Posts tagged with movies
-
![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://25.media.tumblr.com/283b6615a4d7712bb1c7246480aab3fd/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o6_r1_1280.jpg)
![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://25.media.tumblr.com/496475fff8f88e8fcd712cf23973c58e/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o4_1280.png)
![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://24.media.tumblr.com/ee1c4579be0fabcd00fbb06b51ddd7ea/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o2_1280.jpg)
![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://25.media.tumblr.com/88e95ad03dfddb7b3e686201e045610e/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o5_1280.jpg)
![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://25.media.tumblr.com/d53601d8ed9525557b635de1fa9c0e6f/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o3_1280.jpg)
![Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
[[MORE]]
The crew kept filming all the way to Rockaway, on the last train out before the entire subway system shut down in anticipation of the oncoming hurricane. It would, in fact, be the last train out to Rockaway to date. Once he realized what was happening, Fleischner put Sanchez on a flight back to his home in Florida and waited for the storm surge. Most of the crew took off, probably for good, since their rental was up on November 1 anyway. Fleischner’s cinematographer, one of the toughest people he knows, stuck around until the next day, when he got nervous and headed back to Brooklyn. “Of all people, I thought this guy would ride it out with me,” he says.
Fleischner himself lives in Rockaway, in a wood-frame house left from another era on Beach 92nd Street. Soon after moving to New York in 2006, he’d taken up surfing, traveling out to Rockaway from his apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. It was during this time that his first feature film, Wah Do Dem, won the top prize at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival. He also directed music videos for MGMT, Santigold, and Panda Bear. Two years ago, he rented the Rockaway house with two friends, and last summer he started living there full time, subletting his Brooklyn studio to a friend.
The timing was fortuitous. After spending two years developing the script, securing funding, and auditioning actors, Stand Clear was beginning to look like a project that would come together. The search for an autistic child who could play the main role was exhaustive, but Sanchez had the right combination of ability and patience to play the part. Fleischner rented a house for the crew on Beach 96th Street, plus an apartment down the street from his own house to serve as the family’s home in the film. All of the film equipment was kept in his basement when not in use. Filming started on October 6.
When I arrive at Fleischner’s house one blustery afternoon in early February, he’s sitting on his porch, oblivious to the winter temperatures, politely or conveniently wrapping up a phone call. He invites me in, pushing open the front door. I follow him, expecting without thinking of it what one always expects upon entering a home. Namely, floors. Instead, sheets of plywood compose makeshift paths atop floor beams that are the only objects between me and the concrete basement, some 12 feet below. I follow him across one and up the stairs.
For the moment, Fleischner and his two roommates make do on the upper two floors, sans living room or kitchen. That he still manages to offer me a cup of tea speaks to an unflappable sense of decorum, or of the normalcy we force on ourselves when our house is half-destroyed. He heats water from the bathroom sink in an electric tea kettle propped on a wobbly end table in the hallway. He has curly dark hair that appears to be taking an extended break from any relationship with a pair of scissors, and a beard that has been left to its own devices for quite some time.
We sit near his editing station in the front room and start to talk. In Fleischner, there is an ease in discussing creative endeavors which suggests a life that has always included them; and indeed, I soon learn that both his parents are artists. Through a window, we can see the ocean out beyond where the boardwalk used to be.
Fleischner tells me the story you might expect about the night of Hurricane Sandy — the pitch black, the awesome sounds, the bottle of Jack Daniels. And earlier, the not taking the whole event all that seriously. “I was thinking it was a chance to edit and think more about the movie. I was really kind of ignoring the storm.” He urged one of his roommates — who also happened to be doing some work on the film — to record audio for possible use later. He filmed footage of the ocean from a neighbor’s balcony. “I managed to get some unbelievable shots when the storm was coming in,” he says.
That afternoon, the water started seeping up from the sewers. “Then as it was getting dark,” recalls Fleischner, “water started pouring down the streets.” His two roommates watched their cars float away. From a second-floor window after dark, they made out faint outlines of large floating objects. They watched transformers explode above the street. A little later, Fleischner was standing in his living room when water started bubbling up through the floorboards. At that point, he and his roommates scrambled to get the film equipment — which they’d already lugged from the basement to what they’d thought was high enough ground — up another flight to relative safety.
The next morning, “waking up to see what it was was mind-blowing, so shocking,” says Fleishner. The way some new mothers talk about how everything else fades into the background once the baby is born, so Hurricane Sandy pushed all else into irrelevance. Those large floating objects revealed themselves to be entire swaths of boardwalk. The entire Rockaway Peninsula was covered in a foot of sand. A blocks-long stretch of his street remained flooded for days.
That first night and for many after, he cooked food with neighbors over a bonfire in the empty lot across the street. “We ended up hanging out with so many random Rockaway people. It was just an interesting, interesting time.” Days were consumed cleaning up and helping others do so. By the time one of his producers made it out to Rockaway four days after the storm, Fleischner had become lost in the remarkable event around him. “My head was no longer there at all,” he says. “The movie just seemed so insignificant.”
But the producer was nudging him to finish the film. Gradually, Fleischner started thinking about it again. He realized that many of the film’s locations — a local diner, a skate park, the boardwalk — no longer existed. He’d recorded them literally in their last moments. He doesn’t say so, but upon that realization, an obligation to see the project through must have become apparent, the obligation of one in a unique position to preserve what no longer is.
In some seamless and instinctive way, it became a foregone conclusion that the movie’s plot would be altered to culminate with Hurricane Sandy. That unbelievable footage of the storm would make it into the final cut. “It’s funny, I don’t even remember how the script was before the storm,” Fleischner says. “Now it just feels very much like it was always supposed to be there. And I’ve thought so much about how to integrate it that I’ve forgotten how it was before.” Without giving up too much, Fleischner explains that “before, the kid makes it back by way of the train, and now he makes it back in a more magical way.”
