compilation

Roundup: July 2015

Content note: self-harm.  A summary of films I saw over the past month featuring fat characters that I didn’t write about.

Chef (2014, dir. John Favreau)

A dramedy focused on a middle-aged man who is stagnating in his professional life and distanced from his family, with the most tantalizing cooking scenes I’ve seen since Eat Drink Man Woman.  Ramsey (Oliver Platt), a food blogger, criticizes Chef Carl’s (Jon Favreau) cooking, speculating that he has gained a lot of weight over his career because he “must be eating all the food that gets sent back to the kitchen.”  Despite the public dig at his size, everyone agrees that he’s a genius chef, and the front of house manager (Scarlett Johansson) has the hots for him.  When it is revealed that his critic is also fat, the dig seems somewhat hypocritical, and is followed by Carl lambasting him for making a living off of being mean.  Carl’s former father-in-law also subtly picks on him, remarking that he’s gained weight since they last saw each other.  Although there is an implication that Carl’s weight is a symptom of his professional stagnation and unhappy family life, there is no indication that he loses weight as he improves his relationship with his son and goes into business for himself.

Beauty and the Beast (1991, dir. Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise)

Several fat supporting characters: Belle’s proto-nerd father Maurice, who is considered an oddball by their community and needs to be saved twice; Lefou (literally “the fool” or “the madman”), Gaston’s toadie who worships him despite constant physical abuse and has a more grotesque character design than the other human characters; Cogsworth, the stuffy majordomo; and Mrs. Potts, the motherly cook. Perhaps of note, Disney is producing a live-action reboot, to be released in 2017, with three of these four characters portrayed by thinner actors.  Ian McKellen is playing Cogsworth, Emma Thompson is Mrs. Potts, and Kevin Kline is Maurice.  Lefou, the one villainous character of this group, will be portrayed by Josh Gad.

Withnail & I (1987, dir. Bruce Robinson)

A character study of two struggling London actors who scrape by on alcohol and bullshit.  Withnail (Richard E. Grant) and Marwood (Paul McGann) escape their dismal flat for a trip to the country, staying at a cottage owned by Withnail’s fat uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths).  Monty is wealthy and effete, a retired actor whose homosexuality is a defining characteristic (in his introductory scene, he discusses his love of gardening: “There is, you’ll agree, a certain je nais sans quoi, oh so very special, about a firm, young carrot.”)  His generosity and kindness are a godsend to the two destitute protagonists, and to an extent, he is an inversion of the trope of the fat incompetent, having his life more in order than the younger men, who can’t manage to clear out their kitchen sink for fear of what lives in it.  However, he is also the middle-class fuddy-duddy foil to their edgy, youthful rebel lifestyle, never questioning the lies they feed him.  Partially due to a comedy of errors and partially to Withnail’s dishonesty, Monty believes that Marwood is also gay and attempts to seduce him, to the younger man’s abject terror.  Monty is overly persistent, forcing his way into Marwood’s bedroom wearing a silk robe and eyeshadow.  He tries to force himself on Marwood, although he also pleads with him to not be ashamed of his sexuality, and only stops when Marwood tells him that he and Withnail are a couple, and that he doesn’t want to be untrue.  Monty backs off and leaves the cottage before they wake up in the morning, having left a note of apology.

The Tales of Hoffman (1951, dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger)

As with Beauty and the Beast, there are a handful of fat flunkies in this film that features several stories within stories.  Most of the fat characters are thin actors with big prosthetic bellies, including a few villains’ servants and, in one sequence, an ugly clown whose love for a ballerina is unrequited.  The one fat character portrayed by a fat actor is Andes (Philip Leaver), who is the servant of Stella (Moira Shearer).  Count Lindorf (Robert Helpmann) bribes Andres into allowing him to intercept a message from Stella to Hoffman (Robert Rounseville), which ultimately allows the Count to separate the lovers from each other.

Tangerine (2015, dir. Sean Baker)

There are a few minor fat characters in this film, the most prominent of whom is Jillian (Chelcie Lynn, who is a big deal on Vine), the madam of a “party room” at a sleazy motel that Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) breaks into looking for Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan), the girl who’s been sleeping with her boyfriend.  It’s not a glamorous role, but none of the roles in this film are.  The protagonists aren’t fat, although a few girls make critical comments about Alexandra (Mya Taylor) for not having a flat stomach, but as transgender women of color, they are definitely marginalized based on their physical characteristics.  Tangerine is the most vivacious and humanizing portrayal of trans women of color in a film that I’ve seen since Paris Is Burning, and I can’t recommend it enough.

