Robin Hitchcock – Page 10

I Want a Woman to be the Next Woody Allen

Woody Allen and Penelope Cruz on set of To Rome With Love

I went to see To Rome With Love earlier this week with the intention of reviewing it for Bitch Flicks. But this film is practically un-reviewable: the kind of frilly nothing of a movie that exits your brain before you’ve taken your last sticky step out of the theater. It’s four short films set in Rome, unwisely edited together into a would-be Altmanesque ensemble piece, thwarted by temporal disjointedness (switching between a storyline that takes place over the span of a day and those that cover weeks or months) and a failure to thematically link the pieces beyond a tone of jovial silliness. If I had a dollar for every review of To Rome With Love that used the phrase “Lesser Allen”, I could pay my rent this month. Because there isn’t much more to say about this movie than those two words.

But one thought since seeing To Rome With Love just won’t leave me alone: I want a woman to be the next Woody Allen.

I want a woman who makes at least one movie a year for thirty years, without caring that they’re all practically the same movie. No one else will care either. If one of her films out of every dozen or so is exceptional in any way, the critics will proclaim that her genius is “back” and award her with another Academy Award even though they know she won’t be there to accept it because, I don’t know, her Breeders cover band has a standing gig on Sunday nights or something.

I want a woman who can write herself as the main character in 85% of her films, and “act” as this “character” whenever she pleases, or, in her autumn years, have the latest Up-and-Coming Actress step in, doing her best impression of our auteur. Every aspiring actress will have a passable impression of our Lady Allen in her stable of characters, just in case.

I want a woman to be able to cast whatever Hot Young Actor is her current muse as her love interest, and enjoy a real-life relationship with a significant portion of these muses. And should that relationship end by her cheating on him with one of the most scandalous available partners, she will only have to endure ten years of so of late-night jokes at her expense, and suffer zero artistic consequences for her personal indiscretions.

I want a woman who can build Dream Team ensembles for any passing notion of a movie script that might come to her. She’ll have a roster of venerable Standard Players, but also be able to pull legends out of retirement or grab the latest It Girl or make the latest It Girl (Never forget: Mira Sorvino has an Oscar).

After Lady Allen writes actors and actresses their Oscar-winning role, they’ll be content to be used by her however she sees fit (As in To Rome With Love, where Vicky Christina Barcelona Best Supporting Actress Penelope Cruz takes on a thankless hooker role in an embarrassing Three’s Company-style storyline of mistaken identities and pointless ruses), or forgotten and shuffled out of the way for her next muse (Another reminder: Mira Sorvino has an Oscar.)

Let’s be clear: I’m not being sarcastic. I am not trying to belittle the great Woody Allen’s admirable body of work. I LIKE having silly little diversions of films with stellar casts coming out on the regular. I don’t miss the seven bucks I paid to To Rome With Love, a movie that devotes around a quarter of its runtime to setting up a low brow opera joke, just to prove that such a thing can exist. And I LOVE getting to see that one out of every dozen or so Woody Allen movies that is true genius. And I truly believe part of what makes those movies possible is that the powerful, prolific Allen has unfettered release of all his creative notions, and leaves it to his audience to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I just want a woman to get in on this action too. I want a woman to have this level of clout in Hollywood. I want a woman who can get away with making whatever movie she feels like at any given time. I want a woman whose “lesser works” are still recommended, who is free from worrying about being “only as good as her last picture.”

So to Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Zoe Kazan, Rashida Jones, Jennifer Westfeldt, Tiny Fey, and the next generation of aspiring writer/director/actresses I say: THIS COULD BE YOUR LIFE. Get cracking.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Defending Dawn Summers: From One Kid Sister to Another

Michelle Trachtenberg as Dawn Summers

In the final scene of the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s Season 5, Dawn Summers, Buffy’s never before seen or heard-of little sister, appears seemingly out of nowhere. While she’s completely new to the audience, oddly, it is clear that from the characters’ perspectives that Dawn has been there all along.

Dawn and Tara, fellow outsiders from the Scooby gang, pass time with a thumb war.

To quote my husband’s reaction as we reached season 5 during his (in-progress) Buffy indoctrination: “Why on earth are they doing this?”

Most of the Buffy fandom reacted with the same puzzlement. As Dawn’s character was fleshed out over the first few episodes of the season as the archetypical annoying little sister, the audience was still denied all but the vaguest of clues as to Dawn’s true nature and reason for being retconned into the Buffyverse.

Dawn as annoying little sister.

It was not until the fifth episode of the season, “No Place Like Home”, that the Dawn’s existence is explained: she is a mystical key that opens gateways between dimensions, magically given human form with blood relation to the slayer, woven into her memories and all of those around her so that Buffy would protect her with her life, to keep the evil god Glory from using the Key to destroy the universe.

Unfortunately, the only place the monks’ spell couldn’t reach was the minds of the audience, and Dawn Summers had to win us over without the benefit of false memories. Which may have been an impossible feat, given her character is pretty much laid out as an immature, whiny, brat with a tendency to get into trouble.

Dawn in damsel-in-distress mode.

Also, she occasionally does this thing where she piercingly shrieks “Get out, get out, GET OUT!” which ranks up there with nails on a chalkboard, dental drills, and Katy Perry songs when it comes to horrible sounds to endure:

And so it is that Dawn is one of the least-liked characters in the Buffyverse. But not by me. I love Dawn Summers.

I suspect my unusually high tolerance for Dawn comes from my OWN memories. In “Real Me,” the episode which properly introduces Dawn’s character, she writes in her diary/narrates: “No one understands. No one has an older sister who is the slayer.”

Dawn writes in her diary.

But I understand. OK, sure, my big sister didn’t have superpowers, and as far as I know she did not save the world even one time, much less “a lot.” But from my perspective as her bratty little sister, I felt like I could never escape her long and intimidating shadow. I could never be as smart as her, as special as her; I couldn’t hope to collect even a fraction the awards and accolades she racked up through high school. And she didn’t even properly counteract her super smarts with social awkwardness: she always had a tight group of friends and the romantic affections of cute boys. She was the pride and joy of my family, and I always felt like an also-ran. Trust me: this makes it very hard to not be at least a little bratty and whiny.

And my big sister was a lot nicer to me than Buffy usually was to Dawn. If the audience found out before Buffy did that Dawn was created to induce the slayer to protect the key, it might have been a little hard to swallow. Buffy shows only hostile resentment toward Dawn for the first half of Season 5. It is only after Dawn learns herself that she is new to the world that Buffy shows her true sisterly love, when she lovingly insists to Dawn that she is Buffy’s “real sister” despite her mystical origins.

