Tag: Women in Film

Ten Years of Oscar-Winning Films: In Posters

We’re coming up on that wonderful time of year when all the studios release their most worthy Best Picture Oscar contenders. This year, we’re in store for such films as the all-star cast of the musical Nine, Scorcese’s Shutter Island, and Eastwood’s Invictus, which have all picked up early Oscar buzz, as have more independent films, like A Serious Man, An Education, and The Tree of Life. So, we thought that, in honor of the upcoming onslaught, we’d take a look at the past ten years of the Academy Award-winning films for Best Picture.

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American Beauty: 2000


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Gladiator: 2001


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A Beautiful Mind: 2002


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Chicago: 2003


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The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: 2004


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Million Dollar Baby: 2005


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Crash: 2006


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The Departed: 2007


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No Country For Old Men: 2008


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Slumdog Millionaire: 2009

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What do these films have in common?

American Beauty: A man narrates the film, has a midlife crisis, and attempts to seduce and/or rape a potentially underage high school student.

Gladiator: A man in captivity avenges the murder of his wife and son by murdering their murderer.

A Beautiful Mind: A man at the height of his genius suffers from schizophrenia.

Chicago: A singing and dancing man attempts to save singing and dancing female inmates from death row.

The Lord of the Rings: Men go on a quest.

Million Dollar Baby: A man narrates the film, telling the story of his friend’s attempt to train and manage a determined female boxer.

Crash: A cast of characters—male and female—illustrates our society’s inability to distinguish between racism and prejudice.

The Departed: Men violently kill one another.

No Country For Old Men: A hired hitman goes on a killing spree with a captive bolt pistol.

Slumdog Millionaire: A man participates in a televised game-show, thinking it will help him find his long-lost love.

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I’m interested to see how the 2010 Academy Awards Ceremony will choose to honor this year’s films, especially now that they’ve bumped up the number of Best Picture nominees to ten instead of five. With the amount of women-centered and/or directed films this year—Julie & Julia, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, Bright Star, Amelia, and The Hurt Locker, to name a few—I hope women will feel some of the Academy love. Don’t forget to check back in February for analysis of the ten Best Picture nominees!

Movie Review: Pirate Radio

*This guest post also appears at Shakesville.

I saw Pirate Radio last night, and had one of those experiences where you can only really enjoy yourself if you turn half your brain off and pretend you’re not getting the messages that are clearly being sent.
Early in Pirate Radio, just as I idly wondered where all of the women were, one of the characters refers to the only woman present with surprise. “I thought there were no women allowed on board…” And it is explained to him that an excuse is made for the cook, because she is a lesbian.
That is all the explanation deemed necessary for the total exclusion of women from the world of Pirate Radio, except as sex partners, mothers, food preparers, or avid audience-members. I have no trouble believing that the world of Pirate Radio in the sixties largely excluded women, but I didn’t expect to find a movie so gleeful about the wonderland of boy bonding and camaraderie that, the movie posits, is only possible in a world where women are only allowed on board every other Saturday in order to provide sex.
The movie veers into an early scene of near-rape played for laughs as well. One of the successful DJs, feeling sympathetic toward a younger man because of his virginity, tries to trick his date for the night into having sex with the other man while the lights are turned off. He hopes that she won’t notice the switch, in spite of a huge size differential between the two men. The scene is played entirely from their perspective, and while the younger man doesn’t get near enough to the woman to touch her, there is a “ho ho ho, so funny my sides might split” scene in which the lights unexpectedly go on, and she screams as she finds herself alone in a room with a naked stranger. I was left with a queasy feeling at the end of that scene, wondering if this was what the whole movie would be.

