The radical notion that women like good movies
Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love Written by Megan Kearns. A version of this article was originally published at The Opinioness of the World. Cross-posted with permission. I had been looking forward to watching Eat, Pray, Love ever since I saw the trailer. I read the book a few ago, its popularity piqued my curiosity. … Continue reading “Travel Films Week: In Defense of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’”
Against a backdrop of a television landscape lacking in queer representation (especially queer women of color) emerged Callie Torres’ anxious and exciting adventure of self-discovery. … Callie Torres is a fully fleshed out resilient, sensitive, complex, and unapologetic bisexual Latina woman. … Callie’s journey was an iconic one that helped to not only change television, but to cement the oft forgotten notion that bisexuality is very real.
“I’ve been in the passenger seat for decades. It’s time for me to get behind the wheel.”
A snappy dark comedy set in a high school bubble, ‘Heathers’ touches on difficult subjects including murder and suicide, and nonchalantly addresses major social issues like female friendship and power. The friendships we are introduced to steer every aspect of the story as it progresses and bring us into a world where female characters aren’t just cardboard cutouts but multidimensional, seriously flawed, and sinfully interesting young women.
And it sinks in. We can, half a world away, celebrate Pussy Riot’s name. We can listen to their music and cheer them on. What our challenge as feminists needs to be is to take their cause as seriously as those Carriers of the Cross take it. We must hold on so tightly to our convictions–at home and abroad–that the utter fear and terror of female power that those enmeshed in the patriarchy are emboldened by is neutralized.
‘The Great Beauty’ (‘La Grande Belleza’ in its native Italy)–winner of Best Foreign Language Film at The Golden Globes (and nominated in the same category for an Academy Award)–could easily have been an example of what the great film critic Pauline Kael called “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties”: European films in which very wealthy, attractive people are depressed in spite of their beautiful homes, expensive clothes, and jet-set lifestyles. These films, especially to contemporary audiences, can seem like at any moment they will cross the line into parody, with one of the characters spoofing an old Weill/Brecht tune, “Oh no, not another opulent location! Oh no, not another expensive, tailored suit! Oh no, not more sex with gorgeous, unhappy people!”
I thought a lot about why Jackson created Tauriel. He’s already messing with the events, chronology, and mythology of the books, so why didn’t he just change the gender of a handful of major characters to make them into women? Why couldn’t we have a female dwarf or two? Why couldn’t the last remaining “skin-changer” the bear-man Beorn have been a woman? Or the Brown Wizard Radagast have been a lady forest foraging force of nature? Answer: Because none of those characters have the potential to be love interests. Instead, Jackson created a throw-away character that he could shape into a love object. I am so tired of seeing women have to give up their identity, their goals, their independence, and their power for love.
This is the turning point of the movie. All the conflicts revolving around jealousy, beauty, and, of course, youth, are henceforth turned into a spirit of sisterhood. The dependence on Ernest transforms into a friendly co-dependent relationship between the two women. However much of a love-hate sentiment resonates throughout the final part of the movie, friendship and solidarity triumph. The special bond that Madeline and Helen share is still based on the wish for eternal youth, but they have finally turned to each other.
Alias Ruby Blade poster Written by Leigh Kolb Alias Ruby Blade, which makes its North American debut this week at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, is a documentary about “love and revolution.” The subject of the film, Kirsty Sword Gusmão, grew up in Australia. She had an “ordinary childhood,” but she says her “parents were very … Continue reading “‘Alias Ruby Blade’: A Story of Love and Revolution, With Not Quite Enough Ruby Blade”
In a film, as in real life, with no language to defend herself, the lone woman is a suspect. She gets stared at and scowled at and catcalled and often told that she’s making herself vulnerable, or taking unnecessary risks. In short, our culture says she’s asking for what she gets. A woman alone is unloved, uncared for and written off. In ‘Wild,’ the film based on Strayed’s memoir of her months solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, she has several uncomfortable and frankly terrifying encounters.
‘The Witch’ is proof that when a film is made with utmost care down to the last detail, one can still be transported by it to another world — though, in the case of ‘The Witch,’ it is a downright creepy and unpleasant world, and one that I am grateful, as a woman, to not have to live in.
In movies and on television, the absence of Black women as scientists is glaringly obvious. …The response on social media to the vocation of Leslie Jones’ character in ‘Ghostbusters’ offers an opportunity to ponder: When have Black women been cast as scientists in laboratories, creating and inventing significant and outlandish developments, and leading investigations? …Where are the Black women playing scientists in films in the 21st century?
