Tag: Guest Writers

Movie Review: Source Code

This guest post by Markgraf also appears at Bad Reputation.

Original artwork by Markgraf

The last film I reviewed, Sucker Punch, had a magnificent trailer. It really stoked me. I was all, “Hey, this trailer is awesome! I must avail my face of the cinematographical delight it advertises!” And then I saw it and it was crap.

Source Code, starring my favourite Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, was the total opposite. I saw the trailer and scattered my scornflakes to the four winds. “Pssh and foo,” I said. “Gorgeous, creepy premise and it’s all about SAVE THE LADY, WOOO, TOTALLY UNFEASIBLE ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP IS THE CRUX OF ALL ACTION.” I guffawed and rolled my eyes. “How boring. How stupid. How anachronistically unfeminist, to have the woman as a passive thing that needs rescuing.”

But I went to see it anyway, because my passion for Jake Gyllenhaal’s beautiful face is unrivalled and disturbing. And also because Duncan Jones’s breakout film, Moon, was widely touted as a dreadfully disturbing psychological affair, and I still rue the fact that I missed it at the cinema – so maybe it would have my proverbial cookies after all?

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: yeeeesssss, mmm, yes, mmm, thank you, Duncan, mmmm, Jake Gyllenhaal, hargleblarge he handcuffs a man to a pole, nrrgghhnnffnnff nargb.

Long intelligible answer: It certainly does. It turns out that the film’s content is the complete opposite of what the trailer would have me believe. The trailer bigs up the romantic relationship and downplays the unsettling premise. The film, on the other hand, is all about the premise, which rules the shop from start to finish, throwing up questions of morality and ethics in science, what happens to the universe when we make decisions, and the nature of a good death. The romance is a barely-there breath of something sweet and touching that’s symptomatic of the premise rather than an event all in itself.

I keep talking about this magical wonderpremise like it’s Jesus and I haven’t even explained what it is. How rude of me. Let’s fix that.

The premise, without spoiling anything, is that there is some military science (SCIENCE! more like) that allows a person to take possession of a dead person’s final memories, ten minutes before their death. This involves, of course, a poor bastard (in this case, a harassed-looking, sweaty Jake Gyllenhaal) being held prisoner in a Science Tank and forced back into some dead guy’s brain so that he can solve terrorism forever. In this case, Jake Gyllenhaal scuba dives through time and space into ten minutes prior to a big-ass explosion that detonates an entire train on the way to Chicago.

In the process of this, Jake Gyllenhaal observes the bloody, violent reality of the terrorist attack, and experiences first-hand the nature of the death the train passengers had foisted upon them out of the blue. This raises two issues: firstly, the morality of the military experiment that forces a man to repeatedly experience death from which he cannot escape. Secondly, we realise, along with Jake’s captive captain, that death without closure is worse than death itself.

So the reason, then, that there’s this romantic subplot anything, is less about OH ROMANCE, SAVE THE LADY, THE MERE PRESENCE OF A WOMANLASS MAKES MAN LOSE ALL SEMBLENCE OF RATIONALITY AND FLING ASIDE ALL PLANS AND SCHEMES FOR HER, FOR SHE IS RUBBISH GIRL! WHO CANNOT SAVE HERSELF! AND HE IS ERECTILE-TISSUE-BRAIN MAN! WHO THINKS OF NOTHING BUT WHETHER OR NOT HE CAN BESHAGGERATE A THING! and more about giving this woman – and her fellow passengers – a chance to have a good death.

Wow, that was one hell of a paragraph. What I’m saying is that Source Code doesn’t buy into the “Fuck everything, save the chick!” spiel wholesale. It touches upon it, but it’s made emphatically clear through events in the film that it’s not really about that at all. And good job too, because we all know that that kind of carrying-on is insulting to everyone involved.

Another thing: although this film deals heavily with military science – a combination of fields that stereotypically leaves women out wholesale – one of the lynchpin characters is a woman, and she’s not only steely and full of agency and poise, but she carries a bucketload of morality and cunning, too. I loved her. I was very glad she was in it to balance out the do-stuff-and-explode machismo of Jake Gyllenhaal Fighting Science.

That said, he fights science very well, and when we’re dumped right into the thick of it along with Mr Gyllenhaal’s beleaguered captain with as much explanation as he gets (that is to say, none whatsoever) the tension is wound so tight that it’s painful. It’s frightening and paranoia-inducing, and flavoured with a little pinch of Groundhog Day.

Overall, yeah! Source Code is surprising: it’s a fun and entertaining ride without being brainless. Also, I did mention the thing with Jake Gyllenhaal and he’s in a suit and he’s doing things and oh god help I’m on fire.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

  • It’s not revolve-around-romance stupid as the trailer makes it out to be
  • It does fun and interesting – if not necessarily innovative – things with choice-making and time
  • Morals and ethics and science, oh my
  • Jake Gyllenhaal, suit, things, oh god his gorgeous face etc.
  • Some bits are, if you think about them, really fucking creepy

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

  • Well, the science is fucking hilarious. Wait, that’s a reason to see it.

Markgraf draws pictures, plays Pokemon, watches films, writes for BadRep, caresses tanks, talks to himself in public and collects interesting bits of cardboard. He wishes he had a life.

    Guest Writer Wednesday: Machete

    Machete(2010)

    This is a cross post from Heroine Content.

    Trigger warning here for a joke from the movie concerning sexual assault, which is mentioned briefly at the end of this post.)
     
    Ah, Machete. What I remember best about Machete, unfortunately, is the phone call I got as the credits started to roll. It was my mother in law, telling me my three year old had fallen off a love seat onto a tile floor, landing on his head, and now he was saying his head was buzzing and his tongue felt funny. Everything turned out okay, but now Danny Trejo will likely always be linked for me with my son’s possible concussion and the Dell Children’s emergency room. It’s a shame, because I really like him. If I could re-link that memory to Jessica Alba, I would, but after Fantastic Four that there just isn’t room for more Jessica Alba pain associations in my neural pathways.
    Before all of that excitement, though, I’m pretty sure I saw a film that included two things.
    First, I saw multiple people of color, including women, as the forces of good in an action film about the concerns of hardworking, decent people who just happen to be one of the most villanized groups in my home state of Texas – Mexicans and Mexican-Americans! In this film, these people are the real heroes, and for a lovely change of pace in media, the U.S. is portrayed with just as much corruption as Mexico, if not moreso because of all the hypocrisy.
    I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the film, especially when Team Good got to kick major ass.
    (This is where some drive-by commenter is going to come along and be all “are you really anti-racist or are you just against white people?” just like happened on my review of Batman Returns. I’m not sure why people do the drive-bys. Do they think I’m going to be struck by the insightfulness of their observations and get therapy to resolve my virulent anti-white-people agenda?)
    Unfortunately, in addition to the righteous ass-kicking by people of color for great justice, the second thing I saw while watching Machete was a film that ruthlessly exploited women for the glorification of a male action hero and the satisfaction of the male gaze, and it was really fucking disappointing.
    To get this across better, let’s take a look at the nurses:

    The nurses
    Electra Avellan and Elise Avellan play the nurses, and I love them. They work in a hospital for The Network, an underground resistance movement that assists Mexicans who immigrate into Texas. I’m not sure they have any medical skills, as their main responsibility in caring for the wounded Machete seems to be comforting him with eye candy, but they are on the side of good and they wear fantastic platform heels and shoot things and I have absolutely no problem with any of that. If sexy nurses with machine guns can’t be part of your revolution, then I don’t want any. 
    (That’s not what you thought I was going to say, was it?)
    In a feminist utopia I think the nurses could still exist in a movie, because I think there are a lot of women who would find that a lot of fun, and for good reasons. When Grace reviewed Grindhouse, which included Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, she said this:
    …the whole package pays homage to/makes fun of the “grindhouse,” which is a beaten-down movie theater that plays double-bills of B movies. […] Now that we’re clear that these are supposed to be B movies, that they are hearkening back to and a parody of a specific kind of film, then we can skip all of the ways in which they are typically sexist. Yes, there are copious bare breasts and ass shots, women are called bitch all over the place, sexual violence is threatened (though, and I thought this was telling, never actually enacted) […] If there is any chance of you enjoying Grindhouse, or finding anything about it to be subversive or interesting, you are going to have to consider these things part of the kitsch that Rodriguez and Tarantino are playing with and move on.