Ten days or so after the storm, Fleischner resumed work on the film. He flew an actor in from Mexico to film scenes as the boy’s father. Sanchez came back up from Florida. By this time, what was left of the film crew — three or four people — worked by the power of a generator on loan from one of the producers. There was grandeur to be found yet. “The remaining structure of the boardwalk was like Roman ruins. I got to shoot in there before they started filling it in with sand,” he says. For Rockaway, it was one of the earliest cases of people just getting on with things. He filmed for two weeks.
This week, the Tribeca Film Festival announced that Stand Clear of the Closing Doors will premiere at the festival on April 20. What viewers will see is a film that doesn’t exploit Hurricane Sandy for dramatic effect, but rather features the storm where it now seems always meant to have been. To leave it out would have been to leave a bleeding hole in the story — the film after all, literally lived to tell the tale. “The symbol of the movie is the Ouroborus,” says Fleischner, referring to the mythical serpent that eats its own tail, which the boy in the film draws and redraws compulsively. “And that’s all about ‘creation can only come from destruction.’ The storm sums that up better than anything.”
— Sarah Stodola](http://24.media.tumblr.com/15511278aacea83cff59521df0ec0f92/tumblr_mjgsf52XFr1rrpm57o1_1280.jpg)
Hurricane Sandy Empowers a Film It Almost Destroyed
On October 28 of last year, Sam Fleischner was riding the A train out to Rockaway. With him were an autistic child actor, a lighting guy, sound guy — an entire film crew in fact, all under his direction. To hear the name of the film, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, is to understand that the location was an appropriate one; it’s the story of a 13-year-old autistic boy played by Jesus Sanchez who gets lost on the subway for 10 days. When it’s not taking place on the A train, Stand Clear unfolds in the Rockaways, where the boy’s mother is on a frantic mission to find him. The real-life story (documented in a New York Times article in 2009) that inspired the film takes place in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. But Fleischner saw parallels between the subway and the ocean, and he wanted the family in his film to live nearby. It was four days before Fleischner’s film was scheduled to wrap, and he needed all the time in the subway he could get. But Hurricane Sandy had other plans.
View post 2,803 notes -
Why You’re Wrong About the Oscars: Best Costume Design
Welcome to “Why You’re Wrong About the Oscars,” a series of rhetorical exercises illustrating the finer points of internet-style debate — live! Each episode of WYWAO features a pair of movie enthusiasts with opposing views about who will win a particular Academy Award. The catch: Each cannot explain why he or she is right. Instead, he or she can only enumerate the many reasons why the other person is wrong. So very, very wrong.
How often will moviegoers enjoy the same story in deadly combat for the very same Oscar? You should look it up, but we bet it’s really rare! This year it’s the year of the famous actresses as villains versus two different Snow Whites, and only one of those Snow Whites was banging the director but that’s not important and had no impact on costume design (that we KNOW OF). Lindsey Weber thinks Mirror, Mirror will win, and Bobby Finger says that Snow White and the Hunstsman will get the golden man.
Shot on location at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.View post 287 notes -
Why You’re Wrong About the Oscars: Best Actress
Welcome to “Why You’re Wrong About the Oscars,” a series of rhetorical exercises illustrating the finer points of internet-style debate — live! Each episode of WYWAO features a pair of movie enthusiasts with opposing views about who will win a particular Academy Award. The catch: Each cannot explain why he or she is right. Instead, he or she can only enumerate the many reasons why the other person is wrong. So very, very wrong.
Today’s Best Actress episode is an all-Tumblr edition featuring our fashion mandarin Valentine Uhovski (championing Jennifer Lawrence from Silver Linings Playbook) versus our communications director, Katherine Barna (contrariwise saying Jessica Chastain from Zero Dark Thirty shall get the nod). Could either of them be more wrong? Let’s find out!
Shot on location at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.View post 272 notes -
Why You’re Wrong About the Oscars: Best Director
Welcome to “Why You’re Wrong About the Oscars,” a series of rhetorical exercises illustrating the finer points of internet-style debate — live! Each episode of WYWAO features a pair of movie enthusiasts with opposing views about who will win a particular Academy Award. The catch: Each cannot explain why he or she is right. Instead, he or she can only enumerate the many reasons why the other person is wrong. So very, very wrong.
In this inaugural episode, the combatants are Jess Burkle (who believes David O. Russell will win Best Director for Silver Linings Playbook) and Halle Kiefer (who believes Steven Spielberg will win for Lincoln). The best part, of course, is that it’s quite possible for everyone to be wrong.
Shot on location at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Oscars image via Shutterstock
View post 454 notes -
Trapped in the Tumblr Closet: Master Puppeteer Wayne White
“I’m a middle-aged man who’s living out a 5-year-old’s fantasy.” So says Wayne White, artist extraordinaire most famously known for creating the puppets behind Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Versatile — and lauded for his eccentric, colorful work — in almost every artistic medium, White creates word paintings, comics, psychedelic sculptures, music videos, and, like the Southern ol’ boy he is, plays the banjo.
But how exactly does one get into puppets? For White, it was all about avoiding a college term paper a few decades ago, and the rest is history — as chronicled in the recently released documentary Beauty Is Embarrassing, an award-winning film on White’s life by Neil Berkeley. We sat down with White and Berkeley to discuss Cheerio-throwing puppets and the magic of the moving image.
View post 675 notes -
![Girls to ‘Magic Mike’: Less Heart, More Flesh
The thong GIF hit my email inbox on the morning of July 4. In it, six men with chiseled chests pull off six pairs of tear-away army fatigues, revealing six packages wrapped in red, white, and blue thongs.An American flag falls from the sky. Repeat.
