Bitch Flicks – Page 13 – The radical notion that women like good movies

Bisexual Erasure in Media and Pop Culture Is Still Far Too Prevalent

Bisexuality is commonly erased in the media, despite there being many examples of characters attracted to multiple genders.

This guest post written by Amy Squire originally appeared at Fanny Pack and an edited version appears here as part of our theme week on Bisexual Representation. It is cross-posted with permission.

Did you know that 23rd September is Bi Visibility day?

Since 1999, the bisexual community has celebrated and promoted its existence on this day but it may seem a strange idea that bisexuality needs more visibility. Everyone has heard the term and many claim to understand it. It’s the famous ‘B’ in ‘LGBTQ’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer). Yet glaring misconceptions and myths still persist, and bisexual people often face rejection from both inside and outside of LGBTQ communities. Bisexual erasure is all around us, but you don’t miss what you don’t see — until someone points it out.

Misconception and myth

Misunderstanding is a causal factor of bisexual erasure. Such misunderstandings can be willful; a refusal to believe in the experience and existence of bisexuality. The most common of these is when a bisexual person settles into a long term relationship or marriage. Depending on the gender of their partner, they are assumed to have settled as either gay or straight, with their previous preferences dismissed as a phase or mistake.

Image source: me-me-me.tv

But the myth-busting of bisexuals as confused or promiscuous can in itself be harmful. It maintains the ideas that confusion and promiscuity are harmful, abnormal, and best avoided. This is challenging for societies that view lifelong monogamous relationships as the ideal. The term ‘bisexual’ itself has been seen as trans-exclusionary, as it most popularly describes people attracted to one of two binary sexes. However, its meaning has evolved since the first recorded use of the term in 1824, when it described intersex people. Later in 1892, it was repurposed to its common use today.

Bisexuality and homosexuality

Bisexual erasure is often a symptom of biphobia, which is expressed in different ways. Bisexual people have been accused of simultaneously being closeted gay people taking advantage of straight privilege — or benefiting from straight passing privilege, which doesn’t actually exist — and attention-seeking heterosexual people taking over queer spaces.

They may erase themselves in order to fit in to either space. Some bisexual people refuse to discuss the gender of their partner where they are of the opposite sex, so as not to contribute to homophobia. They are also often erased in legal matters and the marriage equality debate, where their rights vary depending on the gender of their partner and same-sex couples will automatically be referred to as lesbian or gay.

Ironically, when lifelong bisexual visibility activist Robyn Ochs married her partner Peg Preble in 2004 (in one of the first same-sex marriages in the U.S.), she was misidentified in the press as a lesbian.

Pop culture invisibility

Bisexuality is commonly erased in the media, despite there being many examples of characters attracted to multiple genders. The Netflix series Grace and Frankie follows two women whose husbands fall in love with each other. They continue to love and sleep with their wives, but when they are found out, people call them gay. Some argue bisexual women are more “acceptable” to society than bisexual men. Viewed through the heterosexual male gaze, the idea of women who could sleep with you and other women is titillating; the idea that your male friend could be attracted to you as well as his girlfriend might be more unnerving. Both thoughts are dehumanizing to the individual in question.

Despite this, even the beloved series Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn’t discuss Willow the witch being bisexual, despite being hailed as a progressive show. She was openly attracted to her male best friend, had a long-term relationship with a man, then was suddenly gay. Writers side-stepped discussion of whether she had felt societal pressure to get a boyfriend and was a lesbian all along. Bisexuality was never mentioned at all. Many bisexuals feel her sexuality was erased but most lesbians understandably feel she was a great example of representation. Others have a new interpretation of sexual fluidity to try and reconcile the two.

Image source: Hellmouth Yeah Whatever

Conversely, well-known bisexual or gay characters are erased from the media by being rewritten as straight. Did you know that Mystique from the X-Men is bisexual in the comics? Her character was brought to the mainstream through the X-Men film franchise, but she was only depicted following or being attracted to men. Given her ability to morph into any man or woman at will, sexual fluidity is a logical conclusion for her character.

Bi discrimination

Biphobia at its most dangerous can be lethal. There is poor understanding of the mental health issues of the bisexual community, as well as an increased rate of suicide. In 2013, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Protection found that 61% of bisexual women have a lifetime prevalence of rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner. This is compared to 45% and 35% for lesbians and heterosexual women respectively.

The portrayal of Amber Heard’s bisexuality as incriminating, rather than a risk factor in her alleged abuse from ex-husband Johnny Depp, is a damning example of society’s biphobia. The explanation that he may have been jealous of her female friends is another example of bisexual people being deemed as promiscuous and dishonest. Shockingly, in this case it’s used as an excuse for intimate partner violence.

These are just a few ways in which bisexual people are made invisible. So what is the future for bisexual people? Both heterosexual and LGBTQ communities need to accept and listen to them. Some are now choosing to redefine themselves. Pansexuality and polysexuality are the latest identifiers, which some use as an alternative to bisexual, while others claim it’s a way to describe people who are attracted to all gender identities (such as agender, genderqueer, Two Spirit, and non-binary people, as well as cis and trans women and men).

However, like feminism, bisexual people are now using their original name to encompass a more intersectional, trans-inclusive meaning. Ultimately, it’s up to you to describe your own identity. That may even mean not using a label at all. I hope with every Bi Visibility Day that passes, it becomes more of a celebration and less of an appeal for recognition.

Amy Squire is from Essex and works in London. She is a contributor and the social media coordinator for Fanny Pack. Raised a feminist in an all-female household (much of the time in her mother’s student digs), her approach is that feminism is inclusive, common-sense, and applicable to all our daily lives. Her passion for equal rights and opportunities for women and the next generation of girls developed during her midwifery training. She learned about women’s issues such body image, domestic violence, and female genital mutilation and how they often come to a head during childbearing. She now wants to use her writing to spread the positive message of feminism.

6 Gender-Swapped Films We’d Love To See: Male to Female Casts

From the gender-neutral, Alien-fighting Ellen Ripley, to the deadpan Vulcan Mr. Spock, to whiny Jedi Master Luke Skywalker (yes, that Luke), the genders of some of our best-loved characters have actually been swapping around for decades behind the scenes. The difference with ‘Ghostbusters’ is that – as a remake – the swap was public knowledge, thus inviting the barrage of misogynistic grumbling that flooded the internet.

This guest post written by the Fanny Pack Team originally appeared at Fanny Pack. It is cross-posted with permission.

By now, you’ve probably noticed that the all-female Ghostbusters reboot/sequel (uh, requel? seqboot?) has been out for a little while now, and judging by its healthy box office performance and mainly positive critical reception, has hopefully forced overgrown fanboys everywhere to eat their premature YouTube dislikes and Twitter rants about “ruined childhoods.”

Although there is chatter of the film as the flagship for a whole new “trend” for gender-swapped remakes in Hollywood right now, there’s actually nothing new about this treatment at all. From the gender-neutral, Alien-fighting Ellen Ripley, to the deadpan Vulcan Mr. Spock, to whiny Jedi Master Luke Skywalker (yes, that Luke), the genders of some of our best-loved characters have actually been swapping around for decades behind the scenes. The difference with Ghostbusters is that – as a remake – the swap was public knowledge, thus inviting the barrage of misogynistic grumbling that flooded the internet. It seems that we’re far more open to gender-swapping when we’re unaware of it, which highlights just how much gender alone can dictate a film’s narrative sometimes.

Inspired by Hollywood’s new appetite for gender-swapping remakes, one of our writers, Chelsey Lang, recently wrote a ‘reverse-Ghostbusters’ list featuring her picks for female-led movies remade with male casts, testing if they would still make sense or be rendered absurd to our stereotype-addled brains. We enjoyed Chelsey’s article so much that we decided to expand on her list across a two-part series featuring both female-to-male, and male-to-female remakes. So, without further ado, here are our top picks for male-to-female gender-swapped films.

Which ones would you shell out some cash for at the box office?

1. The Lost Girls

Written by Hannah Collins

Before there was Edward Cullen, Spike, Angel, or even Being Human’s Mitchell, vampires were mainly styled by pop culture as ruffle-shirted, older men with a gentlemanly turn of phrase and a penchant for dwelling in Eastern European castles or stately homes. That was before 1987 rolled up with it’s bleached mullets and Duran Duran-brand of hyper-masculinity to give the aging undead that sexy teenage make-over they didn’t know they needed. I’m talking about cult-classic, The Lost Boys.

To those unfamiliar, yes – the title is a direct reference to J.M Barrie’s “lost boys” from Peter Pan, and merging this parable about the pros and cons of eternal youth with vampire mythology (along with the come-hither-fanged smirk of a then unknown Keifer Sutherland) turned out to be pretty effective at revitalizing both for the modern day. The result is a punk-inflected fairy tale of male youth in revolt – alluring to teen audiences but suitably shocking to all those grown-ups who just don’t get it, man.

But while main character – the mostly human, Michael (Jason Patric) – feels threatened by David (Keifer Sutherland) and his undead gang, he doesn’t feel so threatened by the only female member, Star (Jami Gertz). This is consistantly the plight of the lesser-spotted female vampire: an object of submissive sexuality compared to the sexual dominance that her male counterparts exude. Moreover, Star’s regaining of her humanity by the end of the film paints her more as a victim to be “saved” from the vampire curse, rather than revel in it as the male gang members are allowed to do. (They’ve got at least another ten years to “party hard, Wayne” before Buffy stakes the shit out of the whole nest, after all.)

This is why The Lost Boys is so ripe for a gender-swapped remake, and it needs to happen soon before the vague afterbuzz of Twilight and The Vampire Diaries has fully settled. I want to see a dangerous, morality-ridden teenage girl gang – fanged and fierce – skulking the Santa Carla Boardwalk at night with a token brown-eyed boy member (he could still be called ‘Star’) to reel in the new, unsuspecting human protagonist (let’s call her ‘Micheala’). Less Bella and Edward and more, uh, Beau and Edythe, I guess.

We’ll need some relatively less famous, young faces keeping in line with the original casting, so let’s have Taissa Farmiga (American Horror Story, The Bling Ring) as our fiesty, vamp-busting heroine ‘Micheala,’ Tyler Posey (Teen Wolf) as our eye-candy ‘Star,’ and Zoe Kravitz (Mad Max: Fury Road, Dope) as our badass leader of the pack, ‘Darcy.’

2. Arsonist’s Daughter

Written by Amy Squire

I would love to see a new film about female writers that doesn’t center on the “woman fights against society’s expectations to become a writer” trope. Instead, it would be refreshing to see the fact that they’re writers taken for granted. Wonder Boys was based on Michael Chabon’s novel of the same name about a writer unable to finish his latest novel as his personal life unravels. In the 2000 original, a middle-aged literary professor (Michael Douglas) gets caught up in a weekend’s misadventure in the company of his troublesome editor Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.) and young protege James Leer (Toby Maguire). Their capers involve the theft of a piece of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia, a dead dog, and Crabtree’s roving eye for any man he meets.

