The Old School Lunch

[How hard is it to be a movie critic for a newspaper? Apparently not very hard.]

North Country has been out for a while and I just got around to seeing it.

And it’s easy to see why it gets a lot of cheap attacks from movie critics because it follows Charlize Theron’s Oscar winning performance in Monster. Take this review, for example, from Portland Tribune critic Dawn Taylor:

Charlize Theron gives an admirable performance as Josey Aimes, a fictionalized version of the woman behind a pioneering class-action lawsuit that won millions of dollars for 14 women who had suffered appalling treatment on the job at a Minnesota mine. But it’s a performance that sadly flounders, because it’s wedged smack in the middle of a movie that fails horribly at telling a human story.

After leaving an abusive spouse and moving in with her parents (Richard Jenkins and Sissy Spacek), Josey is pleased to get a good, albeit grueling, union job at the mine. But as soon as she arrives, she finds that for the female workers it’s a veritable carnival of misogyny Ñ catcalls, insults, dirty words smeared in feces on the women’s locker room walls, offensive items hidden in lockers and lunchboxes.

With each successive indignity, one waits for Josey to grow a spine and fight back. And, finally, in typical American fashion, she does Ñ she quits her job in tears and then sues the company. Very empowering, that.

With the exception of some terrific work by Frances McDormand and Sean Bean as Josey’s supportive friends, every frame of “North Country” bangs you over the head with its demand that you see it as a Very Important Movie. It’s not. It’s just an overblown, overlong soap opera about a woman who never learns how to truly stand up for herself. But oh, that scent of Oscar is delicious, isn’t it?

Taylor conveniently forgets to mention the physical and sexual assault that women in the film faced. I don’t know how one forgets a pretty brutal scene in which Theron’s character is thrown to the ground and then a male mill worker lunges on top of her and then sexually assaults her, but I digress.

My biggest beef with this shit review is that Taylor says that the film is a story about “a woman who never learns to stand up for herself” because “she quits her job in tears and then sues the company. Very empowering, that.”

Again, if you actually watch the film you’ll notice that Theron’s character tells the other men to stop, talks to the supervisor about it (who immediately tells her to basically shut up), talks to the other women about banding together and talking to the “Boss” of the company and when they’re scared for their jobs and afraid of retaliation, she goes to talk to the boss herself. Again, like the supervisor, she’s told to “shut up and quit if you have a problem.” At this point, I believe, she’s physically and sexually assaulted in the aforementioned scene and then she quits. And yes, she quits in tears, which the reviewer suggests is the character just being too emotional.

Then she moves to sue the company and after some struggling with the other women and men in the company, a class action is formed.

I don’t know what the reviewer thought would be Theron’s character standing up for herself. What was she supposed to do? Take a gun and shoot the men there? Talk to the HR person there about the sexual harassment laws and workplace policies? Oh, that’s right, most of those policies weren’t there until after the class action…

Taylor is what I would call one of those folks who is so joyously cynical about people suing other people that she’s willing to call bullshit on anyone who does. Since she offers no other suggestions for “standing up” we have to assume that she seriously meant something like “blow the entire place up with a massive gas leak” or “just hurl sexist comments to men and slap them on the ass or grab their balls.” Because, you know, that will put the offending men in their place! That’ll change things!

That’s not to suggest that I think it’s pointless for women, when on the receiving end of sexist insults and comments, to say sexist insult and comments back to men. It is however, a completely bullshit “take it and if the kitchen’s too hot for you then get out” type of mentality. It also suggests that the culture men have created where that type of verbal abuse goes on is completely acceptable and, of course, normal.

Wow.

It’s one thing to say that you’re going to go to serve “specific communities of color” and go to the “African American, Hispanic and Native” communities. It’s another to say that you’re going to reach out to the “communities of color” and just name those three which is what our CEO recently did at our big all-staff meeting. Apparantly all the Asian and API folk in Washington who make up more of the population than the Black community doesn’t warrant any attention. She talked all this fluff about how we’re going to work extensively with members and organizations at this and that place while she said nothing and had no plan to work with the Asian or Pacific Islander communities. I guess I was hallucinating when I saw those statistics saying that Asian Pacific Islander teens have the highest rates of suicide out of any ethnic group in America. I guess I might’ve just read wrong when I saw that Filipinos girls ages 14-19 have the highest number of suicide ideations and attempts out of any single group. Keep in mind, again, that just looking at the population reports, Asian and API residents in Washington outnumber Blacks and Latinos. Specifically, Filipinos are the largest Asian subgroup in Washington. And wow, we’re not going to address that issue right there?