“It doesn’t matter where you came from, or how you got here, you are my sister.”

Because I relate to Dawn as a fellow annoying little brat following around her remarkable older sister, I am more forgiving of her character flaws. But I do think viewers without my background ought to take it easier on Dawn as well.

A common criticism of Dawn is that she’s much more immature than the main characters were at the start of the series, when they were close to her in age (Dawn is introduced as a 14-year-old in the eighth grade; Buffy, Xander, and Willow were high school sophomores around age 15 or 16 in Season 1). Writer David Fury responds to this in his DVD commentary on the episode “Real Me,” saying that Dawn was originally conceived as around age 12 and aged up a few years after Michelle Trachtenberg was cast, but it took a while for him and the other writers to get the originally-conceived younger version of the character out of their brains. But I don’t need this excuse; I think it makes perfect narrative sense that Dawn comes across as more immature than our point-of-view characters were when they were younger. Who among us didn’t think of themselves as being just as smart and capable as grown-ups when we were teens? Who among us, when confronted with the next generation of teenagers ten years down the line, were not horrified by their blatant immaturity?

Additionally, Dawn starting her character arc as whiny brat lets us watch her grow and mature into a pretty awesome young woman. It is a long road, beset by personal tragedy and a theme of abandonment: Dawn loses her mother and her sister within a matter of months in Season 5, and in Season 6 sees her surrogate parent figures Willow and Tara split up just as a returned-from-the-grave Buffy is too detached from humanity to be there emotionally for Dawn. Throughout Season 6, Dawn acts out: lying to Buffy to stay out all night with friends, habitually and perhaps compulsively stealing, and ultimately sublimating her abandonment issues into a curse (with the help of ~~Vengeance~~ “Justice” Demon Halfrek), temporarily trapping the Scooby gang and some innocent bystanders in the Summers home.

Dawn’s tantrum in Season 6’s “Older and Faraway”

But Season 6 represents an era of bad choices for almost the entire cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so Dawn should be given as much slack for her missteps as we give the other wayward characters, including Buffy herself. And it is Dawn who finally pulls Buffy out of the emotional purgatory she is suffering in this season. In the Season 6 finale “Grave”, Buffy finally truly regains her will to live and recaptures her complete humanity, and this epiphany comes in large part because she finally sees Dawn as a gift in her life rather than a burden:

Buffy and Dawn hug in “Grave”

“Things have really sucked lately, but that’s all gonna change—and I want to be there when it does. I want to see my friends happy again. I want to see you grow up. The woman you’re gonna become… Because she’s gonna be beautiful. And she’s gonna be powerful. I got it so wrong. I don’t want to protect you from the world—I want to show it to you. There’s so much that I wanna to show you.” – Buffy to Dawn in “Grave.”

Dawn with Buffy during her metaphorical rebirth in “Grave.”

Dawn finds her own self-actualization in the Season 7 episode “Potential.” Having once again been shoved to the sidelines of Buffy’s attention by the arrival of a collection of young “potential slayers” who need protection from the Bringers who have been systematically wiping out the future slayer lineage. While Buffy focuses on protecting and training the potentials, Dawn clearly feels left out, trapped by her own ordinariness and unimportance (a significant change for a girl who was once the key to the fabric between dimensions).

Dawn lurks in the background as Buffy gives a speech to potential slayers.

That all changes when a spell cast by Willow appears to identify Dawn as a potential slayer herself. Dawn is emotionally overwhelmed by the news, mainly because she thinks it means that Buffy must die before Dawn could ever realize this potential (I’m pretty sure the next potential would be called only by the death of Faith, but that’s neither here nor there). A part of Dawn is clearly excited by the news, and given a huge jolt of self-confidence that lets her bravely defend herself against a vampire and then fight off the group of Bringers who come for her classmate Amanda, the true potential slayer identified by Willow’s spell. Dawn handles the news of her lack of slayer potential with perfect grace, saving Amanda’s life and transferring to her the confidence that comes with knowing you are “special.”

At the episode’s end, Xander, the only other remaining character without any superpowers, has a heart-to-heart with Dawn. He shares with her the wisdom he’s gained in seven years in these circumstances:

Xander has a heart-to-heart with Dawn

“They’ll never know how tough it is, Dawnie, to be the one who isn’t chosen. To live so near to the spotlight and never step in it. But I know. I see more than anybody realizes because nobody’s watching me. I saw you last night. I see you working here today. You’re not special. You’re extraordinary.” – Xander to Dawn in “Potential.”

Dawn accepts her humanity and finds her maturity.

After “Potential”, Dawn, who began life at age 14, crafted from a ball of mystical energy and a spell creating powerful false memories, is finally defined by her humanity, her normalcy. She accepts this position with dignity, grace, and bravery. And in so doing, Dawn also steps up to her place as a mature young adult. And at least for this one-time bratty kid sister, that makes Dawn Summers is just as heroic and inspiring a character as Buffy herself.

—

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa. She is a regular contributor to Bitch Flicks with a new piece appearing each Friday. She is still upset that the Season 5 Buffy DVDs don’t include the awesome “previously on” montage from “The Gift”.

‘The Expendables 2’: Masculinity Porn

Still from The Expendables 2 [source]

“You want to man up? I’ll man you up.” – Sylvester Stallone in The Expendables 2

It’s a good thing The Expendables 2 was released after the Olympics ended, or a lot of innocent athletes might have tested positive for testosterone doping. Where 2010’s The Expendables set out to recreate the 1980’s tough-guy action genre with a straight face, its sequel is more willing to consciously dip into self-parody territory, finally giving audiences what they had wanted and expected out of the original: The Travelling Wilburys of action movie stars running through every available cliche from the genre with a wink and a smile. [The sequel currently rated 62% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes versus the original’s 41% rotten rating.]

The Expendables 2 strives to be the Most Macho Movie of all time. Every possible signifier of manliness is on display [spoilers ahead]: Skulls. Guns. Knives the size of small children. Nameless henchmen who explode into geysers of blood when killed. Hip flasks. Cigar chomping. Feats of brute strength. Explosions. Tanks. Brass knuckles. Gratuitous beret-wearing. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme. Chuck Norris himself reciting a Chuck Norris fact.

