My name is Robin Hitchcock and I am thrilled to be joining the Bitch Flicks team as a regular contributor. I have previously reviewed Michael Clayton, The Descent, and Moneyball for Bitch Flicks. When I was writing about wedding planning at my personal blog HitchDied, I watched and reviewed more wedding movies than any reasonable person would subject herself to. I also used to write about pop culture and feminism at the currently-dormant blog The Double R Diner, which you may remember from the statistical analysis of Total Film’s “100 Greatest Female Characters” which was featured on Bitch Flicks.
I’ve been a movie lover since I was a young teen, when my dad instituted “Movie Camp” in our house to fill in the gaps in my cultural heritage. I’ve been a feminist since longer than I can remember. I have a small amount of formal gender studies training in the form of a certificate in Women’s Studies from my alma mater the University of Pittsburgh (2006), but that department was so small they couldn’t even offer a minor in Women’s Studies, much less a major degree concentration. I also have a J.D. from the University of Pittsburgh (2010), but I do not practice as a lawyer. I am always trying to learn more and strengthen my feminist muscles. I find it more or less impossible to see a movie and not want to write about it. Even when I really hate a movie, I still tend to enjoy watching it, thinking about it, and writing about it.
In addition to using my first post to introduce myself, I want to address some of the peculiarities of my current situation as a movie lover. This past May I moved to Cape Town, South Africa with my partner. It is my first time living outside of the United States. I knew this move would be a challenge in many ways, but I completely failed to anticipate how much I would dislike being subject to the vagaries of staggered international movie release schedules.
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| Non-scientific, not-to-scale plotting of release dates of 2012 summer movies in the USA and South Africa |
Having to wait for movies to come to South Africa a few weeks after they hit the states bothers me not only because waiting is a drag, but because it makes me feel out of step with the cultural zeitgeist. You might be living in a post-Brave society, but it only opened in South African theaters today. So forgive me if my posts here are sometimes slightly dated. Fortunately, Bitch Flicks has a proud history of covering films from the distant and recent past as much as it covers new releases, so I hope to fit right in.
South Africa might not get all the movies when they come out in the US, and the theaters are a far sight short of “state of the art” (Upside: no cheap, under-lit digital projection. Downside: not a single IMAX screen in the entire country) But there are a few things about the way they do movies here that I’d love to see brought to the states:
- When you buy a movie ticket, you select your seat in the theater. I’ll never have to worry about being stuck in the corner or the back row.
- The first screening of the day is often at 9:00AM. I haven’t actually gone to the movies before noon here yet, but I like that it is an option.
- Lower ticket prices. Less than 7 dollars a pop! Party like it’s 1999!
- More art house theaters. I doubt this is so much a cultural difference as it is a function of Cape Town being a bigger city than I’d ever lived in in the States, but I can walk to three different “alternative” movie theaters from my house. The most famous is called the “Labia,” and even though that is pronounced with a short a and is named after some Italian dude, I still get a good chuckle out of that. The wait for these movies to come to these theaters can be as long or longer than my wait for them to come to DVD was back home, but at least I get the chance to see more independent movies on the big screen.
So I hope you will join me in the coming weeks for my slightly-dated, even more slightly internationally-skewed, always irreverent musings on women in film and other media. Once again I thank Bitch Flicks for this opportunity, and can’t wait to read the other new contributors’ works!