September 16, 2008
Desperately seeking female superheroes
Check out this great article over at The American Prospect:
“Progress is slow and often nonexistent,” [Joss, of Buffy fame] Whedon said. “There’s plenty of cool comics with female characters. … But all it takes is one Catwoman to set the cause back a decade.”
He was bemoaning failed superheroine movies that slathered on high camp and special effects while dumbing down their characters. Both 2004’s Catwoman (starring Halle Berry) and 2005’s Elektra (starring Jennifer Garner) were critical and commercial flops because they didn’t embrace the fact that their characters are complicated anti-heroes; neither movie dares to make its heroine really bad or really good and neither movie ends up being very interesting.
Movie studios put out female-led superhero films with poor character writing (and in bad calendar timing, as the article goes on to say), then says there’s no market.
Reminds me of the crappy games put out for women that don’t have much playership, or noting that women don’t want to buy the sexist action games, then saying there’s no female market.
Someone needs to read the Halthor Legacy.
Related previous post: Entertainment and ‘Choice’
I want a female superheroine. I just hope she’s wearing clothes and cool, sensible shoes.
August 12, 2008
“A movie people didn’t know they wanted to see”
Just read a great post at the Halthor Legacy that connected so well to an earlier post of mine, where I wrote
Bottom line: what we “choose” is not always what we want. It’s just what we have to choose from. And what we want for the most part comes from somewhere-it is shaped by what’s available.
Halthor Legacy writes
The reason why big shots would fear people finding out that “nobody knows anything” is simple: financiers pour millions into every movie that gets made […] Investors like to hear what sounds like convincing evidence a movie they’re backing will make them money.
The age-old example here is the original Star Wars. It wasn’t supposed to make more than a modest profit (and that, only because it was so low budget). Fox thought it was crap. To their amazement, it lined people up around the block on the first day […] All because – despite being a rip-off of any number of artistically superior movies – it wasn’t quite like anything anyone had seen before.
Lucas had made a movie people didn’t know they wanted to see. If you’d polled them, they wouldn’t have promised to see it. (emphasis mine)
[…] Everybody knows at the end of the day no stock expert can guarantee you the right investments – no movie is guaranteed, either. But when a movie succeeds inexplicably, potential investors start to wonder if you really know what the audience wants to see.
You handle this by sticking to the formula and memorizing a lot of excuses that always back the formula.
Read the whole thing here.
July 31, 2008
Review of a Mama Mia! review: In which being sexual and sexy are conflated
GRRRRRR
This is a pet peeve of mine: where a woman’s sexuality and her sex appeal are conflated. Sure, sex appeal or a woman performing what we think of as “sexy” could be part of a woman’s sexuality or her being a sexual person, but all too often they are horribly conflated, hence misrepresenting women-as-sexual-beings. In the end, my ire is with the idea that sexual display, performance, or one’s being sexually pleasing to another is what defines or indicates that a woman is being a sexual agent. It’s the classic “women are defined as sexually liberated in that they can prance around naked.”
So this is what make my stomach turn. Jessica at Jezebel reviews Mama Mia! and says the following:
Well, I saw Mamma Mia! on Friday night, and though it’s admirable that the trio of 50 to 60-something women (Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters) are shown as sexual, something irked me about the portrayal of their sexuality — the movie made them into caricatures […] it bugged me that Streep, Baranski and Walters were all given choreography that involved grabbing their breasts and crotches repeatedly. It seemed to be mocking their lustiness rather than celebrating it.
Did you catch that sleight of hand? The women are shown as sexual (they has sex and experienced pleasure and from it), but the “problematic” portrayal of their sexuality is in the caricatured performance of it. Why is mocking the male-centric manner of “performing” sexiness a refusal of their sexuality? In order for that to be true, being “sexual” would have to be necessarily equivalent to representing one’s sexuality in a way that identifies with hetero male pleasure.