What appears on screen is not driven by story, logic, or reason, but by whatever is the most Righteously Dudely. This is the only reason I can account for Stallone’s character favoring a single-action revolver in firefights against scores of men with automatic weapons, or Jean-Claude Van Damme’s villain using a roundhouse kick to drive one of the aforementioned child-sized knives into the chest of a restrained man, or Terry Crews pausing to announce “we’ve got company” before diving to safety under a hail of bullets. Because it looks cool, because it looks manly, because it’s how it would have happened in a twelve-year-old boy’s imagination in 1985.

To my surprise, The Expendables 2 gets very little mileage out of promoting masculinity by contrasting it against femininity. The only significant female character, Nan Yu’s Maggie, is the Smurfette of the group. Stallone gets some macho points with his absurdly chauvinist reaction to being told to work with a woman (“I don’t have time to babysit,” yadda yadda), but Maggie shows him up by being smart and competent and tough and even proficient in torture. She’s one of the guys. She even hits on Stallone with an awkward forced pun. [Her advances are rejected, because of the old Spider-Man excuse of “people I love get killed”, not because Stallone is literally twice her age.]

Promotion poster for The Expendables 2 featuring Nan Yu

In contrast to Maggie, when the team comes across a village of only women (the men having been forced into plutonium-excavating by Van Damme), their attempts to defend themselves with firearms are so incompetent that they can’t hit any of Our Heroes even after they start deliberately walking into the line of fire. Women! Can’t force them into plutonium-excavating, can’t leave them behind to defend themselves either. Sheesh.

And that’s the only scene in the film with more than one woman in it. The Expendables 2 is actually a bizarrely sexless film, with no nudity, hardly any expression of the male gaze, and only the aforementioned fleeting hint at unconsummated romance. Perhaps the filmmakers were worried about girl cooties. Or perhaps women are just irrelevant to the type of masculinity relevant to the film: a pre-pubescent hero-worship of larger-than-life tough guys.

Side-stepping sexuality may have been a shrewd move on the part of the filmmakers, or we could have ended up with another Sucker Punch on our hands. The Expendables 2 is masculinity porn that audiences can walk away from without shame and without further thought. With its shear over-the-top silliness, it easy to dismiss the whole thing as harmless and apolitical.

But that doesn’t mean we should dismiss it as such. Why do unbridled displays of masculinity in an of themselves provide entertainment value (or at least, why are they expected to)? What would a throwback-y femininity extravaganza of a movie look like? Is it terrible that the idea of such a film sounds miserable to me, and I genuinely enjoyed my time watching The Expendables 2? How is the collective id of young boys from thirty years ago still such a powerful cultural force that it’s apparently imprinted on the mind of this grown-up feminist woman in the year 2012?

‘Friends With Kids’: When Harry Co-Parented With Sally…

Still from Friends With Kids. [source]

I’ve been excited to see Friends With Kids since Megan Kearns first wrote about it for Bitch Flicks last March. What a cast! A female writer/director! A romcom with a genuinely new and interesting premise!

I finally got the chance to watch Friends With Kids on a long flight this week, and I tremendously enjoyed watching it, but still found myself wanting more. As Megan expressed in her subsequent review of the film, Friends With Kids falls short of being a “feminist extravaganza” and ultimately isn’t too dissimilar from your standard romantic comedy. I was constantly reminded of When Harry Met Sally… a film that Friends With Kids echoes not only thematically (testing the limits of men and women in platonic relationships) but also structurally (following its characters over the course of several years of their lives) and tonally (witty comedy striped with serious relationship pathos).

Writer/Director/Producer Jennifer Westfeldt also stars as Julie, whose life seems pretty great even though she’s been unlucky in love (one of the most refreshing things about this movie is how it portrays singledom as Not The End Of The World even for a woman who ultimately does want a committed relationship). Her best friend is Jason (Adam Scott, as though that guy needed any more crush points), who favors brief dalliances with large-breasted women to actual relationships. Julie and Jason function as an ersatz couple in their circle of paired-off friends (Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd as the stable and happy partners Leslie and Alex, and Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm as the more tumultuous pair Missy and Ben). After the rest of the gang starts having children, Jason and Jules surprise everyone by deciding to have a kid together. They both want children and do not want to wait to find “their people” to do so, especially given the negative effects on romantic relationships they’ve seen having children can bring. As best friends, they have a lifelong love and commitment to each other making them suitable co-parents, without having to sacrifice passion or romance to the demands of child rearing.

My disappointment with Friends With Kids is that it doesn’t really explore the promise of that premise. Jules and Jason’s child-rearing arrangement works seemingly effortlessly, and the film fails to really express why. When the movie needs to inject some conflict, Friends With Kids retreats to the well-worn issue of whether a woman and a man can enjoy a truly platonic relationship. Only when romantic drama is thrown into the mix does the pair struggle to divide their time with and responsibilities to their son, which seems to support the wisdom of Jason and Jules’ original arrangement, but in reality nullifies their alternative parenting scheme by suggesting that close male/female friendships are always a pretense ultimately giving way to romance.

Which means that in the end, Friends With Kids doesn’t have that much to say about alternative family structures, which is terribly disappointing. Lip service is paid to gay couples raising children, and a few divorced straight couples with kids appear on the sidelines, but their struggles aren’t really explored. So when our heroes end up as yet another “traditional” family by film’s end, it’s quite the let-down to my feminist hopes for the film.

That said, like with When Harry Met Sally…, my id was tickled to see these two characters find love with each other, even though I still long for a movie that explores a male-female friendship that is genuinely platonic. Jason and Jules were so believable as best friends (I particularly got a kick out of their go-to conversation starter: making the other person choose between two hypothetical causes of death) and initially so believable as people not attracted to each other (their baby-making sex scene was so hilariously awkward I couldn’t help but laugh out loud even though I was watching it on a personal headset with earphones on a crowded airplane) that I was quite surprised when Friends With Kids took the old-fashioned turns it did.

Friends With Kids is still eminently watchable: smart, funny, and really phenomenally cast and acted (this is a movie where even Megan Fox is well-cast!). Given that I like watching even bad romantic comedies, it feels unfair and greedy to emphasize my disappointment with what is a really, really good one, just for not being exactly the kind of movie I wanted it to be.

—

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer currently living in Cape Town, South Africa. She would choose death by shark over death by alligator.

Friends With Kids: When Harry Co-Parented With Sally…

Still from Friends With Kids. [source]

—

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer currently living in Cape Town, South Africa. She would choose death by shark over death by alligator.

‘Friends With Kids’: When Harry Co-Parented With Sally…

Still from Friends With Kids. [source]

—

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer currently living in Cape Town, South Africa. She would choose death by shark over death by alligator.

