Katherine Murray – Page 4

‘Coherence’ Is the Best Movie You Didn’t See Last Year

‘Coherence’ is a triumph of low-budget filmmaking, a reality show about an extreme acting challenge, a disturbing science fiction take on human nature and identity, a fascinating puzzle box, and a movie with a well-written, well-acted female lead. Bet you wish you’d seen it, now.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Coherence is a triumph of low-budget filmmaking, a reality show about an extreme acting challenge, a disturbing science fiction take on human nature and identity, a fascinating puzzle box, and a movie with a well-written, well-acted female lead. Bet you wish you’d seen it, now.

It’s awfully hard to talk about Coherence without wrecking all of the surprises in the story – even the central conceit is secret that’s buried until you’re well into the film. Without giving away too much more than the trailer, the story is about a group of friends at a dinner party where really weird shit starts to happen. There’s a comet passing overhead, and – we are told – the last time this comet passed by, people got confused about who they were, and where they were, and what was going on.

During the dinner party, cell phone service goes down, and the power goes out. Two of the characters walk to a house two blocks over, which seems to have power, to ask if they can use a landline phone. When they get back, they’re visibly shaken and don’t want to share what they’ve seen.

From that point forward, everything starts to get weird. People act strangely; they repeat themselves; events seem to happen out of order; the characters discover a box that seems like it shouldn’t exist. As they try to piece together what’s happening, and what they should do to survive, the stress of the situation puts pressure on their relationships, and the darker sides of their personalities come to the surface.

The explanation of what’s happening, when we get it, is internally consistent with everything we’ve seen – and the finale is disturbing, but eerily believable. It’s a movie you have to watch twice – once for the experience of suspense and confusion, and once for the experience of piecing all the clues together, and seeing how carefully plotted each event was. It’s the kind of awesome, well-made film that grabs you right away, makes you want to find out more, and then delivers on its promises in the final act.

Although this isn’t clear at first, the protagonist of Coherence is Emily (played by Emily Foxler), a dancer who regrets the trajectory her career path has taken. Without giving too much away, it’s fair to say that the film follows her from beginning to end, and that she’s the character who’s forced to make a choice in the final moments – about who she wants to be, what she wants to have, and what she’s willing to do to get it.

The second most important character, from a narrative standpoint, is Mike – played by Nicholas Brendon as an exaggerated version of himself (spoilers in the link). Mike is the former star of a cult-hit TV show and doesn’t like who he turns into when he’s drinking. He goes dark as soon as things start to get strange, exhibiting a mix of paranoia and self-hatred, followed by radical, destructive behaviour. Eventually, he starts drinking again, much to the others’ dismay.

By the end of the film, it’s clear that Mike’s story exists to prepare the audience for the choices that Emily’s going to face later on. The dark side of his personality is so close to the surface that it comes spilling out right away, priming us to look for signs of darkness in the other characters. He also states one of the movie’s biggest themes during a small, self-pitying speech, but I can’t tell you, here, what it is.

The reason I bring this all up – in annoyingly cryptic terms – is just to say that, in a lot of ways, Coherence is one of the movies I wished for when I wrote about how big idea movies usually don’t have female leads. This is a story about selfhood and the way we understand ourselves as individuals, in very broad, universal terms, and we’re invited to follow and identify with a woman as the centre of that story.

Also – perhaps because this is a dinner party made up of heterosexual couples – half of the characters in this movie are women. I notice that, in general, the male characters are more action-oriented and push the story forward through doing things, whereas the women tend to push the story forward by talking about and discovering things, but I don’t think that’s necessarily bad. If Emily weren’t the central character, then the way that men seem to make all the really explosive decisions would be more annoying, but, since the story comes back to her in the end, the whole thing feels more balanced.

The other really cool thing about Coherence, and the reason I recommend watching it, is that, in addition to telling a good, suspenseful, interesting story, this movie is also a reality show about acting. Writer/director James Ward Byrkit, and one of the actors, Alex Manugian, spent a year plotting the story before filming it in Byrkit’s home. Manugian was the only actor who knew the whole plot – the others were given notes every day, explaining background information that their characters would have, talking points that they should try to hit in group discussions, and what their motivations were at present. They then had to improvise their way through each scene, working together to tell a story that only one of them knew, trying to stay in character while it was happening.

Not to sound like I normally overlook acting, but this is the kind of movie that reminds you of what actors actually do, and of the skill, self-control, and self-awareness required to do it.

I’m sure that good editing plays a role in making Coherence look seamless, but there’s still something really exciting about watching eight people (seven, if you don’t count Alex Manugian) dive into an acting experiment and just try to do their jobs. Knowing how the film was made, and then watching it play out on screen, I’m reminded that acting is about collaboration – in every scene, each of these actors has to split their attention between hitting the marks set out before them, and helping the others do the same – in this case, without knowing ahead of time what’s actually going to happen. And while all of that’s going on behind the scenes, inside their heads, they have to make it look like it’s just natural, and like they’re the people they’ve been cast to play.

Coherence, for me, involves that sense of pleasure that comes from watching people who are good at something do that thing well. It also makes me wonder what other cool things actors could do, if there were more experiments like this.

When you put it all together, you’ve got an interesting, suspenseful, tightly-plotted movie about identity, starring a female protagonist, full of good acting and editing. There is absolutely no reason you would not want to watch this, so go watch it now.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Why ‘The 100’ Is a BFD

Bisexual protagonists, scenes that pass the Bechdel Test, women making choices that drive the action of the story – I’m still the only person who watches ‘The 100,’ but, boy, do I enjoy it when I do.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Bisexual protagonists, scenes that pass the Bechdel Test, women making choices that drive the action of the story – I’m still the only person who watches The 100, but, boy, do I enjoy it when I do.

Last year, I wrote about the first season of The 100, a dystopian YA science fiction series on The CW, based on a dystopian YA science fiction novel of the same name. While the first few episodes were laughably terrible, the series later took a sharp (and dark) turn toward being kind of good. The second season of The 100, which airs the first half of its two-part finale this week, is also laughably terrible in places, but also kind of surprisingly good.

One of the good surprises happened last week, when the series hero, Clarke, turned out to be bisexual in a low-key, fairly believable way, that didn’t involve any hand-wringing about her sexual identity. The major story line this season has been that Clarke’s group, the Sky People, are trying to forge an alliance with the Grounders – a group of clans native to the planet the Sky People have landed on. The Grounders’ leader, Lexa, is a girl Clarke’s age who’s also been pushed into a position of responsibility, and the two of them grow closer as the season progresses, because no one else understands the pressure of making life and death decisions for thousands of people, or of sacrificing those you love for the sake of the greater good. There’s tension between them, because they have different ideas about what it means to be a leader, and Clarke’s character arc this season is partly about whether she’s going to end up as cold as Lexa.

That’s already unusual for a network TV show, in that the story is about a serious philosophical difference between two female characters who talk to each other about it, and make life and death decisions based on their discussion, but it’s also unusual because the showrunners decided to let them kiss, and didn’t make a whole big deal about it.

It turns out that Lexa doesn’t make Clarke a cold, hard-hearted leader after all – the opposite happens, and Clarke gets Lexa to warm up a little – at least enough to admit that there’s a place in her hard heart for Clarke. And, rather than having her push Lexa away, or say, “I’m not gay – god, what if I’m gay?!” it turns out that Clarke’s been quietly bisexual all along, and it never came up before because it’s not all that noteworthy a thing. It’s exactly the same as if she were kissing a guy.

In other words, the fact that it’s not a big deal is what makes it a really big deal.

As Allyson Johnson writes in The Mary Sue: “It’s not pandering, or queer-baiting; it’s simply a part of [Clarke’s] characterization that’s played as if it’s totally and beautifully normal.” Series creator and executive producer, Jason Rothenberg, also went on Twitter to explain that people don’t get freaked out about bisexuals in the future world of The 100 and that “if Clarke’s attracted to someone, gender isn’t a factor. Some things improve post-apocalypse.”

We’ve already had bisexual characters on science fiction shows – Torchwood is notable for making bisexuality as part of its mission statement – but there’s still something surprising and refreshing about the easy-going way that The 100 made this happen. It’s a step forward in the portrayal of LGBT people in general, but of Bi people especially. That Clarke’s comfortable with who she is – that she already knew this about herself, and the only thing that’s new is that we’re learning it about her; that she doesn’t turn into a lesbian as soon as she kisses a girl – that’s a big deal.

Another pleasant surprise in the second season is how willing The 100 is to cast women in roles where they just need some generic person. Almost every time – if not every time – groups of random, redshirt, background characters convene, some of them – and some of the ones with speaking parts – are women. The show also fills a lot of secondary roles with women – the generically menacing doctor who works for this season’s enemy, the Mountain Men, is a woman; the super hard core Grounder who distrusts the Sky People and causes tension is a woman – but I was most impressed by Major Byrne.

Major Byrne is a cookie-cutter character who exists just to create conflict among the Sky People now that the conflict-creators from last year have been rehabilitated. The Major is the hard-ass, shoot first and ask questions later, “they are the enemy,” letter of the law, peace-hating, harsh justice head of security who keeps telling the other characters that they’re screwing up by being too lenient and soft-hearted. It’s the kind of role that casting directors usually fill with a male actor, because that’s the person we all picture in our heads when we think of this archetype. The reason I’m impressed that Major Byrne turned out to be a woman is that it shows that someone, somewhere along the line, thought past their knee-jerk reactions and made a deliberate choice about casting the role – and I think that’s indicative of the deliberate choices that The 100 makes in casting female actors in general.

That doesn’t mean that Major Byrne was more than a military stereotype, or that the doctor mentioned above was more than generically evil, or that female redshirts are any more useful than male redshirts as characters – it just means that rather than defaulting to “male unless otherwise specified” it seems like The 100 makes a conscious effort to present a world where both men and women are present and involved in what’s happening.

