Bitch Flicks – Page 98

Stop Policing and and Questioning Beyoncé’s Feminist Credentials by Lauren Rankin via PolicyMic

What have you been reading and/or writing this week?? Tell us in the comments!

Here’s a Fun and Depressing Graphic About Television, Ratings, and Dudes Who Create Shows

Canceled: Single Season TV Shows – An infographic by the team at CableTV.com

Do you have any graphics you’d like to share with Bitch Flicks readers? Share them in the comments or email them to btchflcks(at)gmail(dot)com!

Picture This: A Woman Goes to Film School and Becomes a Filmmaker

Filmmaker Violeta Barca-Fontana

This is a guest post written by Violeta Barca-Fontana.

INT. FILM SCHOOL, CLASSROOM – DAY

First day of class at a film school in Madrid. Twenty impatient students are waiting for the teacher, PACO, a very well known film director. Also in the classroom is VIOLETA (20).

The professor enters the classroom with a serious look and a decided walk. Taking a moment to look over the beardless students, some with incurable acne, who return his gaze with eyes wide open waiting for his wise words.

MASTER

You are twenty five students.

Only three of you will ever direct a film.

The students look at each other hoping they misunderstood him.

The professor continues with his welcome speech.

MASTER

I see there are some women here.

(beat)

In film women usually end up in make-up, wardrobe, or as script supervisors.

The six girls, including Violeta, look at each other for moral support not knowing how to react.

MASTER

I say that, just so you take it under consideration.

That was my very first contact with the film world. The first of many scenes I would live through during my career.

But my professor was wrong. My first boss was a woman; one of the best line producers in Spain and, without a doubt, one of the toughest and most unscrupulous bosses I have ever had. I learned the most about film making from her. I learned how films were really made, and how a well organized production leads to certain success.

Carmen, my boss, treated the women of her team much more harshly than the men. At first I thought she was very unfair to do so, but after all these years, reflecting on how much I learned being around her, I realized that maybe she did it because she felt she could bring out the best in them that way.

I worked with her in two different productions. Without a doubt she treated me worse than any of my co-workers. I think she wanted to take the wind out of my arrogance and break through the wall every film school builds around you: “I know everything and I´m the best.” I think she wanted to show me the subterranean underground of real life, where real movies get made, grown-up movies; where if you want to be called Director, first you have to earn your place with lots of effort and years of experience.

Violeta, in color.

Schools, and above all film schools, just serve to create confusion among the students leading them to believe that their initial easy success inside can be achieved in the professional world. No, ladies and gentleman; making movies is very complicated.

In my second film with Carmen, she promoted me from PA to Second AD. The director was the very well known master CARLOS, already considered an icon in Spain.

Pretty soon Carlos took a liking to me and wanted me to sit in front of the monitors with him all the time, explaining every shot to me. I was fascinated to observe how he would sketch the next shot on a scrap of paper with his Mont-blanc fountain pen to show his Director of Photography. As a film student I look back on those hours with him as a divine gift.

I have great memories of Carlos as one of my greatest teachers, a true genius. Despite this I sensed that inside he believed the idea that women do not direct movies. Carlos constantly asked one of my male colleagues, strangely enough the script supervisor, when he would direct his next short film, and what was he writing lately. I always hoped that longed question would be asked of me, but it never came, as if he assumed that I was not writing, and I had no intention of directing either. I always wanted to expound about my many projects to my Master.

INT. PLATÓ DE RODAJE – DAY

A huge set with over fifty people coming and going, working, loading, unloading, cameras, rails, spotlights. Carlos in the background talking to three men in suits, producers. They talk, they laugh.

Violeta walks in their direction. Within a few feet she feels observed by the group, who have a big laugh. Violeta is about to pass by when Carlos stops her.

CARLOS

Violeta, wait. Come here for a moment.

Violeta draw close. The men in suits stop laughing but kept their smiles behind their ties.

CARLOS

Tell me, what are you working on? So you write?

Have you ever directed anything?

Violeta pauses. Uncomfortably, she looks at the group which is waiting for her to give them a failed reply.

VIOLETA

(timidly)

Well, I just finished producing a feature film with two colleagues from school. It’s called La Fiesta and the Walt Disney Company has picked it up for distribution.

Silence. Their smiles go away. Violeta smiles amiably and moves on to continue her work.

I don’t know if it’s easier or harder to work with men or women. I feel very comfortable working with both. But what I do know is that most of the time working with women means not having to constantly prove your worth. We all know what we’re capable of and just do our job.