    To me, the nurses are part of that kitsch. They’re a lighthearted genre trapping. What I DO have a problem with is that almost every other woman with a speaking part in this movie is basically the exact same character as the nurses, just in different clothes. They exist to fawn over the hero, look hot for the audience, and kick ass, without any distracting personal goals or motivations.
    From the naked woman who betrays Machete and stabs him in the leg with his own knife to win a drug lord’s favor, to Jessica Alba’s ambitious INS agent whose career ambitions are quickly sacrificed to furthering his quest, to Cheryl Chin’s turn as the Dragon Lady enforcer for the drug lord, to Lindsay Lohan’s drugged out, often naked internet porn star (who gets used sexually by Machete to humiliate her father, in a plotline I thought was beyond atrocious), there there is barely a hint of any female activity that does not revolve around men. Michelle Rodriguez’s Luz comes close, but even she is ready to turn over leadership to Machete as quickly as possible, anointing him leader of her desired revolution. (For all Rodriguez’s talk in the media lately about how she wants to be typecast as the bad-ass instead of the boring girlfriend, I was expecting a little more.) Alba and Rodriguez even get new costumes late in the movie to make them fit better into the nurse paradigm, and the results are not awesome.
    Lately I’ve been reading some of the Criminal comic book series by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, and it’s gotten me thinking about women in genre fiction. Criminal is specifically noir crime fiction, and when you read that kind of fiction, you know from the get-go that the dame is going to be trouble. I would argue that action movies are almost as bad for prescribing the roles female characters must play, and B movies doubly so. So if you’re going to create in a genre like that, how do you work with your female characters in a way that’s not horribly sexist? How do you give them agency? How do you give them personalities and missions in their lives beyond their usefulness as plot points for the hero?
    Let me tell you, the people who made Machete haven’t asked themselves any of those questions. Or if they have, they’re doing it wrong. “All your babes are belong to our sexy stereotype” is not creating strong female characters, regardless of how many guns you give them. Turning all women into genrelicious Barbie is not staying within the genre, it’s turning them into objects. You could argue that the men in this film are also stereotypes, but damn, at least they get to have clothes on!
    I desperately want to give this film some stars. The way the film treats women, though, is appalling. The rape joke made by Machete’s brother when Machete brings two drugged, naked women to his church was also not okay.
    No stars.
    Skye Kilaen blogs about women kicking ass in action films at Heroine Content, where the unofficial slogan is “Helping feminists with their Netflix queues since 2006.”

    Movie Review: Something Borrowed

    This post is by guest writer Megan Kearns.

    I’m usually no fan of chick flicks romantic comedies or chick lit women’s commercial fiction (god I hate the infantilizing term “chick”). While I enjoy romance, I cringe over the vapid dialogue, shallow characters, the reinforcing of stereotypical gender roles, the obsession over men, getting married and finding The One. I find the absolute solipsism given to men in these wretched movies unbearable, as if women never talk or think about anything else. But every now and then, a movie (like oh say Devil Wears Prada or Definitely, Maybe) comes along, surprising and delighting me. So with this skeptical yet ever so slightly hopeful attitude, I went to see Something Borrowed.
    Based on the New York Times best-selling book by Emily Giffin, Something Borrowed follows the lives of Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Darcy (Kate Hudson) who’ve been inseparable best friends since childhood. Smart, studious Rachel is an attorney while vivacious, lime-light stealing, party girl Darcy is…well, we’re never quite sure what she is in the movie (although in the book she works in public relations). Darcy is also engaged to Dex (Colin Egglesfield), Rachel’s smart and handsome good friend from law school. At her 30th birthday, Rachel confesses to Dex that she used to have a crush on him years ago, a revelation that ends up testing her friendship with Darcy.
    Now, the premise bugged me right from the start; it glorifies infidelity. Oh, it’s okay if you sleep with your best friend’s fiancé so long as he’s The One; otherwise you’re a big whore. But what pissed me off even more is how movies and the media perpetually pit women against each other…and this film is no different. Movies often devalue women’s friendships; they’re tossed aside as if women are too catty, too calculating, too backstabbing, and too man-hungry to ever really get along.
    The actors make the movie a bit more likeable, particularly the hilarious scene-stealing John Krasinski. Colin Egglesfield does his best charming Tom Cruise here. But Ginnifer Goodwin who’s supposed to be the center of the film is forgettable (except for her rampant usage of the word “stop” throughout much of the film) and Kate Hudson plays…well the same role she always plays.
    I couldn’t help comparing this film to Bride Wars, perhaps because Hudson forever churns out these shitty movies, mere mimeographs of one another. I hate the consumerism and competition suffocating Bride Wars. But I must admit that the end makes me weep like a baby as Anne Hathaway’s and Kate Hudson’s characters realize what truly matters: their friendship. But the same can’t be said for Something Borrowed. In the book, you discover that while Darcy is selfish, she stood up for Rachel against a school bully and she would never blow off her friends for a guy. In the movie, the only scene just about the two friends, rather than weddings or boyfriends, occurs during a bachelorette party sleepover when they dance along to Salt N Pepa’s “Push It,” bringing me back to my own junior high days as my best friend Angela and I choreographed a dance to that song too (what is it about that song?!). Yet despite this cute moment, I’m never really sure why Rachel is friends with Darcy, other than habit as they’ve been friends for decades. Perhaps the movie would have been more compelling had the plot focused on the complexities of being friends with someone you find simultaneously infectious and exasperating.
    In the movie, Rachel’s confidante is another childhood friend, Ethan (the adorable Krasinski). But in the wretchedly awful book (which yes, I unfortunately read as research for this review…clichéd language, corny dialogue, lacking character development…the lengths I go to), Rachel confides in Ethan but also her close friend from work Hillary, a female character completely erased from the film. Rachel laments throughout the film that Darcy breezes through life, taking things away from her. But Ethan tells Rachel to stop passively waiting around and to take charge of her life. As a result, Rachel eventually recognizes that it’s not Darcy doing the taking, it’s Rachel giving herself away. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that I wished another female friend advised her or she came to this realization on her own. Again the film conveys that women don’t need other women or themselves for that matter, only men.
    Not only are two women ultimately pitted against one another, they exist as two common female archetypes: the good girl and the bad girl. No depth, no subtle nuances exist here. Rachel is hard-working, thoughtful and sweet while Darcy is impetuous, obnoxious, boisterous, and likes sex. Despite Darcy being the person who’s wronged through her best friend’s betrayal, it’s clear whom we’re supposed to root for here. Through this one dimensionality, women fall into one of two categories and on two sides sparring for the prize: a man. Even though she dabbles in bad girl territory, Rachel follows her heart so all her betrayals and dishonesty become justified; she does it in the name of love so she’s ultimately still a good girl. Too often, women’s roles are relegated to simplistic caricatures, frequently in a virgin/whore dichotomy. Women are far more complicated and nuanced than Hollywood would have us believe.
    In Something Borrowed we learn about Dex’s parents and Dex’s dreams and aspirations but not Rachel’s or even Darcy’s. It’s as if the women in the film don’t really matter; it’s all about the men. Movies like these continually reinforce the notion that careers and friends don’t count; it’s only your love life that matters. Society tells women they can never truly be happy without a man in their life. I call bullshit. Perhaps I’m being too hard on a movie intended to exist as light-hearted, romantic escapism. But I don’t find anything fun about a movie that silences women’s voices and erases their relationships with each other.
    Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World. Her work has appeared at Open Letters Monthly, Arts & Opinion and A Safe World for Women. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. She lives in Boston. She previously contributed reviews of The Kids Are All Right, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest to Bitch Flicks.