This all may sound foolish, but a witty script, showing off the imagination and dark side to these characters, elevates the film above the average comedy. This calls for an accomplished cast. In my reimagining, Jodie Foster plays the dry, weed-smoking genius Professor Tripp who wrote her award-winning novel seven years ago and is hounded by her editor, family, and students to produce the long-awaited follow up. After her husband walks out, her misbehaving editor turns up to chase progress. Crabtree would be the most difficult to cast but perhaps Maggie Gyllenhaal could strike the right balance of intelligence and mischief. Mia Wasikowska has the perfect combination of naivety and brilliance to play the seemingly-innocent but prodigal student Leer.

Something of a cult classic, the thought of remaking Wonder Boys seems sacrilege, but who wouldn’t want to see this dream team’s comedy of errors? We need more female-driven comedies, especially ones that don’t find humor in a woman chasing a man. There is a sub-plot based on Tripp’s love-life, but it’s more of a resolution of an existing relationship, than a romantic love story. The fact that the original film went under the radar at the box office could spell success for a reboot. Since the original title wouldn’t work and Wonder Girls sounds patronizing, I would suggest a new title; Arsonist’s Daughter, the name of Tripp’s eponymous debut.

3. Ant-Woman

Written by Robert Wood

It’s guaranteed to be far from the worthiest choice on the list, but in terms of the immediate good a gender-swap would do, I honestly think Ant-Man deserves a mention. The 2015 movie about Paul Rudd’s shrinking superhero was good enough in terms of a modern movie, but was a great, missed opportunity for Marvel’s first female-led film.

I should probably start my case by snuffing out the ever-present fanboy protest – I know and love as much about Marvel superheroes as the next three people combined, and there’s no reason there can’t be an Ant-Woman. Hank Pym has gone by many pseudonyms, ‘Ant-Man’ included, and has shared them with men, women, people of color, alien imposters, and robots. There are even female characters with the same abilities – Stature/Cassie Lang, who was in the movie (without her powers), and The Wasp/Janet van Dyne, who was in the movie (kind of, in flashback, in CGI). The latter is a founding member of the Avengers who has done everything Ant-Man has done “but backwards and in heels” (he also took her name when she was dead for a bit – precedent!)

That’s why Ant-Man could have a female lead, but why should it get one? First of all, because that choice would add something new and interesting to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Paul Rudd’s “charming fuck-up” portrayal of Scott Lang is fine, but doesn’t bring anything that Chris Pratt, Robert Downey Jr., and Tom Holland don’t have covered. Let a woman add something different to the role – in fact, let a Marvel woman be a fuck-up!

It was announced that Brie Larson will play Captain Marvel, and of course Scarlett Johansson is already a badass Black Widow. Hell, even Ant-Man hinted that Evangeline Lilly will at some point sprout wings as a tough-as-nails Wasp. At least one (probably two) of them will get their own movie soon and enter the Marvel ensemble cast, but there’s not a fuck-up in the bunch. By “fuck-up,” I don’t mean the klutzy-yet-professional woman from a crap rom-com; I mean someone who isn’t immediately good at this, who has made bad decisions they want to atone for, and who can at least deliver their quip allotment in a way that a) we don’t already have and b) includes far more of the audience in the vicarious feeling of agency and ability.

Currently, Marvel superheroes show men (and boys) that you can go from slob/jerk/weakling to hero – that perhaps that’s even how you get to being a hero. That’s a nice message, contextualizing moral behavior as a struggle rather than a quality you automatically possess. Women (and girls), on the other hand, get pre-made badasses who may, in an unguarded moment, reference the appalling tragedy that made them the way they are. Large-scale social change begins with mainstream pop culture and especially with children’s entertainment. If you want more women professionals in business, sports, and STEM in 2036, make more girls in 2016 feel like they could be superheroes.

Who should get the lead role? My first choice would be Fresh Off the Boat’s Constance Wu, a comedic actress who I think could easily pull off the “Oh, God, this now?” that makes Ant-Man fun. Rashida Jones would knock if out of the park as well.

4. The Pursuit of Happyness

Written by Hannah Shoesmith

Will Smith’s portrayal of Christopher Gardener, a Black single father who tackles poverty and homelessness to become a broker, is an honest depiction of the hard struggle it is to be successful. It is a refreshing side of Hollywood where true stories are not whitewashed, where the plight of the Black man trying to succeed in America isn’t devalued or glossed over.

But what if The Pursuit of Happyness had a female lead? What if it were the story of a Black single mother trying to make it as a broker? It is not a new concept that roles written for men have ended up being played on our screens by women. Think Angelina Jolie’s hard-edged character in Salt or Jodie Foster in Flight Plan. The success of this film is down to the honesty of the story. Unlike other biopics, very little was changed from the lived experience of Chris Gardener. Changing the lead from male to female however would expose a deeper, more brutal struggle.

The eventual success of Smith’s character was a hard graft, but what if that character had to also overcome sexism? The dangers a person faces while homeless are tough, but as a woman issues of rape and prostitution are an added danger. There are very little blockbusters that address the stories of Black women within the workplace, or in poverty. It can be perceived by movie big-wigs that there isn’t an audience for these types of films but a single mother’s struggle is probably one of the most relatable stories.

But who would be the perfect leading lady? Even amongst actors of color, there is still hegemony within Hollywood about who gets the roles. Just look at the controversy surrounding Zoe Saldana being cast as Nina Simone. Films such as these are the perfect opportunity to showcase the acting skills of some rising Black female stars. Orange Is The New Black’s Uzo Aduba would be an exceptional lead actress, and we already know she has the ability to captivate an audience and channel emotions.

5. Her(cules)

Written by Alyssa Skinner

Growing up watching Disney film after Disney film where the girl was a beautiful princess (whether from the beginning or not) was so …YAWN. She was always beautiful and soft and sweet and feminine and rescued by Prince Charming. Ugh.

And then there was Mulan. Now, that was my shiz.

Mulan allowed me to see that I did not have to beautiful; I did not have to wait for Prince Charming; I did not have to follow traditional rules; I did not have to be soft, feminine and sweet to be liked or to be successful. I could save the entire country, all on my fucking own. Nowadays, there are a few more strong female leads in Disney productions with recent films like Brave and Frozen, but back in the 1990s, Mulan was the only tale able to set this precedent for me. Perhaps this explains my intense love for the epic. While the current and future female-featured Disney stories (Moana <3) should absolutely continue, how about we remake an oldie but a goodie?

Her(cules): half god, half mortal, full female lead character. Voiced by the sweet and badass, Zendaya, Her(cules) is young and naive but fiercely strong and she doesn’t know her true potential, yet. As an outcast teenage girl, Her(cules) has all the struggles of trying to find her identity and her place in the world. When she finds out she is adopted and goes looking for answers, she learns that she is a descendant from the gods and must become a “true hero” to regain her godliness. To become this hero, she sets out to find a trainer. This prickly motivator and sidekick, Phil(omena), played by the hilarious Amy Schumer, will teach her and guide her.

Through her journeying, Her(cules) stumbles upon and ends up saving Mega from a Centaur. Mega, voiced by Jesse Williams, has the smart-aleck, sarcastic, hair-flipping appeal of a true bad boy. A romance is sparked. Hades, played by Chelsea Peretti, uses this love affair to manipulate Her(cules) out of her powers for 24 hours and in tandem, reveals that Mega actually works for her. In the end, Her(cules) saves her God parents, AND saves Mega’s soul from the undead river of souls by sacrificing herself for him. Her selfless sacrifice restores her godliness which she ultimately chooses to give up to stay with Mega as mortals and live happily ever after and all that jazz.

How often does the female lead character get to save the male love interest via a physical feat? BOOM. A female role model that every little girl can look up to and see that are not waiting for a boy or a crown and a glass slipper. They can dress up as with a Grecian cape and sword for Halloween and know that should they choose, they too can be a true god-like hero.

6. Harriet Potter

Written by Maeve Kelly

Now if there’s one thing that’s hitting the headlines recently, it’s Harry Potter and the ‘Alternative Universe’ Concepts. That is thanks entirely to The Cursed Child, the latest Harry Potter book/film/play/controversy, which presents (amongst other things) multiple alternate realities to the Harry Potter world. Some have pointed out that the play barely passes the Bechdel Test– leaving me (consummate Harry Potter obsessive) to wonder about the level of female interaction in all of these books-come-films.

The Harry Potter series has been applauded in the past for it’s depiction of strong female characters — key of which is, of course, Hermione Granger. Considered the “smartest witch of her age,” Hermione is one of the array of women characters (Ginny, Luna, Molly, Bellatrix, Tonks, Fleur, McGonagall) who prove themselves to have agency, complexities, and flaws throughout the series. J.K. Rowling herself has spoken about the importance of not “marginalizing” women characters, especially within action sequences. So why, then, did Rowling simply not go the whole hog and make Harry a girl?

Quora have previously discussed the concept of a female Harry Potter (suggesting the name ‘Holly Potter’ due to the number of floral names amongst the women in his family), focusing mainly on her relationships with the other characters. Would a romance blossom between her and Ron? Would she be rivals with or friends with Hermione, an equally powerful but arguably less important witch? What would the media pressure that Harry suffers throughout the series do to a young woman? From my perspective, it would be fascinating to see the golden trio re-written with two or even three woman characters at it’s center. This would be instead of Hermione attempting to act as a one-woman-inclusion-machine, representing women, muggleborns, and (more recently) Black people.

The concept of target audiences only buying into what is familiar to them is probably a key reason that Harry was not originally written as a girl. Rowling published under the initials J.K. instead of her first name, Joanne, amongst fears that young boys would not read a book written by a woman. Nevertheless, now that the Harry Potter brand has gained universal fame, it has already proved possible to retrospectively increase diversity in the series (gay Dumbledore and Black Hermione being key examples). Therefore, I think the time is ripe to see Harriet/Holly take to our screens, alongside her platonic best friends, Ron and Hermione. I’d love the next generation to see an angry, neglected, scarred young girl journey through grief, friendship, and loss to become the powerful symbol of the ultimate triumph of good which Harry was for my generation.

Casting young children would be difficult as they are spotted at a young age and grow with the filming, but we could start off by casting Quvenzhané Wallis as either Harriet or Hermione, and work from there.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

A Fragile Masculinity: Gender-Swapping Male Characters
Top 10 Supheroes Who are Better as Superheroines
Top 10 Superheroines Who Deserve Their Own Movies
Top 10 Superheroine Movies that Need a Reboot
Top 10 Villainesses Who Deserve Their Own Movies

Fanny Pack was created to raise awareness surrounding gender inequality and the simple fact that it still exists today. Fanny Pack consists of a team of writers that deliver valuable content to the wider discussion, whilst inspiring more people to read and write.

Making a DVD for Your Independent Film: It’s Not What it Seems!

Making a DVD is fairly easy! I’ve done this loads of times before! All you need is a menu, a ProRes file, and DVD Studio Pro. Then you burn to your heart’s desire. Shouldn’t take me more than a few weeks to get these all finished, right? Wrong. I was so wrong! But now I’m a pro, and I’m going to tell you how to be one too.

This guest post written by Jillian Corsie is an edited version that originally appeared at Trichster.com. It is cross-posted with permission.