Welcome New Contributors!

You’ve probably noticed some wonderful new writers around here. They’ll each be writing weekly posts, so you’ll definitely want to check back here often to read their fabulous pieces. In case you missed any of their introductions last week, I’ve included excerpts below. Make sure to read their full bios to learn more about them–and then welcome them to the Bitch Flicks team!

Myrna Waldron: I am a lifelong film enthusiast, but my particular passion is animation. (I like live action television too, but I’m fairly picky) Since a young age I have obsessively consumed animation in all forms, whether they be slapstick cartoons like Looney Tunes or abstract experiments like Begone Dull Care. I am particularly interested in American animation (Chuck Jones is my hero), but I have some interest in Canadian (particularly the short films distributed by the National Film Board of Canada) and Japanese animation (mostly from the 90s) as well. It is a pet peeve of mine when people refer to animation as a genre rather than a medium, or, even worse, to assume that all animation is for children – so don’t do it! 😉 [click here to read more about Myrna]

Lady T: If I can describe my approach to feminism in one sentence, it would be this: “There’s always room for improvement.” Occasionally, I blog about media that really grates my cheese, but I’m more likely to criticize and analyze works of media that I really love and admire. I like the female characters on The Vampire Diaries, but I think the show’s portrayal of its black characters leaves a lot to be desired. I love the late, great George Carlin for many reasons, particularly his stand-up about abortion and grammar, but I don’t agree with his opinions on rape jokes. Most works of art that I love have some problematic aspects and I think it’s worthwhile and necessary to analyze our favorite things. [click here to read more about Lady T]

Robin Hitchcock: I’ve been a movie lover since I was a young teen, when my dad instituted “Movie Camp” in our house to fill in the gaps in my cultural heritage. I’ve been a feminist since longer than I can remember. I have a small amount of formal gender studies training in the form of a certificate in Women’s Studies from my alma mater the University of Pittsburgh (2006), but that department was so small they couldn’t even offer a minor in Women’s Studies, much less a major degree concentration. I also have a J.D. from the University of Pittsburgh (2010), but I do not practice as a lawyer. I am always trying to learn more and strengthen my feminist muscles. I find it more or less impossible to see a movie and not want to write about it. Even when I really hate a movie, I still tend to enjoy watching it, thinking about it, and writing about it. [click here to read more about Robin]

Erin Fenner: I love cult films, “bad movies” and directors who try their damndest to say something new in a different way. I love black and white, foreign and Cannes Film Festival. I get excited by trying-to-be-subtle symbolism and am a sucker for allegory. I value the filmmakers who push a feminist agenda, and even those who willingly ignore politics but still manage to convey a message that is keenly relevant. Not to say that I don’t like blockbusters and Oscar nodding. Explosions and played-out sensuality don’t titillate me, but I am fascinated by the process, the message and am obsessed with the mistakes. [To be clear, my notion of “liking” or “loving” something is often interchangeable with most people’s notion of “morbid fascination.”] [click here to read more about Erin]

Max Thornton: I am a third culture kid who grew up in the USA, Kenya, and Great Britain. I am a trans* queer person who gets angry a lot. I am a grad student in theology, which I define broadly as the processes by which people create meaning in their lives, and my especial interest is the interrelationship of politics, culture, and religion.

I love film, books, and sci-fi in any medium, and I have an especial passion for television. My favorite show of all time is Mystery Science Theater 3000; my favorite show currently airing is Community; the list of shows I love is ever expanding with series both new and new-to-me, but among my very favorites are Adventure Time, Archer, Arrested Development, Breaking Bad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Farscape, Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, The League of Gentlemen, Parks and Recreation, Phineas and Ferb, Pushing Daisies, Spaced, The Thick Of It, Venture Bros, and Wonderfalls. [click here to read more about Max]

Rachel Redfern: While I grew up in California and still consider it home, I’ve moved around a bit since then; currently, I live in South Korea where I teach English and stuff myself with Kimchi and Toblerone bars and watch way too much TV. My tastes extend into the realm of the eclectic and some of my favorites are Arrested Development, Castle, pretty much anything by HBO but specifically True Blood and Game of Thrones (ditto for BBC), and loads of old shows, Star Trek, I Dream of Jeannie, Murder She Wrote, Northern Exposure, most of which are campy and nostalgic (who else loves the original Doctor Who?). [click here to read more about Rachel]

Leigh Kolb: It was only after graduating college and working in the real world (where one male boss actually told me women’s lib was a bad idea) that I realized feminism needed to be a part of my life. I opened my eyes and saw a world of gendered roles and expectations–from the media to the workplace–and I didn’t like it. I embraced the f-word.

My love for pop culture, analysis, argument and feminism created the person at this keyboard. I’ve learned to bring notebooks with me to the movies, keep one handy in the living room when we watch TV, and keep my eyes and ears open constantly to connect representations of gender roles in the media to our culture. [click here to read more about Leigh]

‘The Dark Knight Rises’s Catwoman: a (Shhh!) with a Heart of Gold

Anne Hathaway as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises [source]

While The Dark Knight Rises has had a more mixed reception than Christopher Nolan’s previous two entries in his Batman trilogy, everyone, even President Obama, can agree that Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman was the best thing about the movie. Slate’s Alyssa Rosenberg calls her, “the best Catwoman ever to grace the big screen.”

And I loved her too. The Dark Knight Rises‘s Selina Kyle is smart, sexy, and complex in her morality: the trinity of characteristics that unites all incarnations of Catwoman. The other details of Selina and her alter-ego Catwoman shift constantly (a fate common to comic book characters). She’s been an amnesiac flight attendant abuse victim (in the Gold and Silver Age comics in which she first appeared), a wealthy socialite who burgles for the thrill of the hunt (how she was portrayed in my introduction to the character, Batman: The Animated Series), a meek secretary transformed into a badass vigilante after her apparent murder by her powerful boss (in Batman Returns), and, well, whatever Halle Berry was reduced to doing with the character (who, just to be clear, was not Selina Kyle, but rather Patience Phillips, and I will waste no more words on a character and film that is best forgotten). As Rosenberg puts it in her Slate piece, “Catwoman has, in the past, been a rich well for explorations of female trauma.”