The third good surprise, and the last one I’ll talk about – although I could mention the show’s humour, and its interesting grimdark twists – is that the writers seem to understand that there was a problem with Octavia in season one. They haven’t figured out the right way to fix it yet, but they’re trying, and I appreciate that.

If you recall, Octavia is the character who began the first season as a sassy, hypersexualized rebel, and then was rebooted as The Kindest Girl Who Ever Lived. In both incarnations, the main point of Octavia was how other people felt about her, and she constantly fell into danger and had to be rescued by other characters.

Season two reboots Octavia again as kind and rebellious, resourceful, independent, and brave. Her character arc this season is that she spends less time with her Grounder boyfriend, and more time training to be a warrior in the Grounder army, after proving herself to the really hard core Grounder, Indra.

There are some ooky colonial elements to Octavia 3.0’s story, and I don’t at all buy that she’s now an honorary Grounder because she started braiding her hair and lost a fist fight in a really spectacular way. She also looks hilarious when she tries to join them in a tribal yell, and she uses literally the worst strategy ever when she tries to take hostages during an early episode. Like, it’s really so bad that I have to believe Indra let her walk away with a hostage because she just didn’t like the guy Octavia was holding hostage very much.

That said, I appreciate that the show is trying to turn Octavia into a person rather than a chess piece in a game that other characters are playing. Right now, the character’s exhibiting a pretty superficial, and unrealistic form of girl power (“Let’s just make her awesome at everything!”), but it’s an improvement over the days when she used to trip over her feet and get knocked unconscious in the woods. If the producers were going to learn any lessons from season one, and latch onto anything as being the core of their show, I think trying to build strong female characters is a fine thing to latch onto – even if they haven’t quite got it right with Octavia.

The 100, like Battlestar Galactica before it, is still remarkable for having women make so many choices that drive the story, and I think that, once they find a way for Octavia’s choices to matter, things will finally slide into place.

And I haven’t even told you about the episode where the A-plot is that the characters go to the zoo and get chased by a monkey!

If you live in the United States, The CW airs The 100 on Wednesday nights. If you live in Canada, you can catch it on Netflix the following morning. Please watch it – I think it deserves to exist.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Child-Eating Parents in ‘Into the Woods’ and Every Children’s Story Ever

Your dad is an ogre or giant, your mom is a witch, and both of them want to kill you. Welcome to your fairy tale life.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Your dad is an ogre or giant, your mom is a witch, and both of them want to kill you. Welcome to your fairy tale life.

If you’ve ever read a fairy tale before, the idea that mother figures end up being witches is not exactly news. Young, beautiful, kind, and loving parents (mothers, especially) are usually MIA or KIA before the action starts, and the child heroes instead interact with angry, powerful fantasy characters who are about the same age their parents would be, and fill some of the same roles their parents would fill, but also want to murder them in shocking and terrible ways.

The clearest example of this is probably Hansel and Gretel, where parents eat their own children through the proxy of a witch, but it’s a theme that repeats itself in children’s literature.

Disney’s adaptation of Into the Woods contains a smorgasbord of missing parents, one of whom is replaced by a bone-crushing giant, and one of whom is replaced by a witch. The giant comes into play during the movie’s riff on Jack and the Beanstalk, where fatherless Jack meets an oedipal complex a “big tall terrible lady giant” who behaves toward him as a mother would before her husband tries to eat Jack for lunch (as recapped in this song). The witch is a more developed character, and a better example of what Into the Woods has to offer as an adult-oriented fairy tale.

The witch, who isn’t ever named, plays a role in multiple plot lines, but her origin is in Rapunzel. After catching her neighbour trying to make off with her vegetables, she curses him and locks his daughter in a tower, raising the girl as her own. From there, the story progresses in the usual way – Rapunzel meets a prince; the witch becomes jealous and attacks them; Rapunzel is reunited with her prince and leaves the witch behind forever.

Some of the commentary on Into the Woods (both the movie and the pre-Disney musical) has painted the relationship between Rapunzel and the witch as one about parents struggling to let go of their children and wanting to shelter them from the dangers of the world. James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim even introduce the witch’s signature song, “Stay with Me” as a touching song about family relationships that’s supposed to show us a gentler side of the witch.

And, while it’s true that “Stay with Me” presents the witch as an emotionally complex person, it also presents her as a pretty shitty parent. If you listen to the whole thing, including how the scene begins and ends, she’s emotionally manipulative, self-centred, prone to sudden fits of anger, and unreasonably punitive.

Kind of like Rapunzel’s witch mom in that other Disney movie.

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the dynamic in Into the Woods influenced Tangled in some way.

Tangled is a lot less nuanced in its presentation – the witch in Tangled is purely self-interested and doesn’t show any signs of genuine affection for Rapunzel. In this version of the story, Rapunzel unknowingly has the power to rejuvenate people, and the witch wants her to stay in the tower and act as a personal fountain of youth. As part of her plan to keep Rapunzel under control, she systematically destroys Rapunzel’s confidence and self-esteem, convincing her that she’s so ugly, helpless, and stupid that she’d never survive on her own, and no one else would want her.

The turning point in the story comes when Rapunzel, who’s been raised by an abusive parent her entire life, without anything else to compare it to, realizes that her witch mother doesn’t really love her, and that she deserves to be part of a family that treats her with kindness and respect.

Into the Woods, which is intended for an audience of adults, is more layered. It’s clear that the witch feels more than one way about Rapunzel. It’s not a case where she’s just lying when she says she loves her daughter, but she displays a selfish, greedy kind of love that turns Rapunzel into an object whose feelings and needs aren’t important.

In the movie, their story arc ends when Rapunzel rides into the woods with her prince, vowing never to see the witch again. The second act of the musical, on stage, is much more explicit in showing us the long-term fallout of Rapunzel’s awful childhood – even though things are all right for her now, she can’t ever be happy because of the way she was raised. It’s an experience that’s going to haunt her forever.

Treating your children as things you own that exist to make you happy – and treating them as things that are defective, when they don’t make you happy – is an abusive form of parenting that more than one witch mother seems to exhibit.

Other Mother, the villain of Coraline, doesn’t have a pointy hat and a broom, but she’s a supernatural creature with magic powers who stands in for Coraline’s real mother in much of the movie.

In this case, the swap is more literal. Coraline, feeling temporarily neglected by her parents, finds a door behind the wallpaper in her house, leading to a world where everything is way more fun an interesting. The Other world is a copy of the world Coraline lives in, where everything revolves around her, and where she is (initially) welcomed by an alternate version of her mother, who’s far more attentive, warm and happy. The only thing Coraline has to do to stay in the world where everything’s awesome and great all the time is let Other Mother carve out her eyes.

When Coraline asserts herself by politely refusing to do that, Other Mother turns into a monster who rages at Coraline for disappointing her, kidnaps Coraline’s real parents, and tries to trap Coraline in the Other world forever. We then learn that Other Mother controls everyone else in the Other world, punishing them if they don’t seem happy enough, and forbidding them to talk to each other when she’s not there.

When Coraline asks why Other Mother is so determined to keep her in the Other world, one of the other characters explains that she wants something to love that isn’t her – or, possibly, “She’d just love something to eat.”

The story resolves when Coraline escapes from Other Mother, and realizes that her parents, although they’re not perfect, genuinely love her, care about her feelings and well-being, and, unlike Other Mother, would never hurt her on purpose. The smothering, overly-attentive “love” that Other Mother initially displays for Coraline is really a greedy, hungry desire for something to trap and control. Love doesn’t mean giving someone everything you have so as to buy the right to keep them.

In most children’s stories, the substitution of witch for mom or giant for dad is a safe way of exploring children’s fears about their parents. Children need their parents to take care of them, which leaves them at their parents’ mercy; even good parents sometimes express sides of themselves that their children find frightening or confusing – stories where children are mistreated or endangered by mother and father figures who aren’t literally their parents provide a way to confront the fear of mistreatment or endangerment while also providing a safety net that says, “Your real mom and dad aren’t like this.” In other words, it’s too awful to think that your mother is evil, so she becomes two people – one that’s nice (and dead or gone) and one that’s really mean.

Because Other Mother looks and sounds just like Coraline’s real mother, the association between nice mom and mean mom is more obvious in Coraline, but the distance between Coraline’s actual mother and the monster behind the wallpaper is clear. One is a reasonable human being and one is an imposter.

Spirited Away, a Japanese film directed by Hayao Miyazaki, offers a more nuanced reading of the switch between nice mom and mean mom, with the witch grandmother Yubaba. Yubaba is murderous and terrifying, but is occasionally replaced by her kindly “twin sister” who invites the movie’s heroine to call her “grandma” and likes to make people tea and knit sweaters. In general terms, Miyazaki’s films seem comfortable with the idea that people aren’t all one way – that there are many, sometimes contradictory sides to our personalities, that are expressed at different times. By the end of Spirited Away, it’s strongly implied that Yubaba and her “sister” are actually the same person, each expressing different aspects of who she is.

The typical witch substitution removes all the negative aspects from mom, and sends them out into the world as a monster that can be defeated. It’s rare to find a mother figure who’s capable of both kindness and cruelty, and rarer still to find one who is predominantly cruel, without being wicked all the way through.

Where Other Mother and the witch from Tangled are pure evil wearing the mask of friendship, the witch from Into the Woods is the rare example of a mother figure who’s mostly bad, with occasional moments of goodness. That fits the story’s more mature approach to fairy tales, and its overarching message that right and wrong and good and bad are not as clear as children’s books would make them seem.

If the child-eaters of children’s stories are monsters, the ones in real life are more likely to be like the witch in Into the Woods: emotionally-immature adults with poor boundaries, who see their children as things that belong to them, like lamps and cars. They can be nice sometimes. They can elicit pity. They can express vulnerable emotions, and they can share common experiences with parents who are mostly good. They honestly do want something to love, but they’d also love something to eat.