While the movie doesn’t play rape for laughs again, the only other two love interest characters who appear are betrayers and interlopers in boyland. One woman, while waiting for a man to find a condom, ends up sleeping with someone more famous because she finds him impressive. Another comes onboard to marry one DJ, without telling him that she’s only doing it in order to sleep with someone else on the ship. I can imagine the first case happening in real life: When women have sexual agency they will sometimes decide to sleep with someone other than the person they start out an evening with. I can’t imagine a context for the inexplicable cruelty of the second case though, and since she represents roughly one quarter of all women in this film, it is easy to assume that the film is endorsing the idea that all relationships with women are suspect, and only relationships between men are noble and pure.

More than anything, I wonder why the film felt it necessary to revel in the sexism of the world that it depicts. These men are not actually great rebels if they really expect women to be content providing sex and food. There may have been many great things about sixties Pirate Radio, but the exclusion of women was not one of those things, and the film would have been more effective if it had taken pains to include women rather than shrugging its shoulders early on and trying to opt out of the subject.
I had a discussion with my husband after the film, and pointed out that most women perceive themselves as the protagonists of their own lives, not as an avid audience for men as they play out their stories. My experience throughout my life when watching movies like this has been to desperately try to find a place for myself among the male characters. How can I be Phillip Seymour Hoffman? There is no space for women in this movie, so how do I rewrite the movie so I can fit myself in? I’ve been doing it for so long that it is almost natural to me, but I think it’s time that it stopped.

The sad thing about this film is that I could have really enjoyed it otherwise. As I was watching it I wondered why I was feeling so fatigued, and I realized it was because it was yet another time that I was expected to happily stand in the sidelines and watch boys have lots of fun. That’s such a bummer to me nowadays that I can’t even pretend to be enthused anymore.

It wouldn’t have been difficult for filmmakers to do a better job than this. One can acknowledge the sexism of an age while still admitting the personhood, value, and contributions of women. Beyond just their ability to cook up a tasty meal, I mean. My gleeful exclusion from this film turned what should have been a charming experience into another bitter pill. It’s not 1967 anymore. I’m ready to throw those pills away.

Eileen Hunter has an MA in English and is working on an MLIS. She lives in California with her cat, husband, and daughter.

‘Obvious Child’: Short Film Review

Obvious Child made its way around the blogosphere last month, but I just watched it today. Here are some general thoughts.

Abortion is a legal medical procedure, and it’s presented as such in this film. That alone is a welcome change–as others have stated–from recent film and television. Obvious comparisons have been made to Knocked Up and Juno, as both completely failed in their representations of options for a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy (the former refusing to even speak the word abortion, and the latter representing a dumpy and disturbing clinic).

The star of Obvious Child, Donna (played by Jenny Slate), is a freelancer who lives in hipster Brooklyn. Others have mentioned the “indie sensibility” of the film, and Donna is the kind of privileged hipster many of us love to hate–and she’s a little bit like Juno in this regard, with toned-down dialogue and ten years added. She has an immature sense of humor (her use of “fart-face” and “fucktard” come to mind), and she just wants to go out and have a good time after the ugly end of her two-year relationship with Joe.

But her maturity level is kind of the point. She is an obvious child. Not a woman who is ready to bring a child into the world. It’s okay that she’s childish, because she’s mature enough to recognize where she is in life, and what her priorities are. She might be a tad immature, but she’s smart and independent. What could have been a self-destructive one-night-stand was handled about as responsibly as possible, and when she learned of her pregnancy she didn’t break down. She handled it.

There are some weaknesses in the film. Donna’s phone conversation with her mother–which was the ethical high point of the film–fell flat. I like that little was made of the revelation–and comparison–of abortion pre- and post-Roe, but the acting left something to be desired. And, there is the whole privileged-white-hipster-with-easy-access-to-a-clinic issue. While the tone and tenor of the humor isn’t my favorite, I like the film and its smart, sweet nature.

Read what Jezebel, Reproductive Health Reality Check, Feministing, and Bitch have to say, and share your thoughts with us!

 

Obvious Child from Gillian Robespierre on Vimeo.

Whip It: Ripley’s Pick


*This guest post also appears at I Will Not Diet.

