Robin Hitchcock – Page 9

Gender & Food Week: Extreme Weight Loss for Roles is not "Required" and not Praiseworthy

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables

This post written by Robin Hitchcock previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on November 16, 2012 and was cross-posted at Women and Hollywood.

Kale and dust. Hummus and radishes. Two squares of dried oatmeal paste a day.

If you recognize any of these phrases, then you’ve probably been hit by the Anne Hathaway starvation-diet-for-her-craft marketing blitz.

In the unlikely event that you haven’t heard about this already, I’ll catch you up: Anne Hathaway, slim to begin with and already leaned down to catsuit size for The Dark Knight Rises, lost 25 pounds to more realistically inhabit the role of starving-and-dying-of-tuberculosis Fantine in the upcoming movie musical Les Misérables. Actors forcing dramatic body weight changes for roles is nothing new and nothing unique (see the similar-yet-tellingly-different coverage of Matthew McConaughey’s weight loss to play an AIDS sufferer in The Dallas Buyers Club), but Hathaway’s weight loss has become The Story of the production of Les Mis: a subject of endless discussion on celebrity gossip sites, the talk show circuit, and the cover story in the December issue of Vogue magazine.

Why is a skinny person getting skinnier garnering so much media fascination? Are hummus and radishes so much more fascinating than Les Mis director Tom Hooper’s decision to have the actors sing live for the cameras? And even if we insist on reducing an actress to her physical appearance, couldn’t we just talk some more about Anne Hathaway chopping off all her hair?

When discussing her weight loss with Entertainment Tonight’s Mark Steins, Hathaway says, “It’s what is required. It doesn’t matter if it’s hard.”

“Required”? Really?

This makes two gigantic assumptions: 1) That physical frailty is necessary to properly play the character Fantine.

Patti LuPone as Fantine, 1985 London production

Randy Graff as Fantine, 1987 Broadway production

Sierra Boggess as Fantine, current West End production

An assumption I think it is fair to reject: these women are slender, but not emaciated, and they are able to play the character convincingly.

But let’s give Hathaway the benefit of the doubt and say the intimacy of a filmed adaptation requires more stringent realism when it comes to Fantine’s body size. This still assumes that the actor actually losing weight is the only way to portray her extreme physical condition.

Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Skinny Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger

Yeah, nope.

So let’s be clear: Anne Hathaway’s extreme weight loss for Les Mis was in no way required. But while it is artistically a wash; as a career choice, it was clearly a good move. The film benefits from all this attention, and Hathaway enjoys the “she so devoted to her craft” kudos that often translate into statuettes.

But it is bad for women, and bad for our culture. More diet talk, more body talk, perpetuation of the myth that weight loss is a noble pursuit and merely a matter of dedication. Voluntary adoption of disordered eating is not praiseworthy. These types of body transformations are not artistically necessary, and certainly not “required.” So let’s hope actors stop endangering their health for roles. We can suspend our disbelief over a few dozen pounds.

———-
Robin Hitchcock (no relation to the Master of Suspense) is a Bitch Flicks weekly contributor. In May 2012, she reluctantly left her home of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to move to Cape Town, South Africa with her husband. Robin is a Contributing Editor for LeWeekley.co.za, a weekly guide of things to do in Cape Town. You can also find her writing at the mostly-dormant feminist pop-culture blog The Double R Diner and her personal blog HitchDied.com.

‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’: I didn’t get it.

Quvenzhané Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild

Just in case the world does end today, I need to get something off my chest, so I can go to my apocalyptic grave with an unburdened movie-loving conscience: I didn’t get Beasts of the Southern Wild.

When it started picking up mad buzz and heaps of festival awards earlier this year, Beasts of the Southern Wild shot up to the top of my to-see list. A visually-stunning, lyrical American fable centered on the breakout performance of a five-year-old powerhouse of a little girl? Sign me up!

I finally got the chance to see Beasts of the Southern Wild on an overnight transatlantic flight last fall, admittedly imperfect screening conditions. I fell asleep during my first attempt to watch it, lulled by its dreamlike qualities (on top of travel fatigue and a couple 187ml bottles of red wine). So I tried watching it again later in the flight, after the sun had come up. I managed to stay awake this time, but not awake enough to understand WHAT ON EARTH WAS GOING ON.

This is the part of the review where I should offer a brief synopsis of the film, but I didn’t understand what was happening enough to be able to adequately do so. In my memory it goes something like this: Hushpuppy lives in The Bathtub, a simple swampy community isolated from the rest of society. Hushpuppy explains her worldview in poetic narration while Events Occur.

Here’s a few more half-remembered details, bolstered by some research into other reviews: Hushpuppy’s dad is also around, bouncing intermittently between neglect of and tough love survival training for Hushpuppy. And then there is a storm and a forced-evacuation from the suddenly-present government? And Hushpuppy and some other little girls go look for Hushpuppy’s mom, and may or may not find her? And then Hushpuppy wins a staring contest with a herd of gigantic prehistoric animals who floated over from the melting ice caps?

Hushpuppy vs. Auroch

Whaaaat? This all makes The Tree of Life seem like a straightforward piece of traditional storytelling.