We’re so used to seeing negative human qualities externalized into monsters, that’s it’s still surprising when a character is both monstrous and recognizably human. In a story that’s about adulthood, and coming to understand yourself and the world more clearly, the crucial move Into the Woods makes is in allowing Rapunzel’s witch mother to be her “real” mother – the only one she’ll ever know. The childhood projections of nice mom and mean mom collapse into one single person, and the thought that was too terrible to entertain in childhood – that maybe your mom is a witch – becomes real, layered and deepened through the knowledge that witches can also be people.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Gibson’s Gonna Be OK: The Comfort of Hypercompetent Heroes

The lead character in BBC’s ‘The Fall’ is impervious to fear, but that’s OK. She’s doing the modern detective’s work of making us all feel safe in a world that’s anything but.

Written by Katherine Murray.

The lead character in BBC’s The Fall is impervious to fear, but that’s OK. She’s doing the modern detective’s work of making us all feel safe in a world that’s anything but.

The second season of The Fall just finished airing on the BBC and, while there’s been a slow decline in quality since the series premiere, it remains one of the only detectives shows – if not the only detective show – to acknowledge that violence against women is a built-in feature of patriarchal cultures rather than a random, strange coincidence. (Rebecca Solnit has a good essay about this in Men Explain Things to Me, if you want to get mad.)

The Fall is about serial killer named Paul Spector and Stella Gibson, the Gillian Anderson-looking detective who hunts him down. In his own mind, Paul is a dark, fascinating genius who’s playing a clever game of cat and mouse with the Irish police force. In almost everyone else’s mind, he’s a loser who hates women, and the police figure out who he is almost as soon as they start looking.

What makes The Fall an amazing piece of television is that it spits in the face of conventional serial killer narratives. Rather than being fascinated with Paul and how tortured and interesting he is, it’s focussed on how his hatred of women fits into a larger societal pattern, and how the lessons we learn about gender inform our beliefs and behaviours in life. It can be heavy-handed, but it’s also refreshing because it’s so different from the narrative we most often see.

The show spends roughly equal time on Spector and Gibson, but it’s Gibson we’re supposed to cheer for, and Gibson who’s built up as the ideal feminist woman. In the middle of a show full of terrifying, realistic, often heart-wrenching violence against women, Gibson’s there to make us feel safe. Not only because we know she’s going to catch Paul Spector and put him behind bars, but because she is completely and utterly awesome at everything. Perhaps unbelievably so.

The main source of tension in The Fall comes from fear and vulnerability. Watching the show, as a woman, you have the same chilling thought you have, as a woman, every time you’re walking alone at night, or hear a sound in your house while you’re sleeping: “What would I actually do if someone attacked me right now?” And the answer, if you’re honest, is that, even if you learned some krav maga one time, you would be just as terrified and just as dead as one of Spector’s victims.

The fear that men will attack us is something women carry around 24/7; it’s always simmering in the back of our minds, and The Fall forces us to look at it directly. In the middle of that horror, like a lifeline, or a warm blanket, Gibson the Terribly Competent stands impervious to fear. She can’t be intimidated by a bunch of tough guys on the street; she doesn’t freeze in an emergency; she can’t be made to feel ashamed for having sex; she breaks your nose if you don’t back off when she tells you to; she isn’t scared of some guy in a bar, or some guy in a limo, or even some guy who chokes other women to death. She looks at those guys with contempt and moves on with her life, without thinking the problem is her. No matter what, we know, she’s going to be OK.

It’s not actually unusual for the hero of a genre story to be hypercompetent. Like, we all understand that Jason Bourne is not realistic, right? And the guy from Mission Impossible? And that one detective from True Detective who said that time was round like a beer can? He was also improbably good at things.

What interests me about Gibson isn’t that it’s weird for the hero to be competent – it’s that, in this instance, her competence speaks to me and comforts me in way that Rust Cohle didn’t manage. She reminds me of another detective I like.

Appropriately, since Veronica Mars is set in high school, the tension in that story’s less about the fear of being killed and more about the fear of public humiliation. And Veronica, its hero, is impervious to all embarrassment.

In The Fall, it’s been implied that Gibson may have been assaulted at some time in the past, and that that’s what motivates her to work with female victims of violence. In Veronica Mars, it’s made explicit from the start that Veronica was the victim of the cruellest forms of high school bullying before she became the cynical, hypercompetent girl we know.

Whenever someone tries to insult, intimidate, or make fun of her, she has a snappy comeback to put them down. Whenever someone seems to get the upper hand against her, she manages to turn the tables somehow, making them look foolish in her place. In maybe the most blatant example, some popular boys she’s investigating put her name on the karaoke list in an attempt to embarrass her and make her back off. With only seconds to think it over, Veronica jumps up and sings the Blondie song “One Way or Another,” turning potential humiliation into a triumph as literally no real person could do.

Knowing that Veronica’s going to land on her feet whenever someone tries to bully her has the same warm blanket effect as knowing that Gibson can’t get scared. It’s not entirely realistic – for all of us, life involves at least some moments of fear and humiliation – but it gives us safe harbour in stories that are otherwise designed to make us anxious. In these particular contexts, Gibson and Veronica always know what to do, and the things they do always work. They allow us to confront the things that make us anxious with the safety net of knowing that it’s going to be OK.

And, if you’re going, “Katherine, that’s what all detectives do,” you’re sort of right.

Part of the point of detectives – at least modernist, soft-boiled detectives – is that they bring order to chaos and therefore restore our sense of safety. When Sherlock Holmes became popular, in Ye Olde Victorian England, it was in a context where urbanization, industrialization, and the expansion of the British empire had made people feel uncertain about what was happening. The world was changing really fast, there were a bunch of strangers around, and it felt like some random person could just murder you or steal your stuff and disappear into the crowd. (From a more racist point of view, it also seemed like a wizard from India could slip some potions in your tea, but that’s a different discussion from this.)

The calming figure of that era was a man with the superhuman ability to piece together tiny bits of information, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of literally everything that ever was, including scary foreign cultures. He was the safe harbour in the storm of modern living.

Flash forward about 100 years, and the same hero is reincarnated as House, a doctor who knows what’s wrong with you even when Web MD has no idea. Like Sherlock Holmes, House taps into our general fear that there is too much information for any one person to crunch. And, in a world where we are terrified that everything from our water bottles to our genes is trying to kill us in new, incomprehensible ways, the House version of Sherlock Holmes provides some safety, because House can see the pattern, House can understand what’s happening, and House can make some order out of chaos. Even if the MRI machine makes all your veins explode exactly in time for commercials, House will have the answer by the end.

The comfort of watching Gibson is both similar and different to the comfort of knowing that puzzles get solved. It’s the comfort of saying, “There’s someone who looks like me and, day to day, is not afraid to be alive. Someone who lives in the world I live in, that’s full of the terrors I face, and – realistically or not – is showing me what it could be like if I didn’t have to be scared.”

It’s a powerful counterpoint to the Man Kills Loads of Women – Is Special, Tortured Genius story that Spector thinks he’s starring in. This is Woman Is Not Afraid to Walk Down the Street; Woman is Not Afraid to Say No; Woman Isn’t Worried That She’ll Be a Total Drag if She Points Out What a Sexist Jerk You’re Being. It’s a different kind of fantasy than Knowing Lots or Solving Things – it’s Having a Right to Exist, opposite the story of a man who chokes women to death to feel strong. It’s the writers consciously and deliberately preventing this from being a story where you should have carried some mace to the bathroom, if you didn’t want to get killed in your house.

What’s different about Gibson isn’t that she’s extra specially good at stuff – it’s that the forces she’s facing off against are specifically aimed at women. The fear that she’s shielding us from is a fear that most men don’t carry around. The Fall, in its graphic and terrifying depictions of violence, would be unbearable to watch if Gibson wasn’t always at the centre, reminding us what life would be like if we didn’t have to feel afraid.

Different monsters require different kinds of heroes to defeat them. Gibson is the right kind of hero to face this kind of monster, and the strength of The Fall may be that it’s the first show to know which monster we’re trying to fight.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Putting the I in Family with ‘Force Majeure’

Quick! An avalanche is about to kill you and your family. Do you: A) Try to save your children, or B) Grab your phone and run away, leaving your loved-ones to perish? If you chose B, you may be the male lead of ‘Force Majeure,’ the sometimes-funny, sometimes-serious Swedish movie up for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2015 Golden Globe Awards.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Quick! An avalanche is about to kill you and your family. Do you:

A) Try to save your children, or

B) Grab your phone and run away, leaving your loved-ones to perish?

If you chose B, you may be the male lead of Force Majeure, the sometimes-funny, sometimes-serious Swedish movie up for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2015 Golden Globe Awards.

The story of Force Majeure – which is revealed in the trailers; I’m not giving anything away – is that a husband and wife, Tomas and Ebba, are enjoying a vacation with their two young children when what looks like an out-of-control avalanche comes barreling toward them. Believing they’re about to die, Ebba immediately tries to save the children, while Tomas abandons all three of them to save himself.

It turns out that the avalanche stops in time, so everyone’s all right, but the rest of the movie is about what it means – for Tomas and Ebba personally, and for their marriage – now that they know he’s a coward. From the moment the avalanche stops, they keep talking about it – and trying not to talk about it – as they try to decide whether it was a Big Deal, and whether it Means Something about the kind of person he is.

In real life, a “force majeure” is a clause in a contract that lets you out of your obligations in the event of a major catastrophe, such as a natural disaster. In Force Majeure, the question is whether Tomas – who generally has a good relationship with his family – can be forgiven for failing to be a good spouse and father, during extraordinary circumstances. What sounds like it could be a joke – man unexpectedly abandons family without a backward glance as soon as things get rough – becomes a very thoughtful and serious examination of what it means to be married to someone, what you have the right to expect from your spouse, and what the proper separation is between Self and Family.