ABCs of Death, “W is for WTF?,” “X is for XXL” (2012, dir. John Schnepp; Xavier Gens)

I didn’t see the whole anthology, so there might be other fat people in the chapters I missed.  “W is for WTF?” features two fat men (John Schnepp and someone whose name I couldn’t find on IMDb) as members of a film production team who are struggling with a looming deadline to produce a W segment for ABCs of Death and can only come up with lazy ideas featuring beautiful women in skimpy outfits before the world descends into utter chaos.  “X is for XXL” follows a fat woman (actor unknown) who never speaks.  She is harassed in public several times due to her weight, and seems to be stalked by an ad campaign for a cereal that claims to have slimming properties.  Upon arriving home, she binges on food in a manner that verges on cartoonish (I believe she drinks olive oil straight from the bottle at one point).  She then goes into her bathroom with a knife and carves off her flesh, which intersperses with shots of the slim spokesmodel in the cereal commercial.

Link: Every Single Word

A project best summed up by its subtitle:  Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in [Mainstream Film Title].  Creator Dylan Marron (whom you probably know as Carlos on Welcome to Night Vale) creates videos that stitch together all of the speaking screentime that people of color have in well known films.  Even including intro titles and credits at the end, there has yet to be a video that runs over 1 minute.

His curation of films is a stroke of genius.  Of the 12 videos he’s posted so far, the oldest is from 2005, making this issue the problem of the generation who is most likely to come across ESW.  They are also largely films that tend to be favorites of those of us who fancy ourselves as smart people with good taste, neatly skewering the classist perceptions we often cling to about who is racist and who is “beyond” that.  Black Swan.  Her.  Frances Ha.  One of my personal favorites, Moonrise Kingdom, clocks in at 11 seconds.

Marron’s project doesn’t explicitly have anything to do with fat people, but his mission of exploring filmic representation (or lack thereof) of a marginalized group parallels that of CPBS.  If anything, I’d say his approach is more impactful (but my blog is still great you love it please don’t stop reading it).  He doesn’t include commentary or analysis, he just lets the facts about these films stand as testament to how people of color are largely absent from many American films and who they are when they are on screen (spoiler alert: a lot of people working service jobs).

Every Single Word can be found on tumblr.

Roundup: June 2015

Although it’s my intention for most of the posts on CPBS to be less about analyses of targeted fat characters and more about my experience as a viewer randomly coming across these characters as I watch films in a more organic fashion, I end up seeing a lot more fat people in film than those I write about here.  In what will hopefully be an ongoing monthly feature, here’s a summary of films I saw over the past month that feature fat characters I didn’t write about.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper)

There are a few fat people in this landmark horror film.  Franklin (Paul A. Partain), one of the main characters, is fat and in a wheelchair.  Although not the most nuanced character or performance in the history of film, he is given more screen time, dialogue, and personality than the other members of his group.  Once scene follows him as he struggles to navigate his chair through an abandoned house, while his friends’ laughter can be heard from the second floor.  I was impressed by this, considering that characterization in slasher films is usually pretty sparse, and that fat and disabled characters are usually not shown in a light that leads the audience to empathize with them.  Leatherface is arguably fat as well, especially when compared to his family members; his size adds to his menace, and he is able to keep up with Sally (Marilyn Burns) pretty well during the chase scene, especially considering that he is carrying a chainsaw.  In a minor part, a fat man of color driving a semi in the last scene runs over the Hitchhiker (Edwin Neal) before he can kill Sally and helps her escape.

The Set-Up (1949, dir. Robert Wise)

This film centers on a boxing match: one of the competitors (Robert Ryan), who is unwilling to accept that he’s past his prime, has been instructed to take a fall.  Unfolding in real time, we see the fight from the differing perspectives of a large cast, including several anonymous spectators.  One of these spectators is a fat man (Dwight Martin) who is shot from a low angle, emphasizing his girth.  He laughs at the violence taking place in the ring, although his schadenfreude is not outstanding relative to other characters in the audience.  He shown eating every time he’s on screen, going through several different food items over the course of the competition.  I saw this film at a theater; by the last half of the film, a good chunk of the audience was laughing whenever the fat man was shown with a new food item.

Blue Velvet (1986, dir. David Lynch)

Set on terrorizing Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) as revenge for having sex with Dorothy (Isabella Rosselini), Frank (Dennis Hopper) forces the two of them to come on a joyride with his crew to a brothel run by his associate Ben (Dean Stockwell).  The scene is consummate Lynch, a tense and menacing tableau that incorporates elements of mid-century American bourgeois culture.  Part of this tableau are three fat women.  Dressed in a conservative manner, they don’t have names or speak, except for one who Ben refers to as “darling” and requests that she fetch glasses for their guests.  Their function is to give Ben’s house an uncomfortable tone.

