The radical notion that women like good movies
Though clearly based on the novel, ‘Bride & Prejudice’ is a successful piece of transnational cinema, which uses the interracial relationship between the Bakshi’s second eldest daughter Lalita and white American Mark Darcy to discuss differences in race, tradition, and cultural imperialism.
By not blatantly focusing on the racial disparity between Jackie and Max, it speaks volumes in regards to who the film is about. … It is silently implied that as a Black woman, she divorces her identity from the men in her life — including a man who, as a white male maintains a sense of privilege in society — and reclaims it for her own.
To have a Black character like this to not only be the co-lead in an iconic franchise but to also include him in a healthy, positively portrayed relationship with a white woman is a brilliant statement. … Finn and Rey’s difference in race doesn’t put any limitations on what this couple can and do achieve.
The newly released Marvel “superhero” movie ‘Deadpool’ is more of a self-aware, raunchy antihero flick that solidly earns its R rating with graphic violence, lots of dick jokes, and a sex scene montage. Basically, it’s a good time. While ‘Deadpool’ is entertaining, self-referential, self-effacing, and full of pop culture references, how does it measure up with its depiction of its female characters?
You can thank me when you’ve finished watching ‘Star Wars: Clone Wars’ and ‘Star Wars Rebels.’ In my opinion, they’re everything ANY of the ‘Star Wars’ movies lacked in story writing, character development, and feminism. You’re welcome.
‘The Danish Girl’ and ‘Tangerine’ collide in their allusion to the notions of gender identity, gender expression and beauty in conversations about trans women. But ‘Tangerine’ takes that necessary next step by centering and humanizing the lives of trans women, which ‘The Danish Girl’ pointedly fails to do.
The traditional family is marked as a hostile space of enforced hypocrisy.
Representations of trans women still remain few and far between in film and on television. Representations of trans women performed by actual trans women are even more rare. (‘Orange is the New Black’ and ‘Sense8’ are the most recent, popular exceptions to that rule, and, interestingly, both are series productions created by Netflix.)
The girls, driven by desperation to escape their mundane lives to take part in Spring Break, scheme a robbery of the local chicken shack to raise the necessary funds to get there. To psyche themselves up for the crime, they exhort each other to pretend it’s a video game, to detach themselves and dehumanize their victims in a hurried pep talk to the same end as the grueling boot camp scenes sequences in ‘Full Metal Jacket.’
How significant it is, then, that Ramsay changes the ending from the novel where Morvern discovers she’s pregnant to instead give her a narrative of hopeful escape and adventure. Through the economic, cultural and narrative capitals gained from the violence enacted on the male author both inside and outside of the text, the female protagonist is offered a radical feminist alternative. Rather than by trapped by her class position, socio-economic position, job possibilities or pregnancy, Morvern is, instead, offered freedom, autonomy and authority.
Furiosa, stabbed and wounded yet still persistent, takes down the main villain Immortan Joe. “Remember me?” Furiosa growls just before ripping his breathing apparatus–and half of his face–clean off. That quip may seem like your average cool one-liner, but for me it is so much more than that. It’s Furiosa, our female protagonist, who takes out the bad guy. Not Max. Not Nux, or any other male character. Her.
Ginger, despite morphing into a werewolf, becomes our protagonist killer in a very human way, and the complexity of her journey is a cinematic rarity. A large part of its appeal is the addictive excitement-and-relief cocktail that comes with seeing your experiences reflected on screen–to see menstruation from a menstruating perspective. Who wouldn’t see want to see the violence of their PMS daydreams being played out?