As the film points out, women’s identities have traditionally been closely tied to their roles as wives and mothers, while men’s identities have been tied to their jobs and extra-familial achievements. It’s telling that, before the avalanche even arrives, Ebba (obliquely) accuses Tomas of focusing too much on work rather than his family. After the avalanche hits, the detail she zeroes in on is that he chose to save his phone – which he’s been using to check his work email – rather than helping her with the kids.

At the same time, the movie suggests that Ebba might be too wrapped up in her family. In one scene, she becomes disturbed and uncomfortable by the idea of polyamory, as explained to her by another tourist staying at the same resort. It isn’t just that she’s not poly herself – it’s that she can’t wrap her head around the idea that a polyamorous couple can lead separate lives while still being committed. When she’s separated from her family for an afternoon, she’s nearly catatonic without them, and bursts into tears when she sees them having fun without her.

By running away from the avalanche, Tomas separated himself from the we/us/ours that Ebba takes for granted as the centre of a meaningful relationship. There are lots of reasons why running away wasn’t the right thing to do, but the part that seems to bother her most is his selfishness.

For most of the film, Tomas and Ebba aren’t able to talk about what happened. It takes Ebba a long time to process what she’s feeling and, at first, she tries to pretend it’s OK. Tomas, on the other hand, at first tries to deny he was scared, and then denies he ran away. He retreats into a detached, intellectual position where he pretends to find it “interesting” that they have “different perspectives” on what happened, abandoning her a second time.

When they finally do talk about it, they drag in two of their friends, one of whom suggests that men from a certain generation were raised not to care about their children – something that starts a second argument about what it means to be a good father. Mats, the friend who’s been divorced already, defensively argues that he’s a good father because he provides financially for his children. His girlfriend points out that his children live with their mother, and suggests that he doesn’t put in enough face time to say he’s involved in their lives.

The disagreement spirals out in several different directions but, every direction it goes, it comes back to the idea that the roles we play in life, and the expectations we have of ourselves and each other, are coloured by gender.

Even though it’s not specifically discussed this way, there’s something gendered about the way Tomas initially refuses to admit that he was scared – about the way that he projects his feelings onto Ebba and tries to tell their friends that she was terrified while he stayed calm. There’s also something gendered about the way that Ebba can’t stop smiling when she’s angry – the way that she can’t stop talking about what happened, even when she hasn’t worked out what to say.

Force Majeure is about a world where men and women are supposed to be equal partners in marriage, but where we don’t yet know what that means. We’re watching an institution that used to mean one thing evolve to become something else. It’s exciting and confusing and the question, what does it mean to be a good partner or parent or woman or man, is one that gets more complicated as our notions of what’s possible expand.

Watching two people passive-aggressively argue about who did or didn’t run away when they were or weren’t about to die is a microcosm for the conflict at the heart of any union – what’s the separation between I and We?

No one knows. That’s what makes it riveting to watch.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Spirit Possession and Military Service: Talya Lavie Talks to Us About ‘Zero Motivation’

What were the biggest challenges in making a feature film? How do people see compulsory military service in Israel? Was that Russian girl really possessed by a ghost? Writer/director Talya Lavie answers our questions about her award-winning film.

Zero Motivation, which won Best Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a dark slacker comedy set in the Israeli military. You can read our review of it here.

The first feature-length film from writer-director Talya Lavie, Zero Motivation was inspired by her own military service. In the Director’s Note found in the movie’s press kit, Lavie writes that “Israeli women may of course serve in more glamorous roles, like pilots or tank crew instructors. But I wanted to focus on us office girls, the unseen and mostly ignored majority whose contribution is lacking any social or symbolic value.”

While promoting the film’s release in New York, she took the time to follow up on that statement, and to answer a few of our questions.

Bitch Flicks: Most of our readers are from the US and Canada, where the concept of mandatory military service is a little bit foreign, so I’m wondering if you could expand on that statement and talk about how you see the role of female conscripts in the Israeli military.

Lavie: Israel is one of the only countries that has mandatory military service for women as well as men. It creates a paradox because, on the one hand, it’s a symbol of equality but, at the same time, the IDF… still demonstrates real gender discrimination. There are women in combat roles but, as I said, the majority of women are still doing secretarial jobs. I believe this may change only if the army becomes less central in Israeli society – hopefully one day.

BF: In many ways, this is a coming of age story, but one that takes place within a very specific setting. (How) do you think that serving in the military has influenced the way these characters define themselves and develop as individuals?

Lavie: In a way, the army for those characters is what college is for Americans. Everyone participates and accepts it as a fact. It is, though, challenging to define your individual identity while having to wear the same uniform as everyone else, and to [live under these] rules. I guess it influences each person in a different way, like every other thing in life.

BF: While the film is very funny, there are a few darker moments in the story. How did you go about managing the changes in tone in the film?

Lavie: The film is defined as a “dark comedy” but, while writing the script, I didn’t want to lock myself into a specific genre. I put a large [range] of emotions in it, and was interested in mixing different spirits. Ultimately, my greatest challenge was to maintain the specific subtle tone of the film; to balance the transitions between humor, sadness, nonsense and seriousness. I felt like an acrobat in a circus walking on a rope, trying not to fall off, and yet to keep the film’s free spirit.

BF: I think the sequence where Irena is “possessed” by the spirit of the dead girl works really well on a metaphorical level, but inquiring minds want to know – was she really possessed by a ghost?

Lavie: All of the characters in the film have a very detailed biography that is not told in the movie – none of them gives a personal monologue. But their background is hinted at in many ways. In Irena’s character, we tried to hint that she has a history of violence. And when she sees Zohar nearly raped, it brings a very strong reaction out of her. Is she really possessed? I leave it for each viewer to decide for himself.

BF: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in making this film, and do you have any advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Lavie: The biggest challenge was raising the budget for the film. It took several years. That stage in the creation of a film can be very frustrating for any first time filmmaker. My advice for filmmakers at this point is, in addition to applying anywhere you can, use that waiting time for learning and preparing for shooting. Eventually, when I look back on the process, that waiting period was frustrating but also useful for rewriting and studying. I came to the set very prepared. And since we had a very short time for shooting, [being prepared] was significant.

Thank you to Talya Lavie for taking the time to speak with us. Zero Motivation is currently playing in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and other select cities in North America.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Suck

So, you just saw a terrible movie and you want to tell the world about it – not so fast. How we frame our discussions about sucky movies depends on who’s listening, and whether we’ve got common ground.

Written by Katherine Murray.

There’s no such thing as a movie that’s universally hated, or a movie that’s universally loved. No matter how awful something is, there’s always somebody who likes it and, no matter how wonderful something is, there’s always somebody who thinks it’s garbage – that is the wondrous variety of human taste.

That said, if there’s one movie that almost everyone agrees is bad, it’s Neil LaBute’s 2006 re-make of The Wicker Man.

Starring Nicholas Cage at his Nicholas Cage-iest, The Wicker Man is a two-hour exercise in casual misogyny, featuring a confusing and unsuspenseful plot. It’s so bad that the YouTube videos designed to make fun of it literally do nothing but show scenes from the movie, exactly as they played out.

It isn’t hard to find people who agree that The Wicker Man was terrible, and it isn’t hard to find people who agree that it was misogynist – what’s weird is that discussions of misogyny in the film usually begin and end with the statement, “Nicholas Cage dresses up as a bear and punches women in the face.” And, while that is entirely terrible on multiple levels, it’s not the most offensive thing about the movie. The most offensive thing about the movie is that it takes for granted that there’s something disturbing and sinister about women who don’t take orders from men.

Billed as a horror story, The Wicker Man follows a detective who’s investigating a case outside his jurisdiction. That means that, when he travels to the remote community where the mystery’s taking place, he doesn’t have the power to make any of the citizens of that community – who are predominantly female – cooperate with him. Instead of adjusting his strategy and approaching them in a friendlier way, he starts off by screaming at everyone he meets, and then acts surprised when they don’t want to help him. Yet, the fact that the female characters recoil from him rather than scrambling to follow his orders is treated, by the movie, as though it’s a sign that Something Is Wrong.

The movie also features a large number of sequences where Nicholas Cage asks a woman a direct question, and the woman a) gives a vague answer that doesn’t help, b) answers with a total non-sequitur, or c) pretends not to understand what he’s talking about in a deliberate attempt to make him feel crazy. In other words, it’s just like talking to your wife – please, take my wife!

At the very end of the movie, when All Is Revealed, it turns out that Nicholas Cage’s ex-girlfriend purposely got pregnant so that she could guilt him into taking an interest in the welfare of their child, and use that as leverage to lure him to the freaky matriarchy she lives in, so that she and her womyn friends could sacrifice him to their pagan god, ‘cause women be bitches like that.

There’s no shortage of angles to take when you’re discussing the misogyny in this film, but the one that seems to resonate most with mainstream audiences is, “Nicholas Cage dresses up like a bear and punches women in the face” – which he does, for the entire final act – because we have achieved a state of gender-awareness in our culture where dressing up as a bear and punching women in the face is almost universally seen as a bad thing to do. Presenting a worldview in which powerful women are inherently threatening, women’s reasoning ability is suspect, and women use sex and pregnancy as a way to trap and manipulate men is actually more misogynist to me than having a guy dress up like a bear and punch women in the face, but that puts me out of step with the general discussion.

In other words, it’s really easy to get buy-in for the idea that The Wicker Man sucks, but we might not be adding much to the discussion of misogyny when we do that.