    Guest Writer Wednesday: Girl Power in Sucker Punch, Hanna, and Winter’s Bone

    This guest post by Marina DelVecchio also appears at Marinagraphy. 
    In the past year, directors have been trying to feed our womanist pangs for more girl power in films. At least this is how I see the trend. Because as a woman and a mother, I want to see movies that represent my gender as empowered, important, and intelligent. I want to see them as real and as true and valued members of society. I want to have faith in humanity—in this world, even though it is still centered on patriarchal values and systems that perpetuate the notion that a woman is necessary only in her sexuality—her ability to bring a man to his knees with the want of her. But this is not a real woman. She does exist, but she does not represent women like me—late 30s to early 40s, a mother and educator, struggling to cast out the voices that tell her she is nothing, old, and imperfect if she doesn’t fit the role patriarchy has assigned her. I want to see movies that show me what power feels like—the kind of power that is accessible to me and my daughter—normal women in a normal and imperfect world. The last few months have found me thinking about the female characters depicted in films and how much power they really have. Here they are:
    Sucker Punch (directed by Zack Snyder) left me with a knotted feeling in my stomach, as well as with conflicted emotions. I loved the idea of a character escaping her reality of abuse and institutionalization by folding within herself and locating a place of refuge deep in her subconscious. Whatever was happening to her body in real life, her mind was not aware of it because she was in another realm—a more powerful one. I didn’t like that she escaped the reality of a mental institution and an impending lobotomy into a brothel where the girls were being sold off to men. A girl would not escape to this kind of world out of choice, even if she knew she was going to be lobotomized at the end of her journey. And to suggest that sex-trafficking is better than a lobotomy is insane in itself—lobotomize me any day of the week. To have her find refuge into a brothel was definitely an attempt at appeasing the men in the audience of this film. It would not appeal to women. What did appeal to me was that I did not have to watch this beautiful girl gyrate and dance provocatively in order to seduce the highest paying john—who of course, is an old, fat, cigar-smoking and money-padded man with power and political standing.
    I loved that she escaped that kind of self-selling image of provocateur to land in a fantasy world wherein she wielded machine guns and knives with natural expertise, power kicks and punches that never missed, and a confidence that all people should have—and all young girls and women should possess. In this fantasy world, she kicked ass, but again, to appeal to the men she had to be called “Baby Doll,” (which brings up the image of a hot red or pure white negligee, depending on the individual man’s fantasy), and she had to look like a little girl in Prep school uniform complete with short skirt and below-the-curve-of-her-busty-bust-shirt. She had to be sweet, sexy, and powerful at the same time—and perhaps because of this—because we cannot seem to have a heroine who is powerful without being sweet (innocent girl) and sexy (slutty siren) at the same time—because we cannot have a heroine who is just powerful, just dominant, and who is not expected to appeal to men’s desires in any way—then Baby Doll (Emily Browning) just doesn’t cut it as a strong female character—and Sucker Punch doesn’t fit the bill of a good, strong, and powerful representation of Girl Power. When the female character has to appeal to men’s sexual yearnings to achieve power, she fails to be powerful.
    In contrast, I was pleasantly surprised with Hanna, (directed by Joe Wright), which just came out. 16-years-old, Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) is raised by her father, an ex-CIA operative who has taught her everything she knows. We first meet her in the wild forests of Finland, very unsexy, un-pretty, and completely covered in layers. And we find her hunting with a bow and arrow, sprinting after her prey, killing it, and then gutting it with her bare hands. So unsexy, and yet so powerful. A small girl, she is smart, fast, and logical.
    But there is one problem—she is not normal—she is a genetically engineered girl who was part of a CIA project to build perfect soldiers from birth. And because she is this kind of “soldier,” she is not someone we can relate to in any way. Her skills were not simply developed with the aid of her father; they were made possible because of the genetic modifications that had been made to her while she was still in her mother’s uterus. She was born a soldier, not developed into one, and this reality makes her an unreal hero—at least to me. If she had been a normal little girl, then all the skills she had learned would mean something—maybe that all girls can achieve this kind of mental discipline, this kind of physical prowess—but this message disappears when we learn about her origins. Still, I loved this movie, and as a heroine, Hanna is very powerful compared to Baby Doll. In addition, Cate Blanchett’s character, although the villain in this film, is strong also in her tailored shin length skirts and suits jackets, sporting a short bob haircut, and toting a gun or two or three. The women characters in this movie were quite compelling, including the mother she encounters on her journey, who refuses to wear makeup because she considers it to be dishonest. I’d like to read her story.
    Which brings us to Winter’s Bone. I rented this movie one Saturday night, and although it has been criticized for its stark and depressing mood, it is real, gutsy, and a true feminist—womanist—girl power-ish film, lacking in pretensions, sexism, or glamor. 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is a real-life girl in the real world, born into the “patriarchal male honor culture of the Missouri Ozarks” (James Bowman, 2010), who feeds her siblings squirrels, and teaches her brother how to hunt, kill, skin, and make a meal of it—all lessons a father would teach to his son. But he’s not around. Part of this culture highlighted by drugs and murder, he is missing; her mother is mentally depressed and useless; and Ree is left to tend to her younger siblings and make sure their house isn’t taken away from them. She is cajoled, lied to, threatened, beaten by men and other women in this clan, and she faces the reality of her real-life responsibilities with quiet fortitude. Accepting the fact that her father is dead, it is left up to this girl to find proof of his death in order to keep her parents’ house from being taken away and leaving her and her mother and siblings homeless. She puts her life in danger to accomplish her goal, and she also gives up her dream of escaping this kind of corrupt life by joining the army and making something better of herself and her future. She is able to save her house and family, through sheer nerve and guts, alone, and for this, she is a true hero—a real life heroine that we can feel confident in advocating as strong.
    There is no guile to her—no sex—just smarts and courage—which is more of what I would like to see in movies and their portrayal of women and young girls. Not surprisingly, this is the only movie of the three mentioned directed by a woman, Debra Granik. Although she adapted the film from a novel written by a man, Daniel Woodrell, Granik gave us the kind of heroine that we need; a heroine who fights for decency and justice, and who does not use her sex or appeal to men’s sexual desires to attain that which she is in need of. We need less of Sucker Punch and Mean Girls; less of Charlie’s Angels and Sin City. But we do need more of Ree Dolly’s. So many more. So bring them.
    How about you? What film heroine kicks ass for you—preferably a non-sexualized, eroticized, or generated-for-male-consumption heroine?
    Marina DelVecchio is a writer and a College Instructor. She has a BA in English Literature, an MS in English and Secondary Education and has completed thirty credits towards a Doctorate in Feminist Theory, Rhetoric and Composititon and 19th century Women Writers. Originally from New York, she began teaching on the High School level and then moved up to the College level in 2005. She presently teaches English Composition, Research, and Literature at a local Community College in North Carolina.

    Tangled: A Feminist Film Review

    This guest review by Whitney Mollenhauer first appeared at Not Another Wave in December 2010.

    Last Friday, I saw Disney’s Tangled with my husband.  I thought it was a pretty good feminist-y movie, especially considering that it was a Disney princess-type movie. Because I am lazy, I have written my review in bullet-point form:
    • Rapunzel’s father (the king) cries on Rapunzel’s birthday as he remembers his kidnapped daughter.  It seems like usually in these kind of movies, you see the mom crying and the dad consoling her; but here, it’s the other way around.  Win!  Men can express emotion, too!
    • Rapunzel sews and bakes, but she also reads, does astronomy, and paints like no other.
    • She is so awesome with her hair!  She ties the male protagonist up, lets herself down from the tower, and climbs everywhere.  Seriously, it’s very impressive.  She can do just about anything with that hair–it’s not just for show. 
    • Rapunzel ends up with short hair!  Okay, that’s just a little thing, but have you ever seen a Disney princess with a pixie cut before?  Even Mulan had longer hair!
    • So yeah, the mom is the bad guy because she’s vain/wants to be young forever, blah blah blah.  But I don’t know how they could have had a male villain or some other way for the mom to be the villain without straying too far from the original.  But at least she gets some jokes.
    • The frying pan proves to be a superior weapon compared to the sword!  This might be getting a little too psychoanalytic, but I saw the frying pan as symbolizing a kind of feminine/transgressive power, while the sword represents traditional masculine power.  I just thought it was neat.  You don’t have to be a swashbuckling dude to kick butt.
    • Her story and her adventure starts not because the guy “whisks her away” or something; but rather, she plans and schemes: she catches him breaking into her tower, and strategically decides to use him to reach her goal of seeing the flying lanterns on her birthday.
    • Spoiler alert: in the end, she’s not “saved” because of her compassion, but in spite of it–her compassion might actually have been her downfall.  Unlike other movies/fairy tales where a woman’s only redeeming quality is self-sacrifice, this ending suggests that self-sacrifice isn’t always such a good thing–or at least that it’s not solely the domain of women.  Men can be self-sacrificing too!  (Didn’t want to reveal too much here.  Go see the movie if you want to figure out what on earth I’m talking about.)
    • I liked the ambivalent nature of how it shows her mom’s and her relationship when Rapunzel leaves the tower for the first time.  She feels guilty, but MAN is she happy and excited and brave!
    • She doesn’t get married at age 18!!!!
    • In my opinion, the relationship was not even really a central feature of the story, but rather a sub-plot.  The main plot was getting away from her mother, figuring out her actual identity, getting to the flying lanterns she wanted to see.
    • I felt like it was good and feminist because it was a major improvement from how Disney usually is.  Also, overt sexism did NOT distract me from what was otherwise a visually appealing, witty movie (as it usually does).  And that is really saying something.
    • Even the rich, hypermasculine stereotype is challenged–the male protagonist reveals his true name/identity, as an orphan, and she says she likes him better than the fictional (hypermasculine) character that he aspires to be like.  
    • In the end, I think it makes a good case for women’s “proper place” NOT being just in the home, but out in the world/public sphere!  I’m not sure how you could get any other moral out of it.  Even in Mulan, after she saves China, she ends up returning home, and (we suspect) marrying the army captain guy, instead of taking a job with the emperor.  In Tangled, the movie’s premise is centered around the idea that it’s wrong and horrible to expect a woman to spend her whole life at home.
    • When the male protagonist breaks into her tower, she kicks his butt; she stands up for herself in the bar; and she stands up to her mother in the end (about having been kidnapped).
    • At the end of the movie, SHE dips HIM and kisses him.  (I always hated it when guys would dip me.  If I want to kiss you, I am going to kiss you, so just let me stay on my own two feet.)
    • Body image stuff:   Okay, so Disney’s not breaking down any boundaries here.  Also, infantilization much?  Rapunzel’s face is that of a two-year-old.  
    • So, I’m not very good at remembering specifics, but I DO remember not getting angry at seeing her needing rescuing again and again and again.  It seemed like mostly she was able to save herself, and the guy didn’t save her a whole lot.
    • In the bar, Rapunzel and the guy (Flynn) meet a whole bunch of rough guys.  They sing a song about how everyone’s got a dream: the one tough guy says to Flynn, “Your dream stinks,” referring to his dream of getting rich.  The other tough guys have dreams of becoming mimes, finding love, being a pianist, becoming a baker–and one made little tiny unicorns.  Even tough guys have nuance and feminine qualities!
    • Rapunzel’s animal companion is Pascal the chameleon.  Pascal is super cute, and is possibly named after Blaise Pascal the mathematician (suggesting that Rapunzel is a math nerd like me, though that could just be me reading too much into it).  Pascal can’t talk, and I felt like that was a good thing (feminist-wise), so he couldn’t show her up and become the hero (remember Mushu the dragon in Mulan?) 
    My points are random and some are not very significant. But still, small wins!  And when it comes to Disney princess movies, any hint at feminist ideology is a HUGE win. And if nothing else, it at least passes the Bechdel Test:

    Whitney Mollenhauer is a graduate student in California where she studies sociology. She has an awesome husband who doesn’t mind her running feminist commentary when they watch movies together. And, she loves cereal.