The Color Thief crew.

This theory held up in my last project, Color Thief. A project, and I promise unintentionally, led almost entirely by females, which from the beginning has been characterized by its fluidity. Is this because it is guided by women? I do not know…

‘Oblivion:’ A Response to Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s Review on RogerEbert.com

Oblivion (2013)
Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) stands on the landing pad to his home.

This is a guest post written by Gabrielle Gopie-Tree.

I’m not a Tom Cruise fan and I usually don’t watch his films, but I quite like Oblivion. To be fair, I am partial to post-apocalyptic productions but often the action is overdone and the plot underdeveloped; this is certainly not the case with Oblivion, which is a film about monoculture. Monoculture lacks the essential elements for life: diversity, complexity, and struggle.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky sees it differently. While he offers a humorous critique of patriarchy and a welcome, albeit limited, view of misogyny from his perspective as a White male of eastern origins, his superficial review of Oblivion ignores the soulful theme of the film: self-recovery. This idea is central to every aspect of the movie and is quite an unusual perspective in a Hollywood film, particularly in a genre that is typically focused on stereotypical masculinity. While discussion of sex-inequality in film is an encouraging development, there are serious flaws in this element of Vishnevetsky’s criticism. Here is my point of view from my perspective as a Black female of western origins.

Vishnevetsky starts with a spirited description of the colour (white) and shape of Jack’s ship, the docking station, and the interior of the central command’s arrival chamber as all being symbolic of female genitalia which he views as encapsulating a violent sexism. I disagree. Instead I see the distilled and contrived soul-lessness of these elements as juxtaposition against the reality of Jack’s former life; a life that keeps calling to Jack in the shape of his attachment to a very green getaway spot on Earth and romantic memories of a woman in pre-apocalyptic New York City. Jack projects an air of perpetual disorientation as his longing for a satisfying existence contrasts with his daily life.

Jack works with Vica (Andrea Riseborough) character to ensure the logistical resource extraction process on a devastated Earth in the year 2077. Vica and Jack are colleagues as well as lovers. They both represent a futuristic version of the patriarchal family: Jack goes out to work each day returning to prepared meals and perfunctory intimacy. Vica is the classic Stepford Wife in both appearance and behaviour: her sheer plasticity and vacuity are her essence. Jack is depicted as having a ‘ruggedly capable masculinity:’ he fixes, fights, and fucks. Despite the mental manipulation of his masters, Jack has a heart. We see this via his expressions of service to others: his successful fight to save a lone dog as well as the woman who turns out to be his wife, Julia (Olga Kurylenko), from death by drone, and his communication of loyalty to the human resistance who awaken him from his alien-induced programming. These are traits typically associated with the feminine, making this a rather feminist/womanist element of Jack’s character and the film itself.

Jack struggles with Drone 166 to get the machine to stand up.

While Vishnevetsky compliments the storytelling method used in Oblivion, he simultaneously lambastes the film as being “derivative” of “several science-fiction movies at once.” I see this critique as plausible in light of the theme of the film itself – self-recovery. However, it seems that while Vishnevetsky is comfortable advancing some semblance of a gender critique, he is much less comfortable discussing the racial element of Oblivion, although he does mention the colour of the pseudo-feminine monoculture that amuses him so greatly as “white.” For example, who could miss the racial dynamics in the fact that there is (as far as I can tell) only one non-white man, Beech (Morgan Freeman), and one non-white woman, Julia–or, that Beech has a similar wake-up talk with Jack as did Morpheus (Laurence Fishbourne) with Neo (Keanu Reeves) in The Matrix. Vishnevetsky’s failure to talk race brings the sincerity of his limited discussion of gender into question.

Morgan Freeman as Beech, the resistance leader who helps Jack recover his identity.

Furthermore, Vishnevetsky’s claim that: Oblivion is about a “lowly technician sending unmanned drones to hunt and kill a demonized, alien Other — until it forgets that it ever was” is overly simplistic. He ignores the element of struggle in the film which is necessary for life and Oblivion is most certainly about the life/death struggle; from the start of the film with Jack and Vica’s life-parody to the story’s culmination in Jack and Julia’s life-reality on a lush green patch of earth, complete with offspring.

Julia (Olga Kurylenko) and Jack recall a pre-apocalypse moment.