In fact, the truth is that I find myself not wanting to argue about exactly why this movie is misogynist, because I’m afraid that, if I start disturbing the soil around that one, I’ll quickly uncover the truth that most people don’t understand that misogyny is more than punching someone in the face. I’m afraid I’ll discover that most people hate this movie because it offends their sense that men should be chivalrous toward women – that they would be totally fine with everything else, if only he didn’t dress up like a bear and start punching.

I’m also afraid that the only reason people are really willing to criticize the content of The Wicker Man is because it’s also poorly made from a technical standpoint. If they were enjoying themselves more – if it were a little better-looking, and, technically, more well-crafted, I’m not sure it would be so easy to toss out this level of scorn.

Sin City is a film that is technically well made (so, one step up from The Wicker Man) and still completely blatant in its misogyny (with racism added to spice things up). I can tell you from personal experience that it’s a lot harder to have a conversation about why you hate Sin City than it is to make fun of The Wicker Man.

The first thing that Sin City’s defenders will tell you is that it is hateful on purpose (as though doing it on purpose makes it better). Frank Miller and the movie are imitating film noir – that genre where dames were dames and the hero was a hard-luck, working class guy who was awesome at bare-knuckle boxing, and gay people arrived in a cloud of evil smoke. I get that that’s on purpose, but all it means is that Sin City did a really good job of mimicking something sexist. If it’s not challenging, or examining, or interrogating the sexist thing in any way, then I need another reason for why someone thought that was a good idea.

The problem with criticizing Sin City is that it gets us into a discussion about whether a work of art can be both technically proficient and fundamentally unworthy in some other way. In other words, it gets us into a discussion of what we mean when we say a movie is “good.” Given the history of moral censorship in the United States and Canada, people are rightly cautious of the idea that we should declare things good or bad based on whether or not we agree with their values. At the same time, completely removing yourself from the meaning of a movie, or the ideas it’s trying to express, and focussing just on whether the camera was in the right place, and the pixels were coloured correctly, seems to be missing the point.

Sin City is a staggering technical achievement, and the tone I use when I criticize it is different because of that. It’s not like The Wicker Man, where you can just write it off, and be satisfied that everyone agrees with the broad-stroke message, “This movie was totally bad.” People have passionate feelings about whether or not it’s possible for a misogynist story to be good if it’s also well-executed. They have passionate feelings about whether it’s even appropriate to consider a story’s misogyny (or racism, or homophobia, or other ideological content) in rendering a verdict about it. The truth is, philosophically, I don’t know if it should be possible for a misogynist movie to be “good” – but I know that I can’t quite hear myself saying, “I found this completely hateful and, oh my god, it was the best!”

Just to be clear, for anyone who doesn’t remember the film, Sin City is about three tough, underworld men who interact with subservient women – mostly prostitutes and exotic dancers. The women have no power, no ability to look after themselves, no ability to make decisions – whenever they try to act, they just make things worse. The Black one is “wild” and she thinks it’s sexy when a guy hits her in the face. The Asian one doesn’t talk and carries samurai swords. The one who’s a stripper is told that she’s “strong” because she can really take a beating without screaming or crying about it. All of the women are sexually available to the men at the centre of the story. At one point, the prostitutes tie up one of the men, and it seems like they have the upper hand, but he reveals that he could have escaped at any time and was just humouring them.

It is horrible.

And yet, unpacking the horribleness of Sin City requires a deftness and care that isn’t required for The Wicker Man. You don’t have the automatic buy-in that comes from Nicholas Cage in a bear suit. You have to start talking about what you mean when you say something’s “good.” Imagine how difficult it would be if the misogyny were just a shade less obvious.

Gone Girl is the reason I’m writing this post because, holy shit, it is hard to talk about Gone Girl.

Megan Kearns did an admirable job of explaining what’s wrong with this movie, and I won’t re-tread the same criticisms, but my reaction, watching it opening weekend, was one of total shock. I could not believe the dedication with which this script was trying to score misogynist bingo. Like, I thought it was written by an MRA hate group. The overriding message, intentionally or not, is that, when a woman says a man attacked her, you should never, ever believe her, because it’s probably part of a nefarious scheme she cooked up just to get revenge on him for something, and women are crazy like that.

Unfortunately, we already live in a world where, every time a woman says a man attacked her, a thousand people who don’t even know her rush forward to call her a liar. We live in a world where guys I actually know said this Jian Ghomeshi stuff was probably a lie before any of us even knew what it was. We live in a world where one of the same guys said that whether you need a girl’s permission to punch her in the face during sex is “kind of” a murky issue (it’s not).

Watching Gone Girl spin out a misogynist fever dream about the lying liars we call women was unsettling enough, but a cursory search of the internet also revealed that this has been a longstanding argument since the novel came out, and that things seem to have settled in a place where it’s not cool to be annoyed by this story. In fact, trying to have a conversation about why you don’t like Gone Girl is like walking through a mine field that calls you a misandrist bitch. Don’t you believe that some men are trapped in abusive relationships? Don’t you believe that some women lie about rape? Don’t you think that people manipulate each other sometimes? Or can you just not handle the idea that any woman in a movie isn’t perfect? Does every woman in every movie that you deign to like have to be a role model? Can you handle the idea that some women aren’t very nice?

Honestly, it just makes me more entrenched in my original assessment that this wasn’t a very good movie.

Gone Girl is, I think, less well-made than Sin City, but worlds beyond The Wicker Man. What makes it difficult to talk about is that the problems with the story – as I’m choosing to call them – are much less concrete than dressing up like a bear and punching someone in the face. In order to talk about Gone Girl we have to talk about the much more abstract question of whether it seems appropriate, given the current political climate, and the rate of violence against women, and the difficulty women have in being believed when they report being assaulted by men – in that climate, do you think it’s appropriate, or do you think it necessarily constitutes a hostile act, to tell a story where the moral is that women are crazy liars and no one should ever believe them?

That’s harder to deal with than Nicholas Cage in a bear suit.

I don’t know the proper way to talk about movies that suck – or the proper way to determine whether they suck at all – but the answer might be that, instead of deciding whether or not something sucks, or how many stars it should have on a scale of one to five, we should talk about movies not as wholes to be judged, but collections of various elements, some of which are great (or fine) and some of which are problematic.

Don’t get me wrong – I love to say “suck,” and I doubt that I’m going to stop – but it occurs to me that I’m less prepared to argue for why any of these movies sucked than I am to argue for why I found particular elements troubling. I think that might be what I’m talking about, when I talk about suck. And I think I might be more eloquent, if I paid more attention to that.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

‘Zero Motivation’: A Female Slacker Comedy Set in the Israeli Army

Despite having familiar themes of disaffected youth in dead-end jobs, ‘Zero Motivation’ is one of those rare, uniquely positioned films that couldn’t have been made by anybody else. Writer and director Tayla Lavie draws on her own experience in the Israeli military to tell a dryly funny and sometimes shocking story about female conscripts who have neither the skill nor the will to serve in the army.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Despite having familiar themes of disaffected youth in dead-end jobs, Zero Motivation is one of those rare, uniquely positioned films that couldn’t have been made by anybody else. Writer and director Tayla Lavie draws on her own experience in the Israeli military to tell a dryly funny and sometimes shocking story about female conscripts who have neither the skill nor the will to serve in the army.

Israel is currently the only country (other than Eritrea, whose conscription practices may be considered a human rights abuse) where women over the age of 18 are required to serve in the military. Norway is making plans to include women in its mandatory service, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The characters of Zero Motivation are, then, 18-20-year-old female conscripts who’ve completed basic training and been assigned to a remote base where they work in “Human Resources” as secretaries. Daffi, who still wears jelly bracelets and writes letters to headquarters begging to be reassigned, has been given the job of office paper shredder. Her best friend, Zohar, sorts the mail.

The characters in this movie (for the most part) are just marking time until their two years are up – although their superiors allude to Israel’s conflict with its neighbours, and to soldiers who’ve been killed in action, we see that lower-level support staff are not particularly involved or invested in what’s happening. For them, this is more like Office Space or Clerks than Full Metal Jacket or The Thin Red Line.

That contrast, while not the focal point of the movie, adds another layer of interest to the already familiar situation of seeing disaffected youth in dead-end jobs. There are two scenes in particular where the secretaries’ commanding officer – also a woman – attends an important meeting about military strategy, and then leaves during the most interesting part of the discussion because she has to find out why the coffee isn’t ready.

There’s another scene where the same commanding officer is about to give a speech that she’s clearly worked hard on preparing and, during the only moment that her male superiors are paying attention to her, they’re all called away to an emergency. She never gets to say what she’d planned and, poignantly, she seems resigned to being unimportant.

It’s hard to say how much a role gender plays in the situation depicted in Zero Motivation, but I’ve had the experience of working in organizations where the departments perceived as least important somehow filled up with women, who were then ignored. I’ve also seen firsthand how support staff – who also tend to be women – are sometimes treated as a necessary evil rather than a vital part of the team.

The situation in Zero Motivation is unique to Israel in that the characters are conscripted for two years after turning eighteen, but, in more broad and general terms, it’s an experience that many young people and women have, around the world, of being pushed into jobs with low levels of responsibility, where they’re treated with low levels of respect.

Zero Motivation is primarily a comedy that’s based on watching Zohar rebel against any suggestion that she should try to do a good job in the army. As with any slacker comedy, we understand why she’s not interested in serving a system that tells her all she’s capable of is sorting mail (and then looks down on her for sorting it), and we cheer for her when she finds ways to get out of doing work.

The primary conflict – which starts simmering in the first of the movie’s three chapters, and explodes in chapter three – comes from the fact that Daffi, motivated by the desire to transfer to a better post in Tel-Aviv, sells out to the man by becoming an officer.

Suddenly, she and Zohar are at odds over whether they should take their dumb jobs seriously, and Daffi is placed in the same kill-joy position as the secretaries’ commanding officer. In order to advance her own career, she needs the group not to be total screw-ups, and she’s frustrated that there’s no way to convince them to try.

