Bitch Flicks – Page 108 – The radical notion that women like good movies

Death and Life on ‘K2: Siren of the Himalayas’

On April 18, 2014, 16 Sherpas, the great guides of the Nepali mountain range, were killed in an avalanche from the Khumbu icefall, making Friday, April 18, the deadliest day in Everest history. The tragedy brought light to a controversy of Everest summiting that had been brewing for the past few years. Suddenly, there was a spotlight on the high-adventure tourist industry running out of Everest: the overcrowded and littered Everest summit, the fights between Sherpas and trekkers, and the fact that Sherpas do the hardest, most dangerous work of summiting without awards or recognition.

Written by Rachel Redfern.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB4rTolvnFY&feature=kp”]

In light of the 2014 tragedy on Mount Everest when 16 Sherpas were killed in an avalanche, the release of Dave Ohlsen’s 2009 K2 documentary, K2: Siren of the Himalayas, feels especially timely. On April 18, 2014, 16 Sherpas, the great guides of the Nepali mountain range, were killed in an avalanche from the Khumbu icefall, making Friday, April 18, the deadliest day in Everest history. The tragedy brought light to a controversy of Everest summiting that had been brewing for the past few years. Suddenly, there was a spotlight on the high-adventure tourist industry running out of Everest: the overcrowded and littered Everest summit, the fights between Sherpas and trekkers, and the fact that Sherpas do the hardest, most dangerous work of summiting without awards or recognition.

K2, however, is a slightly different animal than her more popular sister; while summiting the highest mountain in the world, at 8,848 meters, is no mean feat, and by 2010, 3, 142 individuals have climbed Mt. Everest.

As of 2010, 302 have climbed K2.

At 8,611 meters, K2 is not only the second-highest mountain on earth, it is also widely considered the most dangerous; its faces are steep and technical, and there is no safe path to the top. Over one-fourth of those who attempt K2 will die.

K2: Siren of the Himalayas follows four world-renowned climbers, Fabrizio Zangrilli (USA), Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner (Austria), Jake Meyer (England), and Chris Szymiec (Canada) as they attempt to summit K2 on the 100 year anniversary of the Duke of Abruzzi’s surveying expedition in 1909.

For these four Alpinists, summiting K2 marks the peak in their careers; Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner especially since she had already climbed 13 of the world’s 8,000 meter peaks and K2 would make her 14th (only 32 people have ever completed all 14). And the Zangrilli/Kaltenbrunner expedition stands in stark contrast to those on Everest: Zangrilli and Kaltenbrunner explicitly climb without the use of oxygen or high-altitude porters.

For what at first glance feels like stock tribute to a group of male climbers dominating a mountain, is actually a contemplative, slow-moving exploration of the dangers of high-altitude mountain climbing. And while there are stunning vistas of sunrises, sunsets, and glaciated mountain ranges, the majority of the film centers on the close-knit climbing community and their measured patience and startlingly humility in the face of their accomplishments. Especially since so much of the film shows their unwearied acceptance of their failures over the mountain.

Rather than a puff piece on “Look what I did!” K2: Siren of the Himalayas is instead, “Look what I could not do, but continue to respect and admire.”

The film evolves as well as Kaltenbrunner comes into focus with her calm wisdom, joy of the mountains, and humility at her failures and successes. Kaltenbrunner would actually be the only one from the expedition to attain the peak and become the second woman to climb the fourteen eight-thousanders, and the first to do it without oxygen and high-altitude porters. Basically, she’s amazing.

Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner after reaching the K2 summit in 2011.

As much of the climbing world contemplates the unsteady future of Everest expeditions (the 2014 season was canceled after the avalanche), K2: Siren of the Himalayas stands as a moderated, joyful glimpse of why so many climbers do what they do, as well as highlighting the great dangers of our beautiful, and volatile home, and the adventurers who explore her.

K2: Siren of the Himalayas will be released in the USA on Aug. 22, 2014: visit their website here for information about screeners and locations.

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Rachel is a traveler and teacher who spent the last few years living in Asia. Now back in her native California, she focuses on writing about media, culture, and feminism. While a big fan of campy 80s movies and eccentric sci-fi, she’s become a cable acolyte, spending most of her time watching HBO, AMC, and Showtime. For good stories about lions and bungee jumping, as well as rants about sexism and slow drivers, follow her on Twitter at @RachelRedfern2

‘Outland’: An Unsung Treat for Queer Sci-Fi Fans

‘Outland’ is a little-known but hilarious Australian miniseries about five gay nerds in Melbourne. It has been called “a gay answer to ‘The Big Bang Theory,’” but I don’t think this description does it justice.

Written by Max Thornton.

Outland is a little-known but hilarious Australian miniseries about five gay nerds in Melbourne. The six half-hour episodes aired on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2012. Each of the first five focuses on a different member of the group, as each takes his or her turn hosting their sci-fi movie-watching club and nothing goes according to plan.

First there’s Max. Max is the closest thing this show has to the everyman character, the Ted Mosby or Jim Halpert – but this is a show about queer nerds, so he’s a gay science fiction enthusiast with an anxiety disorder. As far as I’m concerned, this makes him far more relatable than the Mosbys and Halperts of the televisual landscape.

The excellent second episode focuses on Rae, who is coping with the aftermath of her breakup from her girlfriend, Simone. Max voices his sympathy for Rae’s situation as a lesbian of color in a wheelchair: “Black, gay, and disabled – it’s like a discrimination trifecta.” She responds by quoting James Baldwin and then agreeing to have a nude photo of her displayed in an art exhibit. Rae is the literal best.

Then there’s Andy, the openly kinky one. As his friends try to get him down from his ceiling harness (this is a sitcom), Andy expounds upon the connection between his two favorite hobbies: “Science fiction and sex: they’re two sides of the same coin. Exploration, adventure, discovery…” In the DVD special features, writers John Richards and Adam Richard make it clear that this isn’t wholly a joke. There’s a thematic throughline undergirding the whole series which draws parallels between geekdom and queerness, from Max loudly “coming out of two closets” to the whole gang narrowly avoiding a queerbashing as they cosplay on their way to Pride. Being queer and being a nerd are two ways of being outside of the mainstream, and forming countercultural communities are a (perhaps the) major way for outsiders to survive.

Even communities with really really low effects budgets!

Fab is probably the most stereotypically gay character. He’s a flaming queen, he’s delightfully bitchy, he has tragically flamboyant fashion sense, and he lives with his nan. This is a great way for the writers to sneak in a bit of social commentary – when the others are creeped out by being around an old person, Andy points out, “You’re only saying that because we’ve been conditioned to believe that aging is the worst thing that can happen to a gay man.”

The last member of the gang is Toby. Poor Toby, whom nobody likes. Toby is an uptight rich kid who’s sure nobody outside of the group knows about his obvious queerness. His episode has songs and dancing and is totally amazing.

In the final episode, the splintered gang tries to overcome their assorted squabbles and neuroses to reunite for Pride. As a frustrated Max says, “All I wanted was a group where I could fancy the guy from Farscape without anyone making a big deal out of it!” Ultimately it’s the external threat that brings them back together, as the nerds realize that, as dysfunctional as their little group is, it’s a community that serves their needs in a hostile world.