While Vishnevetsky sees Oblivion as “a wannabe mindbender that raises questions about its lead character’s identity — except that the lead character is too sketchy to make these questions compelling,” I see it as an exploration of a man’s struggle to recover himself from monoculture programming which in itself requires interactions with others for one’s self-development to occur. Curiously, Vishnevetsky condemns Jack using the archetype of the self-sufficient masculinised rugged individual but mislabels it as “creation myth.” Thereafter, he bemoans what he sees as none of the many women in the film being “able to do anything without Harper’s help.” This is a very strange critique and smacks of a highly neoliberal notion of sameness as the benchmark for sex-equality. Also, it does not hold up in light of the fact that Vica administers both the home and the office each day while Jack fulfills his duties outside on the ground and she engages in almost all communications with Sally (Melissa Leo) at central control, including the authority to terminate her working relationship with Jack by simply saying they are no longer an “effective team.” Additionally, toward the end of the film Jack and Julia collaborate to challenge the authority of the alien masters including Julia’s decision to undergo cryosleep as the best option for facilitating Jack’s assault on the alien’s central command.

Do not be fooled by Vishnevetsky’s use of terms such as “uterus,” “vulva,” “mother figure,” “creation myth,” and “misogyny” which suggest a feminist critique of Oblivion that just is not there.

Gabrielle Gopie-Tree has a background in law, politics, psychology and spirituality. She is a nomadic social theorist trying to be the change she wants to see in the world; a believer in the lessons of the guide Qadhafi; and valiantly trying to allow the universe to unfold as it should.

"I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy."

Angelina Jolie

This guest post by Melissa McEwan appears at her blog Shakesville and is cross-posted with permission.

Angelina Jolie has written an extraordinary op-ed for the New York Times, titled “My Medical Choice,” about her recent decision to have a preventative double mastectomy after learning she carries the BRCA1 “breast cancer” gene and had an estimated 87% risk of developing breast cancer.

This piece is remarkable for a lot of reasons. Jolie notes that she “finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved” on April 27, and: “During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work.” And having managed to keep it a secret, itself a rather impressive feat, she decided to then publicly disclose it, in order that “other women can benefit from my experience.”

It’s remarkable because she writes very plainly that her ability to get the $3,000 BRCA1 test is a privilege, and advocates wider access:

Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.

And because she does not assert or imply that her decision is the only right decision, but one of many options:

For any woman reading this, I hope it helps you to know you have options. I want to encourage every woman, especially if you have a family history of breast or ovarian cancer, to seek out the information and medical experts who can help you through this aspect of your life, and to make your own informed choices.

I acknowledge that there are many wonderful holistic doctors working on alternatives to surgery. My own regimen will be posted in due course on the Web site of the Pink Lotus Breast Center. I hope that this will be helpful to other women.

And it’s remarkable because Angelina Jolie is generally regarded as one of the most beautiful women in a world that profoundly values beauty and defines women’s worth by their sex appeal, and she is telling women to value their health.

There is something deeply moving to me for a woman whose body, by nature of her profession, has been treated like public property even more than most of us, writing such an intimate piece about her body, making it public property in yet another way by her own choice, for the benefit of other women.

Melissa McEwan is the founder and manager of the award-winning political and cultural group blog Shakesville, which she launched as Shakespeare’s Sister in October 2004 because George Bush was pissing her off. In addition to running Shakesville, she also contributes to The Guardian‘s Comment is Free America and AlterNet. Liss graduated from Loyola University Chicago with degrees in Sociology and Cultural Anthropology, with an emphasis on the political marginalization of gender-based groups. An active feminist and LGBTQI advocate, she has worked as a concept development and brand consultant and now writes full-time.

She lives just outside Chicago with three cats, two dogs, and a Scotsman, with whom she shares a love of all things geekdom, from Lord of the Rings to Alcatraz. When she’s not blogging, she can usually be found watching garbage television or trying to coax her lazyass greyhound off the couch for a walk.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Shonda Rhimes on TV’s Lack of Diversity: “I Think It’s Sad and Weird” by Jamilah King via Colorlines

Network TV is Broken. So How Does Shonda Rhimes Keep Making Hits? by Willa Paskin via The New York Times

Girls on Film: The Danger of the ‘Female Filmmaker’ Label by Monica Bartyzel via The Week

The Onion Can Go to Hell [Trigger warning: on their “joke” over Chris Brown beating Rihanna to death] by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville

Hollywood Abhors an Aging Woman. Too Bad for Hollywood. by Sagit Maier-Schwartz via Slate’s Double X

Pissed Off: When Did Playing Evil Women Become a Rite of Passage for Oscar-Winning Actresses? by Melissa Silverstein via Women and Hollywood

YA Author Takes on Gendered Book Covers with the Coverflip Challenge by Rebecca Pahle via The Mary Sue

The Gender Coverup by Maureen Johnson via The Huffington Post

This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter from TV Spoilers (Spoiler: She’s a Girl) by Dana Liebelson via Mother Jones

The Women of Mad Men Kick Ass in Season 6 by Nicole Aragi via Buzzfeed

18 Female Friendship Truths, As Told by ‘Bridesmaids’ by Erin LaRosa via Buzzfeed

What have you been reading or writing this week?? Tell us in the comments!