What makes Beasts of the Southern Wild so elusive is that it is told from the perspective of its young protagonist, Hushpuppy (played by Quvenzhané Wallis, only five years old at the time of filming). Wallis really is a magnetic screen presence, and I wanted to love this movie on the basis of her captivating performance alone. But I also wanted to know what was happening. The sci-fi fan in me was too distracted by the unanswered questions (among them: what year is it?) resulting from the sidelined world-building of The Bathtub to fully invest in the character-driven, loosely-structured story in Beasts, no matter how engaging I found Wallis’s tiny tour de force.

Writing for Bitch Flicks last summer, Megan Kearns suggested,

“Even as you watch the film, you might not understand or fully comprehend the meaning of the unusual plot. But let its poetic beauty, emotions and raw honesty wash over you. Let it sink in.”

I tried. I want to support experimental narratives. I want to support films that showcase marginalized groups like children, women, and people of color (Hushpuppy is a triple threat!). I want to be intellectual enough, patient enough, film-lover enough and feminist enough to enjoy Beasts of the Southern Wild, but I was not.

So if this is the end of days, at least I will go out honestly. Do you have any cinematic confessions to share with the class while you still have the chance?

Where ‘Ruby Sparks’ Goes Wrong

Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan in Ruby Sparks

Written by Robin Hitchcock.

I expected to either love or hate Ruby Sparks depending on where it took its premise. This premise being: sad sack writer creates a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Character named Ruby Sparks, she manifests into his real life, still influenced by what he writes about her, consequences ensue. I suspected I’d hate the movie if the creation of the woman Ruby Sparks was a happy miracle, and love it if it turned out to be a disaster, depicting the limitations of the fantasy applied to real life.

But my feelings were more complicated than I expected. I found Ruby Sparks to be an engrossing film that was very uncomfortable to watch, like a good horror movie. But I was also left unsatisfied and disappointed by the film, wanting both a better take-down of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope and a better all-around movie watching experience.

The first problem with Ruby Sparks is that it takes entirely too long to establish its premise. It’s actually a pretty simple idea for anyone hip to storytelling tropes (even if you don’t know the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” you probably recognize one when you see one, and writers with God-like authorial power is nothing new either). While it is realistic that it would take our characters a while to accept this premise was actually happening, it’s frustrating for the audience. We’ve already accepted it before we started to watch the movie, which makes the first forty minute or so of “Yes, REALLY” rather tedious.

I believe this first problem is a symptom of the second and most serious problem with Ruby Sparks: that the writer who creates her, Calvin, is the protagonist. Given the that film was written by a woman (Zoe Kazan, who also plays the eponymous character), co-directed by a woman (Valerie Feris, alongside Jonathan Dayton, the directing team behind Little Miss Sunshine), and centered on deconstructing an antifeminist trope, I was surprised how much sympathy I was expected to have for the man luxuriating in a hyper-real version of it.

The Sad Sack in Need of the Love of Good Woman, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl’s counterpoint, is a sexist trope in and of itself. It’s rooted in the idea that only men are burdened by the pathos of true adulthood/personhood, that the expectation to be a Great Man is a constant yoke that women will never understand. In the case of Ruby Sparks‘s Calvin (Paul Dano), he’s suffering the terrible burden of being a literary wunderkind who hasn’t been able to follow up the Great American Novel he wrote in his early twenties.

Zoe Kazan as Ruby Sparks

Calvin’s therapist gives him a writing assignment to help with his writer’s block: write about a person who could love Calvin’s shaggy dog, Scotty, despite his flaws (guess what guys: THE DOG IS A METAPHOR FOR CALVIN! Whoaaaa!). Calvin then dreams (literally) and encounter with Ruby Sparks, a pretty, friendly, charming girl who likes Scotty even though she’s unfamiliar with the works of his namesake, F. Scott Fitzgerald. After this dream, Calvin can’t stop writing about Ruby (on a typewriter! In 2012. Ugh, he’s the worst.)

Calvin at his magical typewriter.

Cultural ignorance is only one of the many infantalizing qualities given to Ruby by Calvin: she can’t drive, she doesn’t own a computer, she “isn’t very good at life sometimes” because she forgets to pay bills and the like. Then there are the deficits in Ruby’s true personhood that aren’t by design, but by omission: Calvin writes that she is a painter, but we never see her paint, and neglects to give her a regular job, or any friends or family. The only outside relationships he gives her are memories of inadequate exes: a high school teacher she had an affair with (thus failing to get her diploma), an alcoholic, another age-inappropriate partner. All to make Calvin the more comparatively worthy.

While this is all cutting writing on Kazan’s part, doing its work to highlight what makes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl a problematic trope, within the story of the film it comes out of Calvin, which makes him extremely unsympathetic to the audience. But it is clear we’re supposed to be rooting for him: as he swears off writing about Ruby and she becomes more and more human (and less and less interested in Calvin), we’re meant to worry for him. When he succumbs to the pressure to write her back into being the perfect girlfriend and it backfires, we aren’t supposed to fret for Ruby as she suffers extreme mood swings, but rather for their effect on Calvin. We don’t see how “Real Ruby”‘s friends react to these changes, only Calvin. We see how Calvin’s family responds to Ruby, but Ruby doesn’t have a family, because Calvin didn’t bother to write her one.