Martin & Orloff (2002, dir. Lawrence Blume)

A comedy about Martin (Ian Roberts), a man who attempts suicide, and the unorthodox psychiatrist Dr. Orloff (Matt Walsh) who forces him on a bizarre journey of self-discovery, strongly influenced by improv and sketch comedy and featuring a dream team cast of improv actors and comedians (Amy Poelher, Tina Fey, H. Jon Benjamin, Andy Richter, the list goes on).  When Patty (Amy Poehler) falls in love with Martin, her boyfriend Jimbo (Sal Graziano) falls into a jealous rage.  Jimbo is a large, fat man with an absurdly large penis who spends most of his screentime threatening to beat up Martin, often squatting like a sumo wrestler and charging.  Through Dr. Orloff’s incidental help, Jimbo connects his anger to his thwarted football career, and decides to ally with Martin.

When Marnie Was There (2015, dir. Hiromasa Yonebayashi)

Anna, a 12-year-old struggling with asthma and her sense of self-worth, is sent to live in the country with her foster mother’s relatives for the summer to improve her health.  One of her temporary guardians, Mrs. Oiwa, is a fat woman.  She is a laid-back maternal figure who treats Anna with kindness and respect, even if she doesn’t always have a bead on the girl’s emotional needs.  She is often shown in relation to food (snacking, cooking, and tending her vegetable garden), and connects with Anna over the latter two activities.  Another fat character in Marnie is Nobuko, a girl who lives in Mrs. Oiwa’s neighborhood.  Mrs. Oiwa tries to encourage a connection between her and Anna, but Nobuko’s extroverted personality makes Marnie uncomfortable.  When Nobuko asks Anna some overly personal questions, the quiet girl becomes overwhelmed and calls her a “fat pig.”  Nobuko retaliates with some insults of her own before suggesting they drop the matter, but Anna runs away in embarrassment.  Before she returns to her home in the city, Anna apologizes to Nobuko, who accepts her apology by forcefully insisting that Anna join the neighborhood trash pickup next summer.

Unfinished Business (2015, dir. Ken Scott)

Dan (Vince Vaughn) is the founder of a startup sales firm and has the poor work-life balance of every white collar American dad in every comedy ever.  One of the family problems he doesn’t have time to pay attention to is that his teenage son Paul (Britton Sear) doesn’t have any friends and is being cyber-bullied by his classmates because he’s fat.  That plotline resolves with Vince Vaughn giving him a pep talk about being himself.  Another notable fat character is Bill (Nick Frost), one of Dan’s clients. He is revealed to be a gay man in the leather scene who, because of his commitment to his job, has stopped working out and doesn’t get attention from men anymore.  If you’re not at work, here’s some evidence of how there are no gay men in the world who think Nick Frost is a total babe. No siree.  He also is spineless when dealing with his boss (James Marsden), but Dan inspires him to go behind his boss’ back (so he can help Dan out).

The Master (2012, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

In the beginning of the film, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) is directionless and animalistic.  Drunk at his job as a portrait photographer at a department store, he harasses a fat client (W. Earl Brown) to the point that the man engages him in fisticuffs.  He then meets Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a fat man who is the charismatic leader of a pseudo-scientific religion.  Dodd, called the Master, preaches that humans are above animals, and have forgotten their true elevated nature.  He makes Freddie’s redemption his pet project; this relationship makes up the bulk of the film.

The Blind (Drunk) Leading the Blind (Drunk): Shaun of the Dead; Hot Fuzz; The World’s End (2004, 2007, 2013; dir. Edgar Wright)

My article The Blind (Drunk) Leading the Blind (Drunk): Masculinities and Friendship in Edgar Wright’s Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy is up on BitchFlicks as part of their theme week on masculinity.  The Cornetto Trilogy are three of my favorite films, and Andy Knightley (Nick Frost) in The World’s End is one of my favorite fat characters, a topic I hope to explore more in depth on here in the future. I had a lot of fun writing it.  Please check it out, as well as the other articles about masculinities in film and television.

Link: Director’s Club Podcast Bonus Episode: Cape Fear & Shutter Island

Director’s Club Podcast is going on hiatus, but not before putting out a series of bonus episodes over the next few months.  The topics are requests from listeners who donated $50 or more to the production of Most Likely by Bang! Films, an independent romantic comedy featuring the acting talents of my bff Jess Conger.  (You can’t fight synergy, Lemon.  It’s bigger than us all.)