Isn’t this was feminism criticizes-that being validated by that male-centric sex culture does not define a woman’s sexual agency and is not what give a woman license to be sexual
(disclaimer: I didn’t see the movie, so my critique is on their commentary, not on the film)
July 24, 2008
Quick Hit: Check out Halthor Legacy!
I recently found this blog through another blog, I can’t event remember which, but it’s really great!
Hathor isn’t a review site. Nor is it a fan site. It was started in 2005 by Betacandy to demonstrate that there are people who don’t like how women and gender roles are presented in movies and TV because she was sick of hearing from film execs that the audience only wants white men in lead roles.
Very cool! And check out these posts especially:
Why discriminate if it doesn’t profit?
The question this brings to mind is: why would they discriminate against a group when there’s more profit to be made by doing the right thing? That’s a good question, and one that deserves an answer.
Some answers provided: ego and laziness.
Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test
To pass it your movie must have the following:
1) there are at least two named female characters, who
2) talk to each other about
3) something other than a man.
So simple, and yet as you go through all your favorite movies (and most of your favorite TV shows, though there’s a little more variety in TV), you find very few movies pass this test.
June 16, 2008
Iron Man review
I just saw Iron Man today and I wanted to write a mini-review while it was still fresh. Semi-spoilers below.
The Tony Stark character is reprehensible. My stomach was on fire after the 1st 15 minutes; I asked my partner “I sure hope his superhero actions redeem him.” By that, I meant does he see the jerk of a human being that he was? The answer is yes and no.
The beginning sets up the kind of person that Stark is. He a sexist womanizer. He sees every woman as a sexual conquest. He doesn’t know their names and doesn’t care. He treats professional women as nothing serious–only as sex objects.
His views on military weapons comes out when an attractive female reporter questions him about his company’s support of the war industry. His responses were unapologetically pro-weapons and throughout he propositions her to have sex. She continues to stand her ground, ignoring his sexism and asking the tough questions. She’s well spoken and savvy. We find out she’s Brown educated. Then we find her going to bed with him.
The movie is about his change of heart regarding the effect that weapons have on international relations. His creation–Iron Man–is to rectify his participation in the war machine. Which was great: I love the weapons critique aspect of the story. (See this review for good commentary on the “good vs. bad” weapons users and the “us vs. them” dichotomy that I felt in the film but didn’t know quite what I made of it.) I think the movie as a whole is pretty good, with some predictability and far-fetched aspects (i.e. why would the Afghan militia men put Stark, a weapons designer, in a room with tons of weaponry supplies unattended?)
But he never rectifies his sexist approach to women. Read the rest of this entry »
June 15, 2008
Comic-strip commentary on roles for women in film
It’s too big to post so check it out here.
via feministing
May 7, 2008
I want. to see. this movie.
I can’t wait til XXY is showing nationally.
From the official website:
Alex is a 15-year-old teenager with a secret. Soon after her birth her parents decide to leave Buenos Aires to make a home out of an isolated wooden cabin tucked away in the dunes of the Uruguayan shoreline.
XXY begins with Alex´s parents receiving a couple of friends and their 16-year-old son Álvaro from Buenos Aires. Álvaro´s father is a plastic surgeon who accepted the invitation because of his medical concern for their friend´s daughter. The inevitable attraction between both teenagers forces them all to face their worst fears…
Rumours are spreading around town. Alex gets stared at as if she were a freak. People´s fascination with her can become dangeous.
Right now it’s only showing in New York, but at soon as it’s national, I’m all over it (and I’ll review it).
Trailer:
April 17, 2008
Props where props are due: Entertainment Weekly
AfterEllen comments on Entertainment Weekly‘s “50 Actors We’d Watch in Anything” list. The downside? Only 18 out of 50 are women. The upside? The women chosen are actually good, respectable actresses, their presence on the list seems to actually be about their acting! As opposed to the lists that, ya know, end up being more about popularity and sex appeal, and rarely correspond to actress’ talent. Bravo!