I kept wondering if I was reading the film wrong, until the denouement which confirmed that Calvin is meant to be the main sympathetic character. Having “released” Ruby from his magical creativity, Calvin writes a novel recounting this experience called The Girlfriend. It is met with wide acclaim, duhdoy. Then Calvin, walking Scotty, happens upon a woman in the park. A woman who looks just like Ruby. She acts a little bit more like a real person than the Ruby from Calvin’s original dream, but it’s clear Calvin still has the upper hand: she asks if they’ve met before, because he looks familiar to her, and he points her to his photo in her book jacket, as she’s reading The Girlfriend. The scene is extremely reminiscent of the end of (500) Days of Summer, where despite all the self-entitled jerkwad behavior we’ve seen the main male character go through over the course of the movie, we know he’s the one we’re supposed to be rooting for because he meets another (sorta, in this case) girl.

This meeting should have read more like the villain in a slasher flick popping out of his grave to kill again, but it really seemed intended to be a heartwarming second chance for a lovable loser. And trying to make Calvin a sympathetic character when he’s acting more like a monster for most of the film makes Ruby Sparks fall apart. It’s not like we couldn’t have had Ruby as our primary protagonist because she’s “not real”, see Pinocchio. It’s a shame that Ruby Sparks asks us to sympathize more with Calvin than the title character, it weakens the film’s mission and makes it much less enjoyable to watch.

In Praise of Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln

When Mary Todd Lincoln, played by Sally Field, first appears in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, I got nervous. With a weary voice and a far-off manner, she analyzes one of Mr. Lincoln’s dreams as a portent of doom. Looks like we’re getting the “batshit crazy” take on Mary Lincoln, I thought.

Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln

I was particularly upset by this because the characterization of Mary is especially crucial to the success of the film from a feminist perspective, because it is otherwise almost entirely focused on men (although Gloria Reuben is great in her small role and S. Epatha Merkerson brings as much as she can to her even smaller one).

But as the film progresses, it becomes clear that just as it does with her husband Abraham, Lincoln is merely incorporating the legend of Mary Todd—stated eloquently by the character herself as “all anyone will remember of me is that I was crazy and that I ruined your happiness”—into a much more nuanced depiction of a complex character.

Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln in Lincoln

I have to admit, my initial reaction to the Mary in Lincoln was not helped by my preconceived opinion on the casting of Sally Field. My issue was not the age difference (Field is 10 years Day-Lewis’ senior, the reverse of the real-life age difference between the Lincolns) that required Ms. Field to fight to keep her role. I was rather concerned with the contrast in acting style between Field and Day-Lewis. I recalled the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, where Marlon Brando’s then-revolutionary method realism left Vivian Leigh’s remarkable (and Oscar-winning) yet much more theatrical performance as Blanche DuBois in Stanley’s dust.

In an interview with Sharon Knolle, Sally Field insists:

“Listen: People don’t know what method is. I am method! I studied at the Actors’ Studio. I studied with Lee Strasberg. That’s where the term “method” came from. Daniel and I work exactly the same way. I always stay in character. Any good actor does that.”

Ms. Field obviously knows her own technique better than I do, but I doubt I am alone as a moviegoer in thinking of her as an actress whose screen presence is largely defined by her personal charm and her ability to turn the melodrama up to eleven rather than an ability to disappear into a character.

But Field’s performance style actually fits in well among a universally strong but stylistically-varied ensemble. While Tommy Lee Jones is uncharacteristically reserved even playing the bombastic abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, and the inimitably restrained David Strathairn does fantastic work as Secretary of State William Seward [Tangent: my greatest beef with this film is that Seward is largely absent from the third act—just when his story gets really good!—because it diminishes Strathairn’s awards chances, and I think he’s still owed statues from Good Night and Good Luck]; there’s also plenty of delightful scenery chewing among the supporting cast, from Lee Pace as pro-slavery Democrat Fernando Wood, who ought to have a mustache just for twirling at the appropriate beats in his racist speeches on the Congressional floor, to James Spader’s cartoonishly uncouth political trickster.

Although Field plays most of her scenes against Day-Lewis, they play off each other surprisingly well. Lincoln as a whole walks a fine line between humanizing and further mythologizing one of the greatest figures in American history. Despite Day-Lewis’s historically-accurate adoption of a slouched posture and gentle high-pitched speaking voice, the film unquestionably presents Lincoln as the Great Man of the Lincoln Legend. But these indulgences are brilliantly counterbalanced by having the character aware of his place in history and the inevitable myth-making about him.

Fittingly, this vulnerability is no more apparent than when he is with his wife. Playing off Field, Day-Lewis is perhaps at his most actorly, but the effect is subtly demonstrating to the audience that Abraham is the one acting as the character of President Lincoln when he is politicking and speechmaking. Field’s work in Lincoln makes the central performance and consequently the film itself better, which is exactly what a supporting actor should do. My misgivings about her casting could not have been more wrong.

And thankfully, neither could my first impression of the film’s overall take on the character. While Lincoln‘s Mary is indeed emotionally erratic, occasionally difficult, and haunted by grief, the film doesn’t damn her the way some historical accounts have by making these her only characteristics. She’s treated as an intellectual equal by her husband, we see her watch the congressional debates on the 13th Amendment from the balcony with keen interest, and in Field’s best scene, she epically takes down Thaddeus Stevens with a smile while playing the role of First-Lady-as-Gracious-Hostess.

Field’s best scene in Lincoln

Tony Kushner’s script and Sally Field’s game performance evade the two traps of fictional portrayals of Mary Lincoln: she’s neither the crazy shrew undermining her great husband nor the equally sexist and hoary cliche of the Great Woman Behind a Great Man. Instead, Sally Field’s Mary Todd Lincoln is one of the many compelling elements that make up Spielberg’s excellent Lincoln.

Damning ‘Ted’ with Faint Praise

Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis in Ted.

As I’ve written on Bitch Flicks before, I’m not a fan of Seth MacFarlane’s work. I must admit, when I selected his feature-film debut Ted for my in-flight entertainment during my long trip back to the States for Thanksgiving, I was expecting it to be a diverting “hate watch” that would give me fodder for an easy-to-write negative post for this site, something I could quickly crunch out in between turkey and pie without missing too much family time.

But, alas, I sort of enjoyed Ted. It made me laugh out loud over a dozen times, even though I was watching it through headphones surrounded by hundreds of strangers probably watching The Amazing Spider-Man, and even though every time I laugh at something Seth MacFarlane is responsible for I feel like a hypocrite at best, if not a morally reprehensible enemy of human decency and storytelling itself.

Then again, Ted proves that Seth MacFarlane is capable of presenting jokes within the confines of a meaningful narrative, and of deriving comedy from plot and character interaction instead of meaningless cutaways to pop cultural name-checks. This is a huge step forward for MacFarlane, finally putting him on par with, well, pretty much everyone who has ever told a story or a joke to any level of success, including your Uncle Morris at last night’s dinner when he regaled the family with the tale of how he almost got arrested during last year’s Black Friday.

Unfortunately, the story that Ted tells is an uninspired and sexist Apotovian tale of man-child John (Mark Wahlberg), whose failure to launch into adulthood threatens his relationship with a Good Woman (Mila Kunis). The “twist” is that John’s connections to his immature life of hedonism are represented by his relationship with his lifelong best friend and roommate, Ted (voiced by Seth MacFarlane), a plush teddy bear come to life from a childhood wish. [DO YOU GET IT? John can’t be an adult because of his relationship with a CHILDHOOD TOY.]

Perhaps I’m so enchanted by MacFarlane’s ability to stick to a narrative to begin with because I’m so tremendously BORED with the pedestrian sexism of his chosen narrative. The Man-Child’s struggle to adapt to the demands of his Mature and Responsible Woman who Improbably Tolerates Him is soooooo 2007. There is nothing more to say about the sexism of this trope. I’m falling asleep thinking about it.

Which leaves only semi-positive notes like, hey, that Mark Wahlberg sure is charming, and Mila Kunis really is doing all she can to redeem this crap role; and wow, this CGI is pretty great, at least on a 3-inch screen on an airplane seat back. It’s so astonishing to me that Ted is a competent film it becomes all too easy to dismiss its entirely expected and uninteresting sexism. So I won’t do that. Ted is sexist. But I’m still impressed and surprised that it isn’t entirely terrible.

Extreme Weight Loss for Roles is not "Required" and not Praiseworthy

Cross-posted at Women and Hollywood.

Kale and dust. Hummus and radishes. Two squares of dried oatmeal paste a day.

Anne Hathaway as Fantine in Les Miserables

If you recognize any of these phrases, then you’ve probably been hit by the Anne Hathaway starvation-diet-for-her-craft marketing blitz.

When discussing her weight loss with Entertainment Tonight’s Mark Steins, Hathaway says, “It’s what is required. It doesn’t matter if it’s hard.”

“Required”? Really?

This makes two gigantic assumptions: 1) That physical frailty is necessary to properly play the character Fantine.

Patti LuPone as Fantine, 1985 London production

Randy Graff as Fantine, 1987 Broadway production

Sierra Boggess as Fantine, current West End production

An assumption I think it is fair to reject: these women are slender, but not emaciated, and they are able to play the character convincingly.

Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Skinny Steve Rogers in Captain America: The First Avenger

Yeah, nope.

Disney Buys Star Wars: A New Hope for Women and Girls

Disney logo with Death Star

Last week, one of the only news items to penetrate the horrifying coverage of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation and the nerve-wracking anticipation for the US Elections was the surprising, perplexing, but exciting news that Disney was buying Lucasfilm and planning to release Star Wars Episode VII in 2015. It was like a shot of adrenaline to this weary geek’s heart.

The Five Stages of Disney’s Buyout of Lucasfilm: 1) Denial. 2) Angst. 3) Cautious optimism. 4) Futility. 5) Resignation.
— Eric S. Donaldson (@EricJokes) October 31, 2012

Like every geek, I’m riding the wave of emotions that comes with this news, with renewed “no, there is another” hope for new GOOD Star Wars movies, and anxiety that those hopes will be dashed yet again (I mean, think about what the word “Disneyfication” means.) As a feminist geek, there’s a whole additional layer to conflicted feelings about Disney buying Star Wars: what does this mean for women?