    Guest Writer Wednesday: Network

    This is a cross post from Feminéma
    Maybe I saw Sidney Lumet’s Network in high school — I remember the “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” scenes — but I wasn’t prepared to find its satire so brilliant 35 years after its initial release. What I’d completely forgotten was all the other satirical elements, from the sex scenes between Faye Dunaway and William Holden to the subplot of Dunaway’s attempts to sign a group of violent radicals, the Ecumenical Liberation Army, to a TV contract. Considering that it’s a satire of the TV-ification of America I can’t believe it’s so fresh today, and so prescient of what we experienced in television during the last generation. From the opening scenes to the conclusion, this film is perfect.

    Network (1976): prophetic satire

    One of the film’s themes is the generation gap; so how perfect that Holden — anti-hero star of Stalag 17 and Sunset Boulevard, whose cynicism helped create such 1950s anti-establishment protagonists as Holden Caulfield — would play Max, the head of the United Broadcasting Service news division. Now in late middle age, he’s found himself defending principles and idealism against the über-cynical corporate types who are taking over UBS. Of these, Diana (Dunaway) is the worst: a gorgeous series programmer with a preternatural gift for repackaging TV to get a bigger market share. She can see that “the American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression; they’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp, and nothing helps.” Whereas Max and his news anchor, Howard Beale (Peter Finch) joke darkly about a new program like “Terrorist of the Week”:
    Max:  We could make a series of it. “Suicide of the Week.” Aw, hell, why limit ourselves? “Execution of the Week.”
    Howard:  “Terrorist of the Week.”
    Max:  I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: “The Death Hour.” A great Sunday night show for the whole family. It’d wipe that fuckin’ Disney right off the air.

    Diana is utterly serious about such plans. She hires a radical black commie feminist to wrangle the crazy members of the Ecumenical Liberation Army into creating a popular new show (the scene of their contract negotiations is worth a Netflix subscription). Most of all, Diana can see that the newly insane Howard, with his TV rants about all the bullshit in American society, can be repackaged as The Mad Prophet for a new-and-improved news hour that also features Sybil the Soothsayer. Diana is television: for her, all publicity is good publicity, all political agendas can be transformed into catnip for audiences, there is no meaningful distinction between news and amusement. She doesn’t care in the least that Howard tells viewers to turn off their televisions, because she knows that his show gets more viewers than any competitor.

    Even more dark is the film’s portrayal of Howard, who really is saying something important about TV — even though no one pays any attention:
    Man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We’ll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker’s house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds… we’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube! This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! WE are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I’m speaking to you now! TURN THEM OFF… (He collapses in a faint on the set. The studio audience explodes with applause and cheers; the studio cameras pan out from his limp body.)

    They don’t turn off their sets, as Diana well knows; they can hardly wait for more. The script by Paddy Chayefsky — his third to win an Oscar for Best Screenplay — is perfect at every turn. When I watched this last night with my friend Susan, we commented on one of those mini-moments in which Diana’s assistant (a very young Conchata Ferrell) pitches ideas for new series:
    The first one is set at a large Eastern law school, presumably Harvard. The series is irresistibly entitled “The New Lawyers.” The running characters are a crusty-but-benign ex-Supreme Court justice, presumably Oliver Wendell Holmes by way of Dr. Zorba; there’s a beautiful girl graduate student; and the local district attorney who is brilliant and sometimes cuts corners. The second one is called “The Amazon Squad.” The running characters include a crusty-but-benign police lieutenant who’s always getting heat from the commissioner; a hard-nosed, hard-drinking detective who thinks women belong in the kitchen; and the brilliant and beautiful young girl cop who’s fighting the feminist battle on the force. Up next is another one of those investigative reporter shows. A crusty-but-benign managing editor who’s always gett… (Diana cuts her off there.)

    No wonder the film won so many awards. Watch it again — it’s gone right up to my list of Best Films Ever. 
    Feminéma is a blog about feminism, cinéma, and popular culture kept by Didion, a university professor in Texas. This blog is my way to address the achingly slow progress women are making toward social and financial equality, as film is a vivid place to see how women so frequently appear as stereotypes onscreen and only rarely appear in powerful roles like director, producer, and screenwriter. Please read!

    Guest Writer Wednesday: Your Review Is Scarier Than Scream 4

     
    This guest post by Kevin Wolf is cross posted at Shakesville.
    [Trigger warning for misogyny, eating disorders and body policing, ableist language.]

    The masses were clamoring for another Scream sequel (people simply would not stop talking about it!) so Scream 4 was manufactured and hits theaters today. Hence, the posting of reviews across the internets, including this one from Michael O’Sullivan at The Washington Post, which opens:
    “Scream 4” has issues.

    If it were a person, and not a movie, it would be a 17-year-old bulimic girl, desperate for the attention of 17-year-old boys and alternately bingeing on cheesy slasher-flick cliches, and purging, by pointing out, over and over, just how gag-me-with-a spoon cheesy they are.

    On the one hand, it is obsessed with itself, winking and pouting in front of the metaphorical mirror of self-referential scrutiny that the series — directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson — is famous for. On the other, it suffers from a case of crushingly low self-esteem, reminding us at every turn just how lame it is. (In a sense, it won’t shut up about how fat it looks in these jeans.)

    Mr. O’Sullivan is not a teen, bulimic or otherwise. But because this is a movie for and about teens, he evidently felt obliged to wedge something “teenagery” into his review. And because this movie has “issues,” he must represent our hypothetical teen as a “girl” who is bulimic, who is desperate for boys to notice her, and who is so “lame” and self-involved she won’t shut up about how fat [she] looks in these jeans!!
    Now, I’m not the target audience for the movie, nor the target of O’Sullivan’s horrific clusterfuck of misogynist, fat-hating, exploitative, condescending bullshit, yet for some reason I’ve taken offense. Why? Because I hate the assumption made by this critic that it’s gonna be just fine with me that he represent this film and its audience in this carelessly stupid, thoughtless, and endlessly privileged way.
    I’m going to suggest to O’Sullivan that he take another look at this review and compare that opening with a paragraph further along: “At the heart of the film is a joke: What’s happening on screen is just like a bad horror movie. Except that, by acknowledging its own badness, ‘Scream 4’ hopes to turn itself into a good horror movie. Or at least a hip, funny and self-aware one.” Notice, Mr. O’Sullivan, that you have here said essentially the same thing (the movie is agonizingly self-conscious and wants to be hip) without personifying the film as an offensive stereotype and thus demeaning teenage girls with disordered eating in the process. And it was so easy!
    Please, Michael O’Sullivan: Stop trying to be hip and clever. For a start, you’re about as hip and clever as an Allstate commercial. And your lack of self-awareness and empathy is painful—one guesses especially so for the targets of your “humor.”

    Guest Writer Wednesday: Easy A: A Fauxminist Film

    Emma Stone stars in Easy A

    This is a cross post from The Funny Feminist.
    It appears that star power is on the rise for the funny, luminous Emma Stone.  She first caught my attention as the snarky cool girl who was way too good for Jonah Hill’s character in Superbad(and not because she was hot and he was fat, but because she was sarcastic and witty and he was whiny and entitled).  She continued to charm me all the way through Zombieland, which was no easy feat when she was the prickliest of the four main characters.  Finally, someone decided to give her a starring role in a movie called Easy A. I saw the trailer for this and was immediately intrigued.