I was a guest commentator on the first of this series of bonus episodes, in which Patrick and I talk about Martin Scorcese’s divisive thrillers Cape Fear (1991) and Shutter Island (2010).

Listen to the episode here, or download it from the iTunes store.

The DUFF, or: What Makes a Character Fat?

In wide release as of last week, The DUFF is about Bianca (Mae Whitman), a senior in high school who is told that she is a Designated Ugly Fat Friend, someone whose social value lies in making her friends look more attractive by comparison.  This premise has not gone without critique.  From Genevieve Koski’s review on the Dissolve:

The idea of a “DUFF”—a “designated ugly fat friend,” or the less-attractive person hot people keep around to make them seem more desirable and approachable—is hideous, offensive, and shallow. And to its credit, The DUFF treats it as such. The idea of Arrested Development’s Mae Whitman, a just barely unconventionally attractive, objectively not-fat actor being a DUFF is even more hideous, offensive, and shallow. And to its detriment, The DUFF doesn’t do enough to undermine that idea.

When an actress who is straight-sized (if not willowy) is cast as someone who is devalued because of the size of her body, does that representation highlight the unobtainable exclusivity of  beauty standards, or uphold them by eclipsing the potential for featuring an actress whose body deviates even further from those standards?  According to its defenders, The DUFF concludes that it’s best to embrace who you are, but is that necessarily synonymous with critiquing culturally established beauty standards?  Frankly, I don’t want to schlep downtown in the cold and pay $11 to find out for myself, but the DUFF kerfuffle did bring to light something I’ve been wondering for a while:  what establishes a character as fat?

Spot the ugly fat person, win a prize!

In our day-to-day lives, we have indicators from various institutions as to whether or not we are fat.  The body mass index (BMI) is a commonly used, if flawed, tool in the medical field.  Mass-produced goods like clothing give us indication about what bodies are supposed to look like.  However, it’s unusual for a film to explicitly state a character’s height and weight, or their clothing size.  Of the films that I’ve reviewed on this blog so far, the closest that we’ve come to information about a character’s height/weight or clothing size is In & Out, where Emily reveals that she used to be 75 pounds heavier.

“Fat” as a descriptor goes beyond quantifiable data.  Mae Whitman obviously isn’t fat by clothing size or BMI standards, but she was cast as a “fat” character.  Even if she can buy clothing in the same store as her peers and her doctor doesn’t tell her to lose weight, Whitman’s body is further than co-star Bella Thorne’s from the established Hollywood ideal.  The measurement that The DUFF uses to consider someone beautiful and thin is objectionable, but it is hardly unprecedented, even in Whitman’s own career.  Her previous roles include characters whose function in the story is to be undesirable in comparison to someone else.  These roles include Mary Elizabeth in Perks of Being a Wallflower, who is less desirable as a girlfriend than Sam (Emma Watson); Roxy in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, where her relationship with Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is dismissed as a “bicurious” phase;  and her arguably best-known role as as Ann Veal in Arrested Development.  Ann has many qualities that make the Bluths question her suitability as a girlfriend for George Michael (Michael Cera), such as her far-right Christian beliefs and her predilection for mayoneggs, but her appearance is an undeniable factor. His father Michael’s (Jason Bateman) numerous Freudian slips when referring to her include “Ann-Hog,” and when George Michael points her out to Uncle Gob (Will Arnett), he puzzledly responds, “What, is she funny or something?”  Ann is the butt of these jokes, but so are the Bluths themselves, as the series’ humor is often driven by characterizing them as shallow California elitists.  So no, the common person on the street would probably not characterize Mae Whitman as fat or ugly, but that’s the point: the viewpoint that’s being presented is not the common person’s, it’s a viewpoint coming from the apex of cultural power and privilege.

Even if it’s positioned in different places based on the context, there exists a boundary that divides bodies with an acceptable amount of fat tissue and bodies with an excessive amount.  Fat bodies.  Marilyn Wann offers a thought-provoking meta-description of fat, saying that it “functions as a floating signifier, attaching to individuals based on a power relationship, not a physical measurement.”  (“Forward,” The Fat Studies Reader)

One of the reasons that fat has become one of my main intellectual preoccupations is because of my own disorienting experiences being a fat character in other people’s lives.  According to the BMI, I am obese.  Most clothing lines don’t make clothes in my size.  However, my body is usually accommodated in public spaces (e.g. I’ve not yet had to pay for a second seat on an airplane), and I don’t suffer a tenth of the harassment that some of my larger friends do.  So while I’m fat, I occupy a weird in-between social space where thin(ner) people have no qualms about saying horrible things about Fat People to me, or express disgust at how fat they themselves are.  At least once, the average-height adult making the latter observation weighed half as much as I did.  I don’t think someone larger than me has ever complained to me about their weight in that way. “Ugh, I’m so fat, I’m so disgusting.”  And what, I wonder, does that make me?  Hearing virulent rants about Fat People is equally confusing for me.  Am I the Ambassador of Fat, tasked with the diplomatic mission of returning to my people with the message to stop ruining society and being so gross?