When my production team and I first started crowdfunding our feature documentary, Trichster, in the summer of 2012, we offered DVDs as one of our incentives. We figured that since our film was going to be small, it would be no big deal to burn a handful and send them to our supporters. Little did we know that first campaign would gain international attention, that our film would end up on ABC’s 20/20, or that we’d soon be winning awards for a documentary we were all making in our spare time.

Once we finished the film (two years later than we thought), it was time to fulfill our crowdfunding rewards. At this point, my producers and I started questioning whether or not people would even want a DVD. Who watches DVDs anymore? Now it’s all about streaming sites like Amazon and Netflix. We had already released the film on iTunes and VHX and sent our supporters their digital downloads. Maybe we didn’t need to make DVDs after all! Once we released Trichster, the emails from fans started pouring in. People wanted to know when and how they could buy their DVDs. As it turns out, Trichster has a wide range of audiences. A lot of people don’t have iTunes accounts or find VOD platforms like VHX confusing and difficult to navigate. We knew that we needed to make DVDs. I figured the process wouldn’t be all that difficult. But what I thought was going to take me 3 weeks ended up taking 4 months.

SUBTITLES: They’re not what they seem

First I needed to gather my assets. I have one 73 minute feature film and 4 bonus feature clips to include. I also needed English and Spanish subtitles for the film, since we have a large Spanish speaking following. I’m about to get really technical here so bear with me!

I had already had an English SRT file made (total cost: $500) for our online closed caption delivery. I needed to find a place that could convert the file into a STL file in order to make the DVDs. I’m no genius when it comes to subtitle file types, so this was an incredible learning experience. I tried downloading some software which would allow me to edit my SRT file and do the conversion myself. After 4 days of frustration and wasted time, I gave up and decided it’s best left to the professionals. I got quotes from a few different caption houses and settled on one that was reasonably priced and in my area. They wanted $657 for the Spanish subtitles and $25 for the SRT to STL conversion.

Here’s where frame rates come into play. My film was shot and finished at 23.98fps. Our NTSC DVD needed to be 29.97fps, and we needed to make a PAL DVD for our international community at 25fps. 3 different frame rates equals 6 different subtitle files. I asked my subtitle house to do a blind conversion, meaning they don’t manually sync up the text to the picture. Seems like it would work anyway right? Wrong. So I spent $175 for a conversion that didn’t work before having to have them manually sync the English and Spanish titles for a cool $643.86. Finally, I had my titles ready to send to my DVD author. Total cost of digital closed captioning and DVD subtitles: $1,975.86.

MENU DESIGN: It pays to have talented friends

It dawned on me that I had better have my DVD menu artwork all figured out before I sent my assets over to my DVD author. Luckily, I have an extremely talented friend who is a whiz at Photoshop who volunteered to design all of my assets for me. She designed the disk artwork, DVD case artwork, and all 4 pages of the DVD menu. After a week of printing out tests and trying different things, we finalized the artwork. Now, let’s get those DVD’s made!

DVD AUTHORING: NTSC and PAL and what region now?

After putting my feelers out to my network of independent filmmaker friends, I picked a guy who cut me a break because I was an independent documentarian trying to do work that helped people. He explained to me the different file types that he’d need from me and talked to me about converting all 5 of my video files from 23.98fps to NTSC 29.97fps and PAL 25fps (10 files total!). PAL is optimized for TVs in Europe, Thailand, Russia, Australia, Singapore, China, and the Middle East while NTSC is optimized for TVs in the USA, Canada, and Japan. He said he’d also make all DVDs region 0 so that they would play in DVD players in all countries. He did the conversions and worked with me to send my subtitle house the correct transcodes so that my titles lined up. I send him a timecode list of where our chapter makers should be. After some back and forth, he sent me my preview disks for me to approve before making the final masters.

PANIC ENSUES: Is this DVD in sync?

I held onto my test DVDs for about a month. I watched them at home on my DVD player. I watched them at work. I had my friends who work in post-production watch them. I was convinced something was wrong with them. I couldn’t tell if the film was in sync, if it was drifting out of sync, or if I had just seen the film so many times that I couldn’t think clearly. Most of my friends said it was fine and that I was being ridiculous. Finally, after sleepless nights and panicked phone calls to my producer, a friend in IT told me something that calmed my nerves right away: all DVDs are highly compressed and all DVD players are doing their own frame rate conversion in order to play on whatever monitor it’s being played on. Some monitors playback at 59.97fps, some are 23.98fps, etc. These things are not, and will never be, in my control. I was released of my worry! Onto the mass printing of the DVDs.

DUPLICATION v. REPLICATION: Isn’t that the same thing?

As it turns out, a DVD author is not the same thing as a DVD printer. Once I had my final DVDs ready to go, I needed to get them printed. We wanted 500 NTSC DVDs and 100 PAL DVDs. Our choice was to either duplicate or replicate them. Which to me sounded like the exact same thing. Except it’s not, and one is more expensive. A DVD duplicator extracts data from the master disc and writes it to a blank disc, like making a copy, whereas the replication process is essentially cloning a master disk. Duplication can be done much faster, and at a higher price, while replication is more time consuming but less costly. We chose to replicate our DVD since it would save us about $500. After 2 weeks, I got the call that my DVDs were ready! I went and picked up 6 boxes of shiny, plastic-wrapped, DVDs. I’ll admit, seeing it for the first time was pretty cool. Total cost of DVD printing: $1591.42

SHIPPING 200 DVDs: Or, how to be the most annoying person at the post office

So I had 6 boxes of DVDs sitting in my living room. Time to email our supporters and get their addresses so I can ship. I know there are easy ways to ship mass quantities of DVDs, but when you are without a printer it makes it difficult. So, one Saturday, I put on Friends re-runs and I started hand writing the 200 envelopes and stuffing the DVDs into the packages. I then made 4 separate trips to the post office to use the self-serve machine. I had to go to the counter to mail the international envelopes which created a big line and made people behind me a tad irritated! As it turns out, it costs $13.25 to ship each international envelope! Note to self: consider this when choosing crowdfunding incentives.

WHAT I LEARNED: DVDs are cool, but do we need them today?

I have to say, it was an amazing feeling to send out our DVDs. It was really the last hurdle I had to jump for Trichster, and it felt like closing a chapter on a wild 4 ½ year period of my young life. I’m really proud that we even made it this far and that we were able to send our supporters what they were promised. I feel like we’ve made a difference and I’ve learned so much about the entire filmmaking process. It’s so fun to see fans excited about receiving their DVDs on social media. That being said, next time around I would not make DVDs. The world is changing and people don’t consume media the same way they used to. Most of us plop down on the couch and head to Netflix or iTunes to watch our favorite content. At a whopping total of $3,567.28 to make our DVDs, I think it’s better to put funding into marketing than to put so much time and effort into such an expensive process! That being said, it’s an incredible feeling to hold your professionally printed DVD in your hands. Best of luck indie filmmakers!

Jillian Corsie is a freelance editor and award-winning filmmaker based in the Los Angeles area who specializes in post-production. She has worked on a wide range of projects varying from commercial work to film trailers to feature documentary. She recently finished touring the film festival circuit with her debut feature documentary, Trichster, which launched on the iTunes “New and Noteworthy” best-seller list just days after it’s release in the Spring of 2016. Jillian was awarded “Best Young Filmmaker 2015” from Los Angeles Center Studios. She looks forward to making more films!

The Porn Reviewer’s Dilemma: What’s the Right Way to Talk About the ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Trilogy?

Most people (rightly) expect more from art than they do from porn; we expect art to offer a perspective or point of view, to have a message, to be more than a spectacle to press the pleasure centers of our brains. … And, while I don’t think it’s wrong to say that ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ fares pretty poorly as art, I do think it’s wrong to single it out, as if our cinemas aren’t full of spectacle already.

Written by Katherine Murray.

“What even is porn, really?” That’s the question I eventually asked myself when I broke my self-imposed boycott on Fifty Shades of Grey. The trailer for the second movie – which looks almost exactly as creepy and aggravating as the first movie, but with more masks – landed last week and, like it or not, a story that began life as an X-rated Twilight fan fiction is now in mainstream theatres, presenting itself as art.

Part of me wants to say it’s foolish to try to talk about Fifty Shades of Grey as if it’s anything but porn. When the novel series first became popular, a lot of the commentary about it involved people who weren’t familiar with fan fiction responding to it as a novelty – with either amusement, curiosity, or some combination of the two. It’s easy to make fun of X-rated fanfic – what turns people on is so idiosyncratic that it almost always seems ridiculous to someone else – but, over the years, I’ve learned to take a live-and-let-live attitude. People can’t control what turns them on, and it’s unkind to argue about it with them. None of us would come off looking awesome if our sexual fantasies were projected on a cinema screen. Even if your fantasy is about men’s domination of women through non-consensual sex and domestic violence – which, let’s be clear, is the central fantasy in Fifty Shades of Grey, even though it’s wrongly presented as BDSM – as long as no one’s getting attacked in real life, your fantasies are your own business and no one should make fun of you or criticize you for them. The world is a terrible place, and it sometimes conditions us to be aroused by things we might not have otherwise chosen. You may as well enjoy it if you can.

When I look at Fifty Shades of Grey as porn, I don’t especially like it, but I don’t judge other people for liking it, either. And that’s where the discussion would stop, if it were playing in an adult movie theatre, instead of a multiplex. The Fifty Shades movies are marketed as R-rated, mainstream dramas – to a certain extent, they’re also marketed as romance, which is a completely different problem, since there’s nothing romantic about this relationship. While it’s very likely the series was marketed this way in order to maximize profits and make the most money possible, it also moves them into a space where they could be considered art.

Most people (rightly) expect more from art than they do from porn; we expect art to offer a perspective or point of view, to have a message, to be more than a spectacle to press the pleasure centers of our brains. Watching Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film adaptation of the first novel (which I have not read), I can see that she tried to make art. The main character goes on a journey from beginning to end – it’s not a very happy journey, but it’s one where she finds the courage to say no to the older, charismatic man who’s slowly taken control of her life – and there’s a sense of finality and completeness. The acting and camera work also convey layers of complexity that the bare bones of the story do not. At the same time, most of it still feels like spectacle. And, while I don’t think it’s wrong to say that Fifty Shades of Grey fares pretty poorly as art, I do think it’s wrong to single it out, as if our cinemas aren’t full of spectacle already.

I get why people hate Fifty Shades of Grey more than they hate other spectacle films, and, in my heart, I kind of hate it, too. Its raison d’être is to let its audience take pleasure in watching a man mistreat a woman and it largely fails to demonstrate a critical understanding of what that means. For a film presenting itself as art, that makes it look pretty misogynist. For a film presenting itself as a beginner’s guide to BDSM, that makes it look ignorant (not even considering the part where the script’s understanding of the physical mechanics of BDSM rates something like -5). For a story that suddenly made fanfic a part of mainstream culture, I think everyone except for E. L. James would have picked a different flagship.