    I thought, “Ooh, feminist issues!  A comedic look at sexual hypocrisy in society, especially high schools!  A cast with funny actors!  Count me in!”
    I saw it in the theater.  I laughed.  I sympathized with Emma Stone’s character Olive, found myself crushing on the character played by Penn Badgley even though he failed to even make a blip on my radar on the one episode of Gossip Girl I watched, and thoroughly enjoyed every scene with Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as Olive’s quirky, hippie parents.  I went home with a smile on my face.
    The smile soon turned into a straight line, which eventually became a scowl, as the more I thought about the movie, the more it annoyed me.  I think it’s much less feminist than it seems, and for that matter, not as funny as I thought it was when I first saw it.  (Warning: Spoilers ahead).
    Why the Movie Fails on a Feminist Level
    1) Olive is awesome.  All other women are bitches.
    How would I describe Emma Stone’s character, Olive Penderghast?  First of all, she has the coolest name for a character in a teen movie since Anne Hathaway’s Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries. She’s also independent, feisty, compassionate, and refuses to let other people define who she is.  When the school labels her as a slut, she decides to take her reputation into her own hands.  Note that it’s already inherently problematic that she’s embracing the “slut” label as a form of rebellion – it’s kind of a stupid rebellion, in my opinion – but her motive behind that rebellion is still laudable.  And of course she Learns and Grows from the experience and finally tells the world that her sex life is nobody’s goddamn business but her own.  That is a fairly satisfying conclusion, even if getting there was a bit of a struggle.
    But let’s take a look at the other female characters.
    We’ve got Rhiannon, the hypocritical best friend of Olive played by Aly Michalka.  At first, she eagerly devours Olive’s account of her made-up sex life, but then turns on her and joins the rest of the school in slut-shaming her.  She’s a pretty crappy best friend, and of course, she’s motivated by jealousy.
    We’ve got Marianne, played by Amanda Bynes, the holier-than-thou religious girl who begins the campaign to slut-shame Olive.  In addition to being judgmental, she’s also a cheap, less funny ripoff of Mandy Moore’s character from Saved!
    We’ve got all of Marianne’s friends, who join in on the slut-shaming campaign. 

    We’ve got Mrs. Griffith, played by Lisa Kudrow, who turns out to not only be an incompetent guidance counselor, but cheating on her husband with a student.  Of course, her husband is the best teacher in the school, making her crimes even worse.
    In other words, Olive is a great character because she’s not like the other girls – implying that most “other” girls are bitchy, catty, jealous, conniving, and mean.
    I can’t praise a movie for its feminism if ONE female character is strong and the others are horrible.
    2) The boys get a free pass for their douchey behavior.
    We’ve talked about why the girls are bitches.  But what about the boys?  Are they portrayed as being jerks for taking advantage of Olive, for participating in a system that allows her to be shamed while they reap the benefits of her fallen reputation?
    No.  No, they are not.  We’re supposed to think that the boys are wrong, certainly, but we’re also to feel sorry for them.  Brandon asks Olive to fake-fuck him at a party so he can pretend to be straight and stop getting bullied.  Never mind that he’s indirectly asking her to put her reputation on the line, so she can get bullied in a different way.  We’re supposed to feel sympathy for the poor, bullied gay kid, not angry with him for being a hypocrite.
    I also feel that we’re supposed to make the same kind of excuses for the other boys who ask Olive for permission to say they had sex with her.  It’s wrong of them to do it, but they’re shy nerds who aren’t good with girls, so all they want is to build their reputations so that girls will like them.  Wow, what a feminist message – guys use a girl’s fallen reputation to build up their own “street cred” so they can trick other girls into actually having sex with them!  And the girl participates in this deceit of other girls!  But that’s okay, because other girls are shallow!  I think I have to take back what I said about Olive being awesome.
    There’s also Cam Gigandet’s character, a 22-year-old high school student named Micah, who is dating Marianne.  He is supposedly religious and chaste, but he turns out to be cheating on Marianne with Mrs. Griffith!  And he tells everyone that he got syphilis from Olive! DUN DUN DUNNN!  Is he condemned for this?  No.  Why?  Because the poor guy was under pressure to lie after – wait for it – his mother beat him over the head and threatened to beat him more if he didn’t tell her who he slept with!  His mother browbeats him, and his lover denies him.  Older women = bitches, amirite, guys?
    On a less serious note, there’s Thomas Haden Church’s character, Mr. Griffith.  By Olive’s account, he is the best teacher in the school.  Yet, when one of Marianne’s minions calls Olive a tramp in the middle of the class, and Olive responds by calling her a twat, he sends Olive to the principal’s office!  This was all contrived so we could get a very awkward, unfunny scene in the principal’s office as he ranted about private schools vs. public schools (um…what?) but any teacher worth hir salt would have sent both Olive AND Nina to the principal’s office – or, at the very least, publicly condemned Nina for attacking Olive out of nowhere.  Come on.  That’s Classroom Management 101.
    The only male character who the movie acknowledges to be a jerk is the guy who tries to pay Olive for actual sex.  The screenplay and tone of the direction clearly condemn him.  But he is the only one.  The rest of the men (excluding Olive’s supportive, quirky dad) are either being used by evil bitches, or using women because they can’t help it.
    3) Sex is still bad, especially for girls.
    I appreciate that this teen movie is acknowledging slut-shaming and why it’s wrong.  I really do.  But I feel like it chickens out, by the very fact that Olive is still a virgin by the end of the movie.  I think the movie is implying that slut-shaming Olive was bad because she never actually had sex.  Would the screenwriters have written a movie with the same message about a sexually active young woman?
    I doubt it, because of the scene where Olive confides in her mother.  I didn’t mention Patricia Clarkson’s character under my first point because she’s not a bitch.  She’s a quirky, supportive, loving mother.  That’s great!  But she admits to Olive that, when she was in high school, she had sex with a bunch of people (“mostly guys,” HAHA LESBIAN EXPERIMENTATION LOL!).  But don’t worry, viewers!  She didn’t have sex because sex is fun and enjoyable.  She did it because she had low self-esteem.
    Of course she did.  That’s the only reason why teenage girls ever have sex, or why adult women ever have sex outside of monogamous relationships. Low self-esteem.
    Pffft.
    At the end of the movie, Olive spells out the message, that it’s nobody’s business what people do with their private lives.  That’s admirable, and true. But the message means very little when the journey getting there is so icky and filled with double standards – the same double standards that the movie is supposedly criticizing, but tacitly embracing.
    Why the Movie Fails on a Humorous Level: “Remember that funny line when…um…that person said that one thing?”
    I have a great memory for dialogue.  It’s a family trait that I share with my younger brothers.  I can recite entire episodes of The Simpsons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and will do so upon request, though I’ve begun charging by the word.  Speak to my agent and we’ll talk rates).  I can recite movies after seeing them once.  But the movie has to make an impression on me before I can do that.  I have to really like the movie.  The dialogue has to be memorable.
    When I left Easy A, I tried to recall particular lines of dialogue that struck me as funny.  I drew a blank.  I had to go onto imdb.com to look it up.  I never have to go to imdb.com to find funny dialogue.  Reading through the “memorable quotes” page, there was only one line that really made me laugh.  It was Mr. Griffith to Olive: “I don’t know what your generation’s fascination is with documenting your every thought… but I can assure you, they’re not all diamonds.”
    That was very funny, and I like anything that mocks Facebook and Twitter (even though I use both).
    But any other moments that made me laugh, I chalk up to the strength of the actors.  The scene where Olive’s parents try to find out the “T” word that their daughter used in class would’ve been insufferable and awful in the hands of lesser actors than Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson.  The movie has a strong cast that can handle any dialogue you throw at them.  I only wish they had better material to work with.
    In Conclusion?
    I didn’t talk about how the movie misses the point of The Scarlet Letter, because I hated The Scarlet Letter – I admire Hawthorne’s politics, but hate his prose, and when I was forced to read this book in my sophomore year in high school, I actually wrote in my annotations: “Does the scarlet A symbolize shame?  Because I didn’t get it the FIRST HUNDRED TIMES YOU MENTIONED IT!”  Misappropriating and misunderstanding literary themes seems like a very high school thing to do, so it oddly works for the film.
    However, I’m afraid I can’t give Easy A the letter grade it wants.  On a humorous level, it gets a C for “Cast is Awesome Despite Mediocre Dialogue.”  On a feminist level, it gets an F for “Fauxminist,” with a note home to the parent: “Shows good effort, but fails to grasps key concepts.” 
    Lady T writes about feminism, comedy, media, and literature at the blog The Funny Feminist.  Her essay “My Mom, the Reader” has also been featured at SMITH Magazine.  A graduate of Hofstra University, she teaches English to eighth graders and writes fiction about vampires, superhero girlfriends, and feisty princesses.  

     

    Guest Writer Wednesday: Sucker Punch

    Sucker punched by “Sucker Punch”– Girls and guns don’t equal female empowerment

    This is a cross-post from What Tami Said.