The Opportunity for Women to Take Creative Control of Star Wars

Enormously successful female film producer Kathleen Kennedy is now president of Lucasfilm and “brand manager” of Star Wars after the sale to Disney. A woman is now in charge of Star Wars. I don’t know about you, but I’m hearing a chorus of angels sing.

And then an abrupt record scratch, because it’s a naïve fantasy to suppose that having a woman executive produce the new Star Wars films will meaningfully shift the gender balance of the larger creative team. A quick overview of Kennedy’s credits on IMDb confirm that she’s mostly helped bring male voices to the screen, and a very discouraging (although unsourced and hopefully entirely dubious!) quotation in her personal trivia section has a very “binders full of women” tone:

But what I always find interesting is when you take the areas of writing, producing and directing. I don’t think there’s a great deal of discrimination — although I’m completely perplexed and confused as to why there aren’t more women. For instance, if we’re looking for new, young directors, which is something we do all the time, we certainly never go look at films because they’re directed by a man or a woman. We look at films because they are winning awards, they’re good, and it has nothing to do with gender. And women certainly have equal opportunity to get into a university like UCLA or USC, to get into the film department, to take the same courses to allow them to make films, to deal with a whole gamut of subject matter, and yet I don’t know what happens. There’s something that happens in the process of getting there that seems to turn many women away. – Kathleen Kennedy [Oh, bugger, here’s the source.]

But the fact remains that a woman now controls Star Wars, and moreover the door is now open for new writers, directors, and other producers to step into the Star Wars franchise, and a lot more diversity in the creative team continuing the franchise is now a possibility.

Gender Neutral Kids Entertainment or the Entrenchment of the Girl’s Ghetto?

Disney Princess Leia

My childhood pretty much exactly coincided with the Disney Renaissance, so even though the Disney Princess marketing machine hadn’t fully sprung to terrifying life, I was pretty obsessed with Disney’s lineup of plucky heroines. I foolishly assumed they were a cultural touchstone for everyone in my generation, until I was in college and went on a date with a guy who had only brothers, who said he’d never seen an animated Disney movie. “I always thought that was just girl stuff,” he said.

While the Disney Princesses (and the Disney Fairies) get a lot of direct-to-video content and toys, the feature films branch of Disney seems desperate to get that somehow-more-valuable BOY MONEY. First they bought Pixar, which made animated kids movies untainted by the “girl stuff” smear (this year’s Brave was the first Pixar film with a female protagonist). Then Disney acquired Marvel’s film division, and went about developing films for even pretty obscure male Marvel superheroes while leaving the women to Smufette-y supporting roles (Though I’m still holding out hope for a She-Hulk adaptation, which could be the brilliantly postmodern Gremlins 2: The New Batch-style answer to the Avengers mega-franchise.) And while Disney Animation Studios still creates princess-centered features like The Princess and the Frog and Tangled, they alternate these pictures with more boy-appealing fare like Wreck-It Ralph. It’s easy to worry that Disney has cut its losses with girls, figuring they are only valuable viewers once they’re old enough to obsess over sci-fi/fantasy young adult novels with love triangles.

But while Disney Princess Leia was just an amusing meme for most of us, for me, it was a signal of hope that Disney buying Star Wars could help blur the distinction between “boy stuff” and “girl stuff” when it comes to children’s entertainment. Bitch Flicks’ Megan Kearns’s excellent feminist character analysis of Princess Leia demonstrates that while the original Star Wars trilogy was extremely limited in its portrayal of women and fell into some harmful tropes with its central female character, what it got right about Leia, it got VERY right.

I firmly believe Star Wars is the cultural juggernaut that it is because it captures young girls’ imaginations as well as young boys’, largely in part because of the dynamic character of Princess Leia. And given their history of creating female-centric (albeit sometimes problematic) entertainment, and despite recent moves away from that niche, Disney may be the best production company to capitalize on that aspect of Star Wars‘ appeal when making the next trilogy.

The next Star Wars films could bring us more than one—seriously, I swear it is possible—dynamic female character. We might even see a woman as the central figure in the next trilogy. Those oh-so-valuable boys will still be bought and payed for by the Star Wars name and universe. In this brave new world where a “Disney Princess” is a diplomat who carries a blaster, the new Star Wars films might finally break us of gender-segregating our children’s entertainment.

Too Many Hitchcocks

Sienna Miller and Toby Jones in HBO’s The Girl

1997 had volcano movies. 2000 had Mars movies. 2006 had magician movies. 2012 has Hitchcock movies.

The Girl, premiering tomorrow on HBO at 9PM, stars Toby Jones as Hitch, Imelda Staunton as his wife Alma, and Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedren. Hitchcock, opening in limited release November 23rd, stars Anthony Hopkins as the title character, Helen Mirren as Alma, and Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh. Having only seen the trailers, it is my suspicion that the close proximity of these movies’ releases will sabotage the artistic impact of both films.

