The boy and I went to see Tropic Thunder last night. Just before the trailers started he reminded me that there were fictional trailers. I promptly assumed that Role Models, Lakeview Terrace and Max Payne were parodies. I laughed my head off at how well they mimicked the pomposity of the trailer genre, and admired the artistry that had gone into their assembly. The Max Payne trailer starts “In a world…” which had me in stitches.

Everyone up to and including the boy looked at me oddly, at which point it finally dawned on me.

“Real, huh?”

“Real.”

“Okay then.”

The real fictional trailers were a bit of a letdown after that.

The film made me laugh. I do enjoy Ben Stiller as an actor. There’s a lovely generosity to his comedy, here and in Zoolander. He’s unafraid to make himself look like a gigantic twat in order to let the rest of the ensemble glow, and he’s always with the big ensemble, bless. Steve Coogan was great, he always is, as the pompous Brit director in a Union Jack t-shirt. Jack Black was wonderfully manic as a sweaty junkie. Matthew McConaughy was surprisingly sweet in his role as Ben Stiller’s asshole-agent-with-a-heart-of-TiVo. Everything looked and sounded fantastic – great rainy and sometimes explodey jungle and excellent choice of Vietnam-cliche 60s songs. The whole thing was a very affectionate sendup of the genre.

I liked a bunch of the cameos – Toby Maguire and Lance Bass especially – but the big one everyone’s talking about left me cold. To me the big-name actor in question is the opposite of Ben Stiller. He sucks the air out of the room. He thinks he’s in on the joke but it’s clear we muggles are the butt of his joke. His massive self-regard is palpable and repulsive. I can live without being sniggered at by gajillionaires.

So, race! Downey’s metamorphosis from Osiris to Lazarus was especially funny for me because Lazarus was supposed to be Australian, a thinly veiled caricature in fact of Russell Crowe. (And maybe poor old Heath.) So the rattling off of Aussie cliches – Crocodile Dundee, a dingo ate my baby – was tiresome to me in much the same way that the black cliches were to the black character, Brandon Jackson’s Alpa Chino. I gotta say, though, I fretted about the portrayal of the Burmese-or-Laotians. The film’s moral hierarchy of race goes: white Americans, black Americans, Australian butt-monkeys, Asian drug kingpins.

And surprise, the film utterly fails the Bechdel test. Of three speaking roles we counted for women, two were cameos and the third was a receptionist. Mustn’t distract from the flow of the story! Where “the story” is defined as “things of interest to the straight white male protagonist”. Hollywood, I hate you.

Of our last five movies, Jeremy chose this, The Dark Knight (which I walked out of in tears) and Get Smart (which we both promptly forgot). I chose the Herzog Antarctica film and Up the Yangtze. Our findings: Up the Yangtze is the only one that passes the Bechdel test. And Jeremy should always let me choose the film.

Finally finally finally got to see Up the Yangtze, on the fourth try. Lots of handheld camera work, which makes me physically ill; even the memory is making me queasy as I write this. Staggering film nonetheless. China has always been fascinating, but for the last ten years it’s become, or has gone back to being, the tumultuous center of all human life, or maybe it always was and I am just less young and foolish than I used to be. There are cities in China I have barely heard of, that are three times the size of London. Did I say staggering already?

Up the Yangtze starts as a nostalgic cruise by a Chinese Canadian director down the Three Gorges, one of the last such cruises before the dam gates close in 2011 and the entire region is flooded. Then the film dives into the lives of two of the employees on the cruise ship. Jerry Chen Bo Yu is a goodlooking teenage boy from a middle-class, urban family; but he is not a fraction as handsome and charming as he thinks he is.

Yu Shui is only sixteen. Her family has been farming the land abandoned by the people of Fengdu the Ghost City as they moved out of the way of the floodwaters; which means that over the course of the film, the patched-together shack itself disappears beneath the river. The time-lapse sequence in which we watch the farm drown is as effective a memento mori as I have seen. Nevertheless this was a smart choice on the part of Yu Shui’s parents, as these desperately poor, illiterate people grew corn and potatoes there and were able to raise three healthy children, at least for a while.