Outland has been called “a gay answer to The Big Bang Theory,” but I don’t think this description does it justice. The Big Bang Theory has (or had, when I last watched it, which was admittedly several years ago now) a palpable contempt for its characters, and concomitantly for the nerd culture it purports to portray. Outland, on the other hand, comes from a genuine place of affection for its characters and their geeky pastimes. This is evident in a wonderful subtlety of Outland, which is that its nerds have overlapping but distinct nerdy interests. Toby is the one who collects figurines; Max is the one who owns a Dalek suit; Rae is the one who’s into gender politics and Ursula LeGuin (obviously). This entirely reflects my experience with sci-fi club: we all loved science fiction and fantasy, we were all conversant in the obvious stuff, but everyone had their niche – Tim was our Middle-Earth expert, Michael knew everything there was to know about comic books, Heda was a Star Wars extended universe obsessive. (I was the go-to guy for zombies and B-movies.) Over the nearly 100 episodes of Big Bang I saw, I don’t recall ever seeing the specific interests of Howard, Leonard, Raj, and Sheldon being so well delineated as the Outland crew’s in six. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the group’s cosplay effort, where the interests and personality of each character shine in each specific iteration of the same costume.

Dressed as Lulara from show-within-a-show Space Station Beta. — Dressed as Lulara from show-within-a-show *Space Station Beta*.

Outland is broader and less nuanced than Spaced (oh, Spaced, will anything ever match your brilliance?), but it’s perhaps the closest thing we have to a queer Spaced. It’s unfortunately lacking in female characters; episode 2 is the only one that passes the Bechdel test, and you almost wonder if there’s self-awareness in making Rae do triple duty as the proverbial black disabled lesbian – oh, hell, can we just see a spinoff that follows Simone’s splinter group, the Lesbian Separatist Feminist Fantasy League?

Until the day we see a specifically lesbian and/or trans nerd sitcom, though, Outland is a delightful and very funny show (even if it can, alas, only be imported at great expense in the wrong DVD region).

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He’d like to thank his friend Gary for hooking him up with the Outland DVD.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!

Amy Poehler’s New Film “They Came Together” Is Over-the-Top Stupid in the Best Possible Way by Jennifer L. Pozner at Bitch Media

Hollywood studio announces boot camp to nurture female directors by Ben Child at The Guardian

“Tammy”: Melissa McCarthy finally gets creative control by Sady Doyle at Salon

“Orange Is The New Black” Does Not Need To Tell Male Prisoners’ Stories by Rebecca Vipond Brink at The Frisky

Television Shows That Understand Birth Control Better Than The Supreme Court by Jessica Goldstein at Think Progress

Broad City’s Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson: Yes, We Are “Totally” Feminists by Lindsay Miller at POPSUGAR

Long Live Tousstee: Taystee & Poussey Challenge the Portrayal of Black Woman Friendships by Michelle Denise Jackson at For Harriet

What Pennsatucky’s Teeth Tell Us About Class in America by Susan Sered at Bitch Media

How Melissa McCarthy Became a Box Office Powerhouse by Melissa Silverstein at Forbes

Vietnamese-American Filmmaker Turns Lens on NYC’s ‘DIY Generation’ by Jamilah King at Colorlines

‘Do The Right Thing’ Celebrates Its 25th Anniversary by Shereen Marisol Meraji at NPR

Lena Waithe to Write BET Pilot Based on Her Webseries “Twenties” by Inkoo Kang at Women and Hollywood

A Feminist Character ≠ A Character Who Is A Feminist: Examining Claire Underwood and Olivia Pope by Cate Young at Persephone Magazine

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

Lessons from Underrated Coming of Age Flicks

Something about summer always makes me nostalgic. I think it’s that when you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, it all seems so significant. You tend to measure time in summers, those long unstructured months that melt together in your own dream world where your parents have no authority. How many coming of age stories begin with something akin to “It was the summer I turned 16”? In honor of the summer months, I thought I’d take a look at some underrated coming of age films and what I learned from them.

Something about summer always makes me nostalgic.

Remember riding your bike around town? Remember waiting at the ice cream truck, or trying on new looks in front of the mirror, driving aimlessly around with a new license, or just listening to music in your room alone and having multiple epiphanies? ‘Tis the season to come of age. To be forever changed.

I think it’s that when you’re a kid, when you’re a teenager, it all seems so significant. You tend to measure time in summers, those long unstructured months that melt together in your own dream world where your parents have no authority. How many coming of age stories begin with something akin to “It was the summer I turned 16”?

In honor of the summer months, I thought I’d take a look at some underrated coming of age films and what I learned from them.

Slums of Beverly Hills

Like many coming of age classics, Slums of Beverly Hills is both semi-autobiographical (for writer-director Tamara Jenkins) and set in the recent past. 90s indie darling Natasha Lyonne plays Vivian Abromowitz, a girl struggling with her dysfunctional family, burgeoning sexuality and uncomfortably large breasts (an unusual teenage girl problem in a genre full of girls praying for big boobs), all while constantly moving between seedy apartments in Beverly Hills as part of her father’s plan to allow her and her brothers to attend prestigious schools. Through the course of the film, Vivian not only has her period and loses her virginity, clear markers of ascent into womanhood, but also realizes sex can be pleasurable and she has a right to demand that it is. She also comes to appreciate her eccentric father (Alan Arkin) for the sacrifices he makes to give his children the best futures possible.

Lesson: Learn to be amused, not afflicted. Practice saying, one day this will all go in my memoir.

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, like Heathers, Beetlejuice, and Mermaids, stars Winona Ryder back when she was the patron saint of “weird girls” who liked to wear black and didn’t talk much in class. Her unfortunately named character, Dinky, is a social outcast who prefers animals to her peers, who constantly taunt and torture her and disappoints her adoptive mother by rejecting feminine clothing. Though sometimes its hard to figure out whether Dinky is ostracized for being antisocial or has learned to be antisocial after years of being ostracized. Stuck in a quirky indie film style town where the childhood home of minor celebrity, Roxy Carmichael, is preserved as a museum, Dinky sets out to validate her existence by proving she is Roxy’s long lost daughter.

Lesson: You can’t develop in a vacuum. Spending time alone is valuable, but you really learn who you are from living in the world you have and getting to know the people around you, not from escaping into the world you wish you had.

Lisa’s whole understanding of the world is changed when she watches a woman die in her arms and knows she is partially responsible.

Margaret

Despite hitting some familiar beats (loss of virginity, teacher-student relationship, first encounter with death), Margaret is a very different type of coming of age story, and to my mind, a truer one, than I’ve seen before. As it begins, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), a privileged Manhattan teenager, is just coming into her own. She has new and serious opinions about war and politics and passionately argues them in class and charges around the city casually flirting and testing out her new power. When she distracts a bus driver, contributing to a fatal accident, her grief and guilt lead her to seek the driver’s dismissal, which she feels is the only fair consequence. Here, Lisa shows how young she still is, as she doggedly seeks fairness, blind to the interests of the other parties involved and to any other option. She still sees the world as one where the guilty are always punished and the innocent rewarded, and in the moment where she learns things will not work the ways she imagined, she breaks down into a child-like tantrum.