It was a scene from Magic Mike — the Steven Soderbergh film that crossed the $100 million box office mark last month — and when I copied the link to my Tumblr, it exploded with a kind of orgasmic fury. Within a matter of minutes, hundreds of women had reblogged the image, many of them too young to even buy tickets to the R-rated film. The puns on “America the Beautiful” were obligatory. (“From seam to shining seam!”) “Why has no one made the [GIF] of Channing Tatum walking away butt naked yet?” one girl cried. Another joked, “my ovaries passed away due to explosion from watching Magic Mike. R.I.P.”
It was no huge surprise that a movie set in a male strip club would find a fandom among young women on the Internet. Based on Tatum’s real-life stint as a 19-year-old Tampa, Fla., hardbody, the film promised to rain men for two hours — a caliber of cinematic blockbuster man candy young female viewers had been waiting for. And yet, for a film about strippers, Magic Mike is surprisingly anti-stripper. The men’s bulges and asses are wrangled into the trappings of a cheesy romance, sealed in a vibe so chaste that women were forced to flee to their Tumblr dashboards just to get their fill.
“Magic Mike is supposed to be 90 minutes of man bananas flopping around in hammocks,” gossip blog Dlisted said of the film, which was written, directed, and produced by an all-male crew. Instead, it gave hot-and-bothered female audiences gratuitous “shots of the ugly-ass junkyard furniture Channing Tatum’s stupid character made” (and precious few shots of Tatum’s own ass).
When details of Magic Mike leaked last year, buzz among women and gay men reached the point of hysteria. Then, the first trailer hit, and it was loaded with all of this … context. The teaser lingered only briefly on Tatum’s glistening core before slogging into the film’s plodding romantic plot points. The titular Magic Mike is an impressive, successful, and affable exotic dancer, but he “wants something more.” He yearns for the pretty, uptight physician’s assistant who does not approve of his lifestyle, and so he escorts her to private islands to prove he’s more than just a bulge. What he really wants to do is make custom driftwood furniture and marry the girl next door.
To those already lining up to see Tatum take it off, the narrative felt like a betrayal. It offered, quite simply, the same tripe that Hollywood has always pushed on women—that their sexual desires are only acceptable when they’re safely tethered to a narrative of true, monogamous love. Rather than giving the stripping lifestyle a fair shake, the film painted it as toxic: Magic Mike’s protégée, The Kid, played by British model Alex Pettyfer, escapes his grueling day laborer job when he’s pushed onto the strip club stage in his briefs and likes it. But the film frames this as a cautionary tale: removing his clothes on stage for tips ultimately leaves The Kid morally bankrupt and glaze-eyed on ecstasy, groping for his co-worker’s wife’s enormous breasts.
And watching men remove their clothes on stage? That’s bad, too. Just look at the characterization of Mike’s two romantic prospects. Joanna (played by Olivia Munn) is the bisexual psych student who has an academic interest in Mike’s work, comfortably walks around topless, and engineers playful threesomes with him and other women. But instead of ending up with Mike, she ends up teary-eyed in a bar with her secret fiancée, dismissed as a lying pariah. Left in her amoral wake is Brooke (Cody Horn), the physician’s assistant who spends the film giving male strippers the side-eye, flees Mike’s club in a moral panic, convinces him to give up stripping—and kisses Mike across the kitchen table as the credits roll, elevated as the film’s virtuous feminine figure.
The takeaway? Women who openly enjoy sex are bad. Women who don’t are good. (Oh, and gay men? They may be flocking to the film with their straight girlfriends in tow, but they don’t exist on screen. Demonized bisexual Joanna aside, there are no gay strippers, no gay besties at the club, not even an experimenting frat boy in the film’s sorority party scene.) “I did get that sense that it was a little anti-stripping,” says Ríkey Elíasd, a 19-year-old from Iceland (which banned strip clubs entirely in 2010). “I thought it was weird,” she says. “The only reason I saw the movie was for the stripping part.”
This is America, of course: arousal and shame are inextricably linked here. But it seemed an odd message to be sending to the fans who’ve ponied up $10 to see the men of Magic Mike strip to Ginuwine’s “Pony.” It was as if Magic Mike enticed women with gyrating abdominal regions, then told them to hate themselves for looking.
“The credits came up and I was actually angry,” says Cassady Ranford, a Vancouver 19-year-old. “We all gush about wanting any of the characters to kick down our door and give us a lap dance, but we don’t want to hear about their boring lives afterward.”
It’s clear what female viewers would have preferred: A live public streaming of Tatum tirelessly working a pole.
“I could be viewing much better uncensored action than this on the Internet, for free, at home,” one young woman complained on her blog.
“Just YouTube the good stripping parts and don’t even bother for the rest,” another commented.
But perhaps Ranford put it most succinctly: “Not enough ass… Not enough ass… Not enough ass.”
Women like Ranford may be willing to buy tickets for boozy afternoon screenings — the film’s returns have set plans for a sequel into overdrive — but they’re refusing to buy the Hollywood narrative. Instead, they’re picking the pieces of the film that they came to see—the sexy parts—and setting them on a permanent GIF loop, walls of coordinated groin-thrusting and chest-rubbing and butt-flashing, no moralizing necessary.
When the film was over, Ranford headed back to her tumblr and posted a GIF of Channing Tatum power-thrusting the floor.
“At least I saw some asses,” she says.
— Amanda Hess(Gifs by Poison Paradise; feature image via Shutterstock)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7zlyzdqsG1rrpm57o1_500.gif)
![Girls to ‘Magic Mike’: Less Heart, More Flesh
The thong GIF hit my email inbox on the morning of July 4. In it, six men with chiseled chests pull off six pairs of tear-away army fatigues, revealing six packages wrapped in red, white, and blue thongs.An American flag falls from the sky. Repeat.