Some of the women named include Rosario Dawson (! a woman of color!), Allison Janney (I’m a huge West Wing fan), Kate Winslett, Catherine Keener, Julia Stiles, to name a few. And no, there’s no hottie-of-the-moment-that-gets-ignored-once she-gets-prego-and/or-older-than-24. For once.
April 3, 2008
Great NPR Commentary on "Horton" and gender
Living in Canada, I listen to NPR online when I can. Almost every show is available online and you can listen at any hour. I love NPR. And I love Peter Segal, host of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” their weekly news quiz show with a panel of known comedians (such as PJ O’Rourke, Mo Rocca, and Paula Poundstone) where you get rewarded for your current events geekdom (which used to be called “civic engagement”) with being able to laugh at the jokes.
So check out this great (and quick!) commentary from Peter Segal on how the revised plotline of “Horton Hears a Who” is just the same-old Hollywood gender shaping. Nothing better than a father (of girls) genuinely pissed off at the flat representations of them in movies.
My favorite part:
Have the clowns who made this movie ever met a daughter? Have they dated one? If they did, did they meet the daughter’s father? Did they then ask that daughter’s father if there was anything more dramatic, interesting, arresting, and moving to him than his relationship with his daughter? Did they ask him if he might find that a close relationship with said daughter might be something he would care about? What do they imagine that we do — sit around, and watch our daughters grow and change and suffer and fail and triumph — and idly wish for something more INTERESTING?
And while you’re at it, check out Dads and Daughters.
March 18, 2008
"Torture Porn" or Female Empowerment? Neither? Both?
Women’s e-news has an interesting article about “torture porn” directors positing their work as “feminist.” This descriptive category, coined by David Edelstein of the New York Times (and frequent Fresh Air film reviewer), refers to recent films such as Hostel and Captivity.
One part of the piece in particular struck me:
“Men are making films and calling them feminist when they don’t understand the feminine experience,” Soloway [a consulting producer of ABC’s TV show “Dirty Sexy Money” ] said. “It’s their salute to how they see female power.”
I find this quite interesting and also don’t doubt this is likely the directors’ intentions. Isn’t it interesting though to see what “power” means to these (male) directors and how it looks when taken up by a woman? But in their unproblematic and uncritical depiction of sex-violence, they don’t see how both are gendered realities, and in women’s daily lives are combined as a means of controlling and possessing women. This lack of contextualization makes their rendering of them more in collusion with gender-based oppression than fighting it.
Further, it leaves the idea of (masculinized) power and its role in maintaining racist, heterosexist patriarchy uncriticized. Women are depicted as powerful so long as they control the violence done to them (brutally done and graphically depicted) by violence of their own.
Lindsey Horvath, who works in film advertising and is president of the National Organization for Women’s Hollywood chapter says, […]
“Essentially I watched an hour and 45 minutes of a woman being stalked, drugged, nearly raped and terrorized,” she said. In the end, the character escapes and kills her attacker. “It’s like as long as the woman kills the guy at the end, then of course it’s a female empowerment movie.”
For the reasons listed above, I find the rationale that the eventual “triumph” of the female character overrides and makes unproblematic the rest of the depictions in a film unconvincing. The ends apparently justify the means. In a way, the sexualized violence throughout the film may also function to make palatable the fact that “the woman wins,” that the woman takes control of herself back from (symbolic) masculine domination.
Further, I really have to doubt that people see movies like these because the woman wins in the end.
I must admit I am fascinated by the way gender and sexuality is produced in horror films. Some recommended reading from my reading “wish list”:
The Naked And The Undead by Cynthia A. Freeland
Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover
Also check out Ax Wound ‘zine.
Thoughts?
UPDATE 3/20: Women’s E-News writer Rachel Corbett has a more detailed discussion up at Alternet.
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