At the same time, the Saw franchise is on movie number eight now, the last Mission Impossible I saw was just about Tom Cruise putting suction cups on a building, I’ve lost count of how many superhero movies only exist to blow things up, and everyone fawned over the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in which, I contend to this day, we were supposed to enjoy watching torture and rape. It seems like there’s a special kind of shame reserved for spectacles that are explicitly intended to turn someone on – and there’s a special kind of misogyny reserved for them too, because we live in an amazing culture – but Fifty Shades of Grey is not so different from other mainstream spectacles designed for enjoyment.

As I watched Fifty Shades of Grey, and tried to figure out what I thought about it, and whether or not it was fair to criticize something as art when its original purpose was porn, I also started to wonder whether or not it was fair to criticize The Avengers as art, or Suicide Squad, or the new Star Trek movies where everyone runs and their ships keep exploding. Even though critics try to ask themselves if a movie succeeds on its own terms – that is, if it’s a good example of what it’s trying to be, usually according to the standards of the film’s genre, regardless of whether what it’s trying to be is desirable – it isn’t always as simple as saying, “Hot Tub Time Machine delivered what it promised, so it’s an amazing movie.” It’s also not as simple as saying, “We deserve more from our culture than Fast and Furious: Furiously Fast Fast Furious 16.” Life is a balance between reflection and indulgence, and I wouldn’t want to eliminate either.

I think the answer might be that there’s room for both types of response to any kind of film – no matter what the main intention was. The story you hear is always the product of an interaction between the storyteller’s mind and yours – it’s never completely the same for two people and, what one person is happy to enjoy as spectacle might be the same thing someone else spends hours analyzing and picking apart. Neither person’s reaction is wrong – it just reflects two different ways of engaging. (Ask me some time about how much I hated Mad Max: Fury Road or how much I’m willing to hand wave every single thing in The 100).

So, what even is porn, really? It’s a class of film intended to be spectacle that we could all still criticize as art. I didn’t particularly enjoy the spectacle in Fifty Shades of Grey, and I didn’t rate it very highly as art. But enjoying the spectacle, in and of itself, doesn’t make you a terrible person any more than enjoying slasher movies or an endless stream of street racing films does. The popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey doesn’t make mimicking the actions of its characters any more acceptable than blowing up half of New York or going on a crime spree, either, but, if you want to let it push the pleasure centers of your brain, more power to you.

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

‘Meera’: The Satyagrahi as Social Rebel

In the two most famous films based on Meera’s life, 1945’s ‘Meera,’ starring the legendary M. S. Subbulakshmi, and 1979’s ‘Meera,’ starring Hema Malini, Meera’s social rebellion is made less threatening by her characterization through an Indian ideal of the devoted and submissive wife, albeit devoted to Krishna rather than to her earthly husband. Nevertheless, each film offers an interpretation of Meera’s resistance that represents its own philosophy of female emancipation.

Written by Brigit McCone.

“Mirabai is said to have offended her husband by following her own conscience, was content to live in separation from him and bore with quiet dignity and resignation all the injuries that are said to have been done to her … Mirabai practised Satyagraha.” – Mahatma Gandhi

Meera, or Mirabai, was a 16th century mystic poet from Rajasthan, North India. Over 1000 poems are attributed to her, which speak of her renunciation of worldly wealth, her devotion to Krishna, her surviving attempts to poison her, and her defiance of family and society. In her willingness to suffer for her beliefs, resisting social pressures, and convincing others through the power of words and example, Mirabai was cited by Mahatma Gandhi as an embodiment of satyagraha (truth force), his philosophy of non-violent resistance. While our culture offers us female martial artists and superheroines as icons of unreal empowerment, it is worth remembering that social orders built on violence inherently disadvantage women, while the philosophy of satyagraha offers women a potentially level playing field in its emphasis on moral courage rather than physical strength.

In expressing her devotion to the divine by calling herself slave or bride to Krishna, Meera may be compared to Christian nuns who conceived of their religious vocation through the feminine role of “bride of Christ,”, even while rejecting dependence on men and often becoming the most educated women of their time. Yet, unlike Christian nuns whose social impact was usually limited by their entering a cloistered, regulated community, Meera roamed freely across the countryside and interacted with people of all castes and genders, making herself a powerfully subversive icon of popular resistance to the dominant social order.

In the two most famous films based on Meera’s life, 1945’s Meera, starring the legendary M. S. Subbulakshmi, and 1979’s Meera, starring Hema Malini, Meera’s social rebellion is made less threatening by her characterization through an Indian ideal of the devoted and submissive wife, albeit devoted to Krishna rather than to her earthly husband. Nevertheless, each film offers an interpretation of Meera’s resistance that represents its own philosophy of female emancipation.

“My eyes have their own life; they laugh at rules” – Mirabai

Made as a Tamil film in 1945, remade in Hindi in 1947, and regarded as a milestone in the development of Indian cinema, Meera is one of only a handful of films to star the Carnatic singer M. S. Subbulakshmi, whose iconic status as the “Nightingale of India” led her to perform for the United Nations in 1966, to be awarded the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration in 1990, and India’s highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna (Jewel of India), in 1998. Subbulakshmi plays Meera as a “simple, untutored” girl, but one with fervent belief and musical talent. After protecting Krishna’s temple bodily, against a cannon sent to demolish it on her husband’s orders, Meera is inspired to leave her husband’s protection and go to Brindhavan (where Krishna is said to have lived as a mortal), renouncing her wealth and royal title “in search of Him who grew up in the humble dwellings of the Ayar clan, of him who is the kinsman of the poor.” Her resistance to caste prejudice and solidarity with people in poverty is one of the core characteristics of this interpretation of Meera. Meera wanders alone among rocks, singing hymns, demonstrating her endurance and independence, before being revived with water by a peasant boy embodying Krishna.

The film cuts to a follower of the guru Rupa Goswami explaining, to an all-male ashram, a chain of authority from mother to father, from father to guru, and from guru to Lord, placing women at the lowest rung of this hierarchy, and a woman’s husband as her intermediary to God. When Meera comes to the ashram of Rupa Goswami, singing of Krishna dwelling in her heart, she is told that the “divine guru will not so much as set eyes upon one born a woman.” Meera asks, “Who in this holy place of Brindhavan can be called a woman, and who a man?” reminding the devotees that they all aspire to emulate the gopikas, cow herding girls famous for their unconditional devotion (bhakti) to Krishna, and therefore that Krishna’s male devotees consider themselves symbolically ‘womankind’ while ironically rejecting fellowship with actual women. The guru (Serukalathur Sama) emerges at her words and professes, “Mother, it is you who are my supreme guru. You have driven out my ignorance.” Woman thus becomes the spiritual equal of man in their shared devotion to Krishna, and Meera becomes the equal of Rupa Goswami in her right to interpret religion.

A similar argument to Meera’s could also be made about Gandhi’s satyagraha as a social philosophy, in that it urges men to renounce traditionally masculine traits of aggression and violence, and to find power in traditionally feminine virtues of patience and self-sacrifice. Where feminism is popularly, if inaccurately, represented only as a campaign for women to adopt stereotypically male roles, satyagraha proposes the equality of male and female through the transformation of both, and as a natural consequence of society’s rejection of all forms of violence and domination. The full film is available on YouTube, subtitled.

“What I paid was my social body, my town body, my family body, and all my inherited jewels” – Mirabai

The 1979 Bollywood film Meera replaces the 1945 film’s visionary mysticism with a portrait more focused on Meera’s satyagraha against the patriarchal social order. The film begins with Meera’s sister (Vidya Sinha) being induced to drink poison because she has been promised to two husbands and must preserve her father’s honor. It climaxes as Meera confronts the head priest, Kool Guru (Om Shivpuri), and is publicly condemned to drink poison because she defied her husband’s authority. Whether sacrificed with her dutiful submission or punished for her resistance, the woman is the victim either way.

Meera’s journey from a theoretical religion of romantic dreaming among books and statues, to the fully embodied beliefs of a satyagrahi, is gradual, and the film slow-paced. She sheds her “inherited jewels” as her dress grows progressively plainer, from bright red to intense saffron to pale yellow to ascetic white. She abandons her “family body” by defying her husband’s family, refusing to cook sacrificial meat and insisting on her vegetarian beliefs, with the same mental independence shown by Subbulakshmi’s Meera. When a temple to Krishna is shut, Meera fasts outside it until it is reopened, a self-suffering protest for religious freedom that recalls the political fasts of Gandhi. Abandoning her husband’s protection and going on pilgrimage to Brindhavan, Meera sheds her “town body” as a wanderer in the wilderness. Finally, she sheds her “social body” as she publicly renounces her family and society before a court of scornful men. As she completes this journey, she is regarded with hostility and fear, not only by the men of her family but by the women, whose rationale for their own lives is threatened by Meera’s freedom.

Through the shedding of “bodies,” or externally imposed identities, Meera achieves a state of selflessness in bleached white costume. Meera’s renunciation of self allows her to publicly voice socially unacceptable beliefs, fearless of death or punishment. The climactic courtroom scene begins with a wide shot of an echoing royal chamber, with a large audience of men rising in unison as the high priest Kool Guru enters, wielding a majestic staff of power. The crowd sits at his command, amplifying his authority, as women watch from the gallery. A gong sounds and the doors pull back to reveal Meera in a martyr’s robe of simple white, isolated and flanked by guards. She steps forward with downcast eyes and modest bearing. The guru proclaims that although a man cannot judge another, “religion and society follow some norms, and anybody violating them is a sinner in the eyes of religion, society and God”.

By choosing to portray Meera’s attempted poisoning as a sentence imposed by a crowded courtroom, rather than a secret conspiracy as in the 1945 film, the 1979 film crushes its heroine beneath the full weight of religion and society’s norms, as represented by ornately enthroned religious patriarchy. The first charge — “scriptures and society decrees that a wife should adopt her husband’s religion” — effectively negates woman’s conscience, once more positioning her husband as her intermediary with the divine. Meera replies, “My religion is only devotion to the Lord,” insisting on her right to a direct relationship. The charge “by interacting with people of low-caste, she persecuted the royal honor” requires her support of the injustices of the caste system, in the name of religion and society’s norms. Meera is asked to acknowledge that her “duties to her husband” are to bear him a child, while male onlookers nod in agreement. She replies, “I’m the soul, not the body. I’m an emotion, not a statue of society norms,” demonstrating that she has fully renounced the “social body” in favor of her spiritual self. This version of Meera’s tale also features a compelling performance by Vinod Khanna as Meera’s husband, a man himself torn by the painful contradiction between his conscience and the social role he feels forced to play, squirming in his seat as Kool Guru condemns Meera.