It was a scene from Magic Mike — the Steven Soderbergh film that crossed the $100 million box office mark last month — and when I copied the link to my Tumblr, it exploded with a kind of orgasmic fury. Within a matter of minutes, hundreds of women had reblogged the image, many of them too young to even buy tickets to the R-rated film. The puns on “America the Beautiful” were obligatory. (“From seam to shining seam!”) “Why has no one made the [GIF] of Channing Tatum walking away butt naked yet?” one girl cried. Another joked, “my ovaries passed away due to explosion from watching Magic Mike. R.I.P.”
It was no huge surprise that a movie set in a male strip club would find a fandom among young women on the Internet. Based on Tatum’s real-life stint as a 19-year-old Tampa, Fla., hardbody, the film promised to rain men for two hours — a caliber of cinematic blockbuster man candy young female viewers had been waiting for. And yet, for a film about strippers, Magic Mike is surprisingly anti-stripper. The men’s bulges and asses are wrangled into the trappings of a cheesy romance, sealed in a vibe so chaste that women were forced to flee to their Tumblr dashboards just to get their fill.
“Magic Mike is supposed to be 90 minutes of man bananas flopping around in hammocks,” gossip blog Dlisted said of the film, which was written, directed, and produced by an all-male crew. Instead, it gave hot-and-bothered female audiences gratuitous “shots of the ugly-ass junkyard furniture Channing Tatum’s stupid character made” (and precious few shots of Tatum’s own ass).
When details of Magic Mike leaked last year, buzz among women and gay men reached the point of hysteria. Then, the first trailer hit, and it was loaded with all of this … context. The teaser lingered only briefly on Tatum’s glistening core before slogging into the film’s plodding romantic plot points. The titular Magic Mike is an impressive, successful, and affable exotic dancer, but he “wants something more.” He yearns for the pretty, uptight physician’s assistant who does not approve of his lifestyle, and so he escorts her to private islands to prove he’s more than just a bulge. What he really wants to do is make custom driftwood furniture and marry the girl next door.
To those already lining up to see Tatum take it off, the narrative felt like a betrayal. It offered, quite simply, the same tripe that Hollywood has always pushed on women—that their sexual desires are only acceptable when they’re safely tethered to a narrative of true, monogamous love. Rather than giving the stripping lifestyle a fair shake, the film painted it as toxic: Magic Mike’s protégée, The Kid, played by British model Alex Pettyfer, escapes his grueling day laborer job when he’s pushed onto the strip club stage in his briefs and likes it. But the film frames this as a cautionary tale: removing his clothes on stage for tips ultimately leaves The Kid morally bankrupt and glaze-eyed on ecstasy, groping for his co-worker’s wife’s enormous breasts.
And watching men remove their clothes on stage? That’s bad, too. Just look at the characterization of Mike’s two romantic prospects. Joanna (played by Olivia Munn) is the bisexual psych student who has an academic interest in Mike’s work, comfortably walks around topless, and engineers playful threesomes with him and other women. But instead of ending up with Mike, she ends up teary-eyed in a bar with her secret fiancée, dismissed as a lying pariah. Left in her amoral wake is Brooke (Cody Horn), the physician’s assistant who spends the film giving male strippers the side-eye, flees Mike’s club in a moral panic, convinces him to give up stripping—and kisses Mike across the kitchen table as the credits roll, elevated as the film’s virtuous feminine figure.
The takeaway? Women who openly enjoy sex are bad. Women who don’t are good. (Oh, and gay men? They may be flocking to the film with their straight girlfriends in tow, but they don’t exist on screen. Demonized bisexual Joanna aside, there are no gay strippers, no gay besties at the club, not even an experimenting frat boy in the film’s sorority party scene.) “I did get that sense that it was a little anti-stripping,” says Ríkey Elíasd, a 19-year-old from Iceland (which banned strip clubs entirely in 2010). “I thought it was weird,” she says. “The only reason I saw the movie was for the stripping part.”
This is America, of course: arousal and shame are inextricably linked here. But it seemed an odd message to be sending to the fans who’ve ponied up $10 to see the men of Magic Mike strip to Ginuwine’s “Pony.” It was as if Magic Mike enticed women with gyrating abdominal regions, then told them to hate themselves for looking.
“The credits came up and I was actually angry,” says Cassady Ranford, a Vancouver 19-year-old. “We all gush about wanting any of the characters to kick down our door and give us a lap dance, but we don’t want to hear about their boring lives afterward.”
It’s clear what female viewers would have preferred: A live public streaming of Tatum tirelessly working a pole.
“I could be viewing much better uncensored action than this on the Internet, for free, at home,” one young woman complained on her blog.
“Just YouTube the good stripping parts and don’t even bother for the rest,” another commented.
But perhaps Ranford put it most succinctly: “Not enough ass… Not enough ass… Not enough ass.”
Women like Ranford may be willing to buy tickets for boozy afternoon screenings — the film’s returns have set plans for a sequel into overdrive — but they’re refusing to buy the Hollywood narrative. Instead, they’re picking the pieces of the film that they came to see—the sexy parts—and setting them on a permanent GIF loop, walls of coordinated groin-thrusting and chest-rubbing and butt-flashing, no moralizing necessary.
When the film was over, Ranford headed back to her tumblr and posted a GIF of Channing Tatum power-thrusting the floor.
“At least I saw some asses,” she says.
— Amanda Hess(Gifs by Poison Paradise; feature image via Shutterstock)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7zlyzdqsG1rrpm57o2_500.gif)
![Girls to ‘Magic Mike’: Less Heart, More Flesh
The thong GIF hit my email inbox on the morning of July 4. In it, six men with chiseled chests pull off six pairs of tear-away army fatigues, revealing six packages wrapped in red, white, and blue thongs.An American flag falls from the sky. Repeat.
It was a scene from Magic Mike — the Steven Soderbergh film that crossed the $100 million box office mark last month — and when I copied the link to my Tumblr, it exploded with a kind of orgasmic fury. Within a matter of minutes, hundreds of women had reblogged the image, many of them too young to even buy tickets to the R-rated film. The puns on “America the Beautiful” were obligatory. (“From seam to shining seam!”) “Why has no one made the [GIF] of Channing Tatum walking away butt naked yet?” one girl cried. Another joked, “my ovaries passed away due to explosion from watching Magic Mike. R.I.P.”
