"You can bake your cake and eat it too!" says the reassuring slogan that distills the comfy revisionist feminism informing Mona Lisa Smile. That slogan is repeated empathically enough to qualify as the defining mantra of a movie that pretends to be audacious. And the lurking duplicity in that loaded word "bake" (remember Hillary Rodham Clinton's sarcastic remarks about baking cookies?) winds up applying to the movie itself. Like Down With Love earlier this year, Mona Lisa Smile preaches disruptive female self-empowerment out of one side of its mouth while out of the other it invokes the dream of being swept up, up and away by Prince Charming.
A miscast but irresistible Julia Roberts stars as Katherine Watson, a free-spirited Californian who moves East to teach at demure, snooty Wellesley College in 1953 and shakes up the place enough to be deemed subversive by the institution's hawk-eyed thought police. The insistence with which Katherine presses her mildly progressive agenda at the elite women's college makes her a kind of academic Erin Brockovich, or so the movie wants us to believe. And in her art history classes, which inspire the screenplay's most intelligent writing, she challenges her students to do more than simply identify paintings shown in slides.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BVI
"Why is an original van Gogh a work of art and a reproduction not?" she asks. And where does a do-it-yourself, paint-by-numbers van Gogh fit into the scheme of things? The early 1950s also brought the ascendance of Abstract Expressionism, and the appearance of a Jackson Pollock canvas on campus stirs up ripples of controversy.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BVI
But Katherine's biggest boo-boo has nothing to do with notions of aesthetics. Arriving at Wellesley, she is appalled to discover that almost to a person, her brilliant, privileged students have no postgraduate ambitions beyond settling down with Mr. Right, having babies and baking sugar cakes for hubby. Her rebellion culminates with an indignant, heretical slide show of vintage magazine ads displaying perky, smiling Stepford wives reigning like queens in their immaculate kitchens.
The movie was directed by Mike Newell, whose popular films Four Weddings and a Funeral and Enchanted April tease you with the same glimmerings of something loftier before settling into a warm and fuzzy niche. Like his fellow Briton Richard Curtis (Love, Actually, Bridget Jones's Diary, Notting Hill and the screenplay of Four Weddings), Newell is master of the feel-good ensemble piece whose shallowness is partly masked by the expertise of a high-toned cast.
A star-watcher's guilty pleasure, the movie rubs together three of Hollywood's brightest younger stars -- Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles and Maggie Gyllenhaal, all playing Wellesley seniors -- and throws in an appealing newcomer, Ginnifer Goodwin. Topping off this marshmallow sundae are vivid turns by Marcia Gay Harden as the world's prissiest (and weepiest) teacher of elocution and poise, Juliet Stevenson as the discreetly lesbian school nurse with progressive ideas about birth control, and that empress of hauteur, Marian Seldes, playing the intransigently starchy college president. Dominic West, as a carnivorous-eyed professor of Italian who sleeps with his students, gives the movie its requisite shot of testosterone.
If Roberts is the undisputed star of Mona Lisa Smile, she graciously allows her acolytes plenty of opportunity to sparkle. Each plays a specific type. Dunst is Betty Warren, a vicious, overprivileged alpha girl and archtraditionalist hellbent on marriage to a louse, who attacks Katherine in the college newspaper.
Stiles is Joan Brandwyn, Betty's best friend and Katherine's protege, who finds herself torn between marriage and Yale Law School. Gyllenhaal, who almost steals the movie, plays Giselle Levy, the wised-up class rebel who sleeps around and almost loses her bearings. Goodwin's character, Connie Baker, is the house wallflower (and chief victim of Betty's cruelty) who can't believe it when a boy asks her out. Although the four are stock figures, the talented actresses shade their stereotypes enough to lend them as much humanity as the formulaic screenplay (by Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal) permits.
As the story follows Katherine through her first year at Wellesley, there are enough reversals to keep you guessing which characters will escape this upscale cuckoo's nest, although it's not very hard to figure out. Although Roberts is playing a grown-up academic, the aura she wafts is as ingenuous as ever. She is still the wide-eyed but feisty people's princess and angel of common sense whose high-beam smile can melt steel.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist