The radical notion that women like good movies
What will surprise no one who reads ‘Bitch Flicks’ is: films directed by women and told from a woman’s point of view are often the last to get distribution–and more likely to have limited theatrical runs or are released only on VOD and streaming services, skipping theaters entirely. Two great films by women I saw during the spring are still very much on my mind and will be playing film festivals in October.
In a close-up Sarah takes a piece of a (year-old) cookie that is trapped deep in the car seat and puts it in her mouth, like a communion wafer: she closes her eyes and, for the first time since before her son went missing, we see her face smooth, for a moment, into bliss. The only other time we see her free from tension and sorrow, is when, in another stunning shot, this one on a rooftop, she states with great confidence, “My son is alive.”
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!”
Lisa Gerrard of Dead Can Dance, one of the few successful women musicians who made the transition to film composer (she won a Golden Globe for her work on ‘Gladiator’), wrote and performed the music for 2002’s ‘Whale Rider’–and she didn’t have to date writer-director Niki Caro to do so. Gerrard might seem an unlikely choice: when I briefly worked in a women’s sex shop in the 90s, the store owner told me not to play Dead Can Dance on the sound system because they scared away customers. But Gerrard’s score for ‘Rider’ does what the best movie music is supposed to do: reinforcing the drama of the film without calling unnecessary attention to itself.
Check out all of the posts for our Children’s Television Theme Week here.
The New York Film Festival (NYFF) wraps up this weekend. Here are the best of films about women or directed by women (or both) that still have NYFF weekend screenings (including some “encore” shows on Sunday) or are streaming or open today in theaters: including Ava DuVernay’s ’13th,’ Kelly Reichardt’s ‘Certain Women,’ and Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Julieta.’
Out queer writer Gore Vidal was prescient in discussing the danger of self-labeled “conservative” Republicans (“reactionary” has always been a better term for them). In 1968, as part of network news coverage of the political conventions Vidal debated William F. Buckley, the loathsome “conservative” stalwart… In their debates, Vidal describes Buckley’s rhetoric as “always to the right and almost always in the wrong.” The debates are the focus of Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s documentary ‘Best of Enemies.’
Two things that make Leyla Bouzid’s new film ‘As I Open My Eyes’ distinct from these other [portrait of the artist, coming-of-age films] are: the lead who resists family pressure by joining a band is a young woman and her parents have more to be concerned about than what the neighbors think. The action takes place in Tunis, Tunisia, in 2010, before the Revolution, so any kind of rebellion, even artistic, can draw the attention of the police and lead to arrest — or worse.
Both are critically acclaimed dramas directed by women documenting the coming-of-age of five teenage sisters under close scrutiny for their behavior — especially when it comes to their sexuality. And in both films, the girls’ response to this repression is to resort to desperate measures to regain control, resulting in tragedy that could have been averted if they were given the freedom for which they hungered.
Saving a beautiful woman from danger is such a pervasive male fantasy that right now, no matter where you are you could probably see an example of this trope by randomly flipping through channels or wandering into a multiplex. But what if the man was never able to save the woman? Or what if he has problems of his own that keep him from being a stereotypical hero?
Check out all of the posts from our Women Scientists Theme Week here.
Audiences have to look to documentaries like ‘Particle Fever,’ about the discovery of the Higgs boson, to see women scientists in prominent roles on film. The Netflix documentary ‘Mission Blue’ focuses on one woman scientist, Sylvia Earle, a former chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pioneering oceanographer and marine biologist who is on a quest to save the world’s oceans from dying.