“Don’t forget love; it will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.” – Mirabai

Meera is framed in close-up, drenched in a golden glow as she calmly stares into the eyes of Kool Guru and declares, in measured tones, “I’m the epitome of love and am not tied in the shackles of family bonds.” In this moment, Meera represents the ideal of a satyagrahi, resisting all external authority in the assertion of her own loving conscience. Hema Malini’s Meera equally represents an ideal of traditional femininity in her soft-spoken delivery and classical beauty, but the radicalism of her message of female emancipation cannot be denied, with its total rejection of society’s concept of woman as a dependent defined by her family bonds. As Meera’s resistance enrages Kool Guru, she calmly declares to the priest, “Anger leads to destruction, so don’t get angry,” denying the legitimacy of violence as the basis of social power, before defending her decision to associate with the Muslim sultan by rejecting sectarianism and xenophobia: “I don’t accept your parameters as my country.” If this courtroom confrontation were edited to replace Kool Guru with many of today’s politicians, Meera’s stand would sadly be as relevant as ever. The film ends after Meera drinks the poison, miraculously survives and roams the countryside, leading devotees in song and establishing an indelible portrait of her beliefs through her poetry. Through this image of Meera, satyagraha emerges as a quintessentially feminine form of social rebellion, one whose power we ignore at our peril.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPW25vLQY84″]

Brigit McCone is not the epitome of love, and is occasionally tied in the shackles of family bonds. She writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and terrible dancing in the privacy of her own home.

‘Boys in the Trees’ Is the Best Movie You Might Not See Next Year

The first feature film from Nicholas Verso, ‘Boys in the Trees’ is a coming-of-age story focused on questions of masculinity and wrapped in a delightful – and visually stunning – cloak of Halloween. …They explore what it means that their friendship fell apart – what childhood loses to adolescence, what adolescence loses to adulthood, what we gain in either case, and what we give away when we stop hoping that something amazing could happen to us.

Written by Katherine Murray.

By the time I walked into my screening of Boys in the Trees, it had a little frowny face beside it in the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) mobile app, and there was a “buy one, get one” sale on tickets. Since premiering at Venice earlier this month, the film hasn’t received more than a handful of mixed reviews. While it’s slated to hit Australian theatres in time for Halloween, I haven’t been able to find any news about distribution in North America. This is very disappointing, because Boys in the Trees is one of the best films I’ve seen in recent years, and I left the theatre wanting to share it with everyone.

The first feature film from Nicholas Verso, Boys in the Trees is a coming-of-age story focused on questions of masculinity and wrapped in a delightful – and visually stunning – cloak of Halloween. I was in love with every part of it, right from the start – the details in the costuming, the weirdly specific soundtrack (which Verso explained was built out of songs that had personal meaning for him), the charismatic performances from its young actors, the incredibly vivid colors in a movie set almost completely at night. Mostly, though, I loved the dark emotional palette the story draws from, and its fearlessness in letting itself and its teenage characters be uncool enough to care about things.

The story takes place in a stylized, hyper-real version of 1997, in which a bully and his victim go on a supernatural adventure together on Halloween night. Corey (Toby Wallace), the bully, is also the film’s protagonist, trying to figure out whether following his dreams is worth exposing himself to scorn and ridicule. Jonah (Gulliver McGrath), the victim, used to be Corey’s best friend, before Corey started trying so hard to fit in. Over the course of a night, they explore what it means that their friendship fell apart – what childhood loses to adolescence, what adolescence loses to adulthood, what we gain in either case, and what we give away when we stop hoping that something amazing could happen to us.

The film’s greatest trick is that there’s a false ending roughly 80 minutes in, in which it seems like Corey’s learned everything he needed to learn and wrapped all of his problems up neatly… only to discover that there’s still half an hour in this movie, nothing is as simple as it seems, and sometimes you can’t take back what you’ve done.

At the screening, Verso explained that he’s received mixed reactions from men watching the film. Some hate it passionately, and others told him it’s precious to them because of how it reflects their experiences. In exploring masculinity, Boys in the Trees brushes against sexism, homophobia, latent homosexuality, aggression, vulnerability, kindness, friendship, and strength at various times without seeming like a Public Service Announcement. It’s a story about bullying that isn’t as simple as saying, “Bullies are horrible people,” and a story about friendship that isn’t as simple as saying, “Your friends are the people you always get along with.” The film takes a more layered view of what people can be to each other – what boys can be to each other – and how relationships can change from moment to moment.

Verso’s view of Halloween is also – except for one jump scare – less rooted in terror than in carnival – the idea that there’s one night a year where the regular rules are suspended; when the veils between worlds, both real and imagined, become permeable, and people can cross over. This is the most delicious form of Halloween, and it’s on full display from beginning to end.

The only weakness worth mentioning is a subplot in which Corey earns a girlfriend almost completely at random. This plot line has no relationship to anything else in the movie, slows down the action in confusing ways whenever it appears, and seems to happen just because it’s expected. The girl, Romany (Mitzi Ruhlmann), seems pretty cool, but is also made to speak for her entire gender at various points, and literally only ever appears so that she can be a good influence on Corey. Since Jonah’s already a good influence on Corey and more integral to the plot, it’s not clear what Romany’s adding besides proof of Corey’s heterosexuality.

That’s important, because the much more interesting relationship in the film exists between Corey and the leader of his little gang, Jango (Justin Holborow). Jango’s an asshole, but he also values his friendship with Corey, who draws out a gentler side of his personality. Justin Holborow’s performance captures the sense of someone whose entire demeanor can change depending on whether or not he sees the people before him as human, and there are homoerotic undertones to the frustrated sense of ownership he displays toward Corey. It’s not that Boys in the Trees needs to be an LGBTQ movie in order to tell a good story – it’s just that the film seems a lot more interested in the boys’ relationship than it does in Romany, and it might have been nice if the story had leaned into it more.

Even with the extraneous heterosexual romance running interference, Boys in the Trees still presents a remarkably strong sense of voice, and displays the same strength of its characters in daring to leave itself vulnerable through nerdy acts of caring. Verso took risks with this story and poured himself into it rather than holding back, and that’s something I’d always choose to watch over a perfectly executed, perfectly ordinary film.

Boys in the Trees may or may not ever come to a theatre near you, but, hopefully, we can all stream it online one day.

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

Why Meredith and Cristina Redefined Sisterhood on ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

Meredith and Cristina reach for each other consistently for 10 seasons, never allowing a male relationship to supersede their friendship. … Watching ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ depict such a powerful female friendship consistently inspires me to improve my own relationships with women, looking to Meredith and Cristina as a model for how sisterhood really should be.

This guest post written by Olivia Edmunds-Diez.

I am currently on my third rewatch of Grey’s Anatomy. It is a series to which I return when I need a good cry or when I need to feel inspired. With a dynamic and diverse cast that features a plethora of well-developed female characters, I am repeatedly drawn to Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) and Dr. Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh). This time around, I can’t help but notice that the theme of sisterhood follows them consistently. I shouldn’t be entirely surprised that creator Shonda Rhimes would feature a prominent female friendship, given the nature of the show. Although Meredith and Cristina are not related, they might as well be. Dubbed the “Twisted Sisters,” they spend 10 seasons side by side and grow tremendously not just as individuals, but as a pair. Meredith and Cristina’s friendship withstands motherhood, men, and their careers.

Meredith and Cristina earned the nickname “Twisted Sisters” for good reason. Particularly in the early seasons of Grey’s Anatomy’s, both women experience and recount plenty of hardship. They each know what it’s like to pursue work over family, to have mixed and mostly negative feelings about their mothers, and they both have a tendency to assume the worst. But where others might find fault, Meredith and Cristina bond. After all, Grey’s Anatomy epitomized the definition of “my person.” Meredith and Cristina reach for each other consistently for 10 seasons, never allowing a male relationship to supersede their friendship. They can relate to each other in ways that their friends and boyfriends (and eventual husbands) never fully understand, which to me screams sisterhood. I know I can communicate with my sisters and anticipate their feelings in ways that even our parents never quite understood. Sisters know that going to “the dark place,” as Meredith calls it, is sometimes necessary. But it is far less scary when you’re not going alone.

Meredith and Cristina spend early seasons of Grey’s Anatomy with mixed feelings about children and motherhood. Cristina is consistent in her refusal to become a mother and Meredith eventually embraces her fear of turning in to her mother in order to start a family of her own. But even though these two women ultimately take different approaches to motherhood, each enthusiastically supports the other in her choice. Cristina supports Meredith emotionally and physically when Meredith and her husband adopt Zola and then later give birth. Meredith supports Cristina through two pregnancies, with the latter concluding in an abortion. As each woman exercises her right to choose, they affirm each other’s choices and provide them the support that their male partners do not always understand how to give, just as a sister would. In the show’s tenth season, Meredith feels conflicted about her dual roles as surgeon and mother. As Meredith begins to lash out, Cristina is the one to explain that neither of them are “better” for their life choices. But their choices are different and that will continue to lead them down different roads, which ultimately results in Cristina leaving the world of Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital. And though it’s difficult for both Meredith and Cristina to separate, they can each understand that Cristina puts her career first and they are each supportive of these life choices, in ways that only sisters can be.

Meredith and Cristina also support each other through their relationships with men. Cristina is even the first to dub Derek Shepherd “McDreamy.” Whether dating men, marrying men, or having sex with men, Meredith and Cristina know not to judge each other’s choices. Meredith stands by Cristina throughout her almost first marriage and then again through her hasty actual first marriage. Cristina is sympathetic to Meredith’s on-again and off-again relationship with “McDreamy” and helped her emotionally be ready for their post-it marriage. A sister knows when to gossip about cute boys and when to hold her sister’s hand through a break-up; a sister knows when to encourage meeting someone new and when to suggest a quiet night at home.

Meredith and Cristina met as surgical interns and continue to work together as residents and attendings. They push each other, steal surgeries from each other, inspire ground-breaking research, and question each other’s judgments in operating rooms. For me, this is the most sibling-like that Meredith and Cristina can ever hope to be. Anyone with a sister knows that sisters know just how to push and prod your buttons. Sisters know when to tattle to mom or hold a grudge. But sisters also know how to celebrate your accomplishments, and that is exactly why Meredith and Cristina are so amazing. They are just as likely to be seen fighting over a case as they are “dancing it out” or drinking to celebrate.

Through Grey’s Anatomy, Shonda Rhimes teaches us that our sisters are not always related to us. Sometimes we marry into a family and discover a sister-in-law and sometimes we start a new job and find a new best friend. ‘Sister’ is so much more than a genetic link. ‘Sister’ is a job description, a kinship, a love, and a friend. Watching Grey’s Anatomy depict such a powerful female friendship consistently inspires me to improve my own relationships with women, looking to Meredith and Cristina as a model for how sisterhood really should be.

Olivia Edmunds-Diez is a Northwestern graduate, where she studied theatre and gender and sexuality studies. Her current favorite finds are Stranger Things, Big Little Lies, and the Waitress cast recording. You can follow her on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Daughters of Horror Masters: Examining the Films of Asia Argento and Jennifer Chambers Lynch

I’ve chosen to focus primarily on the debut films of Asia Argento and Jennifer Chambers Lynch: ‘Scarlet Diva’ and ‘Boxing Helena.’ … Long story short, these women intrigued me. Both are the daughters of prominent filmmakers, and both released their first feature film at the age of 25. My own father was a juvenile probation officer, so I couldn’t exactly relate in terms of family ties, but being 25 years old myself, I admired their gusto.

This guest post is written by Juliette Faraone.

[Trigger warning: discussion of abuse]

In this essay, I seek to explore the relationship between subject and object. I also seek to better understand how these concepts are influenced and informed by gender and the media. This essay seeks a lot of things. I’m thirsty.