Lesson: Life isn’t fair, it’s really not fair and sometimes there is nothing you can do to make things right.

Dirty Girl

Danielle Edmundson (Juno Temple) thinks God made her purely for sex. Known as the “Dirty Girl” at school for her promiscuity, Danielle looks down on the girls in her class who fuss over their appearance and wish for their Prince Charmings, and uses the boys to prove to herself she has a talent. In Clark (Jeremy Dozier), a shy, gay boy who also sticks out like a sore thumb in their 1980s Oklahoma town, she finds a kindred spirit and the two hit the road, ostensibly to find Danielle’s father, but really to find themselves. Neither Clark nor Danielle have it all figured out. At first she’s the cooler-than-thou mentor who ups his confidence, but in the last moments he’s the one who helps her figure out who she wants to be. Refreshingly, the narrative doesn’t suggest Danielle’s sexual experience is wrong or that she needs to be celibate, but that it’s not the only thing she has or only way people should define her.

Lesson: The people you want in your life are the people who like you for who you are–the people that encourage you to be yourself, but only the best version of yourself.

Danielle appraises her peers and dislikes what she sees.

Haunter

Most teenagers feel bored and trapped at some point, in their small towns or in their families. Haunter twists teenage alienation into a ghost story centered around Lisa Johnson (Abigail Breslin), another 80s teen, the only person in her family who realizes they’re dead. I chose to read Haunter as coming of age story, despite the fact that the central character will never get any older because it’s all about what Lisa learns. She becomes responsible for her family as the only one that knows the truth and her world becomes a nightmare none of them are aware of, as she is tormented by an murderous spirit. Unlike most alienated teenage girls she also finds herself through taking on the mission of trying to save the family currently living in the house from being the murderer’s next victims. And Lisa also grows in the expected ways for a coming of age heroine, as she goes from blaming her parents for their weaknesses and feeling superior, to allowing herself to understand, and walk in their shoes.

Lesson: Some of your angsty feelings are legitimate, some are self-indulgent. It’s a great skill to know the difference.

Lisa’s clarinet practice fills her time as she remains stuck in her house, the same day repeating endlessly.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

‘Snowpiercer’: How Hungry Are You?

It becomes apparent that the characters are facing not just a disagreement over who gets to use the sauna, but also the prospect of being the last remaining humans on a dead planet, on a train, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Written by Andé Morgan.

Snowpiercer (2013) is timely, and in more ways than one. I live in southwestern Arizona, and it’s exploding-eyeballs hot. So I was all like, “Snowball Earth? We should be so lucky.” But, the premise…the film opens by tuning us into 66.6 FM The Exposition, which informs us that scientists have decided to fight gas with gas by releasing a chemical, the innocuously-named CWX-7, into the atmosphere to combat our global warming non-problem. Chemtrails, man…

Somebody must’ve misplaced a decimal point in a metric conversion factor, because too much of the chemical is released, and the Earth quickly becomes very Hoth-like. Just about everything and everybody dies. A train magnate, Wilford (played with creepy awesomeness by Ed Harris), quickly converts one of his luxury lines into a perpetual-motion Ark that circles the globe endlessly, completing a full circuit once a year.

Seems reasonable.

Wilford packs it full of rich people, support staff, and (because he’s a nice capitalist) a bunch of riffraff who were complaining about their juicy babies freezing solid or something.

The thing about trains is that they have two ends. The front cars feature hot tubs, mahogany, and club kids. The rear has roach-flavored jello and bed-head. And that’s the movie – a bloody, single-column metaphor for the ongoing clash between the haves and have-nots, wrapped in sheet metal and a plausibly implausible apocalypse.

Chris Evans plays Curtis, the White Male Lead, and early on he works his grungy antihero shtick to good effect. He’s first mate to John Hurt’s character, Gilliam, King of the Poors. In the first act, we learn that the train has been running continuously for 17 (almost 18) years since the big freeze. During that time, the rear passengers have attempted several uprisings, only to be viciously put down each time by Wilford’s security force. But Curtis and Gilliam have new plan, and this time It Just Might Work.

Director Bong Joon-ho (The Host, 2006) does an excellent job, particularly in the early scenes, of making the viewer feel claustrophobic in a large auditorium. The angles he chooses, the play of light and shadow, and the constant, subtle rocking make the audience feel as if they were on the train, too. As Curtis and crew move towards the front, each car is visually distinct, like the rooms in Willy Wonka’s factory. My favorite was the school car – bright, yellow, and eerily cheery.

Less subtle is the film’s exploration of its class struggle theme. The rear units are more like cattle cars than coach cars, and the haves take perverse pleasure is abusing the have-nots. Bong spares no expressions of pain, misery, and grief as Wilford’s goons rip children from their mother’s arms or engage in freestyle amputation. Much of this malice is directed by women, including Wilford’s moll, Claude (played by Emma Levie).

But Tilda Swinton steals the show as Minister Mason. I mean, she aced it. While her actions are deplorable, fascistic, and cruel, we never quite can tell if she’s inherently evil or if she’s merely been pushed to a place we all could go if we knew we were going to live out our days on the Polar Express. She presides over the bloodiest scene in the film, as Curtis leads his army of unwashed against a larger force of Wilford’s thugs, who are armed with wicked axes, sickles, and pikes.

The scene is blood-drenched with stylized hackery, and it’s actually quite good. We feel each blow of the axe and it takes, as it would, many blows to bring down an enraged prole. The scene also features Curtis performing some slow-motion, ballet-quality jugular slicing that actually feels fresh and not at all like a weak replication of the slow motion fight scene effects in the Matrix films.

But there’s comedy, too. The film develops a rhythm–an illustration of crushing inequality, some tension, and then some bloody ultraviolence punctuated on both ends by jarringly quirky humor or esoteric symbolism. For example, other critics have noted the scene where, while in the middle of the aforementioned battle, the train crosses a specific bridge that marks the new year. Each side stops fighting and stands in place during the crossing, both so as to not knock the train from the track and to observe the event. Wilford’s death squad, imposing and faceless in their black masks, turns en masse to the bloodied resistance fighters, counts down from ten as if they were in Times Square, and deliver an obscenely cheery and sincere “Happy New Year!” Then the carnage resumes.

However, my favorite discordant instance was the propaganda video played for the kids in the schoolhouse car. In black and white, with campy mid-century aesthetics, it details Wilford’s early obsession with trains. Young Wilford looks at the camera and says, “I want to live on a train, forever!” As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that the characters are facing more than just a disagreement over who gets to use the sauna, but the prospect of being the last remaining humans on a dead planet, on a train, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

There are several other interesting female characters in Snowpiercer. Octavia Spencer puts in a strong performance as Tanya, one of the rear car passengers whose child is stolen by Wilford. She is extremely believable, and the viewer clearly registers the grief and resignation in her eyes. Ah-sung Ko plays Yona, the daughter of one of the train’s designers, Namgoong Minsoo (played by Kang-ho Song). While her performance didn’t move me, her character is written well, and proves vitally important to the plot. But really, the film is too busy focusing its dark symbolism on human extinction to really comment very pointedly on the plight on women in the world, or on the train. In fact, aside from Mason, the female characters with speaking parts are fairly one-dimensional; either they’re victims of horrible injustice, or psychotic perpetrators of horrible injustice.