I’ve never had the nerve to ask a thinner person to tease out the meaning behind their statement, or even why they felt it appropriate to say.  There have been a handful of times when these comments have felt like a passive-aggressive attempt to shame or scold me, but I can extrapolate from 30 years of being around humans that the majority aren’t intentionally including me, even if they inherently are.  People often describe themselves as “fat” as shorthand for feeling unattractive or unhealthy.  Applying Wann’s quote, “fat” is used in this context to express how someone feels their own body devalued– disempowered– in comparison to the thin ideal.  I’ve been on friendly terms with most of the people who have made disparaging comments to me about Fat People, the disempowered Other who should be ashamed of themselves for not being Us, without realising that I can’t/won’t detach myself from that Other.

But let’s return to the original question: what makes a film character fat?  When choosing characters to discuss for CPBS, the most obvious guideline I use is whether the movie explicitly labels them as fat.  Some characters conveniently describe their own bodies as fat, like Louis in True Stories or Pagliacci in Shock Corridor.  Some are labeled fat through another character’s observation, like Bianca in The DUFF. But a fair number of characters aren’t explicitly assessed in these terms.  Stereotypes can draw attention to a character’s fatness, like Sgt. Powell’s Twinkie habit in Die Hard, or Dale’s lack of confidence in Tucker and Dale vs. Evil.  But as I talked about with regards to Emma Levie’s role in Snowpiercer, it can be impossible to discern if a fat actor is in a role because they were the best person for the job regardless, or if their body is intended to symbolize a concept or visually reinforce a character trait or interpersonal dynamic (e.g. that timeless dramatic pairing, hottie/DUFF).

The former situation even raises further considerations about a character who is written as fat versus a character who is played by a fat person.  Would The DUFF be given more credit for exploring its subject matter if Sharon Rooney had been cast as Bianca?  No offense to Mae Whitman, but that would make me more willing to see it in theaters.  It would be a more sincere approach to feature an actress who could realistically be the fattest person in the room outside of a casting call for a Hollywood-made teen movie.  As with In & Out, if a film wants to make a point about fat people accepting their bodies, the actor in that role should be someone whose body actively challenges the audience’s expectations about what acceptable bodies look like.  But of course, not every fat character in a film is intended to carry a message about self-acceptance.  Individual films vary greatly in their agendas, cultural milieus, and viewpoints.

After 1400 words of thinkpiecing, I find myself no closer to universally applicable guidelines for who a fat character is, but I feel like ambiguity is the only thing that could accurately reflect the mutable nature of socially constructed power dynamics.  Leaving that process of discernment (especially when looking for topics for this blog) should probably remain in the intuitive realm, because the one common thread that I have found in the characters that I’ve written about thus far is that I find myself able to compare and contrast them to my own real-life experiences of being a fat person.  From my perspective, that’s enough to make them a member of the club.

Year in Review: 2014

Hopefully you’re not too sick of year-end lists; I decided to give myself until the end of the week so I could get in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. (No jury in the world would convict me.) Here’s a list of all the movies I saw this year that had their USA release date in 2014, ordered from most-liked to least. However, I’m keeping my comments to if/how fat people are present in the films; of the 52 films I saw, 15 had characters worthy of discussion. Body size in the documentaries I saw were incidental, so I don’t talk about them. Commentary includes spoilers.

Links are to anything I’ve already written about them. Film details may be inaccurate. I’m going off what my impressions of these films were after the fact; for some of these, I’m remembering a movie that I saw roughly a year ago.

My top ten:

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)/Boyhood (Richard Linklater)

Tied for favorite film of the year. No fat characters in either, but I had Thoughts.

We Are the Best! (Lukas Moodysson)
Whiplash (Damien Chazelle)

My anticipation for Whiplash was piqued early in the year, when I saw the original 2013 short that the feature-length film expanded on (and admirably so). The short is left intact within the longer version: Andrew’s (Miles Teller) introduction to Fletcher’s (JK Simmons) band and, erm, teaching methods. The initial illustration of Fletcher’s aggression comes when a chubby trumpeter doesn’t know whether or not he is out of tune. The hapless student is terrified; Fletcher’s tirade is laced with fat insults, and ends with him expelling the trumpeter. After, Fletcher calmly informs a thinner student that his was the out of tune horn. “But [he] didn’t know, and that’s just as bad,” Fletcher justifies, and the punitive moment passes.

Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)
Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho)

In the above piece, I focused on Claude (Emma Levie), but the discussion of the film is not complete without Tanya (Octavia Spencer). Snowpiercer is high-concept, politicized science fiction with a largeish cast, so it is unsurprising that the characters are closer to allegorical sketches than complex, realistic people. Tanya is brave, strong– stronger than the skinny men Curtis [Chris Evans] is taking with him on his fight through the train, she tells him– and devoted to her son. These traits are admirable, but also characteristic of the strong black woman trope. After I wrote the original piece, which I banged out pretty quickly because I wanted to capture my gut reaction as accurately as possible, I kept thinking about why I didn’t talk more about Tanya, who has more screen time than Claude. The shitty truth is that, an audience member, when I see a fat black woman playing a character whose story is one of resistance in the face of hardship and oppression, I don’t wonder why that casting choice was made. That reaction speaks to a need for me to continue dismantling and unlearning racism, but also the dire need for films with more varied roles for women of color.

octavia spencer, tanya, snowpiercer, bong joon ho

Coherence (James Ward Byrkit)
12 O’Clock Boys (Lotfy Nathan)
Cheap Thrills (E.L. Katz)
The Babadook (Jennifer Kent)

The following films didn’t make my top ten, but I enjoyed and would recommend them:

The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki)
Listen Up Phillip (Alex Ross Perry)
Obvious Child (Gillian Robespierre)
The One I Love (Charlie McDowell)
The Double (Richard Ayoade)
Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)
The Immigrant (James Gray)

The main thing that I admire about this film is how it presents its characters and situations with empathy and complexity, to a degree that would take a much longer piece to explore. Rosie (Elena Solovay), the stout owner of the bar that Bruno’s (Joaquin Phoenix) cabaret calls home, is a smart, savvy businesswoman. Do I want to say that I like her for those reasons? Yes. Do I find myself unable to do so without reservation, because she is party to forced prostitution? Yes. Similarly, there is a part of me that liked this film for having women who have sagging breasts and fleshy arms but are still read as sexy. However, another part of me can’t give that reaction a pass, partially because seeing more voluptuous women in historical films can be as much a sign of the times as the costumes, but mostly because these women may have been forced into sex work, and are an ultimately disposable part of the story that is ultimately concerned with slender Ewa (Marion Cotillard).

Ernest and Celestine (Stephane Aubier, Benjamin Renner, Vincent Patar)

Some bears are bigger than others. (Some bears’ mothers are bigger– no, stop, this is serious blog business.) It’s not as easy to talk about body size when looking at a species that is pretty uniformly big, especially when they’re anthropomorphic cartoons, but the characters are drawn in a range of shapes and sizes. I think Ernest is supposed to be read as fat. At the very least, his appetite gets him into trouble, a trait that is easily associated with a fat character, even if the one in question is living paw-to-mouth.

Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund)
Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Declan Lowney)

As I mentioned regarding Ernest & Celestine, there’s a lot of grey area when figuring out if a character is fat or not. I was on the fence about Pat (Colm Meany), but during a rewatch, Patrick helpfully pointed out a demonstrator holding a sign reading “Pat Farrell the Fat Barrel.” You can’t argue with objective evidence like that. Pat is a victim of corporate downsizing who snaps and takes hostages in the radio station where he and Alan deejay. Meany’s portrayal is sensitive and low-key enough to gain audience sympathy, but not that of his coworkers, especially egomaniacal Alan (Steve Coogan) who uses the seige to advance his career. He ultimately comes across as a pathetic figure. The other fat character in the film parallels Pat’s social awkwardness and inappropriate relationship with violence: a cop who comes across as gun-obsessed and somewhat incompetent, in a scene where he and Alan geek out about historical hostage situations.

fat barrel

Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt)
Willow Creek (Bobcat Goldthwait) Includes a major spoiler

This was an unexpected one. Fat people are the sole visual source of threat in the film. A Hollywood-handsome couple making an amateur documentary about the Patterson-Gimlin footage of Bigfoot is threatened by a fat man at the edge of the forest that is purportedly home to the elusive creature. After one of the skin-crawlingly tensest builds I’ve ever seen, that doubles as one of the best reasons to make a horror film found-footage, the two main characters are hopelessly lost in the woods, being stalked by either a Bigfoot, said fat man, or their own imaginations. Or a mountain lion. The climactic scare before they’re taken out of commission? They stumble across a naked fat woman standing alone in the darkness.

