think men and women could be friends. Growing up, I thought I was a tomboy because I had lots of boy friends. Not boyfriends but friends that were boys. Looking back, I ended up hooking up with half of them and the other half came out gay after we hooked up. This is obviously a pressing issue since two films were released this year on the subject: Ivan Reitman's No Strings Attached and now Friends With Benefits directed by Will Gluck (Easy A).

Jezebel was where I read that Easy A could be the next Mean Girls. I enjoyed the literary allusion to The Scarlet Letter as well as the parallel storyline this film shared with 1987's Can’t Buy Me Love, a movie about a teenage nerd who pays a girl to make him seem cool and they fall in love. Mr. McDreamy, Patrick Dempsey, played the lead.

When I see the charming posters for these films I can’t help to think, "but they get together in the end!" Any pre-adolescent sixth grader can tell you that. At the end of the movie, they are going to fall in love and live happily ever after. That’s not my only beef with these movies. These people are also way too good-looking to need fuck buddies. If you took the female leads from both of these films and put them in an Oscar worthy drama they would still hook up.

This is all actually a sensitive subject for me; I am a recovering fuck buddy. I actually had two friends with benefits scenarios. I am a bit embarrassed to admit all of this. Maybe that one year of Catholic school really did screw me up. Fast-forward 12 years later to the booty call and 4th wave feminism, add a shot of Maker’s Mark and we are up to speed.

So there was…let’s call him Boy A. Not Andrew Garfield, just my good friend from college, Boy A. Boy A and I became single at the same time and found ourselves equally horny. We figured we would do it a few times until we found real people to date/sleep with. In our social circles, we urged to keep this quiet. Especially since, okay not proud of this either, he dated a dear girl friend of mine. I was never this kind of girl. I actually had this happen to me once and I was devastated and here I was, repeating the cliché. It’s physically possible, just generally frowned upon. But we didn’t care; he would compare us to a Dave Eggers short story as if we were a literary novelty.

We got more intense. When we hung out it felt like dates. People started finding out, even his ex-girlfriend and my now ex-friend. He told me he loved me and that he wanted to make me his girlfriend. I just did not feel the same way. Everything went sour from there. We were no longer friends. We tried to make one another jealous and fought all the time. He said I was like Summer, rejecting him, fearful that I would probably fall in love before he was able to move on.

This is coming from the guy who took me to go see Meek’s Cutoff at Film Forum. Not only did he admit that he saw (500) Days of Summer but he equated himself with JGL.

We ultimately decided we would never work and that we actually needed to stop talking to one another. No sex and no friendship. Nothing. We haven't spoke since. I was fine! Thinking, "I don’t need a boyfriend! What for? Dates? Oh so we can hit it off, become sexually compatible, date, meet each other’s parents, make it facebook official, move in together, get married, have kids, grow old, and die.” Yeah not for me. But jeez, Ian Curtis wasn’t messing around when he said, "love will tear us apart again" because low and behold, there came Boy B.

Boy B was a new co-worker. He became the talk around the office cooler. All the girls wanted him and I had no idea why. He was good looking but completely not my type. Maybe my initial disinterest was the appeal to him. He wanted me. Me? The same girl who had braces two years ago.

I was in over my head. Texting, "yeah you can come over but you can’t stay over." At first, it was so carefree. I am pretty much nocturnal and he worked late. I was doing my best to keep up and was enjoying doing so physically. Mentally it was excruciating. It was one late night/early morning drunken mess after another and to top it all off, we were co-workers. He finally laid down the law: "I think of you as a friend, you’re hot and we have amazing sex together. That’s it." And that’s when I said, "I can’t anymore." Which meant ignoring texts, five a.m. phone calls and ultimately leaving my job.

With all this free time not working and not fucking, I was able to do some research. I watched a lot of Sex and the City. In the wee early seasons of the franchise, there was an episode titled "The Fuck Buddy." This was worth the 72-minute wait on megaupload. In the episode, Carrie mentions Edith Wharton and Henry James as she romanticizes New York City. Here’s one of my favorite quotes: "Your tits look really great in that thing." I recognized Carrie’s go-to fuck buddy right away. It was Dennis Duffy from 30 Rock.

My story came full circle when Friends with Benefits came out last weekend. See, I have been completely single for a few months now. With no hook-ups or drunken make-outs. Not even a real date with a guy, like where he pays and I shave my legs. I decided to see the movie all by myself.