It was no huge surprise that a movie set in a male strip club would find a fandom among young women on the Internet. Based on Tatum’s real-life stint as a 19-year-old Tampa, Fla., hardbody, the film promised to rain men for two hours — a caliber of cinematic blockbuster man candy young female viewers had been waiting for. And yet, for a film about strippers, Magic Mike is surprisingly anti-stripper. The men’s bulges and asses are wrangled into the trappings of a cheesy romance, sealed in a vibe so chaste that women were forced to flee to their Tumblr dashboards just to get their fill.
“Magic Mike is supposed to be 90 minutes of man bananas flopping around in hammocks,” gossip blog Dlisted said of the film, which was written, directed, and produced by an all-male crew. Instead, it gave hot-and-bothered female audiences gratuitous “shots of the ugly-ass junkyard furniture Channing Tatum’s stupid character made” (and precious few shots of Tatum’s own ass).
When details of Magic Mike leaked last year, buzz among women and gay men reached the point of hysteria. Then, the first trailer hit, and it was loaded with all of this … context. The teaser lingered only briefly on Tatum’s glistening core before slogging into the film’s plodding romantic plot points. The titular Magic Mike is an impressive, successful, and affable exotic dancer, but he “wants something more.” He yearns for the pretty, uptight physician’s assistant who does not approve of his lifestyle, and so he escorts her to private islands to prove he’s more than just a bulge. What he really wants to do is make custom driftwood furniture and marry the girl next door.
To those already lining up to see Tatum take it off, the narrative felt like a betrayal. It offered, quite simply, the same tripe that Hollywood has always pushed on women—that their sexual desires are only acceptable when they’re safely tethered to a narrative of true, monogamous love. Rather than giving the stripping lifestyle a fair shake, the film painted it as toxic: Magic Mike’s protégée, The Kid, played by British model Alex Pettyfer, escapes his grueling day laborer job when he’s pushed onto the strip club stage in his briefs and likes it. But the film frames this as a cautionary tale: removing his clothes on stage for tips ultimately leaves The Kid morally bankrupt and glaze-eyed on ecstasy, groping for his co-worker’s wife’s enormous breasts.
And watching men remove their clothes on stage? That’s bad, too. Just look at the characterization of Mike’s two romantic prospects. Joanna (played by Olivia Munn) is the bisexual psych student who has an academic interest in Mike’s work, comfortably walks around topless, and engineers playful threesomes with him and other women. But instead of ending up with Mike, she ends up teary-eyed in a bar with her secret fiancée, dismissed as a lying pariah. Left in her amoral wake is Brooke (Cody Horn), the physician’s assistant who spends the film giving male strippers the side-eye, flees Mike’s club in a moral panic, convinces him to give up stripping—and kisses Mike across the kitchen table as the credits roll, elevated as the film’s virtuous feminine figure.
The takeaway? Women who openly enjoy sex are bad. Women who don’t are good. (Oh, and gay men? They may be flocking to the film with their straight girlfriends in tow, but they don’t exist on screen. Demonized bisexual Joanna aside, there are no gay strippers, no gay besties at the club, not even an experimenting frat boy in the film’s sorority party scene.) “I did get that sense that it was a little anti-stripping,” says Ríkey Elíasd, a 19-year-old from Iceland (which banned strip clubs entirely in 2010). “I thought it was weird,” she says. “The only reason I saw the movie was for the stripping part.”
This is America, of course: arousal and shame are inextricably linked here. But it seemed an odd message to be sending to the fans who’ve ponied up $10 to see the men of Magic Mike strip to Ginuwine’s “Pony.” It was as if Magic Mike enticed women with gyrating abdominal regions, then told them to hate themselves for looking.
“The credits came up and I was actually angry,” says Cassady Ranford, a Vancouver 19-year-old. “We all gush about wanting any of the characters to kick down our door and give us a lap dance, but we don’t want to hear about their boring lives afterward.”
It’s clear what female viewers would have preferred: A live public streaming of Tatum tirelessly working a pole.
“I could be viewing much better uncensored action than this on the Internet, for free, at home,” one young woman complained on her blog.
“Just YouTube the good stripping parts and don’t even bother for the rest,” another commented.
But perhaps Ranford put it most succinctly: “Not enough ass… Not enough ass… Not enough ass.”
Women like Ranford may be willing to buy tickets for boozy afternoon screenings — the film’s returns have set plans for a sequel into overdrive — but they’re refusing to buy the Hollywood narrative. Instead, they’re picking the pieces of the film that they came to see—the sexy parts—and setting them on a permanent GIF loop, walls of coordinated groin-thrusting and chest-rubbing and butt-flashing, no moralizing necessary.
When the film was over, Ranford headed back to her tumblr and posted a GIF of Channing Tatum power-thrusting the floor.
“At least I saw some asses,” she says.
— Amanda Hess(Gifs by Poison Paradise; feature image via Shutterstock)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7zlyzdqsG1rrpm57o6_500.gif)
![Girls to ‘Magic Mike’: Less Heart, More Flesh
The thong GIF hit my email inbox on the morning of July 4. In it, six men with chiseled chests pull off six pairs of tear-away army fatigues, revealing six packages wrapped in red, white, and blue thongs.An American flag falls from the sky. Repeat.
It was a scene from Magic Mike — the Steven Soderbergh film that crossed the $100 million box office mark last month — and when I copied the link to my Tumblr, it exploded with a kind of orgasmic fury. Within a matter of minutes, hundreds of women had reblogged the image, many of them too young to even buy tickets to the R-rated film. The puns on “America the Beautiful” were obligatory. (“From seam to shining seam!”) “Why has no one made the [GIF] of Channing Tatum walking away butt naked yet?” one girl cried. Another joked, “my ovaries passed away due to explosion from watching Magic Mike. R.I.P.”