    This really is the best movie ever cuz its like hollywood finally said to me Fuk yeah you my man are all we care about heres some awesome shit for you to get off on and everyone else can just go fuk themselves and you get to watch. Read more…

    I just “liked” Flick Filosopher Maryann Johanson on Facebook solely on the basis of her Sucker Punch review, written in what oddly sounds like the voice of the guy who sat behind me yesterday afternoon when I went to see the movie. Based on the predominately male and middle-aged audience in the theater, I am likely the only woman who fell for the previews and thought Sucker Punch might be some video game or graphic novel-based film about ass-kicking chicks who slay dragons and other cool shit. Well, actually, that stuff does happen, but it’s surrounded by too many other porny, fetishy, gender- and race-biased tropes to be any sort of empowerment tale. The characters were too cartoonish to be relatable. And the fight scenes and CGI weren’t exciting enough to allow me to forget the analysis and enjoy the fun. Sucker Punch comes off like a slightly twisted adolescent’s wet dream–if said wet dream had the benefit of a cool score and awesome computer-generated graphics.
    Set some time in the late 50s/early 60s, Sucker Punch tells the story of 20-year-old Baby Doll (Emily Browning), who accidentally kills her little sister, while attempting to save the girl from being sexually assaulted by their stepfather. The act earns Baby Doll, whose mother dies in the film’s first frames, commitment to a Goreyesque Vermont mental facility, and, after her stepfather pays off a weasly orderly, a date with a lobotomist (Jon Hamm, who seriously must be saying “yes” to every acting job now), due at the hospital in five days. As Dr. Don Draper stands poised above a bound Baby Doll, wielding the long, sharp orbitoclast he will pound into her frontal lobe, Baby Doll (and the audience) escapes into the fantasy that is the rest of the movie, including a second world, where Baby Doll and her fellow inmates are enslaved at a “dance club,” where they are forced to offer sexual favors to keep the moneyed, male clients happy.
    Let me concede that the dirty, gothic look of Sucker Punch was arresting. The soundtrack, with an ominous cover of the Eurythimics’ “Sweet Dreams,” was fantastic. I’ve already downloaded it. It’ll be great accompaniment when I haul my butt off the couch and start my spring running regimen. Also, I’m gonna need to explore more of actor Oscar Isaac’s oeuvre. The fight sequences in Sucker Punch were pleasingly flashy and loud with lots of leaping and flashing steel and steampunkery, but ultimately they were made hollow by repetition and uninspired choreography. We’re more than a decade on since The Matrix debuted. You gotta give me more than slow motion shots of a character leaping past bullets and dragon fire.
    Since Sucker Punch couldn’t entertain me with its sound and fury, I couldn’t help but notice the larger problem in the movie: A disturbing and regressive treatment of women masquerading as “girl power.”
    **Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**
    We can start with the infantilization of the lead character, Baby Doll, a 20-year-old rendered as woman child–tiny but big-headed, with large eyes and white blonde, pig-tailed hair, perpetually dressed in schoolgirl drag. She is mute and trembling through much of the first half of the film. The result is that Sucker Punch plays on “jail bait” fantasies using the cover that its heroine is truly an adult woman.
    So too does the film leverage implied threats to women to titillate–particularly sexual threat. From the earliest scenes, when Baby Doll’s hulking stepfather eyes her lasciviously and tries to push his way into her bedroom, Sucker Punch highlights the protagonist’s sexual vulnerability–not to make a point about violence toward women, but to render her more fragile and endangered, and by extension, to underscore her femininity and desirability.
    And it must be said here that the key to Baby Doll’s persona and her place in the film is her whiteness. Sucker Punch genuflects to the traditional views of womanhood that have historically been assigned exclusively to white women (to the detriment of ALL women). It is not a mistake that, of the gang of female characters, Baby Doll is the blondest and most alabaster of skin. She is the most innocent. It is she that is reserved for the most special of the fantasy club’s clients, the High Roller. It is her dancing that is so arousing that it hypnotizes the men who witness it. It is Baby Doll that the swarthy pimp/orderly (depending on the fantasy world) must have and who he intends to take by force. (A nasty nod to the white women in danger of rampaging dark men stereotype.) Conversely, it is the women of color in the film–Amber (Jamie Chung) and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens)–who are drawn as the flattest of the flat characters, with no back stories or desires, but to serve Baby Doll. And it is those women whose lives are unwillingly sacrificed (literally) so that one pretty, blonde, white woman can live the life she deserves.
    The most obvious sign that Sucker Punch is no female empowerment film–not even a Kill Bill (which I really liked and to which Sucker Punch plays homage)–is the plot itself. The idea that a young woman, who has recently lost her mother and sister; who is imprisoned for fighting against domestic violence; who may have endured rape at the hands of her stepfather or just narrowly escaped it; who is about to endure a forced medical procedure would, for relief from her trauma, retreat into a fantasy world where she is a sexual slave who must dance provocatively for strange men…absurd.

    Sucker Punch is no female fantasy. Sucker Punch isn’t about women at all, despite the female leads. Josh Larsen of Larsen on Film describes exactly what Sucker Punch is:

    …it’s the fantasy of a 14-year-old boy steeped in kung fu, “Call of Duty” and online porn. Read more…

    And this is why I should start reading film reviews before I see films not after.
    Tami Winfrey Harris writes about race, feminism, politics and pop culture at the blog What Tami Said. Her work has also appeared online at The Guardian’s Comment is Free, Ms. Magazine blog, Newsweek, Change.org, Huffington Post and Racialicious. She is a graduate of the Iowa State University Greenlee School of Journalism. She spends her spare time researching her family history and cultivating a righteous ‘fro.

    Guest Writer Wednesday: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

    Enemy of the State: Heroine Lisbeth Salander Fights Back in The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest

    This is a cross post from Opinioness of the World.

    I am usually not a fan of trilogies; the third film often pales in comparison to the crescendo of emotion and suspense built in a series. And while the occasional exception exists (Return of the King), most (Godfather 3, Alien 3, Terminator 3) are substandard when you compare them to their phenomenal predecessors. Would The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third installment in one of the best-selling trilogies, suffer the same fate? Perhaps. But how could I resist the lure of Lisbeth Salander, arguably one of the most interesting, unique and feminist heroines that has ever graced the page or screen?

    The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is the final film in the Millennium Trilogy, which also includes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. GWKTHN picks up right where the second film leaves off. Punk hacker and researcher Lisbeth Salander is in critical condition after surviving a gunshot wound to the head, shoulder and hip. In the same hospital two doors down, her mortal enemy, the sinister Zalachenko, also recovers from life-threatening wounds. While Salander fights for her life physically, she must also prepare for an emotional battle of wits as she must stand trial for crimes committed as well as prove her mental competency. Salander’s friend, journalist and magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist, continues his unwavering support. He races to prove her innocence, uncovering a treacherous government conspiracy to silence Salander.
    I’ve been engrossed by the movies and books written by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson. So I couldn’t wait to see how the story ends.  My mother used to always say that a sequel was only good if you could watch it without seeing the other movie(s) in the series. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest would be difficult to watch without seeing the first two or reading the books. This is truly a film belonging to fans of the trilogy. With a different director, Daniel Alfredson, at the helm, it doesn’t stand alone as well as the first or even the second film. The movie suffers from a choppy pace. But the action scenes, such as the shootout in Samir’s restaurant and a police raid, are choreographed effectively. It’s the powerful performances by Noomi Rapace as the tattooed sullen survivor and Michael Nyqvist as the obstinate and passionate Mikael Blomkvist that elevate the material.

    Michael Nyqvist stars as Mikael Blomkvist

    Not surprisingly, there are differences between the book and its movie adaptation. Annika Gianinni, Salander’s lawyer, is made to seem less competent. In the book, she kicks ass during the trial in her flawless cross-examination of Salander’s childhood psychiatrist, slimy Peter Teleborian, who claims she needs to be institutionalized. But in the movie, she portrays far less resolve. Also, it’s never mentioned that Gianinni specializes in domestic violence and sexual assault cases, which spurred Blomkvist, her brother, to ask her to represent Salander. To my delight, the film retains the strong female police officers Monica Figueroa and Sonja Modig. Thankfully, the film cuts some extraneous storylines like Blomkvist and Figueroa as lovers. The subplot involving Erika Berger, Blomkvist’s best friend and editor of their magazine Millennium, concerns her taking a job at another publication and receiving sexually explicit emails from a possible stalker. In the film, Berger never leaves Millennium and doesn’t support Blomkvist’s stubborn investigation when it jeopardizes the safety of the other journalists. She still receives threatening emails but the film removes the whole premise of sexual harassment in the workplace, slightly diminishing Larsson’s theme of misogyny, preferring to focus on the government corruption.

    In the U.S., the first book entitled The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, altered from its original Swedish title Men Who Hate Women. The Swedish name conveys the theme of misogyny Larsson carries throughout the entire trilogy. The first book contends with sexual assault, rape and domestic violence. The second book confronts sexual trafficking. The third book shows sexual harassment in the workplace. The trilogy depicts all of the different manifestations of men’s hatred towards women. To me, that was one of the things I enjoyed most about Larsson’s books: his ability to seamlessly fuse social justice with compelling characters and an interesting plot. Removing it somehow neuters the book’s message. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet‘s Nest’s original title is The Air Castle that Blew Up, with “air castle” referring to a “pipe dream.” It’s interesting to note Larsson’s original titles because only in the second one does he reference “girl” and in that particular book, he’s referencing Salander as a child. In the U.S., while they infantilize her in the titles, sadly reducing her to a “girl” rather than a “woman,” publishers shrewdly put Lisbeth Salander front and center, for she is the primary reason to read the books and watch the films.

