Kiss of the Spiderwoman would have been a better choice. I saw it at the cinema when it was first released, my Grandma didn't understand why I wanted to go see it, and then was skeptical when I pointed it it was a cinematic masterpiece. She thought we should stick to movies like First Blood instead.
What is it with Grandmas and movies.. Mine loved horror movies (mostly the Hammer ones), I remember when I was about 3 or 4 freaked out of my tiny skull watching The Beast Must Die with her....
She did love scifi as well and I got to see Star Wars twice with her.
Kiss of the Spiderwoman would have been a better choice.
Thankfully, there's always tomorrow. I got the feeling that Kiss was pretty depressing, too.
Back to the female superhero theme... There are already good female superheroes that don't have gender based origins that I think audiences would flock to see...
She-Hulk - she gets her powers by trying to help someone, and when she winds up stuck that way she doesn't whine. She embraces being smart, strong and a kick-ass. - and she doesn't have to wear a bikini to appeal to the audience!
Mystique - Duh! Already in how many movies? And yes, a hero! An independent ostracized shape-changer who owes no special allegiance to Prof X or Magneto, and fights for other mutants on her own terms.
...
By the by, I'm not too keen on Wonder Woman - the Themyscara (sp?)/Fantasy Island thing - again a gender based origin. Would we buy an island of men who shun all contact with "the world of women"?
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Kiss of the Spiderwoman would have been a better choice. I saw it at the cinema when it was first released, my Grandma didn't understand why I wanted to go see it, and then was skeptical when I pointed it it was a cinematic masterpiece. She thought we should stick to movies like First Blood instead.What is it with Grandmas and movies.. Mine loved horror movies (mostly the Hammer ones), I remember when I was about 3 or 4 freaked out of my tiny skull watching The Beast Must Die with her....
She did love scifi as well and I got to see Star Wars twice with her.
My grandmother loved slasher films. The cheesier the better.
She was also obsessed with Halloween. Every year she dressed up as a witch and read ghost stories to children at the local library.
Anyway, I'm thinking we could just take Jane Eyre and give the titular character the power to spray acid out of her eyeballs and then call it a day.
--Evil, misogynist men and orphanages: tick
--Oppression of young women and governesses: tick--Christian missionaries: tick
--Madwoman in the attic: tick
--Lord Rochester: dreamy
I'd give it the green light.
This is how you do it. A fun youtube short.
On a side note, seems that awesome granny's are a common theme.
Well, our heroine need a strong mentor-figure, but can't look to be running to mummy - so we go one generation further back. (Because everyone* loves their granny.)
*Not actually everyone - some grannies are the spawn of the devil - but definitely most people.
That's an awesome video.This is how you do it. A fun youtube short.
If it were an actual trailer, they would have so many happy fans right now.
Henri-Georges Clouzot: the French Hitchcock
Film snobby article that features one of my all-time faves: Le Salaire de la peur.
You have to click the CounterPunch link to get the full article, but the Unrepentant Marxist page has pictures and Youtube links, so I linked to that.
After holding New Hampshire's only post-verdict Trayvon rally (not often the NAACP follows the lead of a couple of commies), we retired back indoors for:
Moonrise Kingdom which I found absolutely delightful, even before Suzy broke out her Francoise Hardy record; and
Things To Come which I was a little bored by in the beginning, fell asleep, and woke up to some awesome 1936 sci-fi sets.
Kiss of the Spiderwoman would have been a better choice. I saw it at the cinema when it was first released, my Grandma didn't understand why I wanted to go see it, and then was skeptical when I pointed it it was a cinematic masterpiece. She thought we should stick to movies like First Blood instead.
Watched the first half and it was awesome. Hopefully will do the second half tomorrow.
Pardon the self-indulgent nostalgia:
He was a former member of a gay Maoist (I know, right?) New Left group in the seventies before he, himself, had been won over to Trotskyism.
Anyway, one day, the subject of movies came up and somehow The Shawshank Redemption got mentioned, and he was like "Yeah, that was okay, except for the homophobia." And I was like, "Really? I didn't think so." Blah blah blah. Anyone, he mentioned Kiss as a much better film about homosexuals in prison and it's quite the shame that it took me 20 years to finally see (half) of it.
Anyway, years later, he quit and, years later, I quit and I went to a couple of his poetry readings. He was pretty good, actually, and I even, one time, while [bubble bubble bubbled] showed him a few poems I had written and he said they weren't any good and I never wrote poetry again. F+!&ing snobby-assed ex-Trotskyites!!!
Kiss of the SpiderwomanWatched the first half and it was awesome. Hopefully will do the second half tomorrow.
[Sobs]
Hmm. Maybe.
I figured he was just doing the whole Comrade Dingo Troll thing.
How bad is it that the first time I read this I thought you wrote 'I figured he was just doing the whole Comrade Dingleberry thing.'?
Comrade Dingleberry is a valued member of the Goblin Resistance, Citizen Irnk, and I wish you wouldn't disrespect his name like that...