So it was inevitable that Selina Kyle be portrayed as a sex worker, at least once Frank Miller got his hands on her. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy has always been transparently inspired by Miller’s seminal comics Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns. The former series first introduced Selina Kyle as prostitute:

Sex worker Selina Kyle in panels from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One [source]

And over the next twenty years or so of DC comics, the prostitute origin story would be hinted at, overtly dropped, slyly repackaged, forgotten, and popped back in at the whims of various comic book writers. Brian Cronin provides a thorough overview of the waxing and waning of this storyline in his Abandoned An’ Forsaked column. When it was announced that Hathaway had been cast as Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, speculation went wild regarding which Catwoman we’d get.

As it should be, The Dark Knight Rises offers a unique take on the character. And it stays cagey about her life’s details and origin story. But watching the film, I inferred that they were incorporating the sex worker background for the character. On the ride home from the theater I mentioned it to my husband, who is not a comic book reader, and he was bewildered how I had gotten that impression.

[SPOILERS for The Dark Knight Rises FORTHWITH]

As a comic book fan, I came in with the expectation that this movie’s version of Selina Kyle might be a sex worker. Because I knew Selina Kyle had been portrayed as one, most notably by Frank Miller, whose work has been so influential on the trilogy. So when Anne Hathaway’s Kyle seduces and absconds with a Congressperson (to provide herself with cover when she makes an illicit exchange, we discover) I figured she was doing this in the course of her business.

As that deal goes down, another character is introduced: Selina’s friend, played by Juno Temple, and according to IMDb named “Jen.” I don’t recall her being addressed by name in the film, but as soon as I saw her I thought to myself, “Oh, hey, it’s Holly Robinson!”

Holly Robinson as drawn by Cameron Stewart in Catwoman Secret Files [source]

Holly Robinson was created by Frank Miller in Batman: Year One, a fellow sex worker living with Selina Kyle. The appearance of that character, even though they’ve given her another name, signaled to me this character was meant to be in line with Miller’s Selina Kyle, a sex worker.

There’s also an offhand reference to Kyle living in “Old Town,” which I’ve never encountered in Batman comics (although there are many thousands I’ve never read, so maybe I am missing something) but which instantly called to mind the prostitute-run red light district of another Frank Miller comic, Sin City.

Selina Kyle’s primary motivation throughout The Dark Knight Rises is acquisition of the “Clean Slate,” a bit of technology that will erase her record, even her very existence, from the world’s databases, allowing her to escape an unspecified past where “she did what she had to do to survive.” Her past could be anything. It could merely be the thieving she’s clearly so adept at. But Kyle very pointedly shows no shame about her burgling, wearing Martha Wayne’s stolen string of pearls while dancing with Bruce at a gala, for example. It stands to reason there is something else she is running away from.

If you accept that The Dark Knight Rises‘s Kyle has a past or present as a sex worker, unfortunately the dynamic character seems much less innovative and much more like yet another iteration of the trope of the Hooker with the Heart of Gold.

The stock character of the Hooker with a Heart of Gold is problematic, even from a sex-work-positive feminist perspective, because the trope itself is not sex work positive. These characters are meant to be interesting because they are good “inside” even though they do “bad” things. The viewer is allowed to be titillated by the character’s occupation without needing to feel as though they condone it. And because hookers with hearts of gold are so often “saved” by men, it plays to a variety of male fantasies beyond women as commodities: that women need them; that women are “correctable.” The trope also reinforces traditional gender roles by masculinizing work for pay, often giving the hookers with hearts of gold tough, emotionally cool exteriors on the job (like men!) that when cracked (by a man!) show their soft, compassionate, womanly true self.

As we have with Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises, who steals and betrays and displays a general disdain for everyone she speaks with in the first half of the movie (other than Holly Robinson’s stand-in). But somehow Batman cracks that ice, first getting Selina Kyle to display emotional vulnerability, and finally inspiring Catwoman to heroically help save the same Gotham she’d been keen to abandon after helping it fall to anarchy. When we spot her casually dining with Bruce Wayne in Florence at film’s end, it’s easy to imagine she’s given up her criminal ways: another soiled dove lifted to grace by a good man.

Anne Hathaway as Catwoman, in hero-mode on the Bat Pod. [source]

Even though I just wrote it, I find this summary of The Dark Knight Rises‘s arc for Selina Kyle overly reductive, and Anne Hathaway’s phenomenal performance in the role nuanced and charismatic enough that it elevates the material. Which is why I don’t so much object that The Dark Knight Rises invokes the trope of the Hooker with a Heart of Gold, I just mind that it does so covertly. It weakens the film’s ability to twist the trope and present a feminist take on it, and wastes an opportunity to give the world an iconic, heroic, feminist character who does or did sex work.

So it doesn’t bother me that The Dark Knight Rises possibly included sex work in the character background of its Catwoman, but it bothers me that they didn’t commit to it. The film signals dog whistles to comic book fans and enable the character and movie to enjoy all the male-id-pleasing benefits of the Hooker With a Heart of Gold trope, without actually having to go to all the trouble of crafting a modern and respectable portrayal of the sex industry in a major summer blockbuster. It’s lazy, even cowardly, and Catwoman, Anne Hathaway, and us movie-watchers all deserved better.

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Robin Hitchcock is an American writer currently living in Cape Town, South Africa. She had to take the long way home for weeks while The Dark Knight Rises filmed in her neighborhood in Pittsburgh.

New Bitch Flicks Regular Contributor: Robin Hitchcock

My name is Robin Hitchcock and I am thrilled to be joining the Bitch Flicks team as a regular contributor. I have previously reviewed Michael Clayton, The Descent, and Moneyball for Bitch Flicks. When I was writing about wedding planning at my personal blog HitchDied, I watched and reviewed more wedding movies than any reasonable person would subject herself to. I also used to write about pop culture and feminism at the currently-dormant blog The Double R Diner, which you may remember from the statistical analysis of Total Film’s “100 Greatest Female Characters” which was featured on Bitch Flicks.

I’ve been a movie lover since I was a young teen, when my dad instituted “Movie Camp” in our house to fill in the gaps in my cultural heritage. I’ve been a feminist since longer than I can remember. I have a small amount of formal gender studies training in the form of a certificate in Women’s Studies from my alma mater the University of Pittsburgh (2006), but that department was so small they couldn’t even offer a minor in Women’s Studies, much less a major degree concentration. I also have a J.D. from the University of Pittsburgh (2010), but I do not practice as a lawyer. I am always trying to learn more and strengthen my feminist muscles. I find it more or less impossible to see a movie and not want to write about it. Even when I really hate a movie, I still tend to enjoy watching it, thinking about it, and writing about it.