Bechdel? Nope.

Two scenes did give me pause: at one point, Curtis has the upper hand on Mason. She pleads, removes her partial dentures and, as I interpreted it, offers to fellate Curtis in exchange for her life. It seemed out of character, as if the directer really wanted to punctuate, in a spiteful way, Mason’s reduction in power at the hands of a man. In a later scene, one of the rebels kills a pregnant woman. Granted, she had just shot his friend in the head. When considered against the nihilistic, slightly insane tone of the movie, and some of the stories Curtis tells, maybe the act contributes meaningfully to the story. I’m not so sure, and I’ll level with you: I’m not a big fan of violence in film for its own sake, and violence against pregnant women just jerks me out of a movie and puts me in an uncomfortable place. Speaking of, if you haven’t seen Shoot ‘Em Up (2007) or Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007), don’t.

I have to admit that I was a little disappointed overall. The film didn’t quite live up to the hype for me, and I can’t really give it as glowing a recommendation as Rebecca Phale did at The Mary Sue. The dialogue was clunky at times, the theme delivery was sledgehammer-heavy upfront yet muddled at the end, and the third act suffered from ponderous pacing.

Still, Snowpiercer is a good film, and you should see it. The dystopia is very tangible, and you will appreciate the carefully crafted visuals and the tantric tension throughout. Swinton’s performance is worth the price of admission, if nothing else.

Note: Snowpiercer is based, loosely, on a French graphic novel.

Also on Bitch Flicks: Dude Bros and ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ by Amanda Rodriguez.

Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about culture, race, politics, and LGBTQ issues. Follow them @andemorgan.

‘Shine’: 10 Women Strip Down and Share Their Thoughts on Body Image

There were parts of the short that I really loved. The variety of women–not just in terms of body type but also ethnicity–was wonderful to see captured on film. The scenes where the women were just hanging out being themselves were beautiful and really conveyed a sense of easy feminine bonding that is something unusual in a world where women are almost always conveyed as competing with each other.

The short film Shine describes itself on its website:

“10 young women were inhibited to come together, shed their layers and return to nature. By removing comparisons, competition and conditioning they were given a space to look inward.”

The short has been created by The Goddess Project, which aims to be a feature-length documentary about everyday women who realize their potential in order to change the world.

In Shine, 10 strangers are brought together. They take off their clothes to have their bodies painted and have pieces of nature glued to them so they effectively become living art.

The camaraderie in the short and the purpose of it–the stripping of outer clothes in order to turn inwards and find the qualities that make us as women feel beautiful and claim inspiration–was quite beautiful to watch.

However, while the cast was diverse and interesting, the vague neo-tribal atmosphere of the short made me feel a little squicky. The whole thing feels slightly orientalist and appropriative. The short does not reference a specific culture, but it has that sort of “back to nature” feel that is generally connected to the appropriation of native or indigenous cultures the world over. I am very wary of empowerment being discovered through appropriation and personally I think the short would have been much more powerful if it had delved more into the individual women’s experience of being naked with a bunch of other women they didn’t know.

The stills from the short of such a wide range of women are quite stunning so I do applaud the film makers for what they have undertaken, but it is important for empowerment not to come at the cost of further marginalizing certain groups of people.

Gaayathri Nair is currently living and writing in Auckland, New Zealand. You can find more of her work at her blog A Human Story and tweet her @A_Gaayathri.

The Joyful Feminist Killjoy

I get tired of constantly pointing out that something is Problematic From a Feminist Perspective™; I want to enjoy, not eviscerate. I want to laugh.

Written by Leigh Kolb.

Being an angry feminist is hard sometimes.

I mean, I had some breakthrough spotting on Monday, and I think it’s because my uterus was protesting the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby decision.

The life of a Feminist Killjoy is an intense one.

One of the most difficult arenas to navigate while feminist is comedy. Misogynist, male-centric comedies are a dime a dozen. I think back to the comedies of my youth–Dumb and Dumber, American Pie, anything with Adam Sandler or Jim Carrey–and while some of those films may have seemed funny at the time, revisiting them through a feminist lens is pretty horrifying.

I hadn’t seen There’s Something About Mary for well over a decade, and I stumbled across it last weekend. Holy shit. When Woogie–who stalked Mary in college so severely that she had to change her name and move–spits out at her at the end, “Shut up, cocktease,” it was all I could do to keep my head from spinning and short-circuiting while screaming “RAPE CULTURE,” “MISOGYNY,” “PATRIARCHY,” “MALE GAZE,” “LAURA MULVEY SAVE ME.”

Watching while feminist is exhausting. The Onion points this out in their satirical “Woman Takes Short Half-Hour Break From Being Feminist To Enjoy TV Show,” and I’m sure most of us can relate.

I get tired of constantly pointing out that something is Problematic From a Feminist Perspective™; I want to enjoy, not eviscerate. I want to laugh.

So I’ve been writhing around in feminist television and film lately, and damn, does it feel good. These are popular and critically acclaimed comedies and they are feminist as fuck. I love it. I can’t get enough of it. As we watch, I frequently look at my significant other with a shit-eating grin on my face as if to say, “Can you even believe that this exists?”

Broad City–starring Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer–debuted on Comedy Central in January and was quickly picked up for a second season. The pair started Broad City as a web series, and Amy Poehler took them under her (feminist superstar) wing and produced the TV show.

As many feminist commentators have already pointed out, this show is great. The writing, the acting, the story lines… I simply can’t get enough (really–I’ve seen all of the episodes multiple times). Abbi and Illana love sex, weed, and more than anything, one another. They also love themselves. It’s incredibly refreshing to see young women on screen who are so comfortable, even in their most uncomfortable moments.

Abbi and Ilana identify as feminists, and care deeply about diversity in media (which the show reflects in an organic way). In her Bitch article about Broad City, Andi Zeisler says,

“…Broad City‘s feminism isn’t so much sneak-attack as baked-in, with an emphasis on the ‘baked’: Ilana and Abbi are as aimless, goofy, boring, and entitled as any guy of their generation. And they’re striking a blow for equality just by subverting the image of the striving young woman who, well, sees her every move as a blow for equality. “

It’s hilarious, it’s relatable, and it’s inspirational–I’m inspired to be more confident by watching them, and I was inspired by their interior design to finally buy that Urban Outfitters quilt that I’d been lusting after (I understand this is a Problematic From a Feminist Perspective™ company, but I really wanted that quilt).

Sometimes watching young 20-somethings in the city (when I’m a 30-something in the country) can make me feel wistful, or bitter, or jealous, or judgmental, or any other cocktail of quarter-life psychoses. Broad City doesn’t evoke any emotion but joy. And maybe it’s because I can relate to a few of the story lines, but more likely it’s because it’s a universally great show.

Broad City–somewhat shockingly–isn’t the lone feminist wolf on Comedy Central (a station not known for progressive, feminist comedy).

We don’t have network or cable TV, so I sometimes have no idea what’s going on on stations I don’t frequent. Algorithms on Netflix and Amazon Prime probably have me pegged as a clear Feminist Killjoy, and avoid recommending comedies to me (“Feminist Killjoy logging in. Suggest ‘Obscure Dark Foreign Female-Centric Dramas'”).