I was mildly embarrassed seeing groups of young girls and perky couples walk in. I barely was able to spit out, "One for Friends With Benefits." As I finished a tweet about the uneventful fall line up for movies this year, a young woman sat down right next to me. There were other seats in the theater. Maybe she was embarrassed to be alone. She seemed pretty and normal. I wondered why she didn’t have a group of friends or a significant other. No woman is an island after all!

In Friends With Benefits, Mila Kunis is so New York and Justin Timberlake is so L.A. They are so opposite, how will this ever work! Within the first twenty minutes, Kunis’ character exclaims how she will show her leading man "the real New York," not the tourist stuff. So she shows him the Brooklyn Bridge, a view of the Empire State building, and Times Square. I would have taken him to a rave in Bushwick, spun the cube at Astor Place, and probably split a forty at the closest Papaya King.

Friends With Benefits contains homages to to Nora Ephron, Nicholas Sparks, Pretty Woman and of course Katherine Heigl of The Ugly Truth. I was very impressed with the opening to the film, wherein both Kunis and Timberlake share similar relationship woes as they are dumped by Emma Stone and Andy Samberg. Emma Stone’s caricature breaks up with JT because he was late to a John Mayer concert, thus missing "Your Body Is A Wonderland." But if you are going go to a John Mayer concert in the first place, you go to hear "Your Body Is A Wonderland." It’s like going to the Louvre, you must see the Mona Lisa or in L.A., you must go to an In-N-Out Burger. Is it a reason to break up with someone?

No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits share identical moments. Alcohol fuels an ill-fated relationship. Rules need to be laid down. Something like: thou shall not cuddle for too long. Thou shall not look each other in the eyes, thou shall not have time when you hang out and not have sex, e.g. meals together, movies, you know normal people stuff.

The film teases the idea of JT as a workaholic and Mila Kunis as the quirky girl that will show him a good time. But a lot of these things get lost in a cute but provocative sex montage. It was very similar to No Strings Attached’s sex montage, in that both lacked a doggy-style position.

Friends With Benefits contains a ridiculous amount of exposition, throwaway characters, and pivotal plot points abruptly dropped. But who cares! Better yet, there is a fake romantic comedy that the couple notes stars Rashida Jones and Jason Segel. They make fun of the production value and the stereotypical dialogue. As cheesy as the faux rom-com seems, it serves as the blueprint for JT to win Kunis’ heart.

A great supporting cast eases the pain. NSA: Mindy Kaling, Kevin Kline, Greta Gerwig, and Ludacris! FWB: Patricia Clarkson, Woody Harrelson, and Bryan Greenberg. However, the film did leave out the whole false pregnancy scene and the adderall inspired threesome but seriously who’s counting? And more importantly, spoiler alert: they all get together in the end and live yet again, happily ever after.

As for me? Two fuck buddies and no, I did not end up with either of them. Through my experience and a few pretty bad romantic comedies, I have realized you do not need sex. I looked into it and lack of sex will not cause cancer. Next time around, I am going to have to do this all from scratch. Let’s say I am on a real first date in the near future.

Guy of my dreams: Oh yeah, I mean, I was on again off again with this one chick but then I met you. What about you? Ex-boyfriends?

Me: Funny you should bring that up because I’ve never had a boyfriend before. I’ve never even liked anyone. I’m a virgin and I’m actually saving myself for marriage.

Think he'll buy it?

Jessica Rionero is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer and comedian living in New York. You can find her website here. She tumbls here and twitters here.

photo by drew kaufman

"Vanishing of Time" - Vivian Girls (mp3)

"Lake House" - Vivian Girls (mp3)

"Death" - Vivian Girls (mp3)

In Which We Encourage The Rehabilitation of Hester Prynne

You Were Romeo, I Was A Scarlet Letter

by DANIEL D'ADDARIO

The summer between sophomore and junior year of high school, I didn’t stay in good touch with my school friends – all we had was AIM, and it was kind of a hassle. You couldn’t have an away message up and talk to people. It all seems long ago.

A girl I had been very good friends with sophomore year came back on a mission: to be the kind of girl with whom I wouldn’t be very good friends. She begged the coach and summarily became the varsity basketball manager in the winter, and it leaked into public knowledge that she was having sex with various team members; I tended to find out a few days after the fact each time she met up with a guy off MySpace at some concert in Hartford, the nearest small city.

I lost track of her, which was hard to do in a class of one hundred. She hardly became infamous, or popular; besides her new black-tipped French manicure, nothing had changed. She had never been a part of the school’s mainstream to begin with. Her time had been spent with the school’s gay kid, watching The Real World/Road Rules Challenge; now it was spent in pursuit of a nebulous goal.

