You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

First, the Thing commissioned by dianora...

My Top 6 Fandom Moments: (off the top of my head and in no particular order)

1) SQ's "Useless and Possibly Untrue Harry Potter Facts" thread
2) Finding and joining my first HP fansite
3) The evolution of The Botherfic
4) Order of the Phoenix release mania, including Spoiler Week, local meetup, bookstore party, frantic reading, and reading everyone's reactions afterward
5) Wahleecon
6) Melissa and Emerson's big news


And now the other thing. Lots of people are doing things on LJ to count down the days to HBP - weekly polls, a_chapter_a_day, etc. So as we near the home stretch, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon with Movie of the Day. I'll pick a movie that I've seen and talk a bit about it. It might be a movie that's just come out or one that's on my DVD shelf, but I'm going to try to post about one every day. So without further ado...




Secretary

I saw this movie a couple of times when it was in its theatrical run and gosh, I love it to bits. On the surface, it might look like a bad porno plot - young woman gets a job as a secretary in a lawyer's office; young woman develops crush on her boss; young woman begins sado-masochistic relations with boss. If you saw some of the scenes out of context, they would seem ridiculous - particularly one where Mr. Gray asks Lee to "step into his office" before engaging in a little corporal punishment. And some people might resent the fact that it's the woman in the story who, while wearing the out-of-date and extremely un-PC title of "secretary," takes the submissive role.

In the wrong hands, this could have been a very bad movie. But I think it's really something special. The characters, and Maggie Gyllenhaal's secretarial Lee in particular, are handled with great care by the actors and director. At the beginning of the movie, Lee has just been released from a mental institution. She has a habit of cutting herself, and one time she accidentally cut too deep. She goes home and, when she finds that her mother has hidden the knives, takes a hot tea kettle and burns herself instead. When she is interviewed by E. Edward Gray (played to creepy and diabolically sexy perfection by James Spader), he asks her several very inappropriate questions. She gets the job, and when she goes for her first day, she doesn't quite understand why her predecessor is crying on her way out the door. Thus begins her strange and wonderful journey.

There are a lot of ways this movie could have been bad. Especially in its treatment of Lee. She routinely cuts herself and then, after taking a "submissive" job, indulges her affinity for masochism by striking up a strange courtship with her boss where he calls her and tells her exactly what she has permission to eat for dinner, asks her to crawl across his office floor to bring him a letter, and makes her bend over his desk so that he can spank her.

HOWEVER...

Lee's relationship with Edward is not self-destructive at all. It is self-affirming and empowering. She makes the choice to do it, and for the most part is the one who does the pushing. She's a damaged young woman, but she manages to find a match in Edward, and refuses to settle for less than what she wants. More power to her, I say.

Secretary is the sweetest S&M movie you're likely to ever see, and though the subject matter is a bit unconventional, deep down it's still just a love story.