The radical notion that women like good movies
Gareth does not “happen to be Black”; the pressure on him to conform to white culture, to avoid limiting his own narrative, mirrors the show’s own need to conform to that culture, to avoid limiting its audience. This conflict is slyly embodied in plausibly deniable food metaphor.
“You’ve got a lot to learn, Myrtle Mae, and I hope you never learn it.” These words, from 1950’s ‘Harvey,’ apply equally to sex and sanity. Harvey’s young women, Myrtle Mae and Nurse Kelly, are open and assertive about their sexual desires and frustrations. It is the older woman, Veta, who is inhibited. She flinches when a bosom jiggles and squirms when discussing sex. Society’s usual concept of sexual inhibition, as a natural innocence corrupted by experience, is flipped in Harvey: female sexuality is the natural innocence that experience disciplines into inhibition. Myrtle Mae and Nurse Kelly have a lot to learn, and we hope they never learn it.
It’s only until Laura begins to question herself and her place in the world when she observes the women around her in the next scene. She’s in her van and as she listens to the report of the missing couple and child she witnessed drowning, a scene of just women, conversing, talking, and walking begins. For a bit, it’s like the montage of her looking for her male victims, with the foreboding background music to match. Later on this same sort of montage occurs, but instead of the scary soundtrack, we hear the hustle and bustle of the street as our eyes scan the women on the screen.
I suppose its no coincidence that many coming of age films feature runaways. The coming of age plot is, after all, the search for self realized through the search for something external. It doesn’t really matter what the search was originally for: an old home, a long lost father or a missed connection; in the end, it’s the journey, both literal and figurative, that matters.
Sometimes I wish the mainstream film industry would stop making movies about queers. The rare times that a queer person is allowed to be the main character in one of its movies, as in this one, he (almost always a “he”), like the rare main character of color is usually unrealistically isolated from the community he comes from, a trope fostered from before Stonewall to the ’90s to now: we are oh-so-tragic and oh-so-alone.
Far more than a common trend in cartoons and superhero teams, the Smurfette Principle is an ingrained interpretative framework that limits female achievement to a model for male imitation, rather than an argument for female inclusion. In comedy, “Smurfette Syndrome” is a bias that asks whether individual women are “as funny as men,” rather than assessing women’s collective contribution as creators of comedy genres.
The character development of Pina and Marina used by Rossellini shows the influence of the war on Italian life and femininity. The suffering women are the epitome of the country at war.
Until the release, ‘Big Eyes’ looks like a promising movie to end off the empowering year of the woman. Flexing in the face of men, Margaret Keane’s story translates to roadblocks women surpass on the daily at the workplace and at home. Depending on how Burton captures Margaret’s story, Amy Adams has the opportunity to do women justice and end off the year of feminism with a bang–a big-eyed bang.
Heathcliff illustrates the brutalization of the non-white male; his every attempt to integrate is rejected, so he grows embittered and alienated, forced to exploit others to achieve his goals. If Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom is often criticized for being implausibly forgiving and accommodating to racist slave-owners, then surely Heathcliff is the anti-Tom, an openly angry and defiant agent of revenge against the racist patriarchy that has killed his love.
What were the biggest challenges in making a feature film? How do people see compulsory military service in Israel? Was that Russian girl really possessed by a ghost? Writer/director Talya Lavie answers our questions about her award-winning film.
For months, Kat idly notes her mother Eve’s increasingly odd behaviour, but is too busy falling in love and losing her virginity to care, until, suddenly, one day, Eve disappears without a trace. Kat assumes she ran away because she didn’t love them, and attempts to go on with her life, but a police investigation slowly begins circling her family. As an audience, we’ve been conditioned to see a movie with thriller or mystery elements in it as a thriller or mystery story. But Gregg Araki’s film, ‘White Bird in a Blizzard,’ is only part mystery, part coming of age story, and part haunted dreamscape, and refuses to be easily categorized as any of the above.
When the young, hippie-ish movie star Shailene Woodley said in an interview that she wasn’t a feminist, many women pointed out that she didn’t seem to know what feminism was. Perhaps Woodley and other women of her generation (she is 22) don’t know what feminism is for the same reason fish don’t know what water is–because it’s all around them and has been for the entirety of their lives.
