While everyone is compiling their year-end (and decade-end) best-of lists, I thought it might be a good idea to take another look at this piece. While The September Issue wasn’t the best movie I saw this year, it was certainly one of the most though-provoking, especially as a member of the print media.
Almost immediately after seeing it, I started writing this. What can I say? It left me with a strong opinion of Anna Wintour. While I put it aside afterward—mostly out of a sense of, who am I to critique Vogue?—rereading it now makes a lot more sense than it did then as print continues to suffer.
So while this isn’t a straight-up movie review like my previous post on The Bourne Ultimatum, it still reminds me of something I would have written in college—but instead of turning it in to an editor at the DTH, I would have submitted it to one of my professors in the comm studies department.
***
Vogue and I never really had a relationship. When I was in high school (and long before I ever knew I’d end up working in the world of magazines), I picked up a few issues when I realized I was getting too old for Seventeen and wanted a different source for pretty clothes. But all it taught me was that there was a class of people I could never dream of joining. They lived in New York, vacationed in places like Sag Harbor and Saint Tropez, and wore clothes by designers I couldn’t even pronounce. The only piece of information I retained from those pages is that there are three Miller sisters, who all married into royalty—the design, philanthropic and literal varieties.
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Allison, December 19th 2009 |
Tags: career, class issues, feminism, movie review, ponderings, the media
Posted in Newer Essays
Last week’s entry regarding my time at the DTH made me think of this piece, which I wrote in late 2007. See, my main gig at the DTH—all four years—was reviewing movies. Most of the time, they were split between heavy-duty art-house films and insipid popcorn flicks. But over time, I got used to it. There was a definite pattern to writing reviews…and it was always much more fun to trash the bad movies. (And as the photo suggests, in my early days on the arts desk, we awarded feet instead of stars.)
After graduating from college, I largely fell out of the habit of writing reviews. But in 2007, I saw The Bourne Ultimatum, which is now one of my favorite movies. It got my brain racing, and I had to write the following. It’s longer and a little more involved than a typical DTH review would have been (I can thank the media studies degree for that), but here it is anyway—in all of its G. Dub glory.
(And I gave it four and a half feet.)
***
When Robert Ludlum first wrote the novels that immortalized the exploits of embattled spy Jason Bourne, his title character roamed a world wrought with Cold War fears and conflict in Vietnam. The Bourne Identity, the first movie that placed Matt Damon in the role, came on the heels of a new era—post 9/11 terrorism fears. And, as we all know, it’s been a rollercoaster ride of suspicious-looking neighbors, confiscated gels and liquids, and wiretapped phone calls ever since then.
So, in a way, The Bourne Ultimatum is exactly the kind of film that Americans need to see right now—and the kind that they don’t need to see at all.
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Allison, November 18th 2009 |
Tags: daily tar heel, DTH, movie review, political
Posted in Newer Essays
How a Hollywood cynic began to believe that dreams really do come true [sic]
When it comes to the hordes who pack up their cars and move to Los Angele
s, I like to think that I don’t fit the cliché. A year ago, I decided to make a change and move out of the San Francisco Bay Area—and my parents’ comfortable suburban home. L.A. offered the same good food, the weather, the politics that I couldn’t stand to leave. Best of all, I didn’t have to change my license plates.
Really, it was just an exercise in laziness.
I carried the typical NorCal resident’s cynicism for anything Hollywood, and I came here with no desire to see my name in lights. I don’t have a screenplay to sell. Getting into the hottest club isn’t my ultimate goal in life. Somehow, I thought this would be evident soon enough; that I’d get a steady job and join the throngs of regular people sitting on the freeway on our ways to work. I’d put the same amount of thought into a place to live—after all, I’m the type who drives my car down Rodeo Drive even though it rattles and is missing a side mirror. Something nice and comfortable, no matter the ZIP code, would suit me just fine.
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Allison, October 28th 2009 |
Tags: bay area, los angeles, personal, ponderings, spec, stereotypes
Posted in Newer Essays
They said that it couldn’t be done. Or, rather, that it shouldn’t.
When my friend and I announced our plans to take a two-week trip to Rome and Cairo, the concerned voices of friends and family across the country all chimed in with opinions.
“You’re two young women traveling by yourselves. Two young American women,” they would say. “How on earth will you be safe over there?”
We weren’t worried. The friends we would be staying with in both locales were young American women themselves, each of whom had been studying in their respective cities for at least nine months. They knew how to conduct themselves; we figured we’d just follow their cues.
“But the Italian men will prey on you, and the Egyptians will just hate you,” the voices continued to say. We were instructed to learn the phrase “No, I will not marry you, and please take your hands off my behind” in Italian, and “I am a Canadian” in Arabic.
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Allison, October 21st 2009 |
Tags: cairo, personal, rome, spec, travel
Posted in Newer Essays
Cupcake mania is sweeping the big city. But is it happening for the right reasons?
There may not be a more perfect pastry on God’s green earth than red velvet cake. With its rich body accompanied by tangy cream cheese frosting—not to mention the larger-than-life color—red velvet manages to appeal to pretty much everyone. You need no further proof of that than bakeries specializing in gourmet cupcakes cropping up across Los Angeles and New York City, where red velvet has joined vanilla and chocolate among the classics. Reworking the decadent old-South recipe into a form that reminds busy big-city residents of their long-forgotten childhoods seems to have struck a nerve—or at least a taste bud. I’ve seen the resurgence attributed to the 1988 film Steel Magnolias, with its famous armadillo-shaped red velvet groom’s cake, or the 2002 nuptials of Nick Lachey to Jessica Simpson in her native Texas. While both have long since faded into the cultural landscape, perhaps it’s appropriate that the surging interest in a longtime Southern tradition counts the two largest cities in the U.S. as ground zero.
And I, for one, could not be more thrilled. A native Californian, the closest I can claim Southern heritage is through my mother, a Tar Heel born and bred in a rural mill town outside Charlotte, N.C. I also spent four years in North Carolina while I was in college. But the closest I ever came to reclaiming that heritage was through the dozens of church cookbooks my mother had collected from her hometown. When I was in high school and antsy to leave California, I’d flip through them, imagining the miraculous tastes I’d come to associate with the two weeks we spent in North Carolina every summer. Eventually, red velvet became my specialty.
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Allison, October 8th 2009 |
Tags: food, los angeles, the south
Posted in Newer Essays