I finally saw Whip It this weekend, and I have to say that the movie did not disappoint. I had low expectations because some people we trust had told us they didn’t like the film. I always think it’s better to go into the theatre with low expectations than high ones anyway because it makes it easier to enjoy yourself if you’re not sitting there thinking something like, I thought this was going to be the greatest movie ever made, but this dialogue is awful!


Maybe the movie was a little bit silly and predictable (and possibly not an accurate depiction of roller derby life), but, like I said, since I had low expectations, I didn’t even notice.

Because to me it didn’t feel predictable as much as relatable, and it didn’t seem silly as much as youthful and fresh. And the story is stand-up-and-cheer inspiring: teenage Bliss (played with loads of empathy and huge Bambi eyes by Juno‘s Ellen Page) has no agency or direction in life (and nothing that really makes her happy) until she sees two roller derby teams in nearby Austin shove it out one fateful night. After trying out for one team, she develops into a derby prodigy named Babe Ruthless who has as much drive and discipline as an Olympic athlete. In this way, it’s a wonderful girl empowerment story that will join the ranks of films like Girlfight and Bend it Like Beckham before it.


But the reason I’m writing about the film is because I couldn’t help but notice that all of the actors looked so darned real, which I absolutely loved. They were all different shapes and sizes—Ellen Page’s Bliss was an adorable little french fry of a girl while her best friend Pash was a lovely roller coaster of valleys and curves. It was a much needed reprieve from the model thin blonde archetype we normally see on the big screen, especially in movies that are supposedly marketed towards women.

And the girls on the various roller derby teams were similarly diverse—sure, Drew Barrymore was in phenomenal shape, but some of the others—Kristin Wiig and Juliette Lewis included—looked their age and sported imperfect stomachs, thighs, and arms without an ounce of shame or self-consciousness. (It’s hard to be self-conscious, I suppose, when you’re skating around a roller rink wearing a short pleated skirt, a sleeveless, stomach-baring top, and fishnet stockings.)

But it wasn’t just their bodies that looked imperfect—it was also their hair (sometimes stringy or uninspired), their makeup (often greasy and overdone), and their skin (blemished on some occasions and wrinkled on others).

Of course, I credit the female director, Drew Barrymore, with keeping these women from looking artificial and plastic while still allowing them to look attractive and even hot. It makes perfect sense to me that it was Barrymore—an actress who’s gone through a variety of looks and dress sizes over the years—who felt comfortable letting these women look so true-to-life. In that way, the direction feels both emotionally and physically honest. And the movie is clearly better for it.

For when Babe Ruthless and her cohorts take to the rink, it’s incredibly easy for those of us sitting in the audience to cheer for them because they look a lot more like us than most of the women we see staring back at us from that giant movie screen—more authentic than artificial, more lifelike than fantasy, more likeable than distasteful.

So I applaud Barrymore and her talented crew of actresses for baring not only their wonderfully diverse bodies but also their middle-aged and appealingly flawed faces.

And I encourage all of you to support Barrymore—and all female directors by extension—by taking your daughters and nieces to see this film (either now while it’s still in the theatre or later on DVD). After all, if we don’t support women who give us what we want, we have only ourselves to blame.

Molly McCaffrey teaches English and creative writing at Western Kentucky University. Her blog, I Will Not Diet, chronicles her effort to lose weight without unhealthy dieting and encourages readers to reject the notion that curvy women are not attractive. She has been nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in Vestal Review, Word Salad, Cairn, Gravity Hill, Antipodes, Quirk, XX Eccentric: Stories about the Eccentricities of Women, and Gilmore Girls and the Politics of Identity.

A List, An Archive, and Some Wishes

Today I’m posting some great links to things other people wrote. Enjoy!

  • Melissa at Women & Hollywood has created a “highlight reel” of some of her best posts. This is must-read material for anyone interested in movies and the role women play in (making) them. Help her celebrate her 1000th post by sending a donation.
  • The IFC has created a list of the 50 Best Movie Trailers. I’d spend all day watching them if I could. What’s your favorite?

