The radical notion that women like good movies
The vision of Eddie/Dirk’s home life at the beginning of the film shows us that no family is without its failures, and that true family and community bolsters individuals while forgiving and healing these flaws. The film is progressive in its inclusivity (of male, female, and queer characters), and specifically in its treatment of Amber as she constructs her own version of motherhood and family, for better or worse.
‘Starry Eyes’ is a bloody, brilliant horror spectacle, about a desperate starlet who makes a dark deal for the promise of fame. Creepy, gross and well observed, complete with a complex female character and a crazy good performance from star, Alex Essoe, it is a film you have to see to believe, as long as you’ve got a strong stomach, that is. I spoke with writer-directors, Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer about their film, their inspirations and the universalities about struggling to make your way in Hollywood.
I can count on one hand the times I’ve fallen asleep in a theater; at ‘Vice’ I suspect my body was telling me this film was never going to get better, so why not do something more worthwhile with my time? I did rouse myself to catch the end of the scene and the rest of the film, but it never did improve. All of its scenes, save one, would have the same coherence if its talented actors barked instead of saying their lines–and if they did so, some Anderson fanboy would still (as I overheard one after the screening I attended) insist to the unlucky woman walking alongside him, “He’s playing with narrative!”
This is not an article that will chronicle empty mother characters. This is for all the badass mamas out there—the honest mother roles that women have nailed. Hopefully this will present a case for why we need a million more. Here’s to the female characters who have outlived the digital revolution and will continue to. Characters that live with us and remain faulted heroes. And here’s to the women who made them so electric.
We all know that women simply are not put on screen as much as men are. This is partially due to the fact that there are fewer women creating films than men and partially due to the beloved foreign sales model in the film industry that seems to reflect that men create more of a return at the box office. I have been on calls with producers where we could make the overall budget of a film lower if we cast a woman instead of a man because simply, we didn’t have to pay her as much.
The other element worth noting in today’s films is what women are given when we finally make it to the silver screen. 28.8% of women on screen wear sexually revealing clothes as opposed to 7% of male characters. 26.2% get partially naked as opposed to 9.4% of men. These numbers all but continue to increase.
Check out all of the posts for Representations of Sex Workers Theme Week here.
Too often, sex work and sex workers on screen aren’t represented three-dimensionally. Media representation is a mirror to our own cultural attitudes and norms, and we’d like to use this theme week to explore and analyze the good, the bad, and the dangerous of representations of sex workers in film and television.
# 50/50 5 Broken Cameras 500 Days of Summer 45 Years The 40-Year-Old Virgin 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days 9 to 5 1971 101 Dalmations 127 Hours 10 Days in a Madhouse 10,000 km 3 1/2 Minutes, Ten Bullets 300: Rise of an Empire 12 Years a Slave 28 Days Later A Abuse … Continue reading “Film Directory”
Movie poster for The Master Well this movie is a piece of shit. Slim at Gone Elsewhere does an excellent job of explaining the plot, so if you don’t know the plot, go there first … then come back here and let me explain to you why this movie is a piece of shit. I … Continue reading “‘The Master’: A Movie About White Dudes Talking About Stuff”
Leading up to the 2011 Oscars, we’ll showcase the past twenty years of Oscar Acceptance Speeches by Best Actress winners and Best Supporting Actress winners. (Note: In most cases, you’ll have to click through to YouTube in order to watch the speeches, as embedding has been disabled at the request of copyright owners.) Best Actress … Continue reading “Oscar Acceptance Speeches, 1998”
…Horror has a strong tradition of using pregnancy to creep-out audiences too. From ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ to ‘Inside’ we can see that this notion is pervasive. (Don’t even get me started on the horror after the child arrives, but I digress.) ‘Antibirth’ is an interesting new slant on the horror of pregnancy.