I’m here to discuss the films of Asia Argento and Jennifer Chambers Lynch. I’ve chosen to focus primarily on their debut films: Scarlet Diva, made in 2000, and Boxing Helena, released in 1993.

Neither Argento nor Lynch was wholly new to me — I’d come across Argento’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things back in 2005 during my Winona Ryder phase. Ryder had a small part, if I recall correctly – it was during all the shoplifting fuss, and she’d taken sort of a hiatus at that point. I digress. Argento’s acting originally drew me into her work, and I first arrived to her films by way of her father, filmmaker Dario Argento.

Having been a massive Twin Peaks fan, I knew Jennifer Lynch primarily as the author of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer. Sometime after its publication, she served as a production assistant on her father’s film, Blue Velvet. Now, I have mixed feelings about David Lynch. Actually, I guess my feelings for David himself are mostly positive — it’s Lynch fans I have a problem with. But hey, that’s another topic for another day.

Long story short, these women intrigued me. Both are the daughters of prominent filmmakers, and both released their first feature film at the age of 25. My own father was a juvenile probation officer, so I couldn’t exactly relate in terms of family ties, but being 25 years old myself, I admired their gusto.

I started with Scarlet Diva. I’ll admit I was turned off by the DVD cover, but decided to give it a shot. The movie itself was surprisingly contemplative – quiet even. Sole screenwriting credit goes to Asia Argento, and though there’s not much dialogue, in my mind that’s a skill in itself. The writing felt minimalist; Meg White on drums minimalist. It was nice – something a 25-year-old woman would make (whatever that means). And it was a road movie, which earned it extra points in my heart. There are probably a great many female-driven road movies, but I can’t really think of any not featuring male leads or love interests. Did you just name one? I’m proud of you — I could only really think of Boys on the Side – at any rate, the number is small. How many female-driven, Bechdel Test-passing, road movies have been made in the past 10 years? Whenever people complain about similarities in women-led films, I try to remind them Hollywood saw fit to release not just one but seven Fast & Furious films, so I think we can probably handle it. Not knocking the Fast franchise, but come on.

In Scarlet Diva, Asia Argento plays Anna Battista, an actress and aspiring director. The title sequence starts with Anna sitting alone on the bus. She stares out the window, observing the scenery but also looking at her own reflection. From the first shot of the film, we witness Anna as both subject and object.

Of course, in broadening our vision, we see Asia Argento not only as dual subject and object, but also as an outside force – the director. She exists apart from her creation, and this is especially important for women. I was once of the mind-set that greater numbers of women directors in film didn’t necessarily equate to progress because it was the content of the film that mattered. This line of thinking now strikes me as, well, pretty fucking stupid. Of course women’s voices matter; representation is crucial.

Asia Argento used a tripod to film many of the scenes in Scarlet Diva herself. Both she and her character display exhibitionist tendencies, but still assert their control over situations. This control is vital to Anna’s character. In one scene, Anna’s co-workers give her drugs. She’s a bit reluctant to take the drugs at first, but her co-workers persuade her to take them. Moments later, Anna awakens in bed beside the man and woman — all three are naked. The room is dark, and Anna is overcome with dread. She’s lost control, and she lets out a scream. This scene was, for me, the most painful in the film.

In moments like this, we learn that while Anna is self-aware, she isn’t omniscient. When Anna derides an actor friend for “selling out” to become a sex worker in L.A., he reminds her that she always said acting is prostitution. Anna’s quick to laugh at herself, and we see a continuation of this love/hate relationship for performance scattered throughout the film.

Boxing Helena began to take shape thirteen years before Scarlet Diva — in 1987, when Jennifer Lynch was just 19 years old. She was chosen to develop the story, written by Philippe Caland, into a film. I’ll admit, on the surface, Scarlet Diva and Boxing Helena are two very different films. Scarlet Diva is intimate — confessional, even. A film shot entirely on digital video, it deals with personal subjects in personal settings, with little pretense along the way. Boxing Helena is slick and larger scale. It has the veneer of Hollywood and in parts, plays almost like a fairy tale. Unlike Scarlet Diva, some of the interactions in Lynch’s movie feel false, and Bill Paxton in black leather pants doesn’t help matters. Instead of a first person subjective camera, we are presented with a pretty conventional narrative structure, insofar as the film has a couple of main characters and follows them around from scene to scene. Nevertheless, the two films share ties.

In Boxing Helena, Sherilyn Fenn plays the title character, and if she has a last name, we don’t know it. Viewers aren’t told much about Helena, and we can’t really fault the character for any lack of personal dynamism — the narrative paints her as object from start to finish — even the film’s title suggests she is the receiver of the action.

I’m assuming at this point you’re all low-key aware of the plot of Boxing Helena. Helena spurns the advances of Julian Sand’s character, a doctor named Nick who is — spoiler alert — a major creep. Apparently, Helena and Nick dated for three seconds before she decided he wasn’t the guy for her and he’s been obsessed with her ever since. Helena gets into a car accident outside Nick’s home, and, being a doctor, he performs surgery on her. Pretty okay so far, except, you know, during surgery he amputates both of her legs. Nick keeps Helena hostage in this way throughout a lot of the film, until she’s had enough and tries to hurt him. At this point, Nick thinks it’s a good idea to get rid of her arms too.

Credit where it’s due: Helena gets in some good verbal jabs — at one point, she says to Nick, after witnessing an exchange from another room, “You’re a goddamn joke.” As a female viewer, I took pleasure in that moment. What woman hasn’t experienced the misery of male entitlement? That said, I’m not sure what Lynch was aiming for in terms of general audience response to her film as a whole, which is actually a big part of the reason I fight for it. I like a little confusion every now and then. It reminds me I’m human — neurons firing, gray matter doing whatever gray matter’s supposed to do, etc.

Nick is persistent in his obsession with Helena. Since a young age, he’s been taught anything in life is obtainable with enough perseverance. Nick sees Helena as not just a conquest but also as fulfillment of some childhood goal. He robs her of her limbs. He objectifies her both literally and figuratively, and, as the audience, we’re right there alongside him. Early in the movie, we watch Nick as he watches Helena. In these scenes, Lynch transforms the camera into the male gaze.

Scarlet Diva and Boxing Helena were made nearly a decade apart and likely with different demographics in mind. Still, we can sense a trend in critical response. Neither work was well received. Boxing Helena was seen as too extreme – misogynistic, even – with a message that confused viewers (myself included). I’d really like to scratch out the last ten minutes of the movie and pretend they never existed. It’d be a much stronger film. Still, it has its moments. Scarlet Diva didn’t bomb, but it wasn’t exactly a hit with audiences either. I knew the film had been chiefly criticized for being “self-indulgent” – criticism I don’t disagree with. But so what? Of course it’s self-indulgent. And I don’t mean in the “all art is self-indulgent” sort of way. (Or maybe I do, but I tend to hate that argument.) It’s self-indulgent in the sense that sometimes getting noticed requires a little push and shove. Who else is going to indulge a young female filmmaker? And what, we then ask, are women to make films about? What would critics prefer? If these films were the product of real women’s thoughts, feelings, drives, perceptions – why was there such a resistance?

Both of these women filmmakers have gone on to direct other films. Would this have been possible without their already established family fame? Would they have even been able to get their first efforts funded? And what of the unknown director – what happens to her?

At one point in Scarlet Diva, Anna finds her friend Veronica bound and gagged in her apartment, and she hasn’t eaten in days. We learn Veronica’s boyfriend is responsible for this abuse. After untying her friend, Anna quips, “You’re like the American housewife who gets beaten but doesn’t tell on her husband.” The friend agrees with the comparison — but after all, she’s in love. (Yikes.) Interestingly, in an interview from around the time of Boxing Helena’s release, Jennifer Chambers Lynch described her film “as a love story, not a horror film”:

“Obsessive love is like a series of amputations as you steal from one another. It’s inviting, exciting, and animalistic. I’ve been there; I’ve been drawn to it.”

I’d be foolish to directly contradict Lynch’s own view of her film. For all I know, she still regards her film as a love story. Nevertheless, it is (in my mind anyway) the duty of the critic to reflect on art and to interpret its role in a larger cultural context. In Boxing Helena, Lynch briefly takes the nightmare in Scarlet Diva to the next level – it’s not just the loss of control to be feared most — it’s resignation. To forget one’s passion and to acquiesce to another’s will is the ultimate self-betrayal.

Taking all of this into consideration, and despite both films being written and directed by women, I’m not comfortable calling either of these films feminist. I don’t think they’re actively misogynistic, but I do think as responsible consumers of art we should be discerning in our application of the F-word. It means something and I want it to keep on meaning something.

There’s a famous Oscar Wilde quote that goes, “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.” In this age, complex questions of morality have gone out of vogue and have been replaced by a single phrase: “Is it problematic?” This question isn’t inherently harmful, but it does become dangerous when it’s used to avoid thinking critically. Instead of asking if a work is problematic (or at least in addition to it), we must train ourselves to ask a new set of questions: How does the narrative treat those subjects? Does it look on them favorably? Why or why not?

So let’s cut to the chase. If you take one thing away from this essay, let it be this: it’s absolutely imperative for a woman to write her own story.

Are you a woman? Do you have something to say? Of course you do. Write it down. Don’t let anyone or anything stop you. You’re the fucking master of your own universe. Believe that with all your heart. I do.

Juliette Faraone studied digital media and film at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College before earning her BA in comparative literature from the University of Evansville. She is an editorial intern at Ms. magazine and a staff writer for Screen Queens. Her work has also appeared at Lesbians Over Everything, Slant and the Zusterschap Collective. In her spare time, Juliette watches a lot of old musicals and talks to her girlfriend and cats.

Beware the Sexist Celluloid Quilt that Is ‘Nocturnal Animals’

…I’m left with the feeling that Tom Ford’s second feature film is a love letter to sexist movies instead. … Like a lot of sexist stories, ‘Nocturnal Animals’ is vague about its attitude toward women, because it doesn’t truly regard women as anything but objects – things that derive meaning only through their relationship to the real subjects, men.

Written by Katherine Murray.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and murder]

The most generous interpretation of Nocturnal Animals is that it mimics the conventions of sexist storytelling in order to criticize them. If that’s the case, the criticism is buried too deep for me to see it and I’m left with the feeling that Tom Ford’s second feature film is a love letter to sexist movies instead.

The film uses a complicated, non-linear, story-within-a-story structure to mask the simplicity of its content. Susan (Amy Adams) is a wealthy gallery director who divorced Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) after a two-year marriage. About twenty years later, Edward sends Susan a galley of his new novel – the novel she didn’t believe he would ever manage to write – along with an invitation to meet when he’s in her city. Susan, who’s miserable with every aspect of her life since leaving Edward, is captivated by his story and experiences many emotions as she thinks about it on the couch – and in the shower, and walking up a spiral staircase at work, and standing in front of a painting of the word “Revenge,” and in other picturesque locations. Because it’s completely impossible that Susan could be happy that things have turned out well for Edward at the same time believing it was best to end their marriage, she decides she wants him back. It’s a plot line that marries the style and score of sexy Michael Douglas-era thrillers to the plot of an Avril Lavigne song (he was a sk8er boi / she said, “see you l8er, boi” / now she regrets all of her life decisions because he achieved something after they grew up). The complication is that Susan did something unspeakably horrible to Edward when they broke up – so unspeakable that we don’t learn what it was until late in the film, at which point it doesn’t really live up to the hype.