Yu Shui wants to go to university and become a scientist, but there is no money for her to finish high school (and she didn’t do well enough to earn a scholarship.) So she ends up on the cruise ship, learning English and crying into filthy sinks after endless washing-up. I had jobs like that myself as a teenager, but it was to pay my horse’s vet bills, not to feed my mum and dad. And in any case I sucked at that kind of work and swore to get a job sitting on my butt, and sure enough thanks to my parents’ generosity and other large chunks of unearned privilege, I did. My heart went out to Yu Shui and to all the people like her, who deserve better.

(The Westerners don’t come across well at all. For a start, we’re funny-looking, with our weird pink faces and blue eyes like cold marbles and colourless wavy hair. But worse, we are arrogant sons of bitches. One woman says to Jerry, as she’s leaving the ship: “I have to congratulate you. You were much less obtrusive than I expected you to be.” He feels pretty much the same way about her.)

Werner Herzog gets thanked in the acknowledgements and, like Encounters at the End of the World, Up the Yangtze works better than most science fiction. We don’t need to imagine contact when it’s happening all the time, between people who might as well be from different planets: Canada and China. The film achieves a lot, but I think what I will remember longest is the shy, complicated heroism of Yu Shui’s father and mother. “How could we do this to you,” her mother asks Yu Shui, “if we had a choice?”

Project-based learning isn’t something you impose on kids; it’s the sea in which they swim. With three months of martial arts under her belt, Claire was mad keen to see Kung Fu Panda. So much so that she painted the panda before we went, insisted on dim sum (Aust: yum cha) for dinner, then improvised what she claimed was Chinese-sounding music during piano practice when we got home.

I had some issues with the film. The character setup was trite, especially in the opening scenes – Po wants to do kung fu you say? But his father wants him to take over the noodle shop? Pardon me while I pass out from boredom. Much worse: the other heroes resent the newcomer in their midst and insult him and are mean to him. What kind of worthless fu is that? Looks like no fu at all to me.

(On a somewhat related note, do American filmmakers really not see what they are doing when they have characters run vertically up through the debris of collapsing buildings? Or have frightened crowds flee from walls of dust? It strikes me as profoundly uncool to work out your 9/11-based traumas in such transparent ways.)

I enjoyed the film a bit more when the it managed to partially-subvert the tedious old Chosen One plot. I’m less violently allergic to Chosen Ones than I used to be, now that I have decided we are all allowed to be the Special Predestined Protagonists of our own lives. (Aren’t I generous.) But it’s a dull trope, undemocratic and unfair. I don’t appreciate heroes like Harry Potter, who are all glowy and adorable Just Because. The rest of us have to work for a living! I like stories where the plain people do the needful by dint of hard work and cooperation. Like, uh, LIFE. Or Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. Or life.

Julia, meanwhile, is making breathtaking cognitive leaps around language. Her speech is clearer and more precise and nuanced every day, and she is on the brink of understanding the relationship between letters and words. The last couple of days it’s been all about Museum ABC. “D is for dances! E is for eggs!”

You want to know my idea of a hero? Two little girls asleep in the next room. I may still be able to bench-press both of them at once, but trust me: not a force in the ‘verse can stop them.

I miss Cambridge. My commitment to contrariness is the stuff of legend. I particularly miss Grantchester, which is a fairly obvious sublimation of the extent to which I have always missed Grant and Kirsty.

San Francisco, my equal in contrariness, is doing its utmost to win back my affections. On Friday we left the kids with a babysitter and went to the Lumiere to see Werner Herzog’s film Encounters at the End of the World. As we arrived a limo pulled up and a whole bunch of people in fancy dress got out. I regret to say I was quietly sarcastic about this, because they turned out to be the producer/cinematographer and several of the interview subjects.

Encounters is about Antarctica. Unusually for a Antarctic film it was made for no budget under the Artists and Writers program; so there were no minders following Herzog around whitewashing everything, ho ho. This shows, especially in the early scenes, where McMurdo squats on Ross Island like a filthy little mining town, and we spend a good deal of time talking to the service workers who make up 90% of the population.

If you like Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Antarctica, funded by the same program, you’ll love this film. Herzog likes the same misfit-idealists for the same reasons. And it’s not all righteous social anthropology either. You can’t really point a camera anywhere down there without seeing something unimaginably beautiful and strange. Producer Henry Kaiser is a specialist diver who blasts holes in 20-foot-thick ice with TNT, then swims in the ocean underneath.

The footage from those dives is otherworldly. There are aliens down there.