As the ringleader of the screw-ups, Zohar is resentful that Daffi chose to buy into the system at the expense of their friendship, and refuses to accept that she has any authority after she’s commissioned.

Together, they act out the age-old struggle between trying to fight the system, and trying to work within it. And, while it could be taking place in any Western workplace, the fact that it’s taking place in the army sends an extra message – that this is what you get when you fill the ranks with people who don’t want to be there and treat them like crap. You get the same thing as you get at the McDonalds counter.

The middle section of the movie, which takes place while Zohar’s left to fend for herself, and Daffi’s away at officer training, is the one that veers the farthest from the through line, but also includes the most direct discussion of gender.

The middle section is about Zohar trying to lose her virginity, on the advice of her Russian co-worker, Irena. The story takes a surprising (and surreal) turn, however, when Irena becomes possessed by the spirit of another girl who killed herself after a boy was mean to her. Spirit-possessed Irena follows Zohar around in a trance, ruining her date with a male paratrooper, and – in one of the movie’s darker turns – saving her from an attempted rape.

The spirit possession is never explained in non-supernatural terms, but it makes sense on a metaphorical level – that, after giving Zohar bad advice to hook up with any random dude she can find, Irena remembers what happened to the last girl who did that, and undoes her bad advice by protecting Zohar from getting hurt.

The entire middle sequence is more a coming-of-age story than a workplace comedy, and it serves the purpose of making Zohar more sympathetic due to showing us her vulnerability, while also driving home the point that these are teenagers, who are still figuring out things like sex and relationships. They did not magically become mature, worldly adults when someone put a rifle in their hands.

What’s interesting about Zero Motivation, from a foreigner’s perspective, is that military service is taken for granted as part of the same right of passage – something that follows secondary school, the way freshman year of college follows secondary school in the USA. The army is a place where young people go when they’re still trying to figure out who they are and what they want to do with their lives.

While that’s true of many young people in countries other than Israel, Israel’s unique conscription policies have created the backdrop for a story that has a singular point of view, and a voice that’s not often heard in cinema.

Zero Motivation is worth seeing on its merits as an entertaining comedy, but it’s also worth seeing as something that adds to the cultural conversation by contributing something we don’t usually hear.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Where is the Female Version of ‘Whiplash’?

I’d really like to see more introspective films about the human experience where the humans experiencing things look like me.

Written by Katherine Murray.

I’d really like to see more introspective films about the human experience where the humans experiencing things look like me.

Two weeks ago, I made a special trip downtown to see Whiplash, a movie that is every bit as good as its rave reviews have promised. Whiplash is tense and thoughtful, with skilful pacing and a stunning conclusion, and it asks challenging questions about the human experience. What is achievement? What drives us? What is the value of love and approval?

I absolutely recommend it – but that’s not what I want to talk about, here.

Aside from having an awesome, introspective story that deals in universal human themes, Whiplash has one other prominent feature – 99.9 percent of it is dudes.

The music student and music teacher at the core of the story are dudes, the other people in their band are all dudes, the main supporting character – who is the music student’s father – is a dude. Melissa Benoist is there for about seven minutes, cumulatively, and then the rest of the movie is about men grappling with big, important questions.

There’s nothing wrong with that – and, in popular cinema, there’s also nothing unusual about that – but it did make me wonder: why can’t we have more introspective movies about the human experience where the humans experiencing things are women?

Like, speaking as a woman, I am just as interested in big, existential, philosophical, and psychological questions as men are. I spend just as much time trying to figure them out, and they have just as much relevance to my life – but you wouldn’t really guess that from going to the movies.

Most of the time, when you watch a movie about how A Person should deal with X, the person is a man. To the point that it really stands out, when it’s not.

Gravity, for instance, aside from being a feast for your 3D glasses, is a story about how A Person should deal with loss. And it’s striking because the person is played by Sandra Bullock, and she’s on screen alone for most of the movie, grappling with universal human challenges like how to process grief, and how to find the will to live after experiencing trauma.

A lot of critics have argued that the film would have been better if it had just been about trying to fix a space shuttle without getting blown up, without making it a metaphor for how Sandra Bullock overcomes the loss of her child. It’s the loss and grief story, though, that takes this from being an action movie with a female protagonist – which is rare enough – to being an introspective movie about the human experience with a female protagonist – a genre that might be the rarest of all.

Depending which types of movies you’re analyzing, only 15 to 23 percent of top-grossing films have a female protagonist, despite the fact that women make up half the population. I’m willing to bet that, if we could easily cordon off and analyze the percentage of female protagonists in introspective movies about the human experience, the numbers would be even lower.

You’ve got your female action heroes, and you’ve got your female romantic leads – you’ve even got your female gross-out and/or buddy comedies, now. Occasionally, you even get your female everyman in the shape of Anna Kendrick. But, finding a woman as the stand-in for humanity is like finding a unicorn in a world where horses are already almost extinct.

If you look at this survey of Hollywood movies that came out in 2012, none of the ones with a female lead – except Brave, which is specifically about how there’s more than one acceptable way to be female – seem to be concerned with especially deep questions. This is the same year that brought us Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi, Looper, and ParaNorman – male-led stories with varying levels of introspection that focus on questions of history and human connection, belief, our capacity to learn to care for others, and compassion in the face of fear. Female-led movies in the survey include a couple of horror movies, an instalment in the Twilight franchise, The Hunger Games (which was good, but not that deep), and whatever the hell Snow White and the Huntsman was supposed to be.

Casually searching the internet for lists of existential movies, or movies about what it means to be human also returns a lot of movies about dudes.

That’s not to say that there aren’t deep, introspective movies with female protagonists. It’s just that they’re few and far between.

Slogging through Melancholia is about as fun as slogging through real depression, but it’s an introspective movie about a person who’s grappling with Big Questions concerning depressive realism, and whether pessimism is just good sense. Similarly, Black Swan is (arguably) a movie about a person grappling with identity, and how we reconcile with our shadow selves.

Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain – or, Amélie – is an introspective story about a person who struggles with shyness and how to take risks. And, it works at least as well as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which is about exactly the same thing, only starring a male protagonist.

So, there are some introspective films about the human experience that feature a female protagonist. But, why do these stories so often default to male?

The first explanation would be that most of the writers, directors, and producers working on movies are men, and therefore they’re more likely to create a male protagonist, because that’s the experience and perspective they’re most familiar and comfortable with.

Fair enough.

Though I hasten to add that Gravity, Melancholia, and Amélie were all written and directed by men, I think it’s valid for a story-teller to gravitate to telling stories about characters of their own gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. In some cases, it can even seem arrogant for story-tellers to presume to speak for people with different life experiences. That’s why it’s important to make room for stories told by people who’ve been underrepresented in media. You know, instead of making it as hard as possible for those people to get in on the action.

The second explanation also goes a long way toward answering the question, “Why does this even matter, Katherine?” and concerns the way that media presents “male” as standard and “female” as a special variation on “male.”

This is feminist criticism 101 and I won’t get into a long discussion of it, but everyone reading this blog understands that we live in a culture where “person” defaults to male a hell of a lot more often than it defaults to female – where being a woman is a marked status that denotes something other than a normal/average/neutral individual. Men and women are so used to seeing men as the default human that it can create a self-perpetuating cycle where writers keep reaching for “a man” when they mean to say “a person,” and the constant presentation of “a person” as “a man” on screen just reinforces that bias.

True story: I’m a woman, and I write things, and unless I specifically stop myself and take stock of what I’m doing, I default to male characters when I just need some random person. This is a thing that happens without malice or even intent, which is why it’s important to bring the pattern to conscious awareness.

Introspective human experience movies are typically more about A Person than they are about an individual with really specific characteristics; there’s a good chance that men are the default just because nobody’s thinking about it that much.

The third explanation, and the one that bums me out the most, is that there may be a perception that women either aren’t interested in or aren’t as capable of answering philosophical questions – something that’s also suggested by the unfortunate pattern where male actors are asked deep questions about the issues raised by their movies, and female actors are asked about their bodies and clothes.

Happily, the solution is the same no matter what the explanation is: we need to balance things out by creating more movies like Gravity, and Melancholia, and Amélie, where the stories are about people grappling with problems that people must face, and the people in question are women.

Just like it’s right that Matthew McConaughey should be able to star in a movie that’s specifically about masculinity (Mud), and a movie that’s about the abstract question of human selflessness (Interstellar), female actors should be able to take the lead in movies that are specifically about women as well as movies that are about people in general – because they represent both of those things.

So, where is the female version of Whiplash? It’s 50 years forward in time, when “person” has an equal chance of meaning “woman.”

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Life is a Battleground in ‘Drunken Butterflies’

Rockhopper Productions’ first feature film, ‘Drunken Butterflies,’ is a fun-to-watch experiment in filmmaking that’s focused on friendship between working-class Newcastle girls.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Rockhopper Productions’ first feature film, Drunken Butterflies, is a fun-to-watch experiment in filmmaking that’s focused on friendship between working-class Newcastle girls.

“Would you rather have Tracy’s extensions or Tracy’s face?”

So begins a conversation between Tracy’s two best friends in Drunken Butterflies, the debut film from UK director Garry Sykes, now available on VOD.

Billed as a cross between “scripted reality TV” and narrative story-telling, Butterflies is a loosely plotted, largely improvised day-in-the-life movie about six fictional Newcastle teens and the shifting friendships between them. The film relied on its cast of young actors to develop and workshop the characters and story, following a 20-page outline, and portions of the footage were filmed directly by the actors, using phones and hand-held cameras.

In other words, it’s a lot like The Blair Witch Project, if The Blair Witch Project contained an extended dialogue about vajazzling and didn’t make you want to puke.