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We have lots of people tell us they like our site.

We also have people who tell us the site looks stuck in 1999.

We hope you’ll be patient with us as we try to bring Bitch Flicks‘ design into the 21st century.

Mixing Business and Pleasure: Making ‘Movement + Location’ and Staying Together

Bodine and Alexis Boling

This is a guest post by Bodine Boling, originally published at Bright Ideas, the Seed&Spark blog.

Here is the synopsis for Movement + Location, a crowdfunded independent science fiction film currently in post-production that I am making with my husband, Alexis Boling:

Kim Getty is an immigrant from 400 years in the future, sent back in time to live out an easier life. It’s a one-way trip of difficult isolation, but in the three years since she landed, Kim has built a life that feels almost satisfying. She has a full time job, shares an apartment with a roommate, and is falling in love.

But when she stumbles on a teenage girl who is also from the future, Kim’s remade sense of self is tested. After the girl leads Kim to her long-lost husband, now 20 years older than her and maladjusted to this time, Kim’s carefully designed identity begins to unravel. Kim finds herself having to choose between two entirely different lives. But once her secrets are exposed, she realizes that the real decision is what she’s willing to do to survive.

I want to say first that it was a gift to make a movie with my husband. I came back to that thought a lot when we were in the thick of production, both of us feeling misunderstood and unappreciated. Gratitude is a good way to find center when all else is cratering. It bailed me out of stress-induced derangement more than once.

If you find yourself about to get into something similar, I’d warn you that production with a loved one feels a bit like the worst parts of getting a tattoo. It can be painful, enormously so, and you’ll question whether you’ve made the right decision, and well-meaning friends will be like, No, but really? You’re sure you want to do this?

But if you get the chance, take it. Sharing what matters most to you with the person you most love is something almost no one experiences outside of parenthood. And the end result could be something you’re proud of for the rest of your life.

I have three pieces of advice:

1. Bring in an outside producer who can break ties. You need to trust this producer and they need to feel comfortable saying no to both of you. This is the person you’ll call when your spouse hasn’t responded to an important email even though he promised he would and you don’t want to be accused of nagging. This is the person you’ll pull aside on set so you can vent while the next shot is being set up. It will feel like this person is saving your life, but they will actually be saving your marriage.

2. If something is said to you that can be interpreted two ways, assume it was meant in the way that doesn’t offend you. This is hard advice to take but will make your life ten million times better.

3. Making a movie requires a level of confidence that is brutal to maintain. Remember that the person in the room it’s easiest to get mad at is also the person best able to help you cope. You both understand how hard what you’re doing is and how much it matters. Give the support you want to receive and watch it come back.

And look forward to production ending, which it will, because that’s when people will start telling you how cool it is that you were able to make something with a loved one. This sentiment will be absent on set, but trust that it’ll come. What you’re doing is wonderful, all difficulty aside. Enjoy that if you can.

I promise it’s worth it.

Bodine Boling is a writer, actress and editor based in Brooklyn, NY. You can find her on Twitter and follow her process of making the film at http://movementandlocation.com.

‘Girl Rising:’ What Can We Do To Help Girls? Ask Liam Neeson.

Girl Rising (2013)

This is a guest post written by Colleen Lutz Clemens.

Girl Rising unites prominent female authors, such as Edwidge Danticat from Haiti or Aminatta Forna from Sierra Leone, with girls such as Wadley or Mariama from their respective countries. Together, Danticat and Wadley, Forna and Mariama, and seven other pairs have their stories of oppression, resistance, community, and family narrated by the likes of Beyoncé or Meryl Streep. Each story works as a discrete unit in the film, using animation, music, and images to give the viewer a glimpse into each girl’s reserve of resilience.