Bank pushes Mumbai’s prostitutes to save

By RAMOLA TALWAR BADAM, Associated Press Writer Fri Oct 26, 6:14 PM ET
MUMBAI, India - In the heart of Mumbai’s red light district, several prostitutes sit on brown plastic chairs in a narrow room waiting to do something many have never been able to do before: deposit their savings in a bank.

The small bank is the initiative of the women and aims to help them break the vicious cycle of poverty and exploitation that keeps them indebted to brothel owners.
Bank pushes Mumbai’s prostitutes to save
The simple act of squirreling away some money was previously out of reach for many customers of the Sangini Women’s Cooperative Bank. Prostitutes are often shunned by regular banks or lack residence documents or birth certificates officially required to open an account in India.

Now, for the last three months, they have been able to enter the bank daily to deposit an average of 10 to 20 rupees (25 to 50 cents) and dream of things they will do as their savings grow.

“We may not have house papers, but we also dream,” said Indra Jai, 40, who was lured from a southern village 20 years ago with promises of a job in Mumbai and then forced into prostitution. “We should get respect; our money is also good.”

Jai said she dreams of buying a small house and a tailor shop in her village and paying for her 19-year-old son’s college education.

The government estimates there are 3 million prostitutes in India, many of whom start as children lured by traffickers. Others are teenagers sold by impoverished family members to brothel owners.

They spend up to five years working for free in dingy, airless rooms to repay the brothel owner’s investment. To survive they often turn to moneylenders charging exorbitant interest rates and drive themselves further into debt and dependance.

Thoughts of breaking the cycle drive the bank’s more than 900 customers.

“If we fall ill who will look after us? We must save when we are still earning,” said Jai, a founding member of the bank.

The bank — three narrow rooms that also house a cooperative store — is filled with women, some queuing up in front of a teller, others shopping for soap, food, grains and condoms.

Mumbai’s prostitutes began a women’s cooperative group two years ago with support from PSI, a Washington-based nonprofit organization. The bank and store were launched with $40,000 in funding from PSI.

“We thought it would take a year to get 100 customers, but we opened more than 100 accounts on day one,” said Shilpa Merchant, PSI’s Mumbai director.

Guided by PSI, the bank invests daily deposits totaling 25,000 rupees ($625) in fixed savings schemes with state-run banks earning 9.5 percent interest per year.

The women say entering the bank every day helps them hold onto their dreams.

“Sometimes I think my life is a waste,” said Gulabja Sheikh, 35, who was sold at 15 by her parents. “But now I have my house to work for.”

Article link here.

I wanted to emphasize in particular the part where the article says that in India, banks shun prostitutes from opening bank accounts on top of denying them because of lack of “proper identification” and such. This sounds like another “it happens over there but never in the U.S.” sort of thing but this happens all the time here. As some of you may know, my old job was working at what was basically a bank/mail/information/referral center for homeless and low-income men and women. These are people who, when they get whatever sort of money they get whether that’s federal assistance, job paychecks, handouts or whatnot, they aren’t able to open up an account at the local Bank of America. Some of these people have a driver’s license. Many do not. Most have a basic plastic ID card printed from one of the local shelters. When you are in this position and you have a check you have to cash, your alternative, if you don’t have a non-profit bank like the one I worked at, is to go to the local check-cashing Money Tree or Money Mart and have them take anywhere from a 10-20% fee from your check. If you’re struggling from paycheck to paycheck (to put it mildly) and they’re taking 20 dollars of your 100, you’re going to feel that. Now, we took a fee from checks as well (2%) but that was pretty minimal compared to, again, upwards of 20%. The point is simple. If you are poor in America, if you’re of extremely low-income or chronically homeless and don’t have a State license form of identification, your birth certificate or banks wont open an account because you have a bad record for writing bad checks, you won’t be able to open an account plain and simple. You will be forced to go to Money Mart or go the Nancy Botwin route and just make everything a cash transaction (which means obviously carrying and finding places to store cash, sounds real safe if you’re living on the streets, right?) unless, again, you’re able to find some organization that does it for an extremely small fee. It costs money to be poor in America.