Encounters may be the best science fiction film I have ever seen.

After the excellent Q&A, Jeremy and I headed out into Russian Hill walking randomly. I wanted to try Petit Robert, although I had no idea where it was. We walked briskly up Polk, under a friendly fog, past wine bars with warm laughter spilling out. It all felt very French and lo, there was Petit Robert. Jeremy had rabbit risotto and I had moules frites. We split a bottle of really delicious pinot blanc, and the dessert came with milk jam, a kind of dulce de leche that catapulted me back to the alfajors my sister used to make by boiling cans of condensed milk, when I was a little girl.

On Saturday we went to Spanish class then drove out to the newly-reopened Warming Hut for sandwiches. I was not-quite-subliminally looking for a place as pretty as Grantchester. Crissy Field is not it; it’s striking but not beautiful. Still, I loved seeing one of the Pier 39 sea lions porpoising along right in front of us.

“Sea monster!” Jules cried joyfully.

We spent the afternoon at the Dyke Rally in Dolores Park. It was too crowded for me, I don’t really like human beings en masse, they are strange, unaccountable chimpanzees. But it was lovely drinking chardonnay with Ian and talking about Europe. We agreed that San Francisco looks and feels like a frontier town compared to Paris or London. Ian says that no one is allowed to build anything in Barcelona until they can prove the new building will be much prettier than the old one.

Today we took both kids to see Wall-E. Jules particularly loved it and was able to follow the plot very closely: “Robot! He has lost his friend. Oh! He has found his friend again!” I cried, because I am a big girly wuss, and also because the dystopian beginning – an Earth of garbage – is much more plausible than the hopeful end. I tend to think the future will look more like McMurdo and less like Grantchester or Oz Farm, but I hope I am very wrong.

Oh! I forgot to mention that a neighbour brought his kid to Martha & Bros this morning. Not his human child. His baby goat. An orphan from the herd he keeps down at the Port of San Francisco. She was adorable and soft, and capered about. A goat in the cafe! Maybe I am wrong!

The scariest, funniest, most heartbreaking, most romantic Doctor Who episode ever.

R: I swear sometimes I think that cat moves when I close my eyes.

J: Don’t be silly.

R: No, look, bite marks!

The first major feature film in an Aboriginal language, ever. Ten men canoeing on the Arafura swamps retell an ancient story of love and betrayal. Gorgeously shot, irreverent and funny as all hell, dark, beautiful, heartbreaking. If you’re wondering why the apology was such a big deal or if you are even remotely interested in Australia or people or culture or contact, this is a must-see.

The 2007 Australian comedy series Summer Heights High features its creator Chris Lilley as three characters: as an appalling private school girl spending a term at a public school; as the school’s acting head of drama, in a role that cleverly skewers Lilley’s own; and, most affectingly, as an illiterate FOB (fresh off the boat) Tongan boy in year eight.

What seems like a crass gimmick as I’m describing it to you (and is just that in something like Little Britain) turns out to have powerful dramatic implications. Lilley seems as convinced as I am that nothing in Australia is not about class (and its co-conspirators, race and gender.) By playing multiple roles, he cuts to the heart of all three issues. How are we shaped by class, by race and by gender? Well, what if you put exactly the same person into three entirely different situations?

That makes the series sound dreadfully po-faced, which it isn’t: Lilley effectively mines the considerable comedic veins from privileged bitch Ja’mie and effete wanker Mr G. And his little dog too. Both caricatures are keenly observed – Ja’mie’s habit of brushing her shiny hair away from her face with the back of her hand, for example, or Mr G’s elaborate self-delusion and barely repressed viciousness. I totally had him for a drama teacher.

All of which serves to underline the tragedy implicit in the situation of Jonah, the year eight boy whose unfocused rebellion and aggression test his teachers’ character and mettle – and in all cases but one, expose their lack of either. And while Ja’mie goes on and up, doubtless to study law at Sydney and marry the heir to a retail empire, and Mr G ends up back where he started, Jonah’s trajectory points relentlessly down. While Australian society keeps rationing its limited opportunities on the basis of anything other than merit, the show points out, nothing’s ever going to change.

Recommended.

And another thing I liked about Juno; it would have been so easy to make the cheerleader character a caricature, like Reese Witherspoon in Election, but they didn’t go there. And ANOTHER thing. Her parents were so right-on in the scene where she told them – so right on that I clutched Jeremy’s hand and hoped to God I would be that cool in that situation.