Based on Donald Spoto’s book Spellbound by Beauty, The Girl centers on Hitchcock’s obsession with and harassment of Tippi Hedren as he worked with her in The Birds and Marnie. It is a dark and unpleasant story, where the director is clearly depicted as a creepy antagonist:

And while “it’s not TV, it’s HBO,” The Girl debuts in the shadow of its theatrical release twin, Hitchcock. Toby Jones yet again plays the also-ran version of the lead actor in a biopic, six years after his take on Truman Capote in Infamous was eclipsed by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-winning turn from the previous year. For me, the biggest “this is only a TV movie” black mark is the casting of “We wanted X, but we got” Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedren.

But The Girl may well get its revenge on the flashier Hitchcock by undermining its depiction of the Master of Suspense as a lovable maverick; eccentric, sure, but far from diabolical:

It’s awkward to watch these trailers together, especially with the one for Hitchcock taking multiple opportunities to ogle ScarJo T&A and closing with a zinger about large breasts. I’m wagering that uncomfortable disconnect will be only more noticeable when comparing the two actual films. So while Hitchcock gets the bigger stars and better buzz, The Girl may pull the red carpet out from underneath it.

—

Robin Hitchcock (no relation) is an American writer living in Cape Town. She has been grumpy for years that the adjective form of her last name is already taken.

‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting’: Unexpected Gem

Elizabeth Banks and Brooklyn Decker in What to Expect When You’re Expecting

What to Expect When You’re Expecting was [excuse the hack writing here, it’s unavoidable:] not what I expected. I expected it to be another He’s Just Not That Into You: an insipid, generally obnoxious star-studded ensemble piece loosely inspired by a bestselling cultural touchstone of a nonfiction book. Instead, it is an entertaining, surprisingly touching star-studded ensemble piece loosely inspired by a bestselling cultural touchstone of a nonfiction book.

One of the best things about What to Expect is that it never attempts to universalize pregnancy or parenting. The five semi-connected expecting couples in the film all have different conception stories (from an oops one night stand, to getting lucky after years of infertility, to choosing adoption) and pregnancy experiences (from Brooklyn Decker’s walk-in-the-park pregnancy with twins to lactation advocate Elizabeth Bank’s hormone-fueled emotional breakdown to [spoiler alert!] an astonishingly sensitive depiction of miscarriage). While the film unfortunately depicts an Atlanta that knows no gays and is largely white, it at least partway makes up for its lack of demographic diversity by exploring a rich diversity of experience.

“Dudes Group” of fathers in What to Expect When You’re Expecting

I was also very happily surprised by the depiction of fatherhood in What to Expect When You’re Expecting, especially after seeing the bit in the trailer where a group of dads pushing strollers slo-mo walk to Biggie’s “Big Poppa.” I expected this plotline to be another iteration of “men doing ladywork: HILARIOUS!” But the “dudes group” is celebrated, not mocked, for embracing fatherhood, and while the group has a code of “no judging” when they share such parenting mishaps as “last week, my kid ate a cigarette”, the dads are not depicted as incompetent impostors in a woman’s world. They’re equal partners in parenthood.

And best of all, What to Expect When You’re Expecting is genuinely funny and emotionally affecting. It’s sort of unfortunate that the movie features a lot of humor bizarrely specific to the 2012 zeitgeist, from food truck rivalries to autotuned remixes of public breakdowns; because the movie could be, like the book of the same title, something of a perennial classic for expecting parents. But What to Expect When You’re Expecting makes up some points by also including some of the best things about the 2012 cultural moment: scene-stealing Rebel Wilson and shirtless Joe Manganiello.

Shirtless Joe Maganiello is one of the best things about living in 2012.

Oscar Hosts Preferable to Seth MacFarlane: An Abbreviated List

Seth MacFarlane, unpleasant person and recently-announced host of the 85th Annual Academy Awards

Seth MacFarlane has been tapped to host the 85th Annual Academy Awards next February. MacFarlane is the creator of The Family Guy and several other animated television programs (American Dad, The Cleveland Show) known for their blatant hostility toward women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, and the basic tenets of comedic storytelling. MacFarlane’s first motion picture, Ted, was a box office hit last summer. He can sing and do funny voices and he looks pretty good in a tux. The producers of the Academy Awards ceremony are hoping he can bring in his lucrative young male demographic to boost the declining ratings for the Oscars telecast. [And I guess they already forgot about that whole debacle with Brett Ratner and Eddie Murphy last year.]

While it’s possible MacFarlane as host will bring in droves of 18-year-old boys to watch montages celebrating old movies they’ve never heard of interspersed with awards being granted to movies they’ll never watch, the Academy Awards have alienated at least one lifelong die-hard Oscars fanatic: me.

It’s hard for me to think of someone I’d be less excited about seeing host the Oscars than Seth MacFarlane. Instead, I humbly present an abbreviated list of potential Oscar hosts I think would do a better job:

1. Miley Cyrus

2. Billy Ray Cyrus
3. James Franco in a wig made from Anne Hathaway’s Les Mis chop
4. Tom Brokaw after half an Ambien
5. A brigade of mimes from Cirque du Soleil
6. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon [The 90s are BACK, people!]
7. On that note, how about reuniting the dynamic duo of the 1994 Oscars:

Oprah. Uma.