The film’s second narrative is a dramatization of the novel that Edward wrote, in which Gyllenhaal plays the lead character, Tony, and other Amy Adams-looking actresses with long red hair play the roles of Tony’s wife and daughter. Tony’s family heads out on vacation when they’re run off the road by three rednecks – I say “redneck” not because I think that’s a nice word to use, but because these are the same stock characters from every horror movie in this genre (think Straw Dogs, The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, Deliverance). There’s a long, tense sequence where the villains try to trick Tony into unlocking the doors to his car, except this scene is hindered by the fact that their ruse isn’t very convincing. The situation ultimately ends with Tony’s wife and daughter (who are referred to exclusively as “my wife,” “my daughter,” “your folks,” or “your women” from this point on) kidnapped, raped, and murdered while Tony survives. Tony teams up with a hard-bitten detective, who plays by his own rules, and plots to get revenge on the three men who ruined his life.

The opening credit sequence – which is a throwback in itself, both because it exists and seems to go on forever – features slow motion footage of plus size women and elderly women dancing burlesque to the tune of a sinister soundtrack. As I write this, I still have no idea why. I also don’t know why the men who murder Tony’s wife and daughter carefully arrange their dead and surprisingly unmarked bodies into a beautiful, vaguely suggestive pose on top of a bright red couch on the edge of their property, almost like they know Tom Ford’s going to take a picture of it. I don’t know why the kidnapping, rape, and murder of two women is only ever presented as a thing that happened to Tony. I don’t know why Susan can’t send a text message when she’s meeting someone at a restaurant. I don’t know why wearing dark red lipstick makes her a different person than she wants to be. I don’t know why Tony doesn’t listen to his wife when she warns him not to get out of the car. I don’t know why what Susan did to Edward is supposed to be as bad as anything any of the characters do in his novel. I don’t know why Susan wants to get back together with Edward. After being subjected to Edward’s great, amazing novel, I wished more than anything that I could divorce him.

Like a lot of sexist stories, Nocturnal Animals is vague about its attitude toward women, because it doesn’t truly regard women as anything but objects – things that derive meaning only through their relationship to the real subjects, men. Susan only matters in so far as she’s the focal point of Edward’s rage, and in so far as he’s able to corral her toward sharing his point of view – that he was great and their relationship was wonderful until she ruined it by doing something evil. Almost 100% of the time she’s on-screen, Susan thinks about Edward, feels emotions about Edward, and remembers Edward. All of the expressions on her face, all of her beautiful poses, everything she does and says – somehow, in some way, it’s all about Edward. He isn’t even there, and he’s still the entire focus of what is supposedly Susan’s story.

The women in Edward’s great, amazing novel fare even worse. A fridge is a fridge no matter what your production values are, and Tony’s wife and daughter are alive for one scene before taking a trip to the fridge so that we’ll understand why Tony feels bad. Then they are literally posed as objects to be viewed because: content imitating form.

There are signs that the film is aware of the way it objectifies women – for example, the burlesque dancers from the opening credits also become objects when they lie on slabs in the gallery, which seems a little on the nose. But creating art with awareness is not the same as executing it with purpose; there isn’t anything in the film that suggests its sexism serves any greater purpose than following the conventions of other sexist films.

Nocturnal Animals is set for limited release this November, and will probably be nominated for awards.

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

Who Controls the ‘ARQ’ in the Time Travel Sci-Fi Thriller?

The characters are thrown into an adrenaline-fueled, confusing, science-fiction quest from scene one. They don’t have time to make anything more than impulsive decisions, there’s a plot twist every time they think they know what’s going on, and every double-cross turns out to be a double-double-double cross instead. The story doesn’t always make sense, but it’s a wild ride that holds your interest from beginning to end.

Written by Katherine Murray.

ARQ, Tony Elliott’s new Netflix movie, delivers about what you’d expect from a writer for Orphan Black. The characters are thrown into an adrenaline-fueled, confusing, science-fiction quest from scene one. They don’t have time to make anything more than impulsive decisions, there’s a plot twist every time they think they know what’s going on, and every double-cross turns out to be a double-double-double cross instead. The story doesn’t always make sense, but it’s a wild ride that holds your interest from beginning to end.

The protagonist is a man named Renton (Robbie Amell) who invented a powerful generator called the ARQ (pronounced “ark”). There’s a fragmented back story about how he stole the ARQ from the evil corporation he used to work for, in a dystopian future where power and food are both hard to come by. The ARQ could be the difference between winning and losing a war between the corporation and a rebel army called the Block, but Renton’s concerned about some anomalous readings it’s giving off. Just as Renton’s house is stormed by Block members who want to steal the ARQ, the ARQ creates a three-hour time loop, trapping Renton and his attackers inside. Renton is the only one who remembers what happened in previous loops; he needs to figure out how to survive, protect the ARQ, and reconcile with his mysterious, newly-returned partner, Hannah (Rachael Taylor).

I have some questions about how the time loop works in ARQ, which I won’t ask here, because they would spoil some of the surprises in the latter half of the film, but, suffice to say, the rules get more complicated as they go, and the complications don’t always make sense.

What I do need to spoil a little bit is Renton’s relationship with Hannah, because the way it plays out isn’t especially thoughtful. At the start of the film, Hannah’s sleeping beside him, just before the Block bursts in, and we later learn that she tracked him down only the night before, after a long absence that began when she was arrested by the corporation. She has an agenda of her own that’s revealed as the movie goes on. But she’s mostly an ally to Renton and – to be completely frank about it – something else he has to carry through this situation, so that it isn’t too easy for him.

Early in the film, Renton is the only one who remembers the time loops and he literally leads Hannah through the house by the hand to evade the Block – this pretty much makes sense, because he knows what’s around each corner and she doesn’t. Later in the film, Hannah starts to remember the time loops as well but, for some reason, this doesn’t change the dynamic where she follows his lead on every single decision – even when they have contradictory goals. On the one hand, Renton is the best chance she has of ending the time loop and anything she does will be for nothing as long as the day keeps resetting, so it makes sense to cooperate with him. On the other hand, Hannah’s primary function in the story is to be an extra person that can die, thereby preventing Renton from stopping the time loop, because he wants to find a solution where both of them live.

It’s a little bit reminiscent of Edge of Tomorrow, except that Emily Blunt’s character was a lot more active in that movie, and the writers got mileage out of the idea that the one person who could remember what was happening was also least suited to do anything about it. In ARQ, it seems like Renton would be better off on his own and Hannah exists to be an extra obstacle that slows him down.

There’s also a love triangle in the story that’s more of a line with a dot beside it. Or a symbol like x_x. In the time Hannah’s been away from Renton, she’s changed a lot, due to some rough experiences, and fallen in love with someone else. That person, happily, is also trapped in the time loop and keeps getting killed. After the first time it happens, Hannah hardly bats an eye at that or at the idea that she and Renton should end the time loop anyway, as long as they both survive. Taken to its natural extreme, this could have been an interesting idea – if Renton keeps resetting the loop because he loves Hannah, and Hannah loves this other person, and this other person loves someone else… on and on until he has to find three hours where nobody in the entire world dies. Unfortunately, the story has a laser focus on what Renton wants, and Renton only wants Hannah to survive. It’s actually better for him if her partner doesn’t make it.

ARQ isn’t a bad movie, and it fits within the Netflix wheelhouse in that it’s so addictive you won’t want to stop once you’ve started. It does suffer from the same kind of emptiness beneath Orphan Black. Once you strip out all the plot twists, there isn’t much of a message underneath and the characters mostly seem motivated to make the story work. The film also doesn’t seem like it reflects on the situation very much, beyond trying to build a framework for more double-crosses and plot twists.

Still, if you’re hungry for more Orphan Black, because you miss feeling confused and enthralled, ARQ is worth checking out.

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

Queer Post-Apocalyptic Western ‘The Lotus Gun’ Director Interview

‘The Lotus Gun’ is a critically acclaimed short, independent student film co-written and directed by Amanda Milius. The film is a beautifully rendered post-apocalyptic story with a Western aesthetic that features a queer relationship between its two female leads.

Written by Amanda Rodriguez.

The Lotus Gun is a critically acclaimed short, independent student film co-written and directed by Amanda Milius. The film is a beautifully rendered post-apocalyptic story with a Western aesthetic that features a queer relationship between its two female leads. Set in a future of wide open spaces, The Lotus Gun is a survivor story about Nora (Lauren Avery), its laconic, independent lead, who escaped from a drug cult and a life of sex slavery.

The cinematography of this film is breathtaking, conveying more about a world long gone to seed than any exposition or carefully placed ruins possibly could. The Lotus Gun critiques collectivism, favoring instead an individualistic approach popular in the Western genre. Here the communal, sharing societies are actually patriarchal, and they commodify women, engaging in sex trafficking and sexual slavery. It is then not surprising that naive Daphine (Dasha Nekrasova), Nora’s partner, is fascinated by a young man who wanders onto their property, while Nora plans to kill him, knowing the threat he poses.

Enter The Lotus Gun.

Guns are often a key feature of the the Western genre, and the relationship between the old West protagonist and his (usually) gun is often a love story. Here, guns are so scarce that few have ever seen them, so the gun itself is a phallic relic. Interestingly, Nora, a woman, is presumably the only person left who has one.

The Lotus Gun is an engaging film with arresting imagery and a plot that took me to surprising places. I look forward to seeing newcomer Amanda Milius’ next projects. My only critique is that the two female leads, being thin, white, blonde women, are not as unique as the story itself. I did, however, appreciate how dirty they were, their skin covered in blemishes and bruises, their clothes ripped and dusty.

I had the privilege of interviewing talented writer and director Amanda Milius.

Bitch Flicks: What made you choose to make this film?

Amanda Milius: I have always been drawn to the things people do when there’s no law around, so in pre- or post- current versions of society or civilization. I had both smaller and larger versions of this particular story I’d had for a while, and at school we got to do these sort of smaller 5-minute films throughout the program. So I explored different aspects of the kinds of people and stories I like, and I just wanted an opportunity to get one fully realized thought out. It happens to be 25 minutes long, which I certainly heard no end about from everyone I know… But I’m glad it is what it is because it wasn’t meant to be 12 minutes long.

I like the idea of these two very different kinds of women and how differently they react to the world and how their basic personality makeups create a conflict just out of that. Nora sees the world as an inherently bad place and Daph feels the opposite. I also just wanted to express my particular style and aesthetic and really have a story where that could be featured… I definitely didn’t want to do anything indoors; I really like people having to survive in nature. I had a very particular visual style I wanted and I used to be a photographer for fashion and music magazines so I’ve had time to sort out the style I like and I wanted a moment to showcase that.