After falling in love with Broad City, I thought we should try that Amy Schumer show I’d vaguely heard about, Inside Amy Schumer. It didn’t look like something I’d like, and if I’ve learned anything in my almost 32 years, it’s to always judge a book by its cover.

However, what I got was an onslaught of hilarious, biting feminist commentary.

When I was waxing poetic about it to a friend, she admitted that she was a fan but didn’t think that I would like it at all, seeing signs of it being, perhaps, Problematic From a Feminist Perspective™. I explained that I loved it, and what makes satire work for me is self-awareness. I can understand why it might be confusing that I hate on-screen gender essentialism, but cannot stop watching and quoting the parody commercial for SandraGel.

As Willa Paskin writes at Slate,

“In its second season, Inside Amy Schumer has become the most consistently feminist show on television, a sketch comedy series in which nearly every bit is devoted in some capacity to gender politics. But Schumer channels her perspective through an onscreen persona that is insecure, self-proclaimedly slutty, crass, selfish, glossy—onscreen, Amy Schumer thinks feminism is the ultimate F word… This pairing is extremely canny. Schumer hides her intellect in artifice and lip gloss—that’s how she performs femininity. By wrapping her ideas in a ditzy, sexy, slutty, self-hating shtick, her message goes down easy—and only then, like the alien, sticks its opinionated teeth in you.”

In “I’m So Bad” and “Compliments,” Schumer parodies stereotypical female behavior (connecting morality to food and being self-deprecating, respectively). The message, however, isn’t “Aren’t these bitches crazy?” Schumer’s comedy sketches show the insidious social construction of these ultimately ridiculous and self-destructive behaviors.

Certainly one could watch these sketches through a different lens, and think instead about the possible audience perception. If a Tosh.0 fan tunes in to Inside Amy Schumer, I’m not confident that he/she will understand the commentary in the comedy.

But I do. And I love it. Being able to laugh at ourselves and the ridiculous behaviors and norms that we are socialized to embody is powerful.

And in the Upper Northwest, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen parody feminism in their “Feminist Bookstore” sketches on Portlandia. Portlandia turns a hilarious mirror on a certain segment of American society in front of the backdrop and personality of Portland, Oregon. In the bookstore sketches, Toni (Brownstein) and Candace (Armisen) run Women and Women First (which is based off Portland’s In Other Words, a feminist community center).

They are absolute caricatures of radical feminists, and it’s glorious. They are not mean-spirited in their depictions (in fact, they have a working relationship with In Other Words, which manned–I mean womanned–Portlandia‘s Twitter feed to live-tweet the Oscars and the Super Bowl).

Watching Portlandia gives me ample opportunity to laugh at myself. When we were contemplating putting an NPR sticker on our new used Subaru, I realized that my life is pretty much filled with Portlandia sketches that would be too boring to air. I recognize many of Toni and Candace’s scenes as extreme versions of my own thoughts and conversations. The blurring of lines between fiction and reality was clear when Toni and Candace met with gender studies professors to “debate” feminism; they brought irreverence and comedy to an otherwise serious, analytical conversation.

Contemplating blatantly satirizing women and feminism is enough to make most of us prickle a bit, and be validly concerned about further marginalization of issues that affect our lives. Laughing about the effects of estrogen on our emotions might feel dangerous when we have Supreme Court justices who don’t understand how contraception works. Hearing women repeatedly align feminism with man-hating might make chuckling at Toni and Candace feel depressing.

However, it feels empowering to laugh in the face of adversity, and put ourselves–as women and as feminists–on the line for good comedy. There’s a clear difference between comedy aimed at feminists and comedy created by feminists, and I’m so thankful that I can bask in the latter. These shows are aimed at wide audiences full of men and women, and they lift women up and laugh at them without tearing them down.

Pure joy.

I’ve been rolling around in a lot of other TV and film that’s getting me all stunk up with feminism: Obvious Child shows how incredibly moving and entertaining women’s lives are; Orange is the New Black overwhelms me with so many women’s stories, such diversity, such power; House of Cards shows that feminist media isn’t always what we think it is; and Parks and Recreation is a consistent delight.

It’s easy to get caught up in all of the terrible, misogynist bullshit that infiltrates our screens and sound waves. Seeing just the trailer for Seth McFarlane’s A Million Ways to Die in the West almost unwound the hours and hours of feminist film and television that I’d stocked up as a defense. The Feminist Killjoy rises again and again–and she’s an important voice–but damn if sometimes it doesn’t feel good to just revel in the excellence of feminist comedy.

___________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

‘Spamalot’: A Feminist Review

Though ‘Spamalot’ doesn’t greatly improve on the number of significant roles for women, it does add a host of female background performers who appear frequently as well as the show-stealing Lady of the Lake (often dubbed the Diva of the Lake). Though she is primarily a love interest, the Lady of the Lake is also essential as she’s the equivalent of a dues ex machina who solves dilemmas the cast faces, puts them on the right path for their quest and generally inspires enthusiasm in the pursuit of the grail.

Written by Amanda Rodriguez.
Spoiler Alert

I recently went to see a local production of the infamous musical comedy Monty Python’s Spamalot (a Broadway adaptation from the 1975 hilarious Arthurian quest film Monty Python and the Holy Grail) at Asheville Community Theatre. Though running a little long at two and a half hours, I loved it. As a fan, it was wonderful to get to see a theatre company bring to life all the gags, costume changes, ridiculous accents, jokes and songs that make Monty Python so special. As a feminist, I’d like to examine how the theatre production measures up to scrutiny through a feminist lens.

First off, despite my love of it, there’s no denying that the original source material, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, is a sausage-fest. Most of the women are played by men, and the most noteworthy scene featuring women is a bunch of cloistered nun-types at Castle Anthrax who all desperately want to have sex with Sir Galahad (they thankfully omitted this scene in the play). Though Spamalot doesn’t greatly improve on the number of significant roles for women, it does add a host of female background performers who appear frequently as well as the show-stealing Lady of the Lake (often dubbed the Diva of the Lake). Though she is primarily a love interest, the Lady of the Lake is also essential as she’s the equivalent of a dues ex machina who solves dilemmas the cast faces, puts them on the right path for their quest and generally inspires enthusiasm in the pursuit of the grail.

The Lady of the Lake has a lot of tongue-in-cheek meta-songs, and the best one, “Whatever Happened to My Part (The Diva’s Lament),” actually acknowledges how little stage time she’s gotten in comparison to her male compatriots. Though this number concedes that her representation is at best uneven, it doesn’t do much to truly integrate the lone female character into the plot itself.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJqAYUAJbTk”]

In the above clip, we have Sara Ramirez of Grey’s Anatomy fame performing the role of the Lady of the Lake in the original Broadway production. She even won the Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in 2005. I love that a full-figured woman of color was cast in this role, and the world recognized how brightly she shined.

Asheville Community Theatre's Nana Hosmer as the Lady of the Lake — ACT’s Nana Hosmer as the Lady of the Lake

In the Asheville Community Theatre Spamalot production, I was so pleased to see the astoundingly talented Nana Hosmer fill Ramirez’s shoes as the Lady of the Lake. The full-figured diva has a dynamite voice that playfully emulated different musical genres but also shook the rafters with its vibrato. I feel fortunate that I (and all the other theatre-goers) got to see this woman’s powerhouse performance.