It was no huge surprise that a movie set in a male strip club would find a fandom among young women on the Internet. Based on Tatum’s real-life stint as a 19-year-old Tampa, Fla., hardbody, the film promised to rain men for two hours — a caliber of cinematic blockbuster man candy young female viewers had been waiting for. And yet, for a film about strippers, Magic Mike is surprisingly anti-stripper. The men’s bulges and asses are wrangled into the trappings of a cheesy romance, sealed in a vibe so chaste that women were forced to flee to their Tumblr dashboards just to get their fill.
“Magic Mike is supposed to be 90 minutes of man bananas flopping around in hammocks,” gossip blog Dlisted said of the film, which was written, directed, and produced by an all-male crew. Instead, it gave hot-and-bothered female audiences gratuitous “shots of the ugly-ass junkyard furniture Channing Tatum’s stupid character made” (and precious few shots of Tatum’s own ass).
When details of Magic Mike leaked last year, buzz among women and gay men reached the point of hysteria. Then, the first trailer hit, and it was loaded with all of this … context. The teaser lingered only briefly on Tatum’s glistening core before slogging into the film’s plodding romantic plot points. The titular Magic Mike is an impressive, successful, and affable exotic dancer, but he “wants something more.” He yearns for the pretty, uptight physician’s assistant who does not approve of his lifestyle, and so he escorts her to private islands to prove he’s more than just a bulge. What he really wants to do is make custom driftwood furniture and marry the girl next door.
To those already lining up to see Tatum take it off, the narrative felt like a betrayal. It offered, quite simply, the same tripe that Hollywood has always pushed on women—that their sexual desires are only acceptable when they’re safely tethered to a narrative of true, monogamous love. Rather than giving the stripping lifestyle a fair shake, the film painted it as toxic: Magic Mike’s protégée, The Kid, played by British model Alex Pettyfer, escapes his grueling day laborer job when he’s pushed onto the strip club stage in his briefs and likes it. But the film frames this as a cautionary tale: removing his clothes on stage for tips ultimately leaves The Kid morally bankrupt and glaze-eyed on ecstasy, groping for his co-worker’s wife’s enormous breasts.
And watching men remove their clothes on stage? That’s bad, too. Just look at the characterization of Mike’s two romantic prospects. Joanna (played by Olivia Munn) is the bisexual psych student who has an academic interest in Mike’s work, comfortably walks around topless, and engineers playful threesomes with him and other women. But instead of ending up with Mike, she ends up teary-eyed in a bar with her secret fiancée, dismissed as a lying pariah. Left in her amoral wake is Brooke (Cody Horn), the physician’s assistant who spends the film giving male strippers the side-eye, flees Mike’s club in a moral panic, convinces him to give up stripping—and kisses Mike across the kitchen table as the credits roll, elevated as the film’s virtuous feminine figure.
The takeaway? Women who openly enjoy sex are bad. Women who don’t are good. (Oh, and gay men? They may be flocking to the film with their straight girlfriends in tow, but they don’t exist on screen. Demonized bisexual Joanna aside, there are no gay strippers, no gay besties at the club, not even an experimenting frat boy in the film’s sorority party scene.) “I did get that sense that it was a little anti-stripping,” says Ríkey Elíasd, a 19-year-old from Iceland (which banned strip clubs entirely in 2010). “I thought it was weird,” she says. “The only reason I saw the movie was for the stripping part.”
This is America, of course: arousal and shame are inextricably linked here. But it seemed an odd message to be sending to the fans who’ve ponied up $10 to see the men of Magic Mike strip to Ginuwine’s “Pony.” It was as if Magic Mike enticed women with gyrating abdominal regions, then told them to hate themselves for looking.
“The credits came up and I was actually angry,” says Cassady Ranford, a Vancouver 19-year-old. “We all gush about wanting any of the characters to kick down our door and give us a lap dance, but we don’t want to hear about their boring lives afterward.”
It’s clear what female viewers would have preferred: A live public streaming of Tatum tirelessly working a pole.
“I could be viewing much better uncensored action than this on the Internet, for free, at home,” one young woman complained on her blog.
“Just YouTube the good stripping parts and don’t even bother for the rest,” another commented.
But perhaps Ranford put it most succinctly: “Not enough ass… Not enough ass… Not enough ass.”
Women like Ranford may be willing to buy tickets for boozy afternoon screenings — the film’s returns have set plans for a sequel into overdrive — but they’re refusing to buy the Hollywood narrative. Instead, they’re picking the pieces of the film that they came to see—the sexy parts—and setting them on a permanent GIF loop, walls of coordinated groin-thrusting and chest-rubbing and butt-flashing, no moralizing necessary.
When the film was over, Ranford headed back to her tumblr and posted a GIF of Channing Tatum power-thrusting the floor.
“At least I saw some asses,” she says.
— Amanda Hess(Gifs by Poison Paradise; feature image via Shutterstock)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7zlyzdqsG1rrpm57o3_500.gif)
![Girls to ‘Magic Mike’: Less Heart, More Flesh
The thong GIF hit my email inbox on the morning of July 4. In it, six men with chiseled chests pull off six pairs of tear-away army fatigues, revealing six packages wrapped in red, white, and blue thongs.An American flag falls from the sky. Repeat.
It was a scene from Magic Mike — the Steven Soderbergh film that crossed the $100 million box office mark last month — and when I copied the link to my Tumblr, it exploded with a kind of orgasmic fury. Within a matter of minutes, hundreds of women had reblogged the image, many of them too young to even buy tickets to the R-rated film. The puns on “America the Beautiful” were obligatory. (“From seam to shining seam!”) “Why has no one made the [GIF] of Channing Tatum walking away butt naked yet?” one girl cried. Another joked, “my ovaries passed away due to explosion from watching Magic Mike. R.I.P.”