Anyway, Netflix sent a new, playable disc of Across 110th Street and, well, it had its moments, but it wasn't very good. Anthony Quinn and Yaphet Kotto do some black cop/white cop shtick that's like if you added The French Connection and In the Heat of the Night plus something I'm sure I'm missing. Meanwhile, gangsters and gangstas are shootin' up Harlem looking for the three bad brothas who dared knock over the Mob's numbers racket. The movie's two best scenes where was when the gravel-voiced guy who used to play Capt. Dobey on Starsky & Hutch, playing local playa Doc "Motherf*~@ing" Johnson verbally dresses down both the racist a@#~*~! Mafia boss andQuinn's drunken, corrupt, racist police captain.
Otoh, Theme Song
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Westworld was pretty good. Probably would've been better if I had some more of that good ol' [bubble bubble bubble].
Superhero movies are hard to make good in the first place, I mean I can count on one hand the number of superhero movies that I thought was good enough that I'd want to see the more than once (though there was a fair bunch that was like "oh, this was worth the time to see, but not going to redo that)... They also by their very nature are very focused on masculine heroism - what is considered a hero is set by male standards. Superheroes as they've been implemented since their conception has been basically male power fantasies.
It'd be hard to make a superhero movie with a character that feels like more than "superman with breasts" without falling to sexist clichés and stereotypes, because the very setup is so deeply founded in masculinity.
But when I think about female "superheroes" and similar that I consider good characters, I think about buffy, and then it kind of stops. There are other good characters that are female heroes but they rarely feel even similar to superheroes. Laura Roslin is an excellent character and saves the day many times, but she hardly feels like a superhero.
So she needs a nurturing superpower like healing, works delivering babies, and fights evil people who are cruel to animals and kids, and does so by making them see the error of their ways.
Good thing we avoided all the cliches!
So she needs a nurturing superpower like healing, works delivering babies, and fights evil people who are cruel to animals and kids, and does so by making them see the error of their ways.
Good thing we avoided all the cliches!
No, of course not! What I said was: "It'd be hard to make a superhero movie with a character that feels like more than "superman with breasts" without falling to sexist clichés and stereotypes, because the very setup is so deeply founded in masculinity."
Not that we should fall into the sexist cliches or that it was impossible.
Buffy is I think a good example of a hero with superpowers (though pretty low-tier superpowers) that is female but is more than "superman with breasts". There are of course many other good characters that are female, but they generally don't have superpowers... And they're rarely leads... But I mean characters like Rose Tyler, Olivia Dunham and Starbuck are all good characters, and looking to them and similar for inspiration can probably yield a lot.
In unrelated news, I caught Elektra on TV yesterday. It's still one of my favourite superhero movies.
Tumblr of someone talking about Sailor Moon as a female role model. Basically, the magical Girl genre is superhero stories designed to be relateable to young women. [spoilers for Puella Magi Madoka Magica]
I'm still having trouble with the boards. I can't access the Messageboards page (I blame the NSA) and have to enter threads through back doors, like going through my posts, or those boxes down at the bottom right on the last page of a thread. Which also means that I can't start new threads.
Which is all a roundabout way of saying: Karen Black, R.I.P.
Saw The World's End just now and it was awesome.
Rewatched Django Unchained sometime last weekend, and it was still awesome.
Inspired by Citizen Dragon's bile, I watched Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.
I followed that up with The Fearless Vampire Killers; Or, Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck.
Tumblr of someone talking about Sailor Moon as a female role model. Basically, the magical Girl genre is superhero stories designed to be relateable to young women. [spoilers for Puella Magi Madoka Magica]
That someone is Seanan McGuire, who incidentally is nominated for 5 different Hugos this year.
Stickin' with wicked feminist film directors, went for a little Sam Peckinpah and some Ride the High Country
Nothin' really feminist nor snobby this time, I am afraid.
Well, except for the first season of Downton Abbey, I guess, which was a little of both.
After that it was The Hobbit, again, and Young Frankenstein, which I am always amazed at how unfunny it is. But I do loves me some Terri Garr...
Costa-Gavras interviewed on Democracy Now! Taking on Capitalism, U.S. Torture & Dictatorships, Costa-Gavras on Decades of Political Filmmaking
Haven't been watching much high-brow stuff lately, I'm afraid, just a rewatch of The Hunger Games (Vive le Galt!) and, um, Zoolander.
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Sorry, LazarX, Donna effectively getting Fridged at the end (even if she's still alive) ruined it for me. Season 4 up until the end was probably my favorite season, and I can't even watch it now because I feel too angry about what I know will happen to Donna. I agree with everything you said about the great things they did with Donna as a companion and that's exactly why she shouldn't have been treated the way she did---it wasn't just that she effectively had all of her character development erased, it's that they did it all just to make 10 feel sad. It had nothing to do with her at all. If she had, say, died a heroic death where the focus was really on her and where she came from and the amazing things she did, and she died knowing how absolutely amazing she was and became, I would have much more happier, actually, with the outcome. But Russel T. Davies didn't have the balls to give us that real awesome whopper of a tragic ending, and was too obsessed with the awesome of the Doctor and made it about him instead of her. I'm too emotional about the whole thing to feel assuaged by others' POV, sorry--I'm glad you can reconcile it, but just thinking about the whole thing just makes me feel furious. I doubt my perception of the situation will budge for a very long time. It's too hard to detach.
