The radical notion that women like good movies
‘A Different World’ will forever hold a special place in my life. …It became my North Star to an experience largely foreign to me — undergraduate life. It gave me insight into the strength gained from friendships with Black women. … Seeing images of young, gifted, and Black women pursuing higher education at a historically Black college or university (HBCU) shaped my vision for my life.
Writing women as interesting, multi-layered individuals with a rich inner life isn’t impossible, so the fact that men continue to write women with so little substance isn’t because they can’t. It’s that they won’t. And the fact that there aren’t more female-driven comedies isn’t because (sorry to bring this nonsense up again) they aren’t funny, it’s because mostly men run the show and most of them don’t value women as anything other than wives and ‘yacht girl in bikini.’ They don’t see women as funny and interesting and smart and worthy of 90 minutes, so they don’t write for them and they don’t include them. It’s. A. Choice.
The queer women we see in sexual situations in ‘Concussion’ are not cut from the same Playboy-ready cloth as the two women in ‘Blue’: one client is fat, another is an obvious real-life survivor of breast cancer and some of her clients, like Eleanor herself, are nowhere near their 20s anymore.
Our theme week for March 2016 will be Women Directors. The gender gap in the entertainment industry has risen to the level of popular consciousness, such that prominent public figures are frequently commenting on it and demanding change, but while awareness of the under-representation and misrepresentation of women in film and television has grown, is there much being done to combat it?
Check out all of the posts from our Interracial Relationships Theme Week here.
It’s a true rarity to see an interracial relationship that doesn’t have at least some element of suffering in it. In ‘Flirting,’ on the other hand, most of the difficulties in Danny and Thandiwe’s relationship seems to come from the relationship itself, not the color of the star-crossed lovers’ skin.
The potency of ‘Carol’ struck me. I found myself hopelessly enraptured by the film’s meticulously flawless and at times excruciatingly realistic depiction of the ineffability that typifies so much of the queer experience. … The film pinpoints and satiates that pulsating, unspeakable longing that I (and I know countless others) have felt too many times.
Are depictions of interracial relationships on the rise due to a diminished stigma around interracial dating? How much is colorism still in play? Do the success of shows with racially diverse casts and the growing success of dark-skinned performers mitigate colorism? How do the very real and present ramifications of slavery and colonialism affect these interracial dynamics?
Anderson was working on her film, ‘Heart of a Dog’ (in theaters now; it will be shown on HBO at a later date) when Reed died and she then took a year off before finishing the documentary. The film contains a loosely connected series of stories and images but is mostly a meditation on grief and death with a focus on her dog, a rat terrier named Lolabelle. What it isn’t about, at least not directly, is Reed, though he has a cameo in the film.
Check out all of the posts from our Violent Women Theme Week here.
Thematically, ‘Jennifer’s Body’ mirrors ‘Ginger Snaps’ in many respects: the disruption of suburban or small town life, the intersection between female sexuality and violence, the close relationship between two teen girls at the films’ centers, and—perhaps most strikingly—the contagious nature of violence in women.
It’s a conundrum, one that Dawn faces head (or vagina) on. She is forced to confront these opposing views, and her body reacts the only way it knows how, it bites the penis of society, it castrates the men that want to turn her into something she doesn’t want to be: a sexual young woman.