In addition to using my first post to introduce myself, I want to address some of the peculiarities of my current situation as a movie lover. This past May I moved to Cape Town, South Africa with my partner. It is my first time living outside of the United States. I knew this move would be a challenge in many ways, but I completely failed to anticipate how much I would dislike being subject to the vagaries of staggered international movie release schedules.

Non-scientific, not-to-scale plotting of release dates of 2012 summer movies in the USA and South Africa

Having to wait for movies to come to South Africa a few weeks after they hit the states bothers me not only because waiting is a drag, but because it makes me feel out of step with the cultural zeitgeist. You might be living in a post-Brave society, but it only opened in South African theaters today. So forgive me if my posts here are sometimes slightly dated. Fortunately, Bitch Flicks has a proud history of covering films from the distant and recent past as much as it covers new releases, so I hope to fit right in.

South Africa might not get all the movies when they come out in the US, and the theaters are a far sight short of “state of the art” (Upside: no cheap, under-lit digital projection. Downside: not a single IMAX screen in the entire country) But there are a few things about the way they do movies here that I’d love to see brought to the states:

When you buy a movie ticket, you select your seat in the theater. I’ll never have to worry about being stuck in the corner or the back row.
The first screening of the day is often at 9:00AM. I haven’t actually gone to the movies before noon here yet, but I like that it is an option.
Lower ticket prices. Less than 7 dollars a pop! Party like it’s 1999!
More art house theaters. I doubt this is so much a cultural difference as it is a function of Cape Town being a bigger city than I’d ever lived in in the States, but I can walk to three different “alternative” movie theaters from my house. The most famous is called the “Labia,” and even though that is pronounced with a short a and is named after some Italian dude, I still get a good chuckle out of that. The wait for these movies to come to these theaters can be as long or longer than my wait for them to come to DVD was back home, but at least I get the chance to see more independent movies on the big screen.

So I hope you will join me in the coming weeks for my slightly-dated, even more slightly internationally-skewed, always irreverent musings on women in film and other media. Once again I thank Bitch Flicks for this opportunity, and can’t wait to read the other new contributors’ works!

Oscar Best Picture Nominee: ‘Moneyball’

Brad Pitt stars in Best Picture nominee Moneyball

This is a guest post from Robin Hitchcock.

I didn’t know until the end credits that Aaron Sorkin had a writing credit on Moneyball. This is good, because I semi-irrationally hate Aaron Sorkin, and I wouldn’t want that bias to have influenced my take on the film. I’m frankly astonished I made it through the movie without recognizing Sorkin’s handiwork given his very specific, very stilted style. I’m not sure if that is a credit to the acting, the directing, the influence of also-credited writer Steve Zallian’s earlier draft, an uncharacteristic bout of restraint on the part of Mr. Sorkin, or a combination thereof. Sure, the dialogue is sharp and clever, not so aggressively sharp and clever that you feel like you’re being stabbed in the throat with wit. The snazzy dialogue is more there to entertain the viewer, instead of demonstrate the genius of the writer, which is pretty much the opposite of how I usually feel about Sorkin’s work.

While I didn’t know about Sorkin’s contribution to the script when I watched Moneyball, I did know I’d be reviewing it for Bitch Flicks. So I watched with my feminist glasses freshly cleaned and firmly planted on my nose. Which was tricky, because this is not a movie about women. Professional baseball is about as much of a man’s world as you could ask for, plus there’s the whole “based on a true story” business to validate keeping all the major characters men.

Which is fine! There are stories, stories worth telling, that are just about men. [Likewise, there are stories worth telling that only involve women, but its hard to get Hollywood to bankroll those.] Telling a story about men in a men’s world isn’t inherently sexist. But I think it is fair to subject whatever scraps of portrayal of women we get in these male-dominated films to a slightly higher scrutiny.

Moneyball becomes pretty cringeworthy when you do that. The film has a runtime of 133 minutes, and by my rough count women “characters” are featured in slightly less than 8 of those minutes. That’s 6%. [This whole “math” thing is kind of a double-edged sword, eh, Moneyball?] In those 8 minutes we see three wives/mothers, two daughters, three markedly cheerful and helpful secretaries, and one bitchy sports reporter. Yep, that’s right, the only woman in the movie who isn’t in a family or subservient relationship to the male characters is established as pushy and mean in a scant ten lines of dialogue.

Casey, played by Kerris Dorsey

The only even remotely well-rounded female character is Billy Beane’s twelve-year-old daughter, Casey (Kerris Dorsey), and the character is only as well-rounded as a dented egg. She’s your standard shy-yet-precocious pre-teen on the brink of womanhood, a favorite stock character of lazy male writers. [See also First Daughter Lucy in Sorkin’s The American President]. Casey feels a bit shoe-horned into the movie, to soften Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane and give him some scenes where he’s not flipping tables or arranging complicated player trade deals, all the better to bait that sweet, sweet Oscar honey. The other reason for Casey’s character to exist is to provide an explanation of Beane’s decision to reject a lucrative offer from the Boston Red Sox to become the best-paid GM in the game. I have no idea if Real Life Billy Beane stayed in Oakland to be near his children (although this Sports Illustrated piece from the time suggests as much), but I am sadly reminded of Aaron Sorkin’s “but you guys remember Rooney Mara, right!?” defense against the feminist criticism of women in The Social Network. When you’re only including women in your story because they motivate the men in the story, it’s not enough to win you any points with feminists.

The other women in the film (aside from an entirely wasted Robin Wright as Beane’s ex-wife) are all presented as service-providers to men. On top of the cheerful secretaries, we also see one of the player’s wives bring out coffee for Beane and his associate when they invite themselves into her living room to recruit spurned former catcher Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) to play first base, and quickly scoop up her and Scott’s young daughter when she toddles her way through this important meeting between the menfolk. I was so distracted by the antiquated gender dynamic playing out in that scene I had to watch it a second time to pay attention to the plot advancement.

Antiquated gender dynamics mar Moneyball

A later scene leads me to believe that the strange emphasis on women as helpmates was intentional, hopefully trying to say something about the old-fashioned hyper-masculine world of baseball. When Beane meets with Boston Red Sox owner John Henry (Arliss Howard), his cheerful and helpful secretary cheerfully and helpfully serves coffee, prompting this exchange.

Henry: You know, it’s her birthday, and I need to get her a present, but she’s usually the one that does that for me. So, do you have any ideas?

Beane: Uh, scarf.

Henry: You mean like wool?

Beane: No, I meant, uh, what women wear with, uh… decorative.

Henry: Where would I get something like that?