Netflix Find Your Voice Film Competition

Via Women & Hollywood.

Visit Netflix, watch clips, and vote for your favorite in their Find Your Voice Film Competition.

Netflix and Film Independent are looking for the next great independent filmmaker and we want you to chime in.

Ten filmmakers were chosen from thousands of applicants from around the country to submit a short video for public vote.

The winning filmmaker receives $150,000 cash production grant, plus turnkey resources like film stock, processing, camera rental, and post-production services, for a total prize value of more than $350,000.

Four of the ten filmmakers are women. Watch the video clips and vote for your favorites.

Misogyny Still Reigns at the Box Office

Despite its abysmal reviews, Transformers: Rise of the Fallen took home the top spot at the box office over the weekend.

Here are some highlights from Rotten Tomatoes:

“It’s a wad of chaos puked onto the big screen, an arbitrary collection of explosions and machismo posturing.” –David Cornelius, eFilmCritic.com

“Will insult your intelligence, hurt your eyes, and offend your sense of decency until you worry that your skull might explode while your brain trickles right out of your ears.” –Tricia Olszewski, Washington City Paper

“A perfectly dreadful sequel that’s the filmic equivalent of a 150-minute waterboarding session.”

–Matt Brunson, Creative Loafing

“Put in your earplugs and grab the aspirin. Enjoyable for the [sic] only the easiest to please 10-year-old boys; this deafening, tiresome epic is a skull-splitting hot mess for everyone else.”
–Diva Velez, TheDivaReview.com

And, my personal favorite: “Only an a*****e could have made this film.” –Rob Humanick, House Next Door

I share these snippets to illustrate, if you weren’t already aware, that this movie was clearly made for, and marketed to, young fanboys who like to watch shit blow up. But what else do they like to see? If you guessed “Megan Fox dry-humping a motorcycle,” you are correct.

In a recent interview, Fox told reporters, “Women in movies, in general, are sexy—especially in Michael’s movies. And if you want to make movies that people want to see, that’s part of it. That’s part of the formula.”

The director, Michael Bay, also chimed in. Referencing the shot of Fox sprawled across a motorcycle in hot pants and biker boots, he says, “We got that first shot out of the way, just to get it out for the young boys … and moved on.”

So, according to Fox (and Bay), making movies people want to see entails objectifying and exploiting women. And what’s worse, Fox goes on to say that making these Transformer films and gaining so much exposure (for her hotness) has opened up many doors for her—she’ll soon star in one film opposite John Malkovich and another film penned by Diablo Cody.

This rhetoric reminds me an awful lot of other excuses actresses have made for the roles they choose. Katherine Heigl famously called Knocked Up a sexist film, and then went on to star in a slew of women-friendlier movies, such as The Ugly Truth and 27 Dresses.

And Elizabeth Banks often finds herself in the same predicament: “‘You can go be in a female-driven indie and make two cents and maybe get an Independent Spirit Award, but then you can’t pay your car lease,'” she says. “‘So Vince Vaughn makes movies, he needs a girl to be in it with him, it might be me.'”

I understand and sympathize with actresses in today’s Hollywood climate. Studios continue to argue that actresses can’t open movies, that any successful women-centered film (Sex & the City, Mamma Mia!) is merely a fluke, and that they don’t find it profitable enough to continue greenlighting movies that exclusively focus on women.

I get that it’s a rough climate out there for young actresses especially, but I’m not exactly sure what the solution is. We need more women filmmakers, obviously. And we especially need women audiences to stop seeing every single ridiculous incarnation of The Proposal and He’s Just Not That Into You. While I don’t want to play into the blame-the-victim ideology, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for these actresses to take themselves a little more seriously as actresses and a little less seriously as male fantasies.

Making blatantly misogynistic films clearly pays the bills for them, but at what cost to women as a whole?