Blue Ruin (Jeremy Saulnier)

Ben (Devin Ratray) is a great example of the fat best friend. His disappeared best friend Dwight (Macon Blair) turns back up in his life, seeking revenge for his murdered parents.  Ben doesn’t hesitate to help him, in the form of an extensive gun collection and expertise. Ben doesn’t ask questions, which both warms the viewer as a sign of his trust in Dwight and disturbs the viewer with regards to his willingness to kill someone to protect his friend. As with many other fat friends, he is lead by his emotions, sometimes towards inappropriate choices: Dwight realizes that Ben’s loyalty to him could have deadly results, and disables his truck so that Ben won’t join him in his act of vengeance.

Like Father, Like Son (Hirozaku Koreeda)
Nymphomaniac (Lars von Trier)
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour)

The film’s sparse story depicts different examples of vampirism, beyond the literal example embodied by the titular character. Hossein (Marshall Manesh), the human protagonist Arash’s (Arash Marandi) father and largest character in the film, is paradoxically both victim and vampire: in thrall to heroin, and unrepentantly leeching off his son.

Joe (David Gordon Green)
Birdman (Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu)
Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (Tommy Wirkola)
Guardians of the Galaxy (James Gunn)
Housebound (Gerard Johnstone)

One of the most delightfully unexpected aspects of this film was Amos (Glen-Paul Waru), parole officer to main character Kylie (Morgana O’Reilly), who is under house arrest. When she tells him that her house is haunted, I assumed that he would be the tightening noose of social services and put her under psychiatric care or something like that– not that he would reveal himself to be an amateur paranormal investigator.

Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)
Neighbors (Nicholas Stoller)

Besides a fat pledge who I don’t remember as having any lines, we have Seth Rogen, who is not shy about referencing his chub. One notable scene is when new dad Mac (Rogen) meets frat president Teddy (Zac Efron), working as a shirtless welcomer at an Abercrombie & Fitch. Mac decides to show a little solidarity and takes his own shirt off, posing and greeting shoppers. The two guys get a kick out of the difference in their bodies, and the scene highlights the weird nature of Teddy’s job.

The Trip to Italy (Michael Winterbottom)
Big Hero 6 (Don Hall, Chris Williams)
The Lego Movie (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller)
Gideon’s Army (Dawn Porter)
The Alley Cat (Marie Ullrich)

No fat characters to my recollection, but the screening of this film that I attended at the Chicago International Film Festival was followed by a q&a with director Marie Ullrich, who I would categorize as a person of size. The Alley Cat makes Chicago look dreamy and beautiful, and was a promising feature length debut.  I hope to see more from Ullrich in the future.

They Came Together (David Wain)
Afflicted (Derek Lee, Clif Prowse)

The next group of films were ones I thought were average:

Le Week-End (Roger Michell)
Paranormal Activity: the Marked Ones (Christopher Landon)
Enemy (Denis Villenueve)
Happy Christmas (Joe Swanberg)

Lena Dunham’s in it.

Captain America: the Winter Soldier (Anthony Russo, Joe Russo)
God’s Pocket (John Slattery)

One of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s final roles, he plays Mickey, a petty criminal dealing with the sudden death of his stepson. The characters are broad and somewhat cliche; Mickey is a pretty typical blue-collar schlub who would have a scene or two in a more epic crime film like Goodfellas, but happens to be the protagonist of this particular story. I’m considering doing a series on PSH this year, in which case I’d look at this film more closely, but I feel that it will ultimately be a minor work in his oeuvre.

And finally, if you’re still reading after discovering that I was cool on both Enemy and CAtWS, the films I would actively discourage people from watching:

Life After Beth (Jeff Baena)
The Skeleton Twins (Craig Johnson)
Altman (Ron Mann)
Cabin Fever: Patient Zero (Kaare Andrews)
That Guy Dick Miller (Elijah Drenner)
Devil’s Due (Tyler Gillett, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin)

So there you have it, my first of hopefully many year-end reviews on this blog.  I’ve gotten a lot out of the past 6 months of writing, and I hope it’s been worth your time to read.  Have a great 2015.

Link: Film Jive Special #17- “Soundtrack of Terror”

Film Jive podcast’s Halloween special is a collection of film podcasters, bloggers, and horror authors talking about their favorite music featured in horror movies.  I was very flattered to be asked to submit a segment, and have my two cents included among some really smart, savvy film geeks.

You’ll have to check out the podcast to find out what piece of music and film I chose, but I will divulge that the film’s director was a fat man and film legend in his own right.  (No, not him.)