Either way, she was making a choice that seemed vaguely socially destructive but, finally, not worth remarking upon. For the kind of kids at my school who actually looked like Emma Stone and Penn Badgely, there were more pertinent dramas.

I thought of my old friend during Easy A, the new teen film loosely based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, following in the footsteps of Clueless (Austen) and 10 Things I Hate About You (Shakespeare) and She’s the Man (ditto) and Mean Girls (ditto once more, in that moment when Lacey Chabert threatens to “totally kill Caesar!”).

Stone, who comes across like a less lip-bitey Lohan, plays Olive, who takes inspiration from the novel she’s reading in English class (guess which one!) and puts together a wardrobe of Frederick’s of Hollywood-y lingerie and a big red “A.” In some oblique way, the outfits are meant to simultaneously rebut and encourage the salacious rumors about Olive’s sex life.

Before getting into the intricacies of the plot, which is seriously twisty for a teen romp co-starring Amanda Bynes, let’s talk for a moment about Hester Prynne! The film recaps the plot of The Scarlet Letter, which helped me and surely helped the BBMing teen contingent sitting to my left, but it mentions only briefly the fact that Hester, Olive’s inspiration, gives birth to a child, Pearl.

Pearl is a major character – the major character, maybe! – in the novel not merely because she’s the only one who consistently speaks in a forthright and honest manner (the manner that passed down to Olive’s generation), but because she’s the physical symbol of Hester’s rebellion. Hester can withstand the “A” – it’s not exactly news to anyone – but Pearl is the true punishment.

Hester has dragged another person into her ostracism. Her actions changed her life irrevocably – the wardrobe change is as surface as it seems. Olive, on the other hand, suffers no such consequence, perhaps because she’s committed no crime besides being a teenager, and in a teen movie.

Easy A takes place in that weird Gossip Girl netherland where people hear a rumor, then immediately break into a dead sprint to tell the nearest interested party, which is to say, literally fucking anyone. (Was high school like this? I thought gossip happened more incidentally.)

As such, the rumors about her wild sex life spread throughout the school in about two minutes of screen time, and it’s not long before she’s decided to sew a scarlet letter on her clothes – a choice Hester had forced upon her. I guess there’s some point here about how what used to be private and embarrassing is now willfully public, but this is neither a review of Catfish nor The Social Network.

Easy A has the same relationship with The Scarlet Letter that a Silly Band shaped like a hot dog has with actual food. It’s all signifier and no signified. Its arguments about the ease with which rumors spread is well-taken, I guess – the movie pauses to allow Thomas Haden Church a soliloquy on how dumb Facebook status updates are, and the teenagers in the house all laughed, and I felt old because I’d had that conversation in like 2007 – but, if it’s like any text, it’s like the song “I Kissed a Girl."

Olive is allowed to seem like a bad girl because she’s insouciant and wry, but she never does the deed. She’s as much a slut at any point as Katy Perry was a lesbian in 2008. Further, the “A” represents, maybe, the grade she wants in English, because she’s scrupulously a “real” virgin and even the worst rumors about her don’t indicate adultery. It’s a merit badge, not an identity.

The actual adulteress in the movie, Lisa Kudrow’s guidance counselor, is allowed a few shrill and aimless words in defense of herself, before being told off by Olive and her husband, and exiting the frame. There is no room for Hesters here.

In that summer between sophomore and junior year, I learned to drive, I worked at a camp, and I did the AP English reading, which included Hawthorne. It never occurred to me to draw any parallels between his novel and what happened later on in the year, mainly because my friend’s rebellion didn’t seem like a big deal at the time – I’d changed schools more than once, and I knew friends drifted apart. I remember I wrote in my essay on the novel that one can choose “the town or the country” – the quest for acceptance or splendid isolation.

As Olive puts it to her own gay pal, "You either do everything you can to blend in, or decide not to care." I didn’t realize, then, and wouldn't until college, that there is a third category, of caring, so very hard, about not fitting in, that such hard work at spiky oddity is so often actually standing in for “deciding not to care.” It’s tiring work, this attempt to distinguish oneself. The film about Olive comes to an end when she turns off the webcam. The movie has taken the form of a live web feed of her bedroom, in 1996’s notion of 2010.

Her adventures after the film are the stuff of other tales: unlike Hester, whose very grave is marked with “A,” she’s able to reinvent herself with the push of a button. After high school graduation, my old friend transferred colleges a few times: Facebook tells me she’s in a relationship of long standing with a woman and has been working at Starbucks for more than a year. She got rid of the manicure; she has pictures with her cat. There’s nothing to judge, no gossip to be had, here: I’m happy for her.

Daniel D'Addario is a contributor to This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about his time working in England.

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