As the story begins, the film’s main character, Chloe, has just had a falling-out with the hard-as-nails Tracy, causing four of their friends to pick sides to the tune of The Pipettes’ aptly-chosen “Judy.”

The next 90 minutes track the group’s movements through the day, following them through minor acts of betrayal, sporadic outbursts of violence, and moments of genuine caring. Their lives are volatile, confusing, and uncertain, but their makeup looks really amazing.

As an experiment in film-making, Drunken Butterflies could have been more ambitious.

The film adopts a style that’s reminiscent of reality TV and documentaries, and there’s a self-referential scene toward the end, where two of the characters talk about how reality shows are all scripted, but there doesn’t seem to be a concrete message about the line between reality and fiction. Butterflies is more of a pastiche of different modes of representation, acknowledging that, in the age of reality TV and social media, the way that we present ourselves has changed. That those things are an extension of the fronts we already put up for the world.

It would have been nice if the film had done more with that idea, or delved deeper into questions of truth and personal identity – I don’t quite buy the press packet’s claim that “the lines between fiction and reality… crumble to nothing” because of this style – but the movie, I think, still succeeds in capturing something true.

While I didn’t grow up on the “Geordie Shore,” and can’t speak to how real that is, I recognize the girls in this movie as people who could have appeared in my own life – in some cases, as people who could have been me. I remember what it’s like to start a fight with someone just because. To stand there screaming the f-word, self-righteous, because you get off on the drama. To dare someone to hit you in the parking lot.

Ah, youth.

It’s a side of girlhood – and maybe a class-specific side of girlhood – that isn’t represented that often, and often isn’t represented in such a sympathetic way.

This is, first and foremost, a movie about female “toughness” – a quality that’s maybe less required of middle-class women, or is expressed by them in a different way. This is the toughness of physical fights – of being so hard that nothing can hurt you, because there’s a world of hurt waiting outside the front door.

As Butterflies starts to wind down, there are some plot threads that make less sense than they could, and some conflicts that seem to get resolved too easily, but the dominant theme is that life is an ongoing struggle. Each of the characters is fighting a private battle that sometimes puts her at odds with and sometimes makes her best friends with the others.

Life is chaotic and scary, and everyone’s just trying hard to survive.

Butterflies is also the rare film that focuses intently on relationships between girls, treating their interactions with boys as an afterthought. The event that sets everything in motion is the discovery that Chloe cheated on Tracy’s brother, Liam, but this isn’t a movie about whether Chloe and Liam will get back together – it’s about whether Chloe and Tracy will get back together. Liam is – in some cases, literally – pushed to the side while they argue about it.

Although gender isn’t the primary focus of the film, the story takes place in a setting where its heroes are, for the most part, menaced by cat-calls and threats of attack, where they talk to each other in front of a wall of pornography posted by boys. It’s uncomfortable to watch them turn their anger on “soft” targets – like a mild-mannered boy named Chris, whom they corner and bully – but there’s also something about that that rings true, even if the film doesn’t examine it at any great depth.

The decision to mold the characters based on the actors’ personalities means that even those with less experience come across as fairly convincing, and the use of hand-held cameras and cell phone video add a sense of immersion and reality to the experience.

For a film that was made on a pretty tight budget, Drunken Butterflies looks and sounds great – it’s an extremely watchable film that’s visually interesting as well as interesting to think about. Rather than having the freak show vibe that reality TV can carry, it feels like a sincere attempt to understand a particular intersection of gender and class that’s often ridiculed or stigmatized.

In that sense, I think it does achieve its goal of blending reality and fiction, in order to get at the truth.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Is ‘Glee’ The Rachel Berry Show? (The Answer May be Kind of)

‘Glee’ was set in Lima, and then it was set in Lima and New York, and then it was set in New York, and now, for its final, thirteen-episode season, it’s moving back to Lima. The most important thing, though, is that it’s finally going to end.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Glee was set in Lima, and then it was set in Lima and New York, and then it was set in New York, and now, for its final, 13-episode season, it’s moving back to Lima. The most important thing, though, is that it’s finally going to end.

Glee has been on for five seasons, and there was no point during that time when it knew when it was trying to be. Originally conceived of as a cynical indie film, the TV show version of Glee became a mishmash of voices, depending on who was writing each episode, and it swung from satire to saccharine, comedy to drama, genuine insight to whatever the hell “Shooting Star” was supposed to be on a regular basis.

Glee has never known what it’s trying to be, but the question really got called at the end of season three, when most of the main characters were due to graduate high school. At that point, somebody had to decide: is Glee a show about a high school glee club, or is it a show about particular characters, whom we can follow after they step outside high school?

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the answer was still “I don’t know.”

The next one and a half seasons were split between the fictional high school, stationed in Lima, and a fictional performing arts school in New York, where most of the graduating characters happened to go. The New York plot line (eventually) featured three of the characters who had anchored the show during the first three seasons – heterosexual diva Rachel Berry, martyred gay man Kurt, and razor-tongued lesbian Santana.

In a slightly aged-up version of Fame, the characters lived and worked in New York, while Rachel and Kurt attended the fictional arts school, and they dealt with young-adult problems, like how to make long-distance relationships work, how to choose between competing opportunities, and how to deal with setbacks and disappointment. Adam Lambert was also there, for some reason.

Back in Lima, the B-team was still going to high school, and high school was full of new characters… who not-so-cleverly stepped in to fill the exact same roles as the old characters who’d left. Only, they had less distinct personalities, because no one is going to own the role of “The New Rachel” the way Lea Michele owns Rachel, and no one is going to be the new Kurt.

Part of Glee’s success came from its original casting decisions. The role of Rachel was written with Lea Michele in mind, and Kurt was created for Chris Colfer, after he auditioned for another part. Naya Rivera and Heather Morris (Santana and her on-again-off-again girlfriend, Brittany) were originally cast in small roles that got bigger once it became clear that their delivery was turning the characters into fan favorites. None of the characters added late in the series – except, arguably, Kurt’s boyfriend, Blaine – have made such a strong impression.

It’s understandable that the producers would want to keep Lea Michele, Chris Colfer, and some of their other rapidly aging stars. The problem is that Glee was never framed as a story about particular people; it was framed as a story about the high school experience.

Shows that start out in high school typically have a rocky transition once the characters graduate. The ones that manage it best are the ones that are focused on particular people who happen to be in high school, rather than high schools who happen to have people in them.

Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, for example, followed its main character from high school to college, and then from college to normal adulthood. The series was never about Sunnydale High – it was about the girl who killed vampires there. Similarly, Veronica Mars managed a slightly less graceful, but still pretty good transition to college, since the series was more about Veronica being a private detective than it was about Neptune High.

The way that Glee was framed and presented, during its first three seasons, it was mostly a show about high school. Rachel Berry was the lead character, but the focus of the show was the high school glee club and its power to transform the lives of students (by literally making them good singers as soon as they stepped inside the choir room, without any practice or training – I digress). The point of the show was that there were multiple journeys of personal discovery, and they were all united by the glee club.

Fame 2.0, in New York, was arguably a better show than Glee, but it wasn’t Glee, and, as we cut back and forth between the two shows, for one and a half seasons, it eventually became clear that someone was going to have to make a choice about which show to pour production resources into.

Someone chose New York.

The last half (or thereabout) of season five dumped the high school story line completely and moved everyone interesting – mostly characters who were introduced during the first three seasons – to New York on a permanent basis. The only strong character who didn’t move there was Coach Sylvester, played by Jane Lynch, but she came by to visit when she wasn’t hosting Hollywood Game Night. It was the right decision in terms of making a show that was good, but it was the wrong decision in terms of making a show that was Glee.

And, now the show is moving back to Lima for its final season. And its characters are now people who keep hanging around their old high school after they’ve already graduated.

The boldest, riskiest decision that Glee could have made two years ago would have been to dump its existing characters and try to create the same magic with an incoming cast. But that’s not the world we live in.

Instead, Glee has become a hybrid of High School Choir Show, and The Rachel Berry Show, with Rachel (who is still the series’ most recognizable character) tethered to her high school for the rest of her life, in order that the series may exist. In season six, she’ll return to McKinley High – along with lots of her friends – as the new coach of the glee club. It’s sort of like when Buffy became a “counselor” at her high school, during the last and worst season, just so the action could take place on site.

Rachel’s story – which mirrors the story of many of the characters on Glee – was that she wasn’t pretty, and she wasn’t popular, and people threw ice in her face, but she knew, deep down in her heart, that she could be somebody special. That all she had to do was believe in herself, and keep pushing, and trust that one day she’d get the brass ring. Unfortunately for her, Glee loved her so much that the show clipped her wings to stop her from flying away.

Her story is now (spoilers say) that she “failed” in chasing her dreams, and has become a music teacher, like the series’ other failed dreamer, Mr. Shue. If Rachel wanted to be a teacher because she loved it, that would be different, but her only consistent motivation, over the past five years, has been wanting to be a star – something that the show has alternately criticized and rewarded her for at different times.

The truth is that Glee has always been partly The Story of Rachel, and the stakes have always been partly about whether or not she can triumph, despite having been unpopular when she was sixteen. At heart, it’s an underdog story, where (rightly or wrongly) she is the principle underdog, and we’re led to believe that her suffering will be redeemed because she turns out to be special.

The fact that Rachel now, literally, cannot leave high school behind just reinforces one of the most troubling messages Glee has produced – that the person you are at 16 is the person you have to be, always. That you’d better embrace that person and sing a song about her, because any kind of change or growth is inauthentic.

An essential part of growing up is letting go, and learning to leave the past, whether good or bad, behind. It’s a tragedy if Rachel stays trapped in high school, either because it was the best time in her life (like Mr. Shue), or because it always haunts her as the worst.

The only hope I have for season six is that it somehow involves letting Rachel go free. After hate-watching this thing for five years, though, I’m also just glad it will end.