    Salander endured rape, assault and institutionalization; her rights throughout the trilogy have been violated. Yet she refuses to be a victim. Salander steels herself, always ready to fight back. For her trial, she dons a “costume” of garish goth make-up, mohawk hair and ripped clothes in court. She wasn’t going to pretend to be something she wasn’t; she had nothing to hide. This speaks to Salander’s strategy, a point not fully conveyed in the film. While Blomkvist, lawyer Gianinni, and her friends Plague, Holger Palmgren, and Dragan Armansky come to Salander’s aid and rally around her, she is an equal participant in her defense. Asphyxia is the program she designs to infiltrate people’s computers, which hacker Plague uses to uncover information on a trial witness. But if you hadn’t seen the other films or read the book, you’d never know that Salander’s brilliant mind invented the program. The last scene of the movie ends differently from the book too, detracting from Lisbeth’s emotional growth in learning to allow people into her life.

    Annika Gianini (played by Annika Hallin) with Lisbeth Salandar (Noomi Rapace)

    Actor Noomi Rapace brings the kick-ass heroine to life, imbuing her with strength and complexity. Despite a bedridden Salander for half the film, a complaint some reviewers have expressed, Rapace captivates. Beyond her dedication to the role (she trained for 7 months in preparation), she has a knack for conveying a range of emotions with a tilt of her chin or a narrowing of her eyes. Yet she’s underutilized here. I kept craving more Lisbeth, more Rapace…for me the two have become inextricably intertwined. I can’t imagine anyone else in the role, particularly as Hollywood gears up for Lisbeth Salander mania as actor Rooney Mara will attempt to fill Rapace’s shoes in the U.S. version.
    My fave blogger Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood had the opportunity to chat with the indomitable Rapace (so jealous!). When Silverstein asked Rapace why she thinks women relate to Lisbeth Salander, Rapace replied
    She does not complain and she doesn’t accept being a victim. Almost everybody has treated her so badly and has done horrible things to her but she doesn’t accept it and won’t become the victim they have tried to force her to be. She wants to live and will never give up. I find that so liberating. Her battle is for a better life and to be free and I think everybody experiences that at some point in their life. They say OK, I’m not going to take this anymore. This is the point of no return. I’m going to stand up and say no.  I’m going to be true to myself and even if you don’t like me that’s fine. I don’t want to play the game of the charming nice sexy girl anymore, I’m me. I think everybody can relate to that.

    It was interesting watching this film and juxtaposing it with For Colored Girls which I saw the same weekend. Both convey the pain men can inflict on women; both show women struggling to not just survive but thrive. What continues to fascinate me about Lisbeth Salander is her defiance to yield, living life on her own terms. She doesn’t wait for justice to come from the authorities; she’s a warrior wielding her own vindication. Salander continually challenges categorization, refusing to be defined by her looks, her sexuality or her gender. She defines herself; a powerful message that we as women and as a society don’t hear often enough. I’m going to miss Lisbeth Salander.



    Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. She lives in Boston. She has previously contributed reviews of The Kids Are All Right, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and The Girl Who Played with Fire to Bitch Flicks.

    Guest Writer Wednesday: The Blind Side: The Most Insulting Movie Ever Made

    This cross-post first appeared at Rage Against the Man-chine on June 11, 2010.
    Davetavius and I consider ourselves the world’s foremost authorities on watching movies for reasons other than those intended by their producers. As such, we go way beyond just watching “cheesy” (whatever that means) movies, 80s movies, or kung fu movies (which I refuse to watch but which every dork on Earth has been pretending to like in some attempt at letting everyone know how “weird” they are since Quentin Tarantino’s ridiculous ass popularized kung fu movie fandom as the #1 route to instant eccentricity cred in True Romance) to focus our attention on recently-released romantic comedies, those obnoxious movies in which two assholes just sit around and talk to each other for 98 minutes, and “serious” movies for which people have been given gold-plated statuettes. One can learn an awful lot about the faults and failings of our social system and corporate entertainment’s attempts to sell us its version of culture by watching movies created by and for the anti-intelligentsia, and if one were to try hard enough, I’m sure one could find the string that, if tugged, would unravel the modern world system buried somewhere in a melodramatic Best Picture Oscar contender intended to make people who refer to beers as “cold ones” feel like they’re considering The Big Issues. There was no way we were going to miss The Blind Side.
    Spoiler alert: this is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and I’m going to spoil your desire to see it yourself by writing this post. Also, I may, if I can manage to give a fuck, divulge important plot elements. But it’s based on a true story that everyone has already heard anyway, so who cares.

    Let me say up front that I’m aware that I’m supposed to feel sorry for Sandra Bullock this week. She’s purported to be “America’s sweetheart” and all, she has always seemed like a fairly decent person (for an actor), and I think her husband deserves to get his wang run over by one of his customized asshole conveyance vehicles, but I’m finding it difficult to feel too bad. I mean, who marries a guy who named himself after a figure from the Old West, has more tattoos than IQ points, and is known for his penchant for rockabilly strippers? Normally I’d absolve Bullock of all responsibility for what has occurred and spend nine paragraphs illustrating the many reasons Jesse James doesn’t deserve to live, but I’ve just received proof in the form of a movie called The Blind Side that Sandra Bullock is in cahoots with Satan, Ronald Reagan’s cryogenically preserved head, the country music industry, and E! in their plot to take over the world by turning us all into (or helping some of us to remain) smug, racist imbeciles.

    The movie chronicles the major events in the life of a black NFL player named Michael Oher from the time he meets the rich white family who adopts him to the time that white family sees him drafted into the NFL, a series of events that apparently proves that racism is either over or OK (I’m not sure which), with a ton of southern football bullshit along the way. Bullock plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, the wife of a dude named Sean Tuohy, played by — no shit — Tim McGraw, who is a fairly minor character in the movie despite the fact that he is said to own, like, 90 Taco Bell franchises. The story is that Oher, played by Quinton Aaron, is admitted into a fancy-pants private Christian school despite his lack of legitimate academic records due to the insistence of the school’s football coach and the altruism of the school’s teachers (as if, dude), where he comes into contact with the Tuohy family, who begin to notice that he is sleeping in the school gym and subsisting on popcorn. Ms. Tuohy then invites him to live in the zillion-dollar Memphis Tuophy family compound, encourages him to become the best defensive linebacker he can be by means of cornball familial love metaphors, and teaches him about the nuclear family and the SEC before beaming proudly as he’s drafted by the Baltimore Ravens.

    I’m sure that the Tuohy family are lovely people and that they deserve some kind of medal for their good deeds, but if I were a judge, I wouldn’t toss them out of my courtroom should they arrive there bringing a libel suit against whoever wrote, produced, and directed The Blind Side, because it’s handily the dumbest, most racist, most intellectually and politically insulting movie I’ve ever seen, and it makes the Tuohy family — especially their young son S.J. — look like unfathomable assholes. Well, really, it makes all of the white people in the South look like unfathomable assholes. Like these people need any more bad publicity.

    Quentin Aaron puts in a pretty awesome performance, if what the director asked him to do was look as pitiful as possible at every moment in order not to scare anyone by being black. Whether that was the goal or not, he certainly did elicit pity from me when Sandra Bullock showed him his new bed and he knitted his brows and, looking at the bed in awe, said, “I’ve never had one of these before.” I mean, the poor bastard had been duped into participating in the creation of a movie that attempts to make bigoted southerners feel good about themselves by telling them that they needn’t worry about poverty or racism because any black person who deserves help will be adopted by a rich family that will provide them with the means to a lucrative NFL contract. Every interaction Aaron and Bullock (or Aaron and anyone else, for that matter) have in the movie is characterized by Aaron’s wretched obsequiousness and the feeling that you’re being bludgeoned over the head with the message that you needn’t fear this black guy. It’s the least dignified role for a black actor since Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s portrayal of James Robert Kennedy in Radio (a movie Davetavius claims ought to have the subtitle “It’s OK to be black in the South as long as you’re retarded.”). The producers, writers, and director of this movie have managed to tell a story about class, race, and the failures of capitalism and “democratic” politics to ameliorate the conditions poor people of color have to deal with by any means other than sports while scrupulously avoiding analyzing any of those issues and while making it possible for the audience to walk out of the theater with their selfish, privileged, entitled worldviews intact, unscathed, and soundly reconfirmed.

    Then there’s all of the southern bullshit, foremost of which is the football element. The producers of the movie purposely made time for cameos by about fifteen SEC football coaches in order to ensure that everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line would drop their $9 in the pot, and the positive representation of football culture in the film is second in phoniness only to the TV version of Friday Night Lights. Actually, fuck that. It’s worse. Let’s be serious. If this kid had showed no aptitude for football, is there any way in hell he’d have been admitted to a private school without the preparation he’d need to succeed there or any money? In the film, the teachers at the school generously give of their private time to tutor Oher and help prepare him to attend classes with the other students. I’ll bet you $12 that shit did not occur in real life. In fact, I know it didn’t. The Tuohy family may or may not have cared whether the kid could play football, but the school certainly did. It is, after all, a southern school, and high school football is a bigger deal in the South than weed is at Bonnaroo.

