Audience Member
I watched this purported documentary mainly because it was being shown on Natasha Del Toro's America Reframed, a show which usually showcases worthwhile material. What kept me watching after the first five minutes of this woman's unforgivable, self-pitying, navel gazing was the hope of seeing Natasha Del Toro prick and drain the boil of stupidity that was this film.
To paraphrase; This program consumed the longest year of my life.
Then I realized a few points that would have been glaring, flashing, red lights long before this piece of dead-air uselessness was ever compiled.
I realized that, if anyone had bothered to ask themselves the question "Would I, given an opportunity to decide whether I might want this woman to be, or have been, my mother, have opted instead for being aborted?" It's a germane question because, if you were genetically predisposed to be stable and sensible and perhaps even happy, this mother would screw you up before you had a chance to vocalize about it. If, on the other hand, you were genetically predisposed to be unstable, lacking good sense and miserable, she might foster a serial killer of whiny women.
Jennifer Fox makes it amply clear that she thinks she's the center of the universe and that everyone else should think so too. It's nice that, when no one else actually thinks that about her, she can simply concoct a never ending soap opera starring herself and hawk it to undiscerning PBS stations as a 'documentary' of her bourgeois woes, hangnails, and indecision.
The fact that Jennifer Fox is a perfectly humorless whiner may explain how it is that no man, or woman, can tolerate being around her long enough to give a rat's ass about her angst. Can you imagine what torture it would be to be waiting on her table at lunch - or to find out you're sharing the cabin of an airliner with her? Would you, absent a threat of great bodily harm, invite her to your house for dinner? This woman is simply boring and boorish in the extreme and that's what she invariably brings to the party. She's also the only person to whom this fact seems to be a mystery.
The saving grace in this vagina travelogue might be that the 'I'm a miserable person. Please take pity on me so I can film another relationship disaster, with you having fallen sucker for my act' look seems to have been permanently frozen on Fox's face. It just looks fake - especially in that scene in which her facial expression reflexively snaps to almost normal at the instant in which the ringing of the telephone interrupts Fox's bad acting.
Then again, now that I think about it, this 'project' is most likely a scam, a fraud from beginning to end, a perfectly concocted ruse to see just how gullible the film industry and its patsies could be. The obvious thing that screams fake is that no one could have these sorts of events occur without a carefully written sardonic plot. So maybe it's worth watching for the humor.
Oh my god! Is it possible that this entire series is one huge hoax and that no one wants to admit that they fell for it hook, line, and sinker? Now THAT would be funny. I await the news.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
Full Review
Audience Member
An amazing journey of the life of a unique woman, chronicled with care into a 6 mini docs, over a period of three years. Yes, a white, privileged, hetero woman, but Jennifer Fox shares with the audience intimate moments with her female friends from around the globe, from rural to highly industrialized, many of whom have experienced things you've only read about. The result is an intelligent, deeply personal, moving, inspiring, funny piece that leaves you in awe of both how what people, especially women, accomplish in this world, as well as how far we have yet to go.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Flying is a fascinating glimpse into a particular and not so unusual woman's sex and love life. Part autobiography, part "roadtrip," part Sex in the City, and part philosophical reflection, Flying builds an addictive narrative (almost like a soap opera), which unfortunately at times lag.
Jenifer Fox's occupation connects her with women all over the world, allowing her the unique opportunity to discover parallels between her life as a "modern" woman and the lives of women from South Africa, London, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Pakistan, India, Cambodia, Russia, and New York City. Though she experiences some humble relief in the privilege she has in being a "free" woman compared to women in other cultures, Fox also realizes that in many ways, no matter how free she has considered herself in the past, she is still within the confines of patriarchy and comes to reconcile her negative feelings toward femininity and her mother.
Flying is presented in six hour-long episodes. The first establishes the context of Fox's life in juxtaposition to her friends' lives in New York (one whom is pregnant and getting married, another whom is in a 7-year-long battle with her husband for child support, and another surviving her brain tumor). Fox ends up torn between a distant and less distant lover (one of which is married with children).
The second and third episodes feel pretty drawn out, but establish more of Fox's international brigade of friends and women who each live a different story of womanhood. Fox learns from women in South Africa that passion need not cease to exist with commited relationships and in India that women have no word/concept of masturbation--they cannot hold back their laughter at such an idea. Fox is also confronted by men in a culture in which men man only have sexual relations with wives (often women who they do not choose to marry) and sex workers.
In the second half of the series, particularly the fourth adn fifth episode, things get more intense, more honest, more profound. Having previously dealth with the themes of love vs attraction and motherhood and sexual freedom, Fox moves into darker terrain, having to confront her past, her early sexual abuse, her relationship to her mother and father (her brothers are conspicuosly absent), and her concept of freedom. Traveling to Cambodia after a week with her married South African lover, Fox reassesses her first childhood experience as well as her identification with her father over her mother.
Picking up some misandry, especially after visiting survivors of female genital mutilation in London, Fox begins to identify more as a woman through realizing the universal themes she discovers. Hermother and granmother, out of love, did so many bad things to her to get her to conform because they thought that was what was best. They did not want her to be an outcast, a stigmatized woman, a "whore." The only acceptable option would be to marry or remain celibate, but times had changed in America and such was no longer the case. However, Fox still recognised she longed after men who were not compatible with her, that she felt no sexual pleasure until her late twenties because everything up till then had been about social acceptance, not love. She realized her mom, aunt, and grandmother had to hold bac so much anger as they had nowhere else to direct it. So in a way, her situation was not so radically different from those women in Sudan, Cambodia, and Pakistan.
After a dramatic climax, a series of twists, and a bizarre crossing with two british women, Fox must make a decision about her future and whether she wants a commited relationship and a child and what legnths she is willing to go through for them. In the final episode, the themes turn away from sexual violence and control to motherhood. Fox having gone through so much over the past three yeas has finally come to a time of acceptance and healing and is able to forgive the women in her family and embrace the femininity within her that she had been fleeing from for her entire life.
I would especially recommend watching chapters four and five of this documentary because of the profound insight into interpersonal, intrafmailial, and cross-gender relationships. Though six hours may be long, these two powerful hours, I feel encompass the greatest stories, knowledge, and growth Fox encounters throughout the series.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/09/23
Full Review
Audience Member
this was so awful but enlightening.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/25/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Inspiring, endearing, fascinating, blissful, life-affirmative, in form and content and style and technique and everything else...The art of womanhood in the art of filmmaking with protagonists all the women who run with the wolves. It spoke to me both as a filmmaker and as a woman. I feel men would love it too if they have the openness to dive into its deep and warm waters.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/29/23
Full Review
Audience Member
I prolly would never have the cojones to make something this self-indulgent, and yet it really spoke to me on a lot of levels. This is something I'd recommend to a lot of my women friends -- maybe some guys, too.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/27/23
Full Review
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