Wadley from Haiti

Mariama from Sierra Leone

Connecting the nine stories are interludes which show other girls in school uniforms as they hold us up signs sharing dreary statistics about girls in the developing world, such as boys outnumber girls in primary schools by 33 million. The stories teach the audience that these girls live in families that love them—even if that love looks different than it does in “the West”—and that education, poetry, art, and organizing are the keys to giving each girl the tools to recognize her own importance and to find her voice.

One of the interludes.

Girl Rising knows and plays to its audience: women in “the West” with access to basic services and education who have some extra money in the bank and a desire to help other women. The documentary works to connect audience members to a movement with the lofty goal of raising money to ensure more girls are educated worldwide.

I love the idea of educating girls. LOVE IT. I love any movie that takes the time and attention to tell the stories of girls to an audience that otherwise would not hear such narratives. I want every girl who wants (and maybe even doesn’t want) to be sitting on the floor or on a chair wearing a hijab, burqa, or baseball cap in a classroom to be there. If that movie is working toward that goal, then I am just about all in, which as a scholar and critic is pretty much as “in” as I can get. However, what proves potentially problematic is the way in which narrator Liam Neeson offers the convenient promise that once girls are educated throughout the world, then global issues will diminish and all will be right.

Thus, two things are still bothering me after seeing the movie a few weeks ago. First, fixing the world via education seems like a pretty big burden to put on the shoulders of girls. The implication of the film is that if girls would just have access to education, so many of the world’s problems such as poverty and malnutrition would disappear. To me this rings the same bell as when people say, “If only women ran the world, there would be no more wars.” There would be wars. There isn’t some kind of natural peace sense linked to the X chromosome. I want girls and women to have the agency that women around the world have been working for—I believe in that idea and in the movie’s thesis that if girls have education, the world can be better. But I don’t think it is just or fair to expect girls to fix all of the problems the movie seems to think they should fix.

Second, the film exploits the burqa to make its point about women’s suffering. It should be no surprise that the last segment is the one that Western audiences will be most eager to witness: the story of Amina in Afghanistan. This young girl is forced to marry at an age when an American girl would still be hanging One Direction posters on her pink walls. Watching her story takes the viewer’s breath away. The girl seemingly has no agency, no voice, until Western filmmakers come and listen to her. She lives in fear of violence, of becoming shamed by expressing her desire to live a life different from the one prescribed to her by virtue of her gender. She is the image of the Aghani woman Westerners are so familiar with but know little about.

Amina

Here’s my concern: I don’t think any of these problems will go away if she rejects and sheds her burqa. So when (spoiler alert) veiled girls start to run up the hill tearing off their burqas as the music crescendos and the voiceover offers us the idea that liberation is just around the corner once the girls reveal their identities, I cringe. This gesture is a bravery manufactured for the audience. Taking off a burqa is a solution that makes the audience feel good. It echoes the rhetoric of post-9/11 warmongering when suddenly we needed to invade countries in the name of women who needed liberation, a convenient excuse when those same women’s plights were completely ignored up until September 10, 2001. Of course, the movie does this on purpose, allowing us to feel justified all over again in our simultaneous invasion and ignorance.

I admire the girls. I want Amina to have everything she wants, even after only meeting her for ten minutes in the film. Yet I fear the other girls’ stories get lost in the noise of the past decade’s war with countries where “brown, veiled” people live. I was thrilled to be invited to co-lead a discussion after the film, yet the moment the lights went up the audience only wanted to talk about Afghanistan, about the Taliban, about Islam. Ten minutes into the discussion I gently steered the conversation back to the girls, as they had already been forgotten in the audience’s desire, and I might say selfish desire, to forget the bigger issue and make the suffering and anxiety all about ourselves again.

But Amina’s section also contains my favorite part of the film: when she looks at the camera and accuses the audience of being silent. She pointedly asks: what are “you” going to do? Of course, right after this segment, the film gently supplies an answer: text GIVE to 5515 and donate money to the 10×10 organization. I didn’t see a flood of phones light up in the theater. But this move of Amina looking at an audience filled with Americans and calling them out for staying silent in regards to her actual issue—“I have no school to go to, my family married me off at 13”—gives me the greatest of hope. Not her running up a hill taking off a burqa that she probably put right back on when she got to the other side of the hill: I can only imagine that she was forced to put her veil back on, although the film’s website says it cannot offer information about her current status as it may endanger her. But that she would look the West in the eye and say “You cannot forget about me. I will not forget about you. We are in this together”: that kind of girl rising is the kind of movement I want to be a part of, one what works toward greater access to education and doesn’t need to make me temporarily feel good or justified in the process.