8. The Oogieloves
9. Anne Curry

10. One of the lesser Kardashians
11. A fully-articlated Oscar statuette, played by Andy Serkis in mo-cap, IN 3D
12. The Romney Sons
13. The cast of The Avengers dressed as the “Let’s All Go to the Lobby” snacks

Sam Jackson can play the popcorn.

14. The cast of Magic Mike in fat suits, because LULZ

15. Jennifer Aniston handcuffed to Angelina Jolie
16. Suri Cruise with a Speak & Spell
17. Mrs. Knerr, my first grade teacher
18. This guy:

That blue bodybuilder dude from Prometheus

19. The reanimated corpse of Bob Hope
20. The reanimated corpse of [insert non-dead previous host, but not Billy Crystal, I like him]
21. Clint Eastwood, live via satellite from an empty furniture store
22. The Fandango lunch bag puppets
23. Daniel Day-Lewis in character as Lincoln and Bill Murray in character as FDR
24. The last five hosts of the Sci-Tech awards, mud wrestling
25. Jay Leno. I mean it: Jay. Leno. I would rather watch Jay Leno host the Oscars than Seth MacFarlane. Let that sink in. Think about what that means. Jay Leno would be better. Did you ever think those words would appear on the internet? Well there they are, and they are true.

—

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa. Her actual proposed Oscar host is Paul Rudd.

‘Seeking a Friend for the End of the World’: The Perfect Setting for a Manic Pixie Dream Girl Love Story

Steve Carell and Keira Knightley in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, from writer–director Lorene Scafaria (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), is a charming and oddly pleasant romantic comedy set against the backdrop of the last three weeks before the Earth is destroyed by an asteroid’s impact. Unfortunately, Seeking a Friend seems to have missed its cultural moment: it not only comes on the heels of 2011’s limited-perspective apocalypse dramas Melancholia and 4:44 Last Day on Earth, but it unironically presents a quintessential Manic Pixie Dream Girl in the year of her deconstruction, from Zoe Kazan’s Ruby Sparks to Parker Posey’s character Liz on the television series Louie. 2012 phenomena aside, Seeking a Friend feels like it ought to have come out around the turn of the millennium, the last time the cultural collective was fixated on The End. As it is, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World feels hopelessly dated and out-of-touch.

Steve Carell stars as the too-on-the-nose named Dodge, the Inhibited Sad Sack who needs Keira Knightley’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl Penny to deliver him from his lonely joyless life. Penny is 100 proof MPDG, from her introduction where she literally throws herself into Dodge’s arms through his apartment window when he checks in on her during a apocalypse/breakup-induced crying session on the fire escape, to her seemingly serious medical condition that’s presented as quirky and precious (hypersomnia); her misplaced priorities (fleeing her home as a rioting mob descends, she grabs as many vinyl records as she can carry and screams to the others, “Goodbye, Friends!”) to her improbably sunny disposition (when Dodge tries to prompt her to think of things she won’t miss about the world, she even finds sympathy for her dentist).

Keira Knightley as Penny

It is unusual to find such a classic Manic Pixie in a film written by a woman, but at least Scafaria crafts Penny so that she has her own motivation outside of fixing what’s left of Dodge’s life. After missing the last of the commercial flights to the UK where her family is, she agrees to help Dodge get to the home of his high school sweetheart in exchange for him taking her to “someone I used to know who has a plane.” In one of the most touching scenes, Penny is able to contact her family via satellite phone (cell service has been discontinued for reasons I didn’t quite understand), and in that moment she seems like a real person with a real history, completely independent from Dodge or any other man.

But for the rest of the film (most notably, the conclusion), Penny seems to exist to save the spirits of Dodge. If Seeking a Friend for the End of the World were just a touch more artful, I would surmise it was using setting to further deconstruct the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Because what better time to meet an Manic Pixie than the last two weeks before the apocalypse, when everyone is acting on hedonist impulses, and long term consequences are not a concern? At the end of most Manic Pixie Dream Girl films, the credits roll and the audience has to suppress cynical speculation as to how the rest of the MPDG and the Sad Sack’s relationship would play out, wondering how such a dynamic could possibly be sustained. As Seeking a Friend for the End of the World fades to white, we’re free from these doubts. Dodge and Penny’s whirlwind romance doesn’t have to work very hard to last until the end of time.

The Resident Evil Series Proves The Bechdel Test Does Not Measure Quality

Resident Evil DVD Cover

Feminist film discussion so often turns to the Bechdel Test—for the uninitiated, it asks if 1) a movie has more than one female character 2) if two female characters have a conversation 3) if that conversation is about something other than a man—that it is easy to forget the test is not meant to be a benchmark of quality. Passing the Bechdel Test does not make a movie good. It does not even make a movie particularly feminist. It’s a bare minimum requirement for movies at all interested in portraying women as part of its story.