Fat at a Movie Marathon

[CW: discussions of violence and sexual assault]

There are a fair amount of spoilers in this post; if that’s a concern, click on the provided link to see what films I’ll be talking about.

This weekend I attended [most of] the 10th annual Music Box of Horrors, a 24-hour marathon of horror films from across the world and history of film.  It’s only my second time attending, and it’s been great fun both times.  Instead of doing a separate post for each movie– which would take a long time and I am so very, very tired– I’m opting to give a brief rundown of fat representation in this year’s lineup, to document my experience as a fat audience member.  For extra fun, I’ll include my favorite moments of misandry, as I was pleased to note that a good number of the movies in this year’s lineup had interesting and kickass female characters.

The Phantom Carriage (1921, dir. Victor Sjöström): no fat characters.

The Man They Could Not Hang (1939, dir. Nick Grinde): we skipped all but the last 15 minutes in the interest of getting lunch, but no fat people in the part I did see.

Cat People (1942, dir. Jacques Tourneur) no fat characters.
Misandry Moment: slimy psychiatrist refuses to stay friendzoned by his patient (ick), she turns into a panther and mauls the crap out of him.

The Curse of the Werewolf (1961, dir. Terence Fischer) Leon, the main character, has a fat best friend.  Jose is his cheerful, hedonistic coworker; he suggests that the two of them spend their wages at a brothel.  Unfortunately, Leon turns into a werewolf and mauls the crap out of him.

The Borrower (1991, dir. John McNaughton) in a group of potentially victimizable young people:  a heavy metal (I guess) band is shown filming a music video of a song about how they want to kill their parents.  The fat lead singer is an egomaniacal bully; when they hear the neighbor’s dog barking, he goes out to the backyard and sprays it down with the garden hose, laughing all the while.  However, the neighbor’s dog is actually the titular serial killer alien, who kills the fat lead singer.  (This was a weird one.)  His bandmates survive unharmed, while…
Misandry Moment: …the young person who has their shit together enough to load a gun and blast a hole in the baddie is the band’s camerawoman.  Also at least three scenes of a female cop shooting and beating up a rapist.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979, dir. Werner Herzog) no fat people.
Misandry Moment: this film follows the classic Dracula story, except that Lucy is the one who is solely responsible for killing the vampire, while Dr. Van Helsing is a skeptical milquetoast.

Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014, dir. Tommy Wirkola) no fat people.
Misandry Moment: a professional zombie killing team that is two-thirds women, raising the film’s undead Nazi body count with shovels, shears, and homemade fertilizer bombs.

I went home for a few hours’s sleep, but stalwart Patrick stayed the whole night.  His not-entirely-awake testimony is as follows:

Nightmare, aka Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981, dir. Romano Scavolini) no fat people.

Shakma (1990, dir. Tom Logan) no fat people.

Don’t Look in the Basement (1973, dir. S.F. Brownrigg) Takes place in a psychiatric hospital; some of the patients are fat.

The marathon also plays shorter pieces in between the features; a short at one point overnight there was a screening of “Space Werewolf”, which features a fat protagonist.

I returned for the last two features:

Just Before Dawn (1981, dir. Jeff Lieberman)  My cup runneth over.  The bad guys are fat psycho hillbilly twins, terrorizing and murdering a group of sexy young campers.  The sexy young campers are given harbingers in the form of a large-bodied park ranger (George Kennedy) who eventually comes to their rescue, and a hillbilly family comprised of a friendly but shy waif daughter, a hostile old dad, and a fat mom in an ill-fitting dress who isn’t given much to do except remind the audience that hillbillies are grotesque, I guess?  The first killer twin to die is shot by Ranger Kennedy and falls on top of the Final Girl who he is attacking, leading some of the audience to vocalize disgust.  It’s pretty gross to have a bloody corpse fall on you, but I feel like the disgust factor was heightened by the fact that the corpse in question is a fat man who looks like he hasn’t bathed in a while.
Misandry Moment: the Final Girl rams her fist down the second killer twin’s throat and chokes him to death while her traumatized boyfriend cowers in the background.  One of the campers is murdered after he mansplains a rope bridge in the forest to the girl who lives in the forest and has presumably had her entire life to figure out the rope bridge.

Audition (1999, dir. Takashi Miike)  no fat people.
Misandry Moment: it’s Audition.

There weren’t any surprises as far as representation of fat people goes.  While nothing was grossly fatphobic, most of the films didn’t incorporate fat characters, and the fat characters that did appear were pretty typical, and in small supporting roles.  Hopefully I’ll end up seeing a horror film with a meatier (ha) role for a fat person that I can write about before Halloween; if I have to resort to writing about Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, one of my favorite horror films, so be it.