For the past two Saturdays i’ve gone to the same Chinese buffet with a friend. It’s not that bad and it’s 15 bucks. Big fan of the seafood but not of the kids who run around without supervision making a general mess of the place while their parents sit and eat…

My friend works for Cingular and he was telling me that Sprint/Nextel recently reviewed thousands of their customer service records, looked at thousands more of their customers in their database and terminated the contracts of 1000+ customers for basically being shitty, verbally abusive customers and wasting Sprint’s time by constantly calling to complain with issues of little substance. “A first in the customer service industry” my friend calls it…

Heroes is surprisingly good. I was pretty skeptical but i’m hooked probably even more so than Lost. It’s nice to hear an Asian language on TV being spoken at the actual pace the actors would naturally speak it unlike Lost where everyone is speaking Korean 5x slower to make it less obvious that Daniel Dae isn’t a native speaker…

And Weeds is pretty good. Though they really put it on thick the first few episodes with the whole “Oriental whore bitch from Thailand” bit. At least Nancy corrects her…

Saw But I’m A Cheerleader after I heard the writer/director talk about it in This Film Is Not Yet Rated. Both are pretty awesome, the latter moreso than anything i’ve seen in a long time. In my hyperbole I may have called Jack Valenti a “nazi” when talking about the documentary to a friend. His response: (gasp) “I believe the man was there was president Kennedy was shot!”…

The two co-workers I am probably most buddy-buddy with at work both told me recently that when they first saw me, they both thought, “What a nerd, i’m not going to talk to that guy at all” and “that guy doesn’t look cool, i’m not going get to know him.” Oh, it’s like that?…

A female co-worker was talking to us at the lunchroom about how she couldn’t decide what to wear at the upcoming auction that she is basically running. She has an outfit that is she looks better in but she doesn’t want old farts who are donating money to hit on her or to stare at her all night. As she was talking about this dress conflict, she stopped herself and apologized to me saying that she felt bad that I as the only man in the room at the time had to endure this conversation because, of course, I just naturally wouldn’t be able to understand any of it. “No, I get what you’re saying. There’s a different between what you’d wear as a guest coming to donate money and socialize and there’s what you’d wear if you’re board member or something and then there’s what you’d wear if you’re working at the function up on stage, etc.”…

It’s another fall season and yet again i’m sitting here wondering what to do with my life. There’s little as frustrating as not being able to decide (or is it just not knowing?) if you want to go one of several directions. I was so hell-bent on going the grad school route and teaching but then yet again the research scares the shit out of me. Is that something I really want to do? Law school almost made a strong case for a while and then it just sort of sputtered out because I got caught up in work. Then I thought, “hey, why not just get that domestic violence focused MPA in Colorado and work for a bunch of cool non-profits…you know, climb the ladder?” Then it became, well, if you’re not going to go for the full Ph.D then should I just go for the M.A.? But won’t I only be able to teach at “really, really small community colleges” as someone once told me? Will that leave me with enough room to go for the eventual Ph.D later on? What the hell do I want to know about public administration? I want to write and teach, not crunch numbers and work on policy and committees. Then, I realized that I basically want to do what Jackson Katz does for a living: talk to men and young men in particular about sexism, homophobia, racism, etc and be able to “coach boys into men” as the Family Violence Prevention Fund saying goes. I think he went Masters in Education and now he’s getting his Ph.D in something but obviously he had a pretty unique experience in the movement. I think I have an opportunity to do my own very, very small scale sort of “coaching” men against sexism at my workplace because I work closely with men who act as mentors for young men and boys but that’d mean i’d have to stick around for a bit which isn’t something I originally planned on doing because the pay isn’t so great. But maybe I should.

I guess the honeymoon phase of “I like/don’t mind my new job” was bound to come to an end at some point and this week was it…

This has proven yet again why I wanted to go to grad school in the first place. Sometimes I’m sitting at my desk thinking “what am I doing?” I don’t regret the work and life experience, but I miss school and i’m afraid the longer i’m out of the game the harder it’ll be to go back…

It’s funny who you think you’ll get along with at the office after first impressions then after first week, first month impressions…

I probably take things too personally for my own good. I don’t like confrontation (because anyone does?) so I won’t really say things when I should when it comes to certain issues…

Today was the first day for our new CEO. We had a brief donuts and introductions meeting in the morning and then as we started to pour out of the room, I was standing there with a few co-workers and the new CEO waiting for the elevator. Our new CEO has been in contact with us since she got hired and all she talked about beyond how excited she was was how she was in China for a few week with her kids. China this and China that. I get it, you went to China.

So one of my well-meaning but not so think-before-she-speaks co-workers cracks the joke/makes the waiting for the elevator small talk of “so…when you were in China, you must’ve stood out as like the tallest person there!” to which the new CEO goes “Yea, on average, I was the tallest.”

And yes, she’s “speaking from experience” and by her own words, the CEO didn’t say anything inflammatory.

And keep in mind that i’m standing right next to both of them and i’m one of two asian people in the entire office.