Azmera

Colleen Lutz Clemens is assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her one-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

‘The Great Gatsby’ Still Gets Flappers Wrong by Lisa Hix via Collectors Weekly

Geena Davis: Girls Need More Role Models in Media by Erica E. Phillips via The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy

A Dude to Direct Hillary Clinton Biopic by Melissa Silverstein via Women and Hollywood

Rodham Will Put Hillary Clinton’s Backstory on the Big Screen by Alyssa Rosenberg via Slate’s Double X

Retrolicious — Mad Men 6.5: “The Flood” [on Mad Men and race] by Tami Winfrey Harris, Andrea Plaid, Renee Martin and Joe Lamour via Racialicious

Gwyneth Paltrow: “You Can Only Be the Damsel in Distress for So Long” by Susana Polo via The Mary Sue

Meera Menon (‘Farah Goes Bang’) Receives Inaugural Nora Ephron Prizeby Kerensa Cadenas via Women and Hollywood

‘Blachman’: Most Sexist Show in History Showcases Unattractive Men Judging Women’s Naked Bodies by Elizabeth Plank via PolicyMic

Will Disney’s Live-Action Cinderella Shake Up the Fairy Tale? by Alyssa Rosenberg via Slate’s Double X

The Business of Diversity: Why Hollywood Needs Integration by Zach Stafford and Nico Lang via Racialicious

What Do You Think of Merida’s Redesign? by Rebecca Pahle via The Mary Sue

Seriously, Disney, I’m Trying to Take a Little Break Here — Must You? [on Merida from Brave‘s redesign] via Peggy Orenstein’s Blog

What have you been reading or writing this week?? We want to know…share in the comments!

Anne Flournoy on Her Comedy Series ‘The Louise Log’

The Louise Log: A Web Comedy Series

Guest post written by Anne Flournoy.

Back in the early 90’s when making an indie feature film was the standard NY indie filmmaker route to a career as a writer/director, I got bogged down for more than a decade in rewriting my second feature. Hey, my first one had been in competition at Sundance, how could this be so hard? Seventeen years later, I gave up, picked up a camcorder and started shooting something, anything.

Six months later and less than a week away from my sixth attempt at a self-imposed deadline, the ‘something, anything’ subject matter, even with a heart-breaking Enrico Caruso soundtrack, was long and boring at 80 seconds.

Anyone who knows anything about screenwriting will tell you to avoid voice-overs. It’s a last resort to be used sparingly and only by people who know what they’re doing. I’d heard Godard’s whispered voice-over in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and had been browbeating friends to use it for years. What a great device! No one is doing this!

Up against my deadline, I was down to my last resort: over this long and boring 80-second video I’d whisper what Louise was thinking.

Stealing wholesale from my 3-page free-writing scribbles, I started whispering into my Macbook. I called it The Louise Log. A month later, due to popular demand for more of actor Christine Cook, it was followed by The Louise Log #2. Today there are 34 episodes available at http://thelouiselog.com and we’re crowdfunding on Seed&Spark to shoot Season 3. After five long years under the radar, BuzzFeed recently compared the series favorably to Louie and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and it was a 2013 Finalist in the Shorty Awards.

So what’s it about? As one of my kids summed it up, “Louise has issues.” Yes, she has a high-maintenance husband, and a lot of other very difficult characters in her life, but it’s her over-active inner voice that is her biggest problem. It’s also her salvation.

And it turns out to be the core of the series.

Louise and Raj in episode 13

When I was growing up, Bitch Flicks would have meant porn or something so redneck and gross that if I ever mentioned it, it would have been in a whisper to a friend. The gap between what I was raised to be (a young lady who was careful to keep her knees together when sitting in a dress) and the leather bomber jacket-wearing indie filmmaker I became, caused a certain tension. That tension is the essence of Louise’s inner voice.

Her eidetic image of what a real woman is is at the core of who Louise is, and it causes her a lot of problems. A ‘real woman’ is someone who could have lunch with the Queen of England and have, not only a grasp of which fork to use, but also a sense of self sufficiency to carry on in sort of a peer relationship with the Queen. Marlene Dietrich plays the role to a T. Louise, on the other hand, falls far short. Not that she doesn’t wear a good mask and appear to carry it off some of the time, but we know what she’s really going through–the self-criticism, the expectations, the dashed hopes, the paranoid rape fantasies.

I flatter myself to think that Louise is a lot more neurotic than I am, but the truth is that her inner-thought loop is closer to home than I’d like to admit.

Watch “How To Take It Like A Girl: The Louise Log #4”