The final season of Glee is set to air in 2015.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Six Types of Political Movies (Spoiler: This Genre Includes Literally All Movies)

All art is political. That’s what they teach you in art school, and it’s what they teach you in criticism school. It’s apparently not what they teach you in internet troll school.

Written by Katherine Murray.

All art is political. That’s what they teach you in art school, and it’s what they teach you in criticism school. It’s apparently not what they teach you in Internet troll school. In a turn of events that is both terrifying and depressing, a feminist game critic was recently driven from her home by threats of violence after some men didn’t like a video she made. If you’ve been following the story, one of the ideas that keeps coming up is the notion that this critic was somehow imposing a political viewpoint on a space that was neutral before she arrived. She was, as the troll legends tell it, “ruining” something that was “pure entertainment” by “trying to make it political.”

Film has been treated as an art form, and been subject to the same critical analysis as art, for long enough now that it doesn’t gall people to see a review that focuses on more than the technical mechanics of how the thing was made. Even so, if you’re a critic who’s interested in gender, race, or sexuality, you still get blasted from time to time for “making things political” when they otherwise wouldn’t be.

With that in mind, may I present:

6 Types of Political Movies

1. The Message Movie

The Message Movie explicitly takes a position on some political topic. Brave is about how women have the right to choose their own destinies. Born on the Fourth of July is an indictment of the Vietnam War. Quills at least thinks it’s about how freedom of expression is the most important good.

Message Movies don’t have to be blunt and simple – and I would argue that Brave and Born on the Fourth of July are fairly nuanced in their presentation – but the blunt, simple movies are the ones that are easiest to point to.

For example, Water, directed by Deepa Mehta, is a really nice-looking two hour lecture on how the Laws of Manu have led to women’s oppression in India. The two main story lines – about a young woman who’s forced into prostitution and then shamed into killing herself, and a child bride who becomes impoverished after the husband she’s only met once leaves her a widow – are shaped explicitly to drive this point home, and the movie ends with a third woman chasing after Gandhi’s train, begging him to help the untouchables.

Whether or not you agree with the film’s position on the issue – and I certainly don’t know enough about it to offer an opinion – Water is very straight-forward in its message and intent. It would be hard to walk away from it thinking that it wasn’t political, even if you didn’t know that Mehta’s films have sparked violent protest in India.

The Message Movie is the easiest kind of movie to discuss from a political point of view, because it frames the questions for you and draws attention to the issues it wants to debate.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 1 percent – even if we don’t all agree with or about the film’s message, we all understand that it’s trying to tell us something. Most people think it’s fair play to discuss that.

2. The Implied Message Movie

The Implied Message Movie still offers a strong point of view on political issues, and still seems to be doing it deliberately – it’s just not as explicit as the Message Movie.

One of my favorite films ever, Children of Men, mashes together everything wrong in the world, from terrorism to racism to wrongful imprisonment to war, but never didactically spells out its message for viewers. At the same time, no one would leave the theater believing that director Alfonso Cuarón is agnostic about immigration policy or the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib. The movie is full of disquieting, uncomfortable scenes and topical imagery that make the director’s position on real-life issues quite clear.

It’s the same way that no one would watch Brazil and walk away thinking, “I’m optimistic about the moral path our bureaucratic culture will be walking,” or feel like racial tension is not a pressing issue, based on watching Crash.

The Implied Message Movie has clearly dipped its oar in the river of politics, and has ideas it wants to share with us, even if they aren’t packaged and delivered quite as neatly as the message in the Message Movie.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 30 percent – depending on how abstract the movie’s themes are, there’s a chance someone will tell you that you’re ruining it by making it about real life.

3. The “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie

The “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie also has its oar in the river of politics, but it resists pushing off in any particular direction. Biographical movies, or movies based on a true story, are especially likely to land in this category, since the filmmakers may feel that they shouldn’t “impose” a viewpoint on events.

Zero Dark Thirty, which is about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, was controversial, in part, because it didn’t come right out and say that torture was wrong. The scenes depicting torture are filmed in a cold, emotionally detached way, often taking us outside the point of view of either the victims or the perpetrators. Rather than discussing whether what happened was right or wrong, Zero Dark Thirty seems more interested in exploring the motivations behind it, from a fairly non-judgmental standpoint.

Michael Moore has a pretty persuasive argument for why the film is actually an indictment of torture as an interrogation technique, but your opinion on the events of the film will mostly depend on your opinion of torture in real life.

12 Years a Slave, though it’s not likely to be mistaken for a pro-slavery movie, is also far more interested in exploring the social and psychological dynamics of slavery than in arguing for why it’s wrong. As compassionate human beings, of course we understand that what we’re seeing is wrong, but the movie is leaving us to do the ideological work on our own.

Whereas Zero Dark Thirty and 12 Years a Slave use politically charged issues as their primary content, straight-up biographical movies like Walk the Line and The Runaways – especially when the subjects or direct descendants of the subjects are alive – often try to take a non-judgmental attitude toward the characters, simply reporting what they did, without examining the larger context.

In either case, the “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie leaves you on your own to decide how you feel about what happened and your feelings are probably based on information drawn from outside the film.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 30 percent – depending on how central the issue you want to discuss is to the movie’s themes, you may be accused of reading something into it that isn’t there.

4. The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie

The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie tells a benign, feel-good story that reaffirms what its target audience already believes, while steadfastly ignoring anything else that might crop up.

The Help exists to congratulate me, as a white person, for being less racist than the movie’s most villainous character. It invites the audience to identify with white people who Aren’t Racist, and completely limits the scope of its discussion to the Jim Crow era, avoiding any opportunity to draw a parallel or connection between racism as it existed in the 1960s and racism as it exists today.

Similarly, Forrest Gump takes a long tour through twentieth-century American history, reassuring us at every turn, through the simple, home-spun wisdom of its hero, that life is miraculous, love is important, and we should always have faith and feel hope. As Amy Nicholson recently pointed out in LA Weekly, the movie avoids discussing any of the difficult, contentious issues Forrest encounters, from the Vietnam War, to the AIDS crisis, to women’s rights, to civil rights – struggles that defined the national history it’s asking us to feel good about.

The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie doesn’t just leave us to make up our own minds – it actively steers us away from controversial topics by drawing our attention to the topics we’re most likely to agree about.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 50 percent – this is the tipping point where we start to talk about and criticize what’s not in the movie, and people don’t like that as much.

5. The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie

The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie is aware that it should probably say something about the issues that it’s raised, but it would rather just do that quickly so it can move on.

Sex and the City 2, for example, makes the bizarre, kind-of-orientalist decision to send its characters to Abu Dhabi for most of the film. Once there, they are, of course, confronted with the very complicated and difficult issue of women’s rights within the UAE, which they address by:

Treating it like it’s none of their business, so they can have fun riding camels
Trying to make a culturally sensitive statement about how it’s probably OK to wear a veil
Deciding that the women of Abu Dhabi probably have things under control, since they meet to wear make-up in secret
Behaving in culturally inappropriate ways and then acting surprised when people get angry about it
Spilling a bunch of condoms all over the street and then screaming at people

Sex and the City 2 is in no way equipped to discuss a topic as complex and politically volatile as women’s rights in the UAE, and it doesn’t really want to do that, either. Instead, it awkwardly fluctuates through a series of attitudes wishing, like so many wayward travelers, that someone else’s political conflict didn’t have to ruin its vacation.

Similarly, 22 Jump Street, which I wrote about earlier, is aware that it should say something about gender and sexuality, given that so many of its jokes are essentially gay jokes, underneath. The best it can manage is an inconsistent pastiche of ideas, in which its characters sometimes deliver humorously-timed lectures on tolerance and equality.

The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie acknowledges that there’s something we might want to discuss about its content, but quietly begs us to just let it go.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 50 percent – depending on how graciously the film has requested that you not do this, and how entertaining it otherwise is, you might get told you’re a buzz-kill.

6. The Invisible Perspective Movie

The Invisible Perspective Movie realistically presents ideas and attitudes that are so normalized within our culture that we’ve forgotten that they form one particular perspective, rather than an objective view of reality.

In The Way Way Back, the film’s teenage protagonist forms an emotional bond with a surrogate father figure who helps him come of age as a man. The film, which is otherwise very thoughtful and enjoyable to watch, takes for granted that part of becoming a man involves learning to objectify women, and battling with other men to win a woman’s loyalty.

Someone watching the movie might say, “Well, that’s what boys learn to do,” and I’m sure that, for some boys, it is. But the fact that the movie doesn’t label or examine this as a political issue – the fact that it treats this as a completely unremarkable feature of gender – doesn’t mean the issue’s not there.

Edge of Tomorrow casually presents a female soldier as being competent and skilled – something that many critics did comment on, since it’s not what we usually see – and it also casually presents the fact that the male soldiers she serves with don’t like her and call her “Full-Metal Bitch” behind her back. Both of those things – the idea that a woman can be a competent soldier and the idea that that means nobody will like her – have political meanings, though you might notice only the first one – or neither – on the first pass.

Every movie that exists is made from a certain perspective, whether the movie calls attention to that perspective or not. And, since we live in a world full of constant political struggle, the perspective a movie is made with can necessarily be read as offering a political viewpoint.

That doesn’t make the movie good or bad – The Way Way Back doesn’t “lose” at politics because it didn’t spend a lot of time interrogating its perspective on gender – it just means that we frame our discussions about it differently. A movie that isn’t specifically trying to impart a political message is still a mirror to the culture that produced it and, by examining what we see in the mirror, we can learn new things about ourselves.

Critics add the most value when they talk about things that aren’t obvious, and help us to consider our assumptions from an alternate perspective. They do, indeed, “go looking for things” to talk about rather than taking films at face value, because that’s how you engage with art as something that’s culturally relevant.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 99 percent – people hate it when things are culturally relevant.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.