After which Beane cuts him off with something like, “I have no time for such frivolous lady issues! Let’s talk about serious matters of vital importance, like BASEBALL!” I believe this exchange is in the movie to highlight the strangeness of the general absence of women in this universe and subservient roles the few present women are in. At least, I hope that is what is going on, because otherwise I get the sinking suspicion that Sorkin wrote all these helper women in the movie as a deliberate fuck you to those who criticized the portrayal of women in The Social Network. Or worse yet, he thought by making all these helper women so markedly cheerful and polite, and by not having anyone snort coke off their bodies, that he was course-correcting. But that’s all wild speculation, given I don’t know the content of Sorkin’s contributions to the script.

Regardless, its inarguable that Moneyball does no favors for women in cinema. Aside from that, it’s a perfectly fine movie, not something I’d generally consider in the echelon of Best Picture nominees, but well worth watching nonetheless. All the same, I wish there were more movies with virtually all-female casts to counterbalance all the Moneyballs I’ve seen over my lifetime.

Robin Hitchcock has previously reviewed The Descent and Michael Clayton for Bitch Flicks. You can read her movie reviews at her blog HitchDied and other feminist pop culture commentary at her blog The Double R Diner.

Horror Week 2011: The Descent

When I first heard of The Descent, around the time of its 2006 theatrical release, it was described to me as “a movie about a bunch of lesbians who go into a cave and there are monsters.”

As it turns out, the entire six-woman cast of characters is ostensibly straight, if their boy talk in the early character-establishing scenes is anything to go by. I suspect my friend saw an all-female cast in a horror movie and assumed there MUST be lesbianism going on, because what’s a horror movie without sex? Or, for a more sexist explanation, chicks doing something interesting together without male supervision reads lesbian.

[Warning: If you are a group of friends in a movie, and you take a picture like this, at least half of you will be killed.]

Regardless, The Descent IS a movie about a bunch of women who go into a cave and there are monsters. What makes it such a brilliant movie is that you can chop the last three words off that plot description and you still have the makings of a terrific scary movie. It’s almost a full hour before the monsters appear, but that doesn’t mean the horror can’t start before the opening titles. After establishing a group of adventuresome female friends, we’re subject to witness the gruesome auto accident that kills main character Sarah’s husband and child. One year later, the friends have reconvened in the Appalachian mountains in the United States for a caving expedition to help a grief-wracked Sarah get her groove back. Only Juno, the alpha dog in the group (who just happened to have been schtupping Sarah’s husband before he was killed) knows that they are actually venturing into an unexplored cave system. In Juno’s mind, this surprise is an even greater gift to Sarah, who will get the honor of naming the cave system, perhaps after her dead daughter. But after a tunnel collapse blocks off their return path, Juno’s surprise means the group has no map and no one on the surface knows where they are.

Being trapped in an unknown cave with limited resources and no hope of outside rescue is in itself a terrifying situation, and The Descent plays it for all it is worth. A seemingly bottomless chasm must be crossed with only half the cams needed. One caver’s hand is sliced open by a ropeline when she saves her friend from plummeting to her death. Another caver follows the illusion of daylight, falls down a hole, and suffers a compound fracture in her leg. I’m already watching about half of the scenes through a finger screen and demanding that we turn the lights back on.

And then, the monsters come. Humanoid creatures with waxy pale skin, unseeing bleached-out eyes, and a tendency to rip people’s throats out and then chomp on their guts. Because the creature design is so simple, The Descent can afford to show them to us without your typical monster-movie restraint. And because the creatures are blind, we’re forced to endure several close-quarters silent standoffs recalling the T-Rex vs. Jeep scene in Jurassic Park. Only this is an R-rated horror movie, so some of those encounters end in stomach-turning gore.

All of this adds up to a horror movie so over-the-top terrifying I can’t believe I was willing to watch it again to write this review. But the gender implications of The Descent are too rich for me to deny, even though the film is sadly bereft of lesbians.

According to the iron-clad authority of Wikipedia, The Descent was originally conceived with a mixed-gender cast, until director Neil Marshall’s business partner “realized that horror films almost never have all-female casts.” But the female cast of The Descent brings more than novelty. I also don’t ascribe to Marshall’s suggestion that the chief advantage of the all-female cast is more naked emotion in a terrifying situation [“The women discuss how they feel about the situation, which the soldiers in Dog Soldiers [Marshall’s previous horror film] would never have done.”] The women of The Descent actually approach their situation with what is, at least to my American eyes, quite the stiff upper lip.

[Sidebar: Wikipedia also notes that Marshall gave the women different accents “to enable the audience to tell the difference between the women,” which is maybe the most depressing thing I’ve ever read. Who needs to bother with characterization when you have ACCENTS?]

I’m not buying the story that the all-female cast was to grab attention (if that were the case, maybe they would have been lesbians) or to allow for deeper exploration of feelings. I think the all-female cast of The Descent is designed to clue the audience into a particular subtextual layer to this horror story. Because what’s more terrifying than being trapped in a cave with monsters? Women. Women’s bodies.

While a cave setting evokes female reproductive organs almost inherently, the set design here takes this metaphor to extremes. The women descend into the cave through a slit-shaped gash in the earth, and then must crawl head-first through a narrow passageway into the greater cave system, where the true danger of the monsters await.

The monsters, depicted as the products of evolution motivated only by a primal drive for survival, are the perfect elaboration of this cave-as-womb horror metaphor. And as a cherry on top, they rip the guts out of these women.

Wait, the actual cherry on top is our heroine Sarah emerging Apocalypse Now-style from a pool of blood in the cave gallery that functions as the monsters’ killing fields, the signature image from the film. And the cherry on top of that cherry is that Sarah fights the only female creature in the film while still wading in the pool of blood and kills her by stabbing her in the face with a phallic bone.

After this menstrual baptism, Sarah shifts from a wounded woman paralyzed by grief into terrifying killing machine, fighting off the creatures so gruesomely it seems almost dangerously inefficient (Eye gouging? Really? They can’t even see!)

After all this, there’s still time for two more twists that rely on the gender of the cast for maximum effectiveness. [SPOILER ALERT, obviously.] First, we have Sarah in Creature Terminator Mode turn her rage against Juno, the only other human survivor, after discovering Juno’s affair with her late husband, by wounding her and leaving her to die at the hands of the creatures. It’s a moment that doesn’t sit quite right with me, in part because it is almost impossible to imagine a similar situation playing out between two male characters.