    But what would have happened to Oher outside of school had he sucked at football and hence been useless to white southerners? What’s the remedy for poverty if you’re a black woman? A dude with no pigskin skills? Where are the nacho magnates to adopt those black people? I mean, that’s the solution for everything, right? For all black people to be adopted by rich, paternalistic white people? I know this may come as a shock to some white people out there, but the NFL cannot accommodate every black dude in America, and hence is an imperfect solution to social inequality. I know we have the NBA too, but I still see a problem. But the Blind Side fan already has an answer for me. You see, there is a scene in the movie which illustrates that only some black people deserve to be adopted by wealthy white women. Bullock, when out looking for Oher, finds herself confronted with a black guy who not only isn’t very good at appearing pitiful in order to make her comfortable, but who has an attitude and threatens to shoot Oher if he sees him. What ensues is quite possibly the most loathsome scene in movie history in which Sandra Bullock gets in the guy’s face, rattles off the specs of the gun she carries in her purse, and announces that she’s a member of the NRA and will shoot his ass if he comes anywhere near her family, “bitch.” Best Actress Oscar.

    Well, there it is. Now you see why this movie made 19 kajillion dollars and won an Oscar: it tells a heartwarming tale of white benevolence, assures the red state dweller that his theory that “there’s black people, and then there’s niggers” is right on, and affords him the chance to vicariously remind a black guy who’s boss thr0ugh the person of America’s sweetheart. Just fucking revolting.

    There are several other cringe-inducing elements in the film. The precocious, cutesy antics of the family’s little son, S.J., for example. He’s constantly making dumb-ass smart-ass comments, cloyingly hip-hopping out with Oher to the tune of  Young M.C.’s “Bust a Move” (a song that has been overplayed and passe for ten years but has now joined “Ice Ice Baby” at the top of the list of songs from junior high that I never want to hear again), and generally trying to be a much more asshole-ish version of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. At what point will screenwriters realize that everyone wants to punch pint-sized snarky movie characters in the throat? And when will I feel safe watching a movie in the knowledge that I won’t have to endure a scene in which a white dork or cartoon character “raises the roof” and affects a buffalo stance while mouthing a sanitized rap song that even John Ashcroft knows the words to?

    And then there’s the scene in which Tim McGraw, upon meeting his adopted son’s tutor (played by Kathy Bates) and finding out she’s a Democrat, says, “Who would’ve thought I’d have a black son before I met a Democrat?” Who would have thought I’d ever hear a “joke” that was less funny and more retch-inducing than Bill Engvall’s material?

    What was the intended message of this film? It won an Oscar, so I know it had to have a message, but what could it have been? I’ve got it (a suggestion from Davetavius)! The message is this: don’t buy more than one Taco Bell franchise or you’ll have to adopt a black guy. I’ll accept that that’s the intended message of the film, because if  the actual message that came across in the movie was intentional, I may have to hide in the house for the rest of my life.

    I just don’t even know what to say about this movie. Watching it may well have been one of the most demoralizing, discouraging experiences of my life, and it removed at least 35% of the hope I’d previously had that this country had any hope of ever being anything but a cultural and social embarrassment. Do yourself a favor. Skip it and watch Welcome to the Dollhouse again.

    Nine Deuce blogs at Rage Against the Man-chine. From her bio: I basically go off, dude. People all over the internet call me rad. They call me fem, too, but I’m not all that fem. I mean, I’m female and I have long hair and shit, but that’s just because I’m into Black Sabbath. I don’t have any mini-skirts, high heels, thongs, or lipstick or anything, and I often worry people with my decidedly un-fem behavior. I’m basically a “man” trapped in a woman’s body. What I mean is that, like a person with a penis, I act like a human being and expect other people to treat me like one even though I have a vagina.

    Guest Writer Wednesday: The Girl Who Played with Fire

    Good Girl Gone Bad: Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander Burns Up the Screen in The Girl Who Played with Fire
    This is a cross post from Opinioness of the World.
    I’ve been utterly consumed by Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s gripping Millennium Trilogy (I’ll be reading the third book soon…so excited!).  I loved the first film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, entranced by the burning intensity of the controversial heroine, Lisbeth Salander.  So I eagerly watched the second film in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire.
    Picking up one year after the first film ends, a young journalist and a doctoral student are researching the sex trafficking trade in Sweden.  Publisher and journalist Mikael Blomkvist’s magazine Millennium decides to publish the controversial work, essentially exposing the identities of the men who purchased young women for sex.  As they are about to go to print with the story, three violent murders are committed.  When the police suspect brilliant hacker Lisbeth Salander’s involvement, Blomkvist is determined to clear her name.  But Salander plots her own vengeful agenda against her enemies, plunging the audience even deeper into the mysterious heroine’s troubled and painful past.
    I enjoyed the gritty, tense film.  With a different screenwriter and director at the helm, the movie surprisingly retains the same mood as the first film yet not the same depth.  Director Daniel Alfredson provides some visually stunning camera shots.  The ominous and eerie score perfectly sets the suspenseful tone.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t live up to the riveting novel.  So much of what I loved about the book is missing as an exorbitant amount of the plot and dialogue are cut from the movie.
    The beauty of Larsson’s books lies in his fusion of societal analysis with compelling characters and gripping suspenseful plots.  In The Girl Who Played with Fire, he focuses his commentary on human trafficking, mental health care, espionage, LGBT discrimination and domestic violence.  Regarding the central theme of trafficking in the book, the young journalist Dag Svensson goes into great detail about the johns and researcher Mia Bergman provides the point of views of the women trafficked as she relays their harrowing tales.  According to Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in their book Half the Sky, 3 million women and girls are forced into prostitution, as many traffickers coerce, beat and rape women into submission.  As with sexual assault in the first novel, Larsson gives you a sense of the horrors these women face.  But this and other vital themes are completely glossed over in the film.
    Part of what makes the book so captivating is that it’s a whodunit; you feel as if you’ve stepped into an episode of Law and Order: SVU (I kept waiting for Mariska Hargitay and Chris Meloni to leap out and bust the perps).  The police investigation into the murders comprises a huge component of the story.  The plot twists and turns and you don’t know the identity of the killer or killers.  Salander’s involvement is ambiguous, as the book doesn’t follow her whereabouts for roughly 100 pages following the murders.  But the film basically tells you right up front, forgoing most of the mystery.
    By its end, the movie (and book too) spirals into a violent frenzy, reminiscent of a slasher film with SPOILER ALERT!! characters wielding axes and chainsaws, along with numerous dead bodies buried outside a warehouse and someone buried alive.  Ending on a cliff hanger, it leaves us yearning to know the characters’ fate.
    Anything lacking in the film, is made up for by the outstanding performances of the two powerful leads.  While he gave a solid performance in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I kept yearning for more emotion from actor Michael Nyqvist as the impassioned journalist Mikael Blomkvist.  In The Girl Who Played with Fire, he delivers, bringing Blomkvist’s obstinate and obsessive compulsion to solve the murders to life.  Devoted to Salander, his former research partner and lover, Blomkvist races to piece together the puzzle of the murders.  Nyqvist captures the essence of Blomkvist’s stubborn optimism and charisma.
    But the spotlight still belongs to actor Noomi Rapace.  While she blew me (and numerous other critics) away with her performance in the first film, I am even more impressed with Rapace as the tattooed researcher Lisbeth Salander this time around.  She stepped into the role through physical training, 7 facial piercings and obtaining her motorcycle license.  Yet she also emotionally transformed herself.  In an interview, Rapace said that she would sit alone, away from the cast and crew, channeling Salander’s anger. Rapace effortlessly evokes Salander’s shrewd intellect, stubbornness and wrath.  We also get to see Salander’s tenderness in her scenes with her trusted former guardian Holmer Palmgren and her lover Miriam “Mimmi” Wu.  She doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, a challenge for an actor, yet Rapace lets us into the wounded character’s world through her subtle yet stellar portrayal.
    Lisbeth Salander has generated an enormous amount of press.  It’s unusual to see a female character exude such ferocity.  Usually when we see violence from women in films, they are subordinate to a male counterpart or lover, re-articulating gendered stereotypes. But not Lisbeth.  An unlikely feminist, she despises misogyny, yearning for fair and equal treatment of women.  Salander refuses to be a victim after her own sexual assault.  Despite her pained and troubled childhood, she never wallows in self-pity.  Salander follows her own moral code, wreaking vengeance on those who have abused her with little regard to the law.  She takes responsibility and accepts the consequences of her actions.  Some may argue that she’s not feminine enough, acting like a male disguised in a female form.  But I think that ignores what makes Salander so refreshing.  Self-reliant and clever, she’s a resilient survivor, never backing down from a fight.  A fascinating and fearless character, she is defined neither by her gender nor her fluid sexuality.
    While not living up to the book or the first film, it’s still worthwhile to watch for the phenomenal performances by Rapace and Nyqvist.  Each of them truly embodies their alter egos.  Rapace in particular mesmerizes with a smoldering strength.   I cannot wait to see (and read) what happens next in the third installment, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

    Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. She lives in Boston. She has previously contributed reviews of The Kids Are All Right and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to Bitch Flicks.