Thankfully, I found a really great team of people who also got it and really expanded on it. Sean Bagley, the director of photography (DP), is just as much a part of it, same with the costume designer Adam Alonso, and the production designers Marcelo Dolce and Katie Pyne — everyone really got it and so it comes together in a very good way, thankfully.

BF: Why do you feel this is an important story to tell?

AM: Because even though society does exist and keeps us safe, there are things we take for granted as reality when they are only just imposed on us from society. So how real are they? How is equality between people maintained? How do the weak stand up to the strong or groups of people when they are outnumbered? I maybe have more of Nora’s point of view of the world: I don’t think people will act the way they do now when civilization is gone, and so then how will people decide what’s right and wrong? What kind of women will survive and how? How will men and women interact? I think it’s important now. I think it’s a good thing to figure out what your values are as an independent person with an independent morality.

At the end of the day, it’s a movie about loyalty and relationships. In two-person relationships, there’s always a power dynamic, which isn’t bad, but it exists. I wanted to deal with ideas about “possessiveness” and ownership and freedom within relationships. Dash splits because she maybe thinks she will find freedom elsewhere. And in this particular world and situation, she finds out she was free before. Nora already knows this, so the way she deals with the betrayal is interesting… how she really does kind of treat Daph as a pet, like she doesn’t know any better. But she saves her and that’s what matters, she still makes sure she has a life. The idea was not that how all these people act is necessarily what I or we would think is correct or right, but in this world it’s what happens.

BF: Why did you choose to make your film a Western?

AM: Technically it’s not a western because it doesn’t take place in the Old West but it is a variation. I chose to place it in a broken down world after civilization for the reasons I mentioned above but I also really like Westerns and the things about people you can explore in those kinds of stories: what people get up to when there’s no real law around, when it’s just people deciding for themselves how to live and what’s right and wrong. I also really like how Nora is basically Clint Eastwood combined with my friend Jennifer Herrema (singer from 90s indie band Royal Trux); there’s no better character than that for me! It’s cool having her be strong in a sort of reserved, silent, resolved, and complicated way. A lot of the “strong” women in films these days, which seems to be the new thing, they are so annoying. I’m not saying people shouldn’t try to have more of those characters, but I haven’t seen one I really liked since Alien or Terminator, which is funny because no one was trying so hard then to make great female characters. That’s probably why there’s not a lot of them, but those two are such great examples and no one notices. Now they have the girls always doing kung fu or something; it’s so awful.

BF: Could you talk about your choice to make the women a couple in the film?

AM: I liked the idea of this sort of sensual relationship in a Blue Lagoon kind of way between the women in their undisturbed environment and how that gets disrupted and altered when the new element shows up.

Basically, they are a couple but that could be seen as being by default, as they are the only two people out there for years together… the idea was that it was a vague kind of non-defined thing where they were best friends and family and probably lovers in this kind of survivalist, futuristic way. When Mike shows up, it can be questioned whether or not Daph is necessarily gay exactly or if she wavers between attraction to the competing personalities in front of her at that moment. He is new, so is it the newness and strangeness that she’s attracted to, or the fact that he’s a guy? I wanted the girls’ relationship to be almost transcendent of a distinct type of relationship; they are every relationship to each other in a way.

BF: Could you tell us about the significance of the gun (the Lotus Gun) in your film and why you chose it?

AM: The gun itself is kind of like an Excalibur thing, since there’s none around… the idea is both guns and women are rare and therefore of value in this world. But the way they are ‘”valued” is as objects, commodities, things you need to stay alive. The gun is special because the backstory (which you’ll see if I ever get to make the feature or serialized version of this!) is that Dennis, the commune / cult leader, collects artifacts from the past civilization, and this gun is a particular rarity. He had it for some time, and during that time, he had his guys engrave over the original engraving to represent his world. Shotguns like that usually have ducks or dogs or other kinds of hunting imagery on them, really beautiful actually. A lot of those guns have some really amazing art on them. Anyway, so he has this guy crudely engrave his snake image and the Datura flowers they use in their drug ceremonies and weed leaves. Which alone is a cool idea, a shotgun engraved with hippie iconography is so cool. So that’s how it becomes the “Lotus Gun” and it has a sort of mythology pop up around it in this world when it supposedly disappears. When Nora digs it up, it’s a whole new world for her. She has something no one else has, and it’s almost like it was meant for her. No one else ever shot it that we know of, so it’s like Excalibur in that the gun was always waiting for her because she’s the rightful owner of it. Now there is a different balance of power that didn’t exist before.

BF: Could you share a bit about your experiences as a female film writer and director?

AM: I don’t really think about it much, so I can just say that being a writer and a director is great because as of yet, no one has ever taken one of my stories and ruined them, as I’m told will happen when someone finally buys a script from me! I know what you mean though. So far, I guess I’ve been very lucky to work with some very cool people because I hear there are difficult situations for women in this field, but I’ve really loved working with everyone I’ve worked with. I know there are definitely people out there who think maybe someone doesn’t know what they are talking about because they’re female or something, but I just wouldn’t be around that. As a director, for sure I wouldn’t tolerate it, so I just don’t think it would ever get to that. Because that kind of person wouldn’t even be around me anyway. Plus, I made this movie in school, so I had the ability to work with my best friends. Maybe I’ll have more to say on it as I progress through the profession.

I think women in this industry should remember that there are lots of different kinds of women and to not hold us to some idea about ourselves, because it will limit us. We ourselves need to be supportive of other women in a real way, which means supporting all different kinds of films and people. Not box ourselves into one way of thinking. I think women’s film festivals are a great idea because they show that women make very different kinds of films and can excel across all genres. At first, I wasn’t sure about the idea of separating films out based on the gender of the director, but actually I think they make an interesting statement that’s important.

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.

‘Colossal’ and ‘Lady Macbeth’ Tell Similar Stories of Violence and Empowerment at TIFF

Both Nacho Vigalondo’s monster movie, ‘Colossal,’ and William Oldroyd’s period piece, ‘Lady Macbeth,’ are solid, carefully-made films built around a stunning performance from their lead actors – Anne Hathaway and Florence Pugh, respectively – and both tell the story of a woman surrounded by men who try to control her. Rightly or wrongly, both films also seem to presume that the best way for women to be strong and empowered is through physical violence.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Last week, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) saw the world premieres of Nacho Vigalondo’s monster movie, Colossal, and William Oldroyd’s period piece, Lady Macbeth. Both of these are solid, carefully-made films built around a stunning performance from their lead actors – Anne Hathaway and Florence Pugh, respectively – and both tell the story of a woman surrounded by men who try to control her. Rightly or wrongly, both films also seem to presume that the best way for women to be strong and empowered is through physical violence.

In Colossal, Gloria (Anne Hathaway) struggles with problematic drinking, got fired from her job, and kicked out of her boyfriend’s apartment. She moves back to her home town to get her life together, but soon discovers that she’s psychically linked to a monster that appears in South Korea every morning to blindly stumble into skyscrapers, leaving a trail of chaos and destruction in its wake. This sounds like a completely bizarre and preposterous premise, but it works really well in the film. At first, it seems that Gloria will have to pull back on her drinking and behave in a more responsible way to deal with the monster, but it slowly becomes clear that there’s another antagonist in this story. At the risk of revealing one of the best twists in the film, it turns out that Gloria’s nice guy childhood friend, who initially seems destined to be her romantic interest, is actually a Nice Guy childhood friend – in that he secretly hates and fears women, and only pretends to be friends with them because he’s angling for sex. The second half of the film is about him getting increasingly vile and misogynist while she struggles to stand up to him.

At the screening I attended, Vigalondo explained that he’d been editing the film right up until the premiere and joked that all he could see were the mistakes he made. However, the mistakes don’t really show. There’s a little bit of fuzzy logic about the monster, and its origin story is built up to be more than it is but, overall, the film seems technically well-made and takes us on an understandable and unexpected emotional journey. The degree to which you enjoy this movie will be mediated by your Matrix quotient – meaning, if you were annoyed that Neo and Trinity killed a bunch of innocent people so they could look cool in The Matrix, you will be annoyed that Anne Hathaway’s monster kills a bunch of innocent people by drunkenly stumbling into a skyscraper. Colossal makes more of these deaths than The Matrix did, but not as much as it makes of the pain Gloria suffers herself.

That said, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Colossal and, even though I’m about to question the film’s use of violence as a path to power, this is a movie that deserves to land a distributor, so as many people can watch it as possible. There are interesting conversations to be had about the film, once it’s part of the cultural landscape.

Lady Macbeth is complicated, in that it’s an adaptation of an opera that was an adaptation of a Russian novel called Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which does not, itself, have anything to do with Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Set in England, in the 1860s, the film follows Katherine (Florence Pugh), a woman who marries into a modestly wealthy family that hates her. The first act of the film depicts Katherine’s life as an endurance test – physical discomfort, humiliation, isolation, boredom, sleep deprivation, celibacy – that will apparently go on forever. By the time the murders start – and there are lots of murders in this film – we’re on her side.

This is Oldroyd’s first feature film (written by Alice Birch), after working mostly in theatre and, although everything looks gorgeous, there’s an overall broadness to the movie that would work better on-stage. All of the physical violence in the film is blocked and shot in ways that reveal it as pantomime; every line of dialogue and sound effect is crisp and loud as though there’s a chance we might not hear it.

Katherine intentionally goes from being sympathetic to villainous over the course of the film, and there are unanswered questions about some events – including what looks like a possible gang rape. The best explanation for the story came from Naomi Ackie, the actor who plays Katherine’s servant, Anna. During a Q&A, Ackie explained that to her, Lady Macbeth is about the choices people have when they’re oppressed, and how intersectionality leaves each of the characters with different options. The option Katherine chooses is to kill anyone who threatens her freedom and – without giving away too much – Gloria eventually resorts to violence in Colossal, too.

On the one hand, it feels great to watch these women fight back against men who threaten violence or have used physical violence to make them subservient – I got really emotional watching Colossal, and appreciated the care Vigalondo took developing the situation and exploring the misogynist undercurrents in what initially appears to be harmless behavior. There’s also a great moment in Lady Macbeth where Katherine stares at her father-in-law impassively during an outburst, and you can tell it’s because she’s already planned his death – it’s a much-welcome change after watching her bow to his wishes earlier in the film. On the other hand, watching these women meet violence with violence reinforces the idea that the best or only way to have power is to beat or kill someone else, which is an idea that’s bad for women (and many men) in the long run.

Men’s domination of women has historically hinged on physical strength and threats or deeds of violence. Although both Colossal and Lady Macbeth seem to propose that the best way for women to end their oppression is also through violence, the biggest gains women have made collectively in society didn’t happen because we started to beat men up – they followed from cultural change that placed more value on freedom, democracy, and equality. Some may argue that it’s important for women to learn to physically defend themselves, but the best way for us to ensure that women are treated like people rather than property is through dismantling intersecting systems of oppression and claiming an equal share of political, economic, and social power. Until we have that, women’s rights are an experiment that men can end at any time.

As committed to empowering women as both of these movies are – and I don’t doubt their commitment – the road to power on-screen looks a lot different than the road to power we’ve taken and probably should continue to take in life.

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