I’d love it if more movies passed the Bechdel test, but don’t count on The Rule as the savior of cinema. Movies can easily pass the Bechdel test and be beyond terrible. Which is abundantly illustrated by the Resident Evil franchise; which releases its fifth installment, Resident Evil: Retribution, today. The first four Resident Evil films pass the Bechdel Test. They even pass the Sarkeesian Corollary—that women characters speak to each other about something other than a man for at least 60 seconds—which is fairly remarkable for action-heavy movies without much dialogue at all. The first four Resident Evil films also pass Alaya Dawn Johnson’s adaptation of the Bechdel test to evaluate the representation of people of color in movies.

[By the way, it’s very easy to pass the third prong of these tests when there’s a gender-neutral ZOMG ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE! to dominate conversation.]

Zombies: something to talk about

Additionally, the Resident Evil films pass what I would call The Ripley Test, in that many of the female characters’ gender is not essential to their character or to the plot, and a male character could have filled that “slot” just as easily. The series protagonist, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, was not a character in the video game series but was invented for the films.

The second film, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, starts bringing over characters from the game series, and notably chooses Jill Valentine, the female of the pair of main characters from the original game, over Chris Redfield, who doesn’t appear until the fourth movie (one film after his sister Claire appears as the leader of a band of surviving humans.) [Author’s note: I’ve never played the Resident Evil games and relied heavily on the Resident Evil Wiki to write this piece.]

Jill Valentine in Resident Evil video game and film

One could cynically dismiss the choice to create the character Alice and select Jill Valentine as one of the first crossover characters as the result of Hot Action Chicks putting butts in movie seats. They do both make incredibly impractical clothing decisions (or in the case of Alice in Resident Evil, have incredibly impractical clothing decisions made for them). But the first film also has Michelle Rodriguez as badass S.T.A.R.S (think S.W.A.T, but working for an evil corporation) officer Rain Ocampo, who could just have easily been another tough dude to leave Alice our Smurfette.

Michelle Rodriguez as Rain in Resident Evil

Resident Evil: Extinction finds Alice, Claire Redfield, and secondary female characters Betty and K-Mart (seriously) dressing and acting much more like people whose primary concern is avoiding grisly death by zombie attack, give or take a little eyeliner.

Spencer Locke as K-Mart and Ali Larter as Claire in Extinction

So the Resident Evil franchise does not have an inclusiveness problem. Unfortunately, it has a problem with pretty much everything else that makes a movie enjoyable: storytelling, logic, consistent mythology, characterization, visual finesse. Zombie genre inventor George A. Romero was fired from the first Resident Evil movie over “creative differences.” Firing Romero from your zombie movie is like firing Zeus from your thunderstorm. His absence is profoundly felt in the Resident Evil films’ total inability to make up their mind about their internal Rules of Zombification (Resident Evil‘s zombie apocalypse is caused by the spread of a biological weapon called the T-virus, which sometimes seems airborne and other times not so much, which when exposed to living tissue either causes superpowers or horrific mutations depending on the will of the plot, and sometimes causes your traditional death and subsequent reanimation as a zombie, or maybe a gigantic Super Zombie if we’ve reached the end of ~~a level~~ an act).

The Resident Evil movies would also have benefited from Romero’s transparency when it comes to social commentary: it’s one thing to have the primary antagonist be the gigantic and sinister Umbrella Corporation, but that lack of subtlety offers no help in understanding the actual meat of your message when Umbrella Corporation’s apparent corporate mission is to be as moustache-twirlingly eeeeevil as possible, rather than, you know, normal corporate goals like making money.

Warning: this teaser trailer is infinitely better than the actual movies.

But the main problem with the Resident Evil series unfortunately is one that severely undercuts is Bechdel-busting assets, and that is that series protagonist Alice is a total cipher. In every film she is re-set, like a video game character reverting to the start of the level. In the beginning of Resident Evil, she awakes (naked in the shower) with no memories. In Resident Evil: Apocalypse, she begins and ends the film waking up in Umbrella Corporation lab with new sets of superpowers as the subject of unknown experimentation.

Alice wakes up in an Umbrella Corporation lab. Get used to it, Alice.

In Resident Evil: Extinction, she’s revealed to be one of hundreds of Alice clones. In Resident Evil: Afterlife, all the clones are quickly killed off in a massive explosion, and the surviving Alice is somehow stripped over her superpowers, only to act more or less exactly as tough as she was when she still had them.

Before the consequences of any of these changes to the nature of Alice’s character can be explored, the series hits the reset button yet again. Meanwhile, Alice’s personality can bizarrely and dramatically shift at any time, and we’re supposed to dismiss it because she’s always just had her memories erased or been genetically modified or remotely activated by satellite or cloned or de-powered or something wackadoo and scifi like that.

While the Resident Evil movies make it abundantly clear that passing the Bechdel Test is not enough to make a movie any good, ultimately I must say I like this series more than I would if it were another male-dominated action franchise. It’s not like video game adaptations are generally known for nuanced characterization anyway. I know I’m going to keep watching these terrible flicks because I like zombie movies and action movies, and if I’m going to keep punishing myself with crap movies, it’s at least nice to see some what-passes-for-“characters” of my own gender represented some of the time. Representing women doesn’t necessarily make a movie any good, but it at least makes it a little different.