The radical notion that women like good movies
In fact, many of the clients grow to appreciate the benefit of the female gaze, making their products truly (for the most part) appealing to women. This makes more profit than the false patriarchal ideas of a woman’s wants and needs. With the character of Peggy, Weiner is able to let us see the advertising world from the female gaze to criticize the falsehood that lies in selling female products with a male gaze.
Like ‘Mean Girls’, ‘Female Perversions’ script (co-written by Streitfeld and Julie Hébert) is an adaptation of a book of the same name of nonfiction, feminist psychology, the concepts and ideas of which are plugged into a fictionalized narrative (and, in this film sometimes into bus stop placards and advertisements that appear in magazines).
I didn’t expect Gerwig and Baumbach together to create in the second film (‘Frances Ha’ was the first) the two offscreen romantic partners have written in which Gerwig plays the lead and Baumbach directs, a movie that (in spite of its terrible title) is one of the delights of this summer: ‘Mistress America’.
Because no archival photos and footage of most of the Pol Pot era exists, films about the Cambodian genocide have had to use creative ways to tell what happened. The Oscar-nominated documentary ‘The Missing Picture’ from a couple of years ago used clay figurines as a visual complement to the narration. John Pirozzi’s ‘Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten’ uses the popular music of Cambodia in the ’60s and ’70s (and the artists who made it) to detail the country’s trajectory.
The refreshing part about this dark story is the calm confidence and self-assurance of an unapologetic Native female protagonist who is unafraid to take risks and clearly provides leadership to her friends and family.
How do you solve a problem like dystopian science fiction? It’s been around for about as long as the film industry and yet, politics and society still won’t stop producing warning signs for the decay of humanity, providing directors, writers, and “artists” with almost inexhaustible opportunities for critiquing the current state of the world community, or showing what the present state of things might turn into if not handled consciously and carefully.
Maybe sitting through years of shitty queer characters in films and TV has sensitized me, because, even though I’m not trans*, I often get a similar, sickly feeling about films and TV with trans* characters made by people who aren’t trans*, most recently the two (or maybe it was one and a half) episodes of the Emmy-nominated ‘Transparent’ I watched when (cis) people I respect raved about it.
The Oxford Dictionary defines dystopia as “An imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad, typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one.” Literature and pop culture are brimming with examples of dystopian landscapes because they serve as a vehicle through which we can follow certain ills in society to their potentially logical and tragic conclusions.
Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!
At February’s Athena Film Festival I saw the documentary ‘Out in the Night’ (showing this Monday, June 22 on PBS’s POV) about a group of queer women who defend themselves against a man who harassed them in the street. The film shows newspaper clips referring to the seven women, friends from Newark out for a night in the West Village (historically the queer part of NYC) as a “lesbian wolfpack” and “killer lesbians”–as if groups of queer women habitually roam city streets and take revenge on men who give them shit. The group of us ‘Bitch Flicks’ writers sitting together at the screening said simply, “We wish.”
Director James Kent: “People offer me these projects and I’m immediately intrigued by the woman’s story in history because often I think women are written out of in history because they are the underdogs. Often it’s a better story than the one who’s king; he’s got it all his way. “
To see a portrait of the inner workings of the FBI we have to look to films like the new documentary, ‘(T)ERROR’ co-directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe, showing this Sunday, June 14 as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. In a highly unusual coup, an FBI informant Saeed aka “Shariff” (who used to be Cabral’s neighbor) agrees to be followed by the camera (though he complains to Cabral during closeups “You’re always getting the fucking headshots”) as he talks about his past cases and sets up a current one.