We got the tree undecorated at the appropriate time. Jonathan, Salome, Robert and Gayatri and the relevant children arrived, exchanged presents and made cookies, I am told; I fled to the comforting steam of Kabuki, where Re-cheng and I compared notes and were pummeled. Sweet.

I keep thinking how great a movie Juno is; for one thing, it’s one of those rare jewels that passes the Bechdel Test. Obviously it’s a meditation on motherhood, but less obviously it’s a meditation on blood and non-blood relations. Juno’s real mother has skipped out and her sole contribution to the story is an annual gift of cactus. Juno’s stepmother is the pitch-perfect Allison Janney, and while their relationship is also fairly prickly, it creates a very believable context for Juno’s choices around her pregnancy. Motherhood, as embodied by Janney’s character, is a matter of showing up and paying attention. To do which you do not need to have actually given birth to the person in question.

One thing I would have liked to see is a scene between Allison Janney and Jennifer Garner. There was a great scene between her and J. K. Simmons as Juno’s dad, but even so… Garner is also stellar, in a much more difficult and less sympathetic role than Janney’s. She connects with this character with absolute empathy and compassion. Her big scene at the end had Kathy and me clutching each others’ hands and sobbing – err, I mean, getting specks of dust in our eyes, and having allergies.

*Ahem.*

I’m often hesitant to recommend a little jewel of a film if I think that doing so might raise peoples’ expectations, only to dash them (hi, Once! Everyone rush out and see it on DVD please) but I’m going to go ahead and recommend Juno anyway. For one thing, I greatly prefer small films to big ones. I call this my “gun, what gun?” principle. As in, Chekhov famously said that if there’s a gun, yada yada, but I say “What gun?”

My life has been largely gun-free; the only gun ever pointed at me was pointed at me by a young, scared British soldier in Derry. My life is small and indie and I am, as I have pointed out elsewhere, a sardonic supporting character. So while I acknowledge the technical skill and cultural cachet of (for example) heist films, I am on a practical level bored to death with most of them. I am not the demographic. Whereas Once and Juno take place in world that, if they are not recognizeably my own, are at least connected by land bridges.

(For what it’s worth I think screenwriter Diablo Cody explicitly acknowledges this by giving Juno the surname MacGuff.)

So who is the demographic, and what is the gun? Put like that the question pretty much answers itself. I’ve been thinking a lot about disability lately, partly because Liz writes about it so well, and partly because the experience of watching a friend become gradually more disabled over the course of a few months, however wittily she blogs about it, is existentially terrifying and curdles your blood. One of the side issues, though, is that her descriptions of a world optimized for the able-bodied have made me more aware that I live in a world optimized for One Standard Unit Man. Things that are too heavy or too high for me were typically packed or put there by someone four inches taller than I am, and able to lift twenty more pounds.

Take sushi! Julia just recently became capable of sitting up at the bar at Yo’s, which has greatly improved our sushi experiences. Yo just makes us whatever’s good. A few weeks ago he served maki cut to size for the children, about half the size of a normal roll. I started eating them and couldn’t stop. I could manage them in my chopsticks! I could eat them in one bite without gagging! It dawned on me that this is what eating sushi is like if sushi is designed for the size of your mouth: ie, if you are a man.

I am glad to be alive right now because this is one of the things that, over the course of my life, has slowly changed. It’s easy to get scared and distracted by newspaper headlines, and one of the best reasons to read history is to identify the movements where a small push from your small hand may combine with many others to change the world in ways that you need it to change. Sure, we are frying the atmosphere as we speak, but let me point out a few ways in which things are substantially better than they were forty years ago.

In my generation we have come from the Referendum to Bringing Them Home; from Stonewall to the winter of love; from the Cold War to the International Criminal Court; from apartheid to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; from Tuskegee to the candidacy of Barack Obama. These have all been intensely difficult, fraught journeys, beset with many reversals, efforts whose work is unimaginably far from being done; but they happened. And they have all given voices to people on the periphery of the world. They help us do our most fundamental work, which is to bear witness.

It’s a matter of showing up and paying attention.

Small, perfect films like Once and Juno do the same. They assert one’s right to be in the world, even if one is not One Standard Unit Straight White Man, with a gun.