The talented Nana Hosmer in Spamalot — The talented Nana Hosmer in *Spamalot*

All in all, though I lamented the lack of female characters and found the number “You Need a Jew” mildly offensive, I was delighted that, though the play felt the need to end with a wedding, it was a gay wedding between Lancelot and the song-loving, fabulous Prince Herbert. I was worried they wouldn’t have the guts for it, but then I remembered, hey, this is Monty Python we’re talking about here. I was, however, the most moved by Nana Hosmer’s Broadway caliber performance. She, along with Sara Ramirez, reminded me how challenging it is for women of color and women with bodies that don’t match Hollywood’s (very thin) standards to find quality roles in films and on TV. I hope this means that theatre is a more welcoming arena that is appreciative of talent and beauty that comes in different shapes, sizes and colors.

Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

Women Who Steal: ‘The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne’ and ‘Lift’

The eponymous center of Kirk Marcolina and Matthew Pond’s documentary ‘The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne’ (the opening night selection of the Roxbury International Film Festival) is an anomaly, a woman who steals and is not only unrepentant, but takes great pride in her skill. Doris is a slim, elegant, 80-something African American who has spent much of her life stealing jewelry, from a watch in the Jim Crow southern town where she grew up, to top-price diamonds she accrued while staying in luxury hotels throughout Europe.

In films and TV male characers are usually the ones who get to have all the fun, especially when their characters commit crimes. Women characters aren’t allowed the relish many male characters take in stealing–and getting away with it. Though some exceptions to the rule exist–Bridget/Wendy in The Last Seduction and Melina Mercouri’s character in Topkapi–more often women play party-pooper roles like Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight as the U.S. Marshall trying to capture George Clooney’s escaped, bon vivant bank robber.

The eponymous center of Kirk Marcolina and Matthew Pond’s documentary The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne (the opening night selection of the Roxbury International Film Festival) is an anomaly, a woman who steals and is not only unrepentant, but takes great pride in her skill. Doris is a slim, elegant, 80-something African American who has spent much of her life stealing jewelry, from a watch in the Jim Crow southern town where she grew up to top-price diamonds she accrued while staying in luxury hotels throughout Europe.

Part of Doris’s ability to steal undetected was, she explains, her creation of a persona, whether she played the “nurse” to a white accomplice or, while wearing impeccable clothes, she casually mentioned to the jewelry store staff the name of her famous (though not well known enough for anyone to know better) “husband.” We spend a lot of time hearing Doris’s stories and even see, when Doris meets with a jewelry store proprietor (who shares Doris’s obsession with gems: they seem to get along well), a security officer approach her to tell her that she can’t be in the store because of outstanding charges against her. She tells him that she didn’t know the restrictions applied to the whole mall and not just Macy’s and she leaves without an argument, explaining politely and meekly to him that she knows he’s just doing his job. Later she tells us, in a very different tone and stance, that she knew the best way to play the situation was to show the guard more respect than he deserved. As we hear from an academic, “Doris Payne for me is someone who manipulates people. I mean, that’s her job.”

Doris’s stories become more far-fetched: in Switzerland she sews a diamond into her girdle, dropping the setting into the sea, and later escapes “through cornfields” after she is taken to a hospital, eventually catching a cab to the airport where she boards a plane out of the country. So we begin to wonder whether she is playing us the same way she played the guard (though one of the directors confirmed in the Q and A afterward that records show Doris was indeed arrested in Switzerland–and did escape). The screenwriter who adapted Doris’s life story into a script (optioned by Halle Berry but progress on production seems to have stalled) says, “Doris is the protagonist and the antagonist in the screenplay Doris Payne writes herself every day.”

DorisPaynemugshot2 — Another vintage mugshot of Doris

We also wonder about the current charges against her. Doris has an excellent lawyer (whom the co-director explained in the Q and A, ended up working pro bono for Doris, which wasn’t the lawyer’s original intention) who exploits every angle to make the jury doubt Doris’s guilt. Doris herself interjects “facts” about the main witness/clerk’s testimony which make us think her identification of Doris is erroneous. With people of color more likely to be accused of stealing and white people (like the witness) more likely than people of color to mistake one Black woman for another, we go back and forth on ascertaining Doris’s guilt even as we see (or don’t see) her steal a ring in front of the camera, while she talks to an outdoor jewelry vendor with her friend from childhood, Jean.

Is Doris, like some older shoplifters, addicted to the thrill of stealing? We see, that, in spite of her expensive-looking clothes she shares a room–and a small closet–with another woman in a halfway house. So does she steal because she has no other means of support? The co-director mentioned during the Q and A that because Doris has spent her life as a jewel thief, she doesn’t have Social Security–and the estimated 2 million dollars worth of jewels she has stolen isn’t much when divided over her career of 60 years. Doris also takes obvious pleasure in recounting her adventures, so excitement and money are probably both factors in her continuing to steal.

The prosecutor at her trial says, “She has made a lifelong career out of stealing and taking advantage of people.” As the judge at the end wonders what to do with her, so do we. Prison seems even more of a waste of resources for Doris than it does for other nonviolent criminals: it doesn’t deter her (she has been imprisoned before, including the time when her white ex-boyfriend/accomplice turned her in as part of a plea deal) and because of her advanced age, even a truncated sentence could mean that she would die behind bars. The filmmakers, with their clumsy reenactments, don’t seem quite up to dissecting the complexities that Doris’s life presents, but we still think about them, even after the movie is over.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ5Cwax-aik”]

Lift, the closing selection from the festival, is a film which the festival originally premiered in 2001, when the star, Kerry Washington, was largely unknown. The movie, filmed on location in Boston and Roxbury offers a fictional counterpoint to Doris Payne. The protagonist, Niecy (Washington) is a chic window-dresser, who uses wire cutters, a big, bulky sweater and fake credit cards and identities to shoplift expensive designer clothing, which she either sells to people she knows in her neighborhood or keeps for herself or her family.

Washington isn’t quite the actress here that she was in the excellent Our Song (released shortly before Lift started filming), and the script by co-directors DeMane Davis and Khari Streeter has a muddled and clichéd it’s-all-Mom’s-fault subplot about Niecy’s relationship with her mother (Lonette McKee), but the scenes of Niecy trying to navigate between her criminal, personal, and family lives present questions that don’t have easy answers. Her extended family know (like everyone else in the neighborhood) that she steals, but are (except for her mother) glad for her gifts–since, except for her mother, they don’t have much money themselves. They also enjoy her company: we rarely see in films criminals who are “good” or even “normal” people when they aren’t breaking the law.

But unlike in Doris Payne, we see that Niecy’s “victimless” crimes do have consequences. Greed, revenge, and a distaste for leaving witnesses behind means people get hurt, and although Niecy isn’t directly responsible, she’s not blameless either. In spite of a “silver lining” ending that seems tacked on, when Niecy finally decides to stop stealing, she does so too late–for herself and for her loved ones.

