Search Results for “spy”

Five Amazing Movies I Just Made Up to Repeat the Same Magic as ‘Spy’

I would pay real money to watch any of these movies. The larger point though, is that I bet, if we actually tried, we could come up with amazing projects for lots of women in Hollywood that aren’t based on assuming that the only thing we want to watch them do is act sexy (or crazy). There’s no shortage of talent in the film industry, so, maybe rather than waiting for screenwriters to craft great starring roles for women at large, Hollywood could also take a closer look at the stars who are already there and custom build some awesome ‘Spy’-like films for them.

‘Spy’: Truly Funny and Truly Feminist

The melding of feminism and marketing means that certain crappy, mainstream films try to convince us our duty is to shell out money for them just because they’re directed by women, written by women or star women. This marketing, of course, is the best way to kill movies directed by, written by or starring women once and for all, by force- feeding us films that are supposed to be “good” for women but which give us no pleasure when pleasure, or something like it, is why we go to movies in the first place.

Spy Mom: Motherhood vs. Career in the ‘Alias’ Universe

This conflict drives Sydney’s arc and establishes a recurring question at the heart of ‘Alias’: can you be both a mother and a spy? … Sydney’s own mother Irina figures powerfully into this conflict. … Yet Irina’s arc throughout ‘Alias’ is the tension between her desire for a relationship with her daughter and her independence as a spy.

Eva Green vs. Frank Miller: A Feminist Revolt in a Man’s World

Even when Eva Green chooses to take part in obviously bad movies, she somehow manages to carry them to a higher level of quality all on her own. Such is the case with two of her films: ‘300: Rise of an Empire’ and ‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.’ …Both of which starred Green in major femme fatale roles, and both of which feel, in part, like pro-feminist reactions to the original films they follow.

Adolescence and Female Friendship in Gurinder Chadha’s ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging’

After chronicling the clashes among family, football, and adolescence in ‘Bend it Like Beckham,’ Gurinder Chadha delves into similar territory with the ebullient coming-of-age tale ‘Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging.’ An adaptation of the 1999 novel ‘Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging’ by the late Louise Rennison, the film tells the story of Georgia Nicolson, a teenager growing up in Eastbourne, England, whose entry into the world of romancing boys is as fraught and funny as you might expect.

One Woman’s View: Martha Fiennes’ ‘Onegin’

Director Martha Fiennes unlocks this costume classic for a modern audience, deftly allowing the two main characters to take their share of the center stage to tell their stories. While Ralph Fiennes’ Onegin plays a familiar type of romantic male, Liv Tyler’s Tatyana is not often familiar, even in modern love stories. She does not play the martyr, pining for someone she can’t have, but rather takes stock of what she needs in life and makes her choices accordingly, regardless of how others may feel.

Versions of Yourself: Nora Ephron as Women’s Storyteller

In addition to her work in film, Nora Ephron was a journalist, playwright, and novelist; unsurprisingly, her stock in trade is words. Crucially, what she does with these words is to give women room. For these women at the center of her films, there is, above all, space. Space not simply to be the best version of themselves, but all the versions of themselves: confident, neurotic, right, wrong, flawed.

A Feminist Guide to Horror: Torture Porn TV

Small screen torture porn, at least in the cases of ‘American Horror Story’ and ‘Penny Dreadful,’ seems to be serving rather to take our fear of sex and women out of the dark and into the light, giving us an opportunity to vicariously take women apart and show them as disgusting as a substantial portion of our society fears we might be.

The Women of the New York Film Festival 2016

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.’

Sisterhood and Salvation in ‘A League of Their Own’

Though the simmering sibling rivalry between Kit and Dottie is a thread that runs through the entire film, the importance of sisterhood goes far beyond this. For both women, sisterhood becomes a ticket to another world: a ticket out, but also a ticket in; to friendship, to competition, and to independence. As such, sisterhood exists as a source of empowerment.

‘Artemisia’: The Romantic Roots of Rape Culture

The impulse to erase a woman’s testimony, to deny her agency and perception of the crime, while denying society’s victim blaming and bias against survivors of rape — this is the basis of what feminism describes as rape culture. Yet here it is practiced not by a misogynist man, nor by a loyal friend of the alleged rapist, but by a female director aiming to create “emphatically a feminist film.”

‘The World Is Not Enough’ and the “Believability” of Dr. Christmas Jones

Dr. Jones went from being a promising step forward for Bond girls to one of the more maligned female characters of the franchise. … And this is what is the most disappointing thing about Dr. Jones. She’s a tough-talking woman whose best moments in the film come when she grows impatient with Bond’s testosterone-driven idiocy and counters his quips with her own formidable sarcasm, yet in the end, she’s just like any of those earlier Bond girls that Denise Richards dismissed as lacking depth…