As I was telling a co-worker this, he suggested that maybe she realized it was a rude joke to make especially since i’m standing right there but since she doesn’t know anyone and since it’s her first day, she doesn’t want to step on any toes. I’m willing to believe all that, but i’d be a whole lot more willing to believe that if she stopped by my office today and said as much…

Is it too much for me to ask that she send me an email, give me a call, stop by my office to say “hey, I just want you to know that I didn’t think that joke was funny”?

Always interesting what you find in the office printer tray when people forget to pick stuff up. Today was a list of interview questions for an applicant and one of the q’s was “What is your experience with diversity?” which is either the dumbest “have you worked with them colored folk?” question i’ve ever seen or either just brilliant in a “you can tell a lot with how they answer to such a vague and weird question” sort of way.

“The shortest guy I went out with was 5′11 and I thought I was going to puke the entire time.” - officemate (who stands 5′0)

“Ewwwwww, that’s disgusting.” - officemate from above after hearing me say “my ex-girlfriend is about 5′10″

Q: You sound awful.

A: It’s the flu. I’m getting my ass kicked. I had to take a day off work the other day.

Q: You aren’t supposed to do that, aren’t you? You’re still training?

A: Yea, but if you’re sick you’re sick.

Q: When did it start?

A: Wednesday night, after I watched Transformers.

Q: Transformers made you sick, figures.

A: I thought it was good, actually. I mean, there were some eye-rolling moments with the “it’s gotta be Japanese” lines and “I always fall for the bad boys” moments and such but overall, it was fun. I don’t understand the folks who say “it’s too serious” or “it’s not serious enough.” It’s robots turning into cars and ships, after all.

Q: Didn’t mind all the GMC/Chevy ads then?

A: It’s to the point where I think viewers are used to it. I wish they could’ve been a little more subtle but it’s certainly not as bad as…say the Dr. Pepper shot in Spiderman. I think the ad-campaign by the automakers makes it worse than it is in the movie.

Q: So what’s been new otherwise?

A: Work. An under-wraps project that I won’t talk about at length (and jinx) until it’s out. Ummm, friend’s birthday coming up, so I managed to finally use that Amazon gift cert I had originally saved up for a camera I wanted to buy.

Q: What’d you get for the present?

A: Season one of….a certain TV show. DHARMAINITIATIVE*cough

Q: I hope he’s not reading this.

A: I don’t think he is.

Q: Do any of your in-person friends know about this?

A: No, I doubt it. They’d have to dig around a bit to find it. Or get at it through the Flickr.

Q: Why don’t you want them to read it?

A: Eh, it’s the lesson I learned from the first blog.

Q: You learned a lot of lessons from that “trial” I imagine.

A: Oh yea.

Q: You want to buy a camera? What for? You’ve already got one.

A: The most advertised feature of mine is that it also doubles as an MP3 player. And it was a gift. From my uncle who I don’t like. It’s time for an upgrade.

Q: What are you hungry for?

A: Nachos. Not really. I wish I wanted nachos so I could go get them. I have zero appetite right now. I could’ve gone the entire day yesterday on tea but I forced myself to eat a salad and then a mini-pizza.

Q: You’re about to say something?

A: A certain flickr group popped into my head just now. I posted about it a long time ago, but basically it’s a group called “feminism” and a majority of the photos people add there I have no idea how they’re related to feminism. So someone posed the question in the group…and the first response was something like “women are beautiful, mothers and nature” and stuff like then and then later on a guy chimes in with the old “this is a good discussion to have” and then proceeds to talk about how his photos (almost voyueristic photos of mainly young, white, attractive women) are somehow a comment on feminism. I don’t get it.

Q: People want views and subscribers. Hence they add their photos to every single group they belong to.

A: Yea.

Q: Are you going to talk about Chris Benoit?

A: God. I’ll just say that while i’m not a medical professional and I don’t know with intimate knowledge the effects of steroid use…just the way in which people are making this out to be purely roid rage is just ridiculous. It’s like a bad SVU episode. Society will always find ways to minimize, evade, cover up domestic violence, men’s violence against women, etc. If we suddenly found out that Dubya physically assaulted his wife, people would start saying that he’s just crazy, stupid and power-hungry. While the latter certainly is true for DV abusers, people just wouldn’t say “hey, it’s a man hitting a woman.”

Q: In Dubya’s case it seems like they’d concentrate on him though and not “the victim” which is unusual for how society reacts.

A: Right, it’s a different case because obviously the man is who he is. But in either way, it situates the abuse in a certain way to avoid looking at it directly. It’s like taking a side-glance at Dubya and focusing solely on him to avoid even considering that it’s indicative of a larger societal problem.