Don Juan... Downton Abbey does some pretty awesome explorations of womens' roles in society and features many very strong women (each in their own way). It's this kind of truly strong women that you need to see more of in other genres---women who are smart, stubborn, stand up for themselves, both emotionally and intellectually very powerful characters. For the kind of stuff you can find on Masterpiece theater, Call the Midwife and The Bletchley Circle also is focused on women and the characters really are quite fabulous.
The latter is about women who were codebreakers in World War II, then had to sign the Official Secrets Act so nobody could know of the amazing things they did, and had to try to go back to "normal" life. They get caught up trying to solve a murder, as they are able to use their skills to recognize the murderer's pattern of behavior and use the Power of Math to track him down. The last of the first three episodes is very uneven and you kind of want to hit the main character for suddenly being a bit done, but it's still a GREAT concept, and it's supposed to go into a second series which I hope will take its strengths and make it better. It's a lot of crimesolvey stuff of course but there's a bit of action.... now if we could throw those ideas into something modern day and add a dash more action that could make for an awesome premise for a female-driven action film.
Don Juan... Downton Abbey does some pretty awesome explorations of womens' roles in society and features many very strong women (each in their own way). It's this kind of truly strong women that you need to see more of in other genres---women who are smart, stubborn, stand up for themselves, both emotionally and intellectually very powerful characters.
I am halfway through Season 2. When Branson told Lady Sibyl that Sylvia Pankhurst wasn't going to let a little thing like interimperialist war stop her from demonstrating for suffrage, I clenched my fist and shouted "Vive le Galt!"
This is how you do it. A fun youtube short.
I'm really unconvinced that a guy dressed in a wig to do the fight scenes really cuts it.
In a world where we have the likes of Gina Carano in Haywire where she convincingly does all her own fights, cross-dressing the role should be confined to history. She'd smack up Jason Bourne without mussing her make-up.
I need to confer with Comrade Anklebiter, but I believe Catherine Tate might well be up for a OHWFA award.
Three movies this time, none, I don't think, which would pass the Bechdel test:
Empire of the Sun
Which was grimmer than your usual Spielberg, but not quite as grim as Ballard, I thought. I think I saw this as a child (I would've been 10 or 11 when it came out, although I think I saw it at my uncle's house on HBO--they got cable way earlier than we did) and I was surprised at how much I remembered.
The Troll Hunter, which I quite enjoyed.
The Dead which I was kinda excited about, being a zombie movie in Burkina-Faso, but it was pretty boring.
Finally, Downton Abbey, Season 2 which probably did pass the Bechdel test.
Empire of the Sun was excellent, wasn't what I expected when I saw it on release at the cinema; indeed it was so much more.
Two more films that are certain to fail the Bechdel test:
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot: Any movie with George Kennedy is worth watching.
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man: Mickey Rourke, Don Johnson, Tia Carrerre, Vanessa Williams? And an opening credit sequence cut to Bon Jovi's "Wanted: Dead or Alive"? I thought it was pretty awesome, actually, although, I admit, I was pretty high.
I wonder if I will ever see a movie that passes the Bechdel test again?
Gave The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus another viewing. That Lily Cole is quite a dish, huh?
Howl: That James Franco is quite a dish, huh? I liked it quite a bit, but then again, I'm a pretty big Ginsberg fan.
Hobo with a Shotgun: At first I thought this one passed because a nurse talked to the female lead, but then I realized that the nurse didn't have a name. And, at first, I thought the female lead was a pretty strong character, but, of course, she was also a prostitute. Regardless, I enjoyed the film.
Picked up a couple of films for a buck a piece at the Goodwill the other day, Rio Bravo and The Dirty Dozen. I don't think either of them are going to pass the Bechdel test, either...
The Bechdel test is worthy of failure, as it is flawed so badly it deserves only mocking and derision.
The Bechdel test was an amusing page in a comic book about a lesbian who hadn't seen a film since Alien.
Suckerpunch passes the Bechdel test with flying colours, you know.
Suckerpunch passes the Bechdel test with flying colours, you know.
Well, to be fair, Suckerpunch was the hight of pro-female storytelling. It wouldn't be fair to measure everything else against that sort of standard.
Yet it was still universally slagged for being exploitative to women.
Empire of the Sun is brilliant.
Harley Davidson & The Marlboro Man, sit in my list of movies that I shouldn't like but l do, some of the movies on that list include The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Tango & Cash, and The Last Boyscout.
Yet it was still universally slagged for being exploitative to women.
I think I gave it a C. Or a C-. Hmm, lemme go see...
Actually, I gave it a B, but only because it had so many hawt chicks.
OHWFA!