Shortly after this betrayal, Sarah escapes from the caves and is able to return to their parked vehicle. As she takes a moment to collect herself, she sees a bloody Juno in the passenger’s seat. In the American theatrical release, the film ends here, but in the original edit and the DVD Director’s Cut there’s an additional minute of footage where we see that Sarah’s entire escape was a hallucination, and she is still in the cave, with no exit in sight. Sarah then hallucinates her daughter sitting with her in the cave with a lit birthday cake, and looks peaceful and accepting as the camera pulls out to reveal the enormity of the cave and the great number of creatures closing in. I prefer this ending, not only because I’m a sucker for bleak endings. Throughout the film we’re given suggestions that Sarah’s grief is so great it has become a mental illness, including earlier depictions of hallucinations. And as much as I tire of cinema’s endless fascination with mentally ill women, in this case, it feels like a more honest character arc than the idea that fighting for survival and exacting cruel vengeance could snap her out of her grief haze.

Whether it was done to cash in on these female tropes, to underscore the metaphors to the female anatomy, or just to grab our attention, the all-female cast undeniably serves in The Descent’s favor. And it sure is a nice treat for us horror-flick loving bitches.

Robin Hitchcock previously reviewed Michael Clayton for Bitch Flicks. You can read more of her movie reviews at her blog HitchDied and plenty more feminist pop culture analysis at her other blog The Double R Diner.

Best Picture Nominee Review Series: Michael Clayton

Best Picture nominee Michael Clayton (2007)

This is a guest post from Robin Hitchcock.

Michael Clayton seems like an unlikely Best Picture nominee: a legal thriller that I would have sworn was adapted from an airport novel if I didn’t know that it was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Can’t you see yourself reading this plot description on a dust jacket while you half-listen to gate change announcements? Michael Clayton is the fixer for the elite Manhattan law firm Kenner, Bach & Leeden, making the deals and greasing the wheels for the tough cases that need to go away and stay under the radar. But when he’s sent to clean up the mess when his firm’s legendary attorney Arthur Eden goes off his medication and starts sabotaging their defense against a billion-dollar toxic tort class action, Clayton is reunited with his long-dormant conscience… and it might cost him his life.

It’s a film completely lacking in the epic trappings or topical social commentary usually characterizing Best Picture nominees, especially back in 2007 when the field was still only open to five films. Sure, it has a slick look, dashes of symbolic pretension (sorry, I have no. earthly. clue. what the horses mean) and an over-the-top and sometimes offensively unrealistic portrayal of mental illness, but it seems a more likely contender for heavy basic-cable rotation than for Best Picture.

Except for the part where it is really, really good.

Tilda Swinton’s phenomenal, Oscar-winning performance as Karen Crowder, general counsel for the toxic tort defendant United Northfield and villain of the story, does much of the work of pulling the film into the prestige league. It’s the best kind of supporting acting: a tremendous richness of character is developed in a few short scenes, leaving an impression so great it is hard to believe she doesn’t appear in more of the film.

Swinton demonstrates incredible control, imbuing characterization into the barely perceptible twitches of individual facial muscles. [It’s worlds apart from Tom Wilkinson’s scenerey-chomping (but also nominated) performance as the unbalanced Arthur, which makes that character seem even more out of place in the film.] In one of my favorite scenes, Karen awkwardly contracts with a hit man with a light-voiced forced professionalism that gives me flashbacks to my worst phone interviews, while reading over a stolen memorandum held in a hand stuffed in a plastic bag. She seems so comfortable with her improvised evidence-prevention, and it stands in such strong contrast with her hesitant negotiations, that we learn a great deal about what lines this character has already crossed that have brought her to the point of contract killing. Even Swinton’s HAND can act, when it’s hidden away in a plastic bag.

It’s a terrific performance in a rich role, but unfortunately some of that richness of character is rife with sexism, or at least relies on the sexism of the audience. We first see the character breaking down in a bathroom stall, pouring sweat broadly staining the pits of her conservative blouse. Her first dialogue is anxious practice for an interview discussing her recent promotion to general counsel as she dresses in the morning. Karen sits on her hotel bed in a practical nude bra and slip, posture slumped enough that some rolls of fat form on her midsection. Rarely is a half-dressed woman so de-sexualized in Hollywood film, and that captures our interest, but only because it relies on our presumption of sexist exploitation. So much of the complexity of the character is derived from our sexist expectations of what a cold-blooded corporate killer would be like and the “feminine vulnerability” (a phrase woefully common in reveiwers’ discussions of Swinton’s performance) of Karen Crowder. Swinton’s performance is strong enough to transcend this and actually earn the mantle of “complex villain”, but it is nevertheless problematic from a feminist perspective.

And my brow furrow deepens when I consider the only other female role with any meat to it—Anna, one of the class action plaintiffs (played by Merritt Wever). Anna is a young, painfully naïve country girl, and her “purity” draws a deep love from Arthur, who calls her “God’s perfect little creature.” Arthur’s love for Anna inspires his crusade to expose U/North’s guilt. [Sidebar: As a lawyer, I hate hate hate when characters are portrayed as heroes for betraying their clients when they find out they are guilty. That is not heroic. It is unethical and WRONG. I’m looking at you, Perry Mason! And Matlock, you oughtta be disbarred! /rant] So: female character that only exists to provide motivation for male character? Check! But why stop the sexist cliches there? Anna is flattered by the (creepy and grossly ethics-violating) attention that Arthur gives her, even after he strips down and professes his love to her while she is being deposed about HER PARENTS DYING OF CANCER. She accepts the plane ticket to New York he buys for her even though she’s never been farther away from home than Milwaukee, and has to lower her voice to an awed whisper when she recounts that the ticket cost eight hundred dollars. Anna’s simplicity and innocence stands in start contrast to Karen’s ruthless professionalism, creating an unpleasant dichotomy where the dumb, docile country mouse is “God’s perfect creature” and the professional, competent city mouse is Pure Evil. I doubt this message was intentional, but it still grates. The lesson is that passing the Bechdel test (Michael Clayton flunks on the second prong) not only appeases us feminists but helps avoid undesired inferences of sexism.

Despite these shortcomings, I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Clayton. The movie is worth watching just to bask in the awesomeness of Tilda Swinton’s performance, which truly is one for the ages, but it’s got plenty else to recommend it as well. It’s gripping, good-looking, thought-provoking, and hey, George Clooney’s face is on screen like 90% of the time.

Robin Hitchcock has a card in her wallet that proves she’s an attorney, but she practices writing more than she practices law. You can read her series of reviews of wedding movies at her blog HitchDied and her reviews of everything else at The Double R Diner.