___________________________________________________

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

Call For Writers: Movie Soundtracks

Music is a powerful tool for the expression of emotions like anger, heartbreak, and lust, but it can also be used to bolster a movement, capture the feeling of a cultural milieu, expose injustices or give marginalized groups an earthshaking voice. Combining quality films with compelling soundtracks is a recipe for the creation of important works of art that speak to more than just our aesthetic.

Our theme week for July 2014 will be Movie Soundtracks.

Music is a powerful tool for the expression of emotions like anger, heartbreak and lust, but it can also be used to bolster a movement, capture the feeling of a cultural milieu, expose injustices or give marginalized groups an earthshaking voice. Combining quality films with compelling soundtracks is a recipe for the creation of important works of art that speak to more than just our aesthetic.

For example, 80s teen films were often concerned with disenfranchised youth. David Bowie’s “Changes” is famously used and quoted in the classic John Hughes film, The Breakfast Club:

And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.

The Breakfast Club is so memorable because, through both its scenes and its songs, it examines social hierarchy, gender roles, adult abuse of authority and dysfunctional homes. The Legend of Billie Jean is another 80s teen film that exposes the systemic lack of agency that youth is afforded while electing a moral-minded, charismatic young woman as the spokesperson for a movement (“fair is fair”). With Pat Benatar’s rock anthem “Invincible,” young people, especially young women, rallied around the idea of carving out spaces of power for themselves.

Waiting to Exhale uses its soundtrack with hits like “Count on Me” to emphasize the importance of female friendship, while it relies on tracks like “Exhale (Shoop, Shoop)” to express the wisdom and rich sexuality of the middle-aged women the film depicts. On the other hand, The Runaways employs “Cherry Bomb” to reveal the explosiveness of budding female sexuality.

Use of The Doors’ “The End” in Apocalypse Now encapsulates the madness of war, while The Matrix‘s use of Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up” is a battle cry against the invisible system that either keeps us complacent or destroys us. The Jamaican film The Harder They Come was not only famous for the way in which “Black people seeing themselves on the screen for the first time created an unbelievable audience reaction,” but for its diffusion of reggae to the world outside the Caribbean. With Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come,” the film was able to show how the oppressive forces in Jamaica could be combated with fierce individualism and tenacity.

We’d like you to write about the movie soundtracks that changed you or changed the world. Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, July 18 by midnight.

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut

Reality Bites

Apocalypse Now

Garden State

Pump Up the Volume

South Pacific

The Runaways

The Legend of Billie Jean

Superfly

The Harder They Come

Mary Poppins

Pulp Fiction

The Sound of Music

Rocky Horror Picture Show

The Breakfast Club

Waiting to Exhale

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

The Matrix

Fantasia

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

‘Faking It’: Better Than You Thought

Rather than being the exploitative show about straight girls playing gay that everyone expected, ‘Faking It’ has turned out to be an exploration of the blurry lines between friendship and romance.

Written by Max Thornton.

When I heard the premise of Faking It, I eyerolled so hard it hurt. I Kissed a Girl: The TV Show? Wow, that’s definitely what pop culture needs in 2014. But there’s almost nothing else on TV at the moment, so I watched it anyway, and…I kind of love it.

Make no mistake, this is not a good show: it is cheesy and melodramatic and cliche-ridden, and I honestly don’t know if it’s even self-aware in moments like the one where Teen Andrew Rannells calls Bargain-Basement Regina George “so two-dimensional, she’s practically a character on Glee.” And yet it’s eminently watchable, and it’s perhaps doing something a little interesting with the well-worn trope of the lesbian who’s in love with her straight friend.

I swear it's not as terrible as it looks. — I swear it’s not as terrible as it looks.

The premise is actually a little more nuanced than the way it’s been sold: two girls who attend a super-progressive high school are taken for lesbians and decide to roll with it to increase their popularity (apparently such schools do exist). The way it’s been promoted has suggested that the two girls take a much more active role in the deception than they actually do – it’s more that they are publicly and dramatically outed by Teen Andrew Rannells, and no one will believe their demurrals.

Karma (Katie Stevens), whose parents are ridiculous hippies, is definitely faking it. Amy (Rita Volk), who has conservative Christian parents, is probably not faking it. Their portmanteau name is Karmy.

Tumblr takes Karmy very seriously. — Tumblr takes Karmy *very* seriously.

Someone on the show referred to “the lipstick one,” but they are both so femmey I honestly didn’t know which one he meant until Karma pulled out fake eyelashes and Amy said, “I guess that makes me the butch one.” Thanks for the clarification, show.

Bargain-Basement Regina George is about to become Amy’s stepsister, which is a potentially intriguing twist that has been squandered. It’s used not to deepen the Regina George character at all but just to make life even more difficult for poor Amy.

Meanwhile Teen Andrew Rannells (Michael Willett) and Bargain-Basement Edward Cullen (Gregg Sulkin) are BFFs. Teen Andrew Rannells is super enthusiastic about having lesbian friends, while Bargain-Basement Edward Cullen and Karma have a gross secret affair that 0 percent of all viewers are emotionally invested in. It’s gross and terrible and Karma needs to get hit upside the head with the cluebat. But it is neat that the gay boy’s straight best friend is a dude, rather than a woman as in 99 percent of pop culture. As repellent as Bargain-Basement Edward Cullen is, it’s refreshing to see a close onscreen friendship between a gay teen boy and a straight teen boy that isn’t full of “no homo.”

Sure, their characters have names, but they'll always be Teen Andrew Rannells and Bargain-Basement Edward Cullen to me. — Sure, their characters have names, but they’ll always be Teen Andrew Rannells and Bargain-Basement Edward Cullen to me.

Hijinks and soul-searching ensue, as Karma is terrible and Amy tries to figure out her sexuality. (“I don’t want to meet another girl.” “Boy?” “I don’t want to meet another boy.” “That limits your options.” Oh honey, not as severely as you think.) The very end of the season took an unfortunate turn into a well-trod territory that needed to happen on TV never again. It might be narratively justifiable, but it seems like every single fictional lesbian ever has slept with a man, and that really needs to stop.

As Autostraddle recapper Riese pointed out, “best friendship in high school is often nearly indistinguishable from girlfriendship.” Rather than being the exploitative show about straight girls playing gay that everyone expected, Faking It has turned out to be an exploration of the blurry lines between friendship and romance.

In some ways, the show it most reminds me of is the British series Sugar Rush (which debuted almost a decade ago, oh god I feel old). Sugar Rush was another show about a high-school lesbian in love with her straight best friend, and it was also somewhat prone to cheese and melodrama, but – you know what? That is honest to the teen experience. Teenagers are prone to cheese and melodrama, especially teenagers who are struggling to figure out their sexuality (and/or hopelessly in love with their best friend).

For all its faults, Sugar Rush was formative for me as a budding queer, and for that reason it will always have a special place in my heart. American teens in 2014 have more lesbionic televisual role models than British teens in 2005; even so, if Faking It can be for even one kid what Sugar Rush was for me, its existence will be justified.

_________________________________________________

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He’s sorry if you now have ‘I Kissed A Girl’ stuck in your head. If it’s any consolation, he does too.

‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’: A Three-Hour Explosion of Contempt for You and Your Family

You don’t have to be an intellectual elitist to hate ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction.’ It is a terrible movie for reasons that have nothing to do with a lack of originality and everything to do with an abundance of vulgarity, violence, misogyny, and racism.