It was no huge surprise that a movie set in a male strip club would find a fandom among young women on the Internet. Based on Tatum’s real-life stint as a 19-year-old Tampa, Fla., hardbody, the film promised to rain men for two hours — a caliber of cinematic blockbuster man candy young female viewers had been waiting for. And yet, for a film about strippers, Magic Mike is surprisingly anti-stripper. The men’s bulges and asses are wrangled into the trappings of a cheesy romance, sealed in a vibe so chaste that women were forced to flee to their Tumblr dashboards just to get their fill.
“Magic Mike is supposed to be 90 minutes of man bananas flopping around in hammocks,” gossip blog Dlisted said of the film, which was written, directed, and produced by an all-male crew. Instead, it gave hot-and-bothered female audiences gratuitous “shots of the ugly-ass junkyard furniture Channing Tatum’s stupid character made” (and precious few shots of Tatum’s own ass).
When details of Magic Mike leaked last year, buzz among women and gay men reached the point of hysteria. Then, the first trailer hit, and it was loaded with all of this … context. The teaser lingered only briefly on Tatum’s glistening core before slogging into the film’s plodding romantic plot points. The titular Magic Mike is an impressive, successful, and affable exotic dancer, but he “wants something more.” He yearns for the pretty, uptight physician’s assistant who does not approve of his lifestyle, and so he escorts her to private islands to prove he’s more than just a bulge. What he really wants to do is make custom driftwood furniture and marry the girl next door.
To those already lining up to see Tatum take it off, the narrative felt like a betrayal. It offered, quite simply, the same tripe that Hollywood has always pushed on women—that their sexual desires are only acceptable when they’re safely tethered to a narrative of true, monogamous love. Rather than giving the stripping lifestyle a fair shake, the film painted it as toxic: Magic Mike’s protégée, The Kid, played by British model Alex Pettyfer, escapes his grueling day laborer job when he’s pushed onto the strip club stage in his briefs and likes it. But the film frames this as a cautionary tale: removing his clothes on stage for tips ultimately leaves The Kid morally bankrupt and glaze-eyed on ecstasy, groping for his co-worker’s wife’s enormous breasts.
And watching men remove their clothes on stage? That’s bad, too. Just look at the characterization of Mike’s two romantic prospects. Joanna (played by Olivia Munn) is the bisexual psych student who has an academic interest in Mike’s work, comfortably walks around topless, and engineers playful threesomes with him and other women. But instead of ending up with Mike, she ends up teary-eyed in a bar with her secret fiancée, dismissed as a lying pariah. Left in her amoral wake is Brooke (Cody Horn), the physician’s assistant who spends the film giving male strippers the side-eye, flees Mike’s club in a moral panic, convinces him to give up stripping—and kisses Mike across the kitchen table as the credits roll, elevated as the film’s virtuous feminine figure.
The takeaway? Women who openly enjoy sex are bad. Women who don’t are good. (Oh, and gay men? They may be flocking to the film with their straight girlfriends in tow, but they don’t exist on screen. Demonized bisexual Joanna aside, there are no gay strippers, no gay besties at the club, not even an experimenting frat boy in the film’s sorority party scene.) “I did get that sense that it was a little anti-stripping,” says Ríkey Elíasd, a 19-year-old from Iceland (which banned strip clubs entirely in 2010). “I thought it was weird,” she says. “The only reason I saw the movie was for the stripping part.”
This is America, of course: arousal and shame are inextricably linked here. But it seemed an odd message to be sending to the fans who’ve ponied up $10 to see the men of Magic Mike strip to Ginuwine’s “Pony.” It was as if Magic Mike enticed women with gyrating abdominal regions, then told them to hate themselves for looking.
“The credits came up and I was actually angry,” says Cassady Ranford, a Vancouver 19-year-old. “We all gush about wanting any of the characters to kick down our door and give us a lap dance, but we don’t want to hear about their boring lives afterward.”
It’s clear what female viewers would have preferred: A live public streaming of Tatum tirelessly working a pole.
“I could be viewing much better uncensored action than this on the Internet, for free, at home,” one young woman complained on her blog.
“Just YouTube the good stripping parts and don’t even bother for the rest,” another commented.
But perhaps Ranford put it most succinctly: “Not enough ass… Not enough ass… Not enough ass.”
Women like Ranford may be willing to buy tickets for boozy afternoon screenings — the film’s returns have set plans for a sequel into overdrive — but they’re refusing to buy the Hollywood narrative. Instead, they’re picking the pieces of the film that they came to see—the sexy parts—and setting them on a permanent GIF loop, walls of coordinated groin-thrusting and chest-rubbing and butt-flashing, no moralizing necessary.
When the film was over, Ranford headed back to her tumblr and posted a GIF of Channing Tatum power-thrusting the floor.
“At least I saw some asses,” she says.
— Amanda Hess(Gifs by Poison Paradise; feature image via Shutterstock)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7zlyzdqsG1rrpm57o4_500.gif)
![Girls to ‘Magic Mike’: Less Heart, More Flesh
The thong GIF hit my email inbox on the morning of July 4. In it, six men with chiseled chests pull off six pairs of tear-away army fatigues, revealing six packages wrapped in red, white, and blue thongs.An American flag falls from the sky. Repeat.
It was a scene from Magic Mike — the Steven Soderbergh film that crossed the $100 million box office mark last month — and when I copied the link to my Tumblr, it exploded with a kind of orgasmic fury. Within a matter of minutes, hundreds of women had reblogged the image, many of them too young to even buy tickets to the R-rated film. The puns on “America the Beautiful” were obligatory. (“From seam to shining seam!”) “Why has no one made the [GIF] of Channing Tatum walking away butt naked yet?” one girl cried. Another joked, “my ovaries passed away due to explosion from watching Magic Mike. R.I.P.”
It was no huge surprise that a movie set in a male strip club would find a fandom among young women on the Internet. Based on Tatum’s real-life stint as a 19-year-old Tampa, Fla., hardbody, the film promised to rain men for two hours — a caliber of cinematic blockbuster man candy young female viewers had been waiting for. And yet, for a film about strippers, Magic Mike is surprisingly anti-stripper. The men’s bulges and asses are wrangled into the trappings of a cheesy romance, sealed in a vibe so chaste that women were forced to flee to their Tumblr dashboards just to get their fill.
“Magic Mike is supposed to be 90 minutes of man bananas flopping around in hammocks,” gossip blog Dlisted said of the film, which was written, directed, and produced by an all-male crew. Instead, it gave hot-and-bothered female audiences gratuitous “shots of the ugly-ass junkyard furniture Channing Tatum’s stupid character made” (and precious few shots of Tatum’s own ass).
When details of Magic Mike leaked last year, buzz among women and gay men reached the point of hysteria. Then, the first trailer hit, and it was loaded with all of this … context. The teaser lingered only briefly on Tatum’s glistening core before slogging into the film’s plodding romantic plot points. The titular Magic Mike is an impressive, successful, and affable exotic dancer, but he “wants something more.” He yearns for the pretty, uptight physician’s assistant who does not approve of his lifestyle, and so he escorts her to private islands to prove he’s more than just a bulge. What he really wants to do is make custom driftwood furniture and marry the girl next door.
To those already lining up to see Tatum take it off, the narrative felt like a betrayal. It offered, quite simply, the same tripe that Hollywood has always pushed on women—that their sexual desires are only acceptable when they’re safely tethered to a narrative of true, monogamous love. Rather than giving the stripping lifestyle a fair shake, the film painted it as toxic: Magic Mike’s protégée, The Kid, played by British model Alex Pettyfer, escapes his grueling day laborer job when he’s pushed onto the strip club stage in his briefs and likes it. But the film frames this as a cautionary tale: removing his clothes on stage for tips ultimately leaves The Kid morally bankrupt and glaze-eyed on ecstasy, groping for his co-worker’s wife’s enormous breasts.
And watching men remove their clothes on stage? That’s bad, too. Just look at the characterization of Mike’s two romantic prospects. Joanna (played by Olivia Munn) is the bisexual psych student who has an academic interest in Mike’s work, comfortably walks around topless, and engineers playful threesomes with him and other women. But instead of ending up with Mike, she ends up teary-eyed in a bar with her secret fiancée, dismissed as a lying pariah. Left in her amoral wake is Brooke (Cody Horn), the physician’s assistant who spends the film giving male strippers the side-eye, flees Mike’s club in a moral panic, convinces him to give up stripping—and kisses Mike across the kitchen table as the credits roll, elevated as the film’s virtuous feminine figure.
The takeaway? Women who openly enjoy sex are bad. Women who don’t are good. (Oh, and gay men? They may be flocking to the film with their straight girlfriends in tow, but they don’t exist on screen. Demonized bisexual Joanna aside, there are no gay strippers, no gay besties at the club, not even an experimenting frat boy in the film’s sorority party scene.) “I did get that sense that it was a little anti-stripping,” says Ríkey Elíasd, a 19-year-old from Iceland (which banned strip clubs entirely in 2010). “I thought it was weird,” she says. “The only reason I saw the movie was for the stripping part.”
This is America, of course: arousal and shame are inextricably linked here. But it seemed an odd message to be sending to the fans who’ve ponied up $10 to see the men of Magic Mike strip to Ginuwine’s “Pony.” It was as if Magic Mike enticed women with gyrating abdominal regions, then told them to hate themselves for looking.
“The credits came up and I was actually angry,” says Cassady Ranford, a Vancouver 19-year-old. “We all gush about wanting any of the characters to kick down our door and give us a lap dance, but we don’t want to hear about their boring lives afterward.”
It’s clear what female viewers would have preferred: A live public streaming of Tatum tirelessly working a pole.
“I could be viewing much better uncensored action than this on the Internet, for free, at home,” one young woman complained on her blog.
“Just YouTube the good stripping parts and don’t even bother for the rest,” another commented.
But perhaps Ranford put it most succinctly: “Not enough ass… Not enough ass… Not enough ass.”
Women like Ranford may be willing to buy tickets for boozy afternoon screenings — the film’s returns have set plans for a sequel into overdrive — but they’re refusing to buy the Hollywood narrative. Instead, they’re picking the pieces of the film that they came to see—the sexy parts—and setting them on a permanent GIF loop, walls of coordinated groin-thrusting and chest-rubbing and butt-flashing, no moralizing necessary.
When the film was over, Ranford headed back to her tumblr and posted a GIF of Channing Tatum power-thrusting the floor.
“At least I saw some asses,” she says.
— Amanda Hess(Gifs by Poison Paradise; feature image via Shutterstock)](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7zlyzdqsG1rrpm57o5_500.gif)
Girls to ‘Magic Mike’: Less Heart, More Flesh
The thong GIF hit my email inbox on the morning of July 4. In it, six men with chiseled chests pull off six pairs of tear-away army fatigues, revealing six packages wrapped in red, white, and blue thongs.An American flag falls from the sky. Repeat.
It was a scene from Magic Mike — the Steven Soderbergh film that crossed the $100 million box office mark last month — and when I copied the link to my Tumblr, it exploded with a kind of orgasmic fury. Within a matter of minutes, hundreds of women had reblogged the image, many of them too young to even buy tickets to the R-rated film. The puns on “America the Beautiful” were obligatory. (“From seam to shining seam!”) “Why has no one made the [GIF] of Channing Tatum walking away butt naked yet?” one girl cried. Another joked, “my ovaries passed away due to explosion from watching Magic Mike. R.I.P.”
View post 1,436 notes
Most Popular
We