Written by Andé Morgan.

Here is all you need to know about Transformers: Age of Extinction: You Don’t Have To See It.

I'm pretty sure that's not in the Bible. — I’m pretty sure that’s not in the Bible.

The fourth installment of the Transformers movie franchise, Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), dropped this Friday, June 27. It has done well at the box office, becoming the first film this year to break $100 million in its opening weekend, and dwarfing the returns of competitors like 22 Jump Street (2014) and How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014). Directed by Michael Bay (again) and written (such as it is) by Ehren Kruger, it features Mark Wahlberg as Cade Yeager, the heroically hunky everyman hero. Shia LeBeouf was unavailable, as lately he has been fully occupied with losing his shit.

Yeah, the critics don’t seem to like the movie very much – it’s currently coming in at 17 percent at Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest rating yet for a Transformers film. I didn’t like it, either. In fact, I hatedhatedhated it, for all the reasons that every other critic mentions. Very original, I know. Actually, my original angle for this review, originally, was to gripe about the film’s lack of originality. You see, it’s very important to me that as many people as possible know that I listen to NPR while driving my Subaru to the farmer’s market, and I was going to tie in my theme with the subject of the latest TED Radio Hour episode, What is Original. However, maybe I’m maturing as a critic, because I’ve concluded that it’s just not fair to expect a film like Transformers (2014) to be original. I mean, it was loud, senseless, clunky, and almost THREE HOURS LONG. But, as Stephanie Palmer wrote recently, summer blockbusters aren’t usually intended to be original. Rather, they’re designed to minimize risk and maximize profit. Fair enough.

I also thought about making the best out of it, as Charlie Jane Anders does in her review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2011). After all, when life gives you poop, make poopjuice, right? No. Nope, in fact. It doesn’t matter that this is an action figure movie designed to appeal to adolescent males, I just can’t muster the good will to hold my nose, wink, and keep my tongue in cheek.

You don’t have to be an intellectual elitist to hate Transformers: AOE. It’s a terrible movie for reasons that have nothing to do with a lack of originality and everything to do with an abundance of vulgarity, violence, misogyny, and racism.

By vulgarity, I don’t mean expletives, I mean excessive tastelessness. Shiny, five gallon buckets of Dom Pérignon tastelessness. Bay is a master of landscape cinematography, and it shows since almost every shot in the movie is a landscape onto which a CGI robot will be projected. For example, after the prologue (dinosaurs), we’re introduced to Yeager. He’s just a regular guy – he drives a rusty blue pickup, he’s dirty, he wears tight T-shirts (yeah, his biceps are dreamy), and he cares about his teenage daughter, Tessa (Nicola Peltz). He’s also a single dad and a small businessman, struggling to make ends meet with his barn-based cassette tape and film projector repair shop/ROBOTICS ENGINEERING LAB. While establishing Yeager’s down home bonifides and cat-saving prowess, Bay treats us to endless shots of cornfields, soybean fields, and field fields. I haven’t seen so much lingering on a cornfield since Field of Dreams (1989) mated with Children of the Corn (1984).

Similarily, the viewer endures an excess of shallow, inarticulate references to the concerns of the day. Posters and billboards in the background allude to our national discussion of immigration policy, while mean Kelsey Grammer and his très chic CIA deathsquad reflect our trepidations about government surveillance.

Violence certainly has a place in storytelling but, like its predecessors, Tranformers (2014) has an excess of violence. Mr. Bay, where is the blood? We see countless buildings ravaged by rockets and errant robots, but where are the human bodies falling from the 55th story, blown out or jumping to escape the flames? Likewise, those same rockets strike countless vehicles, robots slice cars in half, space magnets lift tour buses half a mile into the air only to drop onto elevated trains full of commuters. I’m guessing Paramount couldn’t afford to break off some of that $210 million budget to cast a few hundred thousand dead bystanders. To be fair, I could ask that same question of Godzilla (2014) or Pacific Rim (2013) (and I do).

Was that one of those driverless Google cars?

It’s not like this so-called family film shirked from depicting violence and death entirely. In one disturbing scene, a government agent holds a gun to Tessa’s head while she pleads for her life as Cade looks on, helpless; later, we see Cade’s affable best friend Lucas (T. J. Miller) burned to death, leaving an obscene smoldering effigy that Cade and Tessa…absolutely do not react to. Maybe they’re just like the film’s young audience as the exit the theatre – numb to death.

Bay doesn’t just excel at bloodless mass murder or at getting actors to stare skyward at imaginary robots, he’s also good at casual racist caricature. Early on, our white male protagonist has to defend his home from a real estate agent who is not a black woman who is also large, she’s a Fat Sassy Black Woman. Later we’re reacquainted with Brains, a small robot with a cybernetic afro and dialogue co-opted from a minstrel show. We also see Orientalist cliches, including Every Asian Knows Martial Arts and a Wise (Robot) Samurai.

While the film passes the letter of the Bechel Test, women don’t fare well, either. Bay’s camera often lingers on the female character’s bodies. Lucas’ introductory scene begins with his verbal sexual harassment of two women crossing the street separating him from Yeager. This harassment goes unrebuffed by Wahlberg’s character. Boys will be boys, I guess.

Sophia Myles plays a geologist, Darcy Tirrel; while she’s the first main character to be introduced, she spends the remainder of the film playing The Watson for Stanley Tucci’s Steve Jobs character, Joshua Joyce, to explain Transformer tech to. During the climatic battle (I think it was the climatic battle, it’s kinda hard to tell), she marks Joyce’s development (now he’s a friendly capitalist!), saying “I’m proud of you.”

Bingbing Li plays Su Yueming, Joyce’s Chinese attaché. She wears tight pantsuits, knows Kung-Fu, and can drive a motorcycle. While initially she rebuffs his creepy-boss advances, she relents in the end and they sunset into the credits.

Tessa exists a perpetual protectorate for Yeager. For example, an hour and a half, i.e., midway, through the film, Yeager boards an alien prison ship to rescue her. While Tessa is hiding from her captors, a masculine green alien prisoner wraps a slimy green tongue around her bare leg. As the tongue gets longer and longer, it starts to reach for her genitals. I was reminded of the infamous tree rape scene in Evil Dead (1981).

As Rebecca Phale at The Mary Sue notes, the most disturbingly misogynistic scene is also the most subtle. On the aforementioned prison ship, Hound, a horribly erratic and violent Autobot voiced by John Goodman, murders an alien – essentially, a walking vagina dentata with an unfortunate sniffle – because it is “too ugly to live.” He punctuates the act by calling the corpse a “bitch.”

And so on. I intended to discuss the plot, but there wasn’t one. I was going to use phrasing like “soul crushing,” but I will decline in the interest of originality. How about “a long, loud, and dreary exercise in post-postmodern nihilism,” has that been taken? I will say that you, reader, are free to not see this movie. By all means, see a summer blockbuster, but hold out for one that shows more respect for women, minorities, and your ears.

OK Mr. Bay, I’m done, I’m broken, just leave me alone and I’ll buy a fucking million pack of Bud Light.

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Andé Morgan lives in Tucson, Arizona, where they write about culture, race, politics, and LGBTQ issues. Follow them @andemorgan.