Tag Archives: movies

March 29, 2013 · 5:22 pm

Recommended Viewing

By request, here’s the complete list of recommended movies and television for the Re-Education Project. Just a reminder, these are not endorsements, or even necessarily “great” movies. I asked the Internet (well, my Internet) for recommendations of movies and TV that are defining, genre-challenging, game-changing, emblematic, problematic, or representative of depictions of women/gender/feminism/sex. I want to contextualize what I currently see and watch with some of their important predecessors, and these were your suggestions. Thank you!

Anything with an asterisk is on Netflix Watch Instant!

Television:

  • Ozzie and Harriet (1952)
  • The Jackie Gleason Show (1952)
  • Father Knows Best (1954)
  • Leave it to Beaver (1957)*
  •  that girlThat Girl (1966)
  • Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970)
  • All in the Family (1971)
  • Maude (1972)
  • The Jeffersons (1975)
  • Laverne and Shirley (1976)
  • The Cosby Show (1984)
  • Golden Girls (1985)
  • Roseanne (1988)
  • Murphy Brown (1988)
  • Prime Suspect (1991)*
  • Living Single (1993)
  • X-Files (1993)*
  • Xena  (1995)*
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997)*buffy
  • Farscape (1999)
  • Girlfriends (2000)
  • Alias (2001)*
  • Ellen (not the talk-show) (2001)
  • Firefly (2002)*
  • The L Word (2004)*
  • Veronica Mars (2004)
  • Damages (2007)*
  • Dollhouse (2009)*
  • Lost Girl (2010)*

Movies:

  • Morocco (1930)
  • Sylvia Scarlett (1935)
  • Streetcar Named Desire (1951)streetcar
  • Calamity Jane (1953)
  • Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
  • Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)*
  • Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)
  • The Taming of the Shrew (1967)
  • The Stepford Wives (1975)
  • Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)
  • I Spit on Your Grave (1978)*
  • Norma Rae (1979)
  • 9 to 5 (1980)*
  • Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980)
  • The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982)*
  • Tootsie (1982)
  • Silkwood (1983)
  • Yentl (1983)
  • The Color Purple (1985)
  • Aliens (1986)
  • Fatal Attraction (1987)
  • Baby Boom (1987)
  • Big Business (1988)
  • Working Girl (1988)working girl
  • Bull Durham (1988)
  • Steel Magnolias (1989)*
  • When Harry Met Sally (1989)
  • Thelma and Louise (1991)
  • Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)
  • A League of Their Own (1992)*
  • Sleepless in Seattle (1993)*
  • Natural Born Killers (1994)
  • Boys on the Side (1995)
  • The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
  • Jackie Brown (1997)*jackie
  • Elizabeth (1998)
  • All I Wanna Do (1998)
  • 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
  • Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999)
  • But I’m a Cheerleader! (1999)
  • Erin Brockovich (2000)
  • Chocolat (2000)
  • Riding in Cars with Boys (2001)
  • Anita and Me (2002)
  • Bend it Like Beckham (2002)
  • Whale Rider (2002)
  • Mona Lisa Smile (2003)*
  • House of Flying Daggers (2004)
  • Brick Lane (2007)
  • Becoming Jane (2007)
  • Caramel (2007)
  • Persepolis (2007)
  • Juno (2007)
  • The Duchess (2008)
  • I Spit on Your Grave (2010)
  • Easy A (2010)

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March 26, 2013 · 9:15 pm

Update on the Re-education Project

The view from the Sixth Floor Museum, in Dallas. See those green signs? That's about where Kennedy's car was when he was shot.

The view from the Sixth Floor Museum, in Dallas. See those green signs? That’s about where Kennedy’s car was when he was shot.

Apologies for the radio silence, mi amors. I’ve been in Texas complaining about the weather (I was cheated out of my 75 and sunny!), eating, and weeping at the Sixth Floor Museum (in the building from which Kennedy was shot).

You guys are seriously the best. Last week, I put out the call for movie/TV suggestions to help launch my “re-education project”  in which I try to round out my knowledge of historical on-screen portrayals of the ladies. The suggestions were fantastic and I’m just about ready to quit my job and sit in front of netflix all day. Later this week, I’ll list out all of the suggestions in case you want to undertake your own watch-a-thon.

Let’s talk about Waitress. This wasn’t even supposed to be an official part of the project; I had it filed away in my head as cutesy romance about a pregnant pie maker and her OB. Wow was I wrong. I mean, I’m not entirely wrong, that is what it’s about, but it’s about so much more! This is a feminist movie. About pie. And pregnancy. And romance. This proves, once again, that feminism is not about shitting on pies or babies, but is instead about thinking critically about what choices we afford people, what assumptions we make, and how gendered expectations can limit opportunity.

Waitress, if you don’t know, was a film written and directed by Adrienne Shelly (who was murdered in 2006), about a small-town diner waitress, Jenna, stuck in an abusive marriage. It could have been a heavy-handed film about domestic violence, capital D, capital V. Instead, it’s a sweet, silly, beautiful movie that also happens to capture some truths about domestic abuse that we are all very good at ignoring.

I happened to spend my Texas weekend with a friend who is a domestic violence counselor and she agreed that Waitress, through it’s humor and likability, is able to get at some of the insidious, less acknowledged components of abusive relationships. So many people say to her, why don’t these women just leave? Money is often the culprit, as it is with Jenna, who addresses “how lonely it is to be so poor and so afraid.”

waitressHer husband, Earl, is also not the caricature of an abuser we often see. He is not outright mean and aggressive, but controls Jenna through manipulation and subtle threats. He keeps her money so she won’t have other options. He undermines her confidence with casual insults. He tells her exactly what to say, and how to say it, forcing her to repeat to him the words he wants to hear. He also cries against her pregnant belly. He is weak and insecure, and he hides his insecurity behind faux swagger. He says things like:

“After everything I’ve done for you…”

“I provide for you. I put the clothes on your back, the roof over your head.”

“You’re the only thing I’ve ever loved.”

“You belong to me.”

“Ask me how was my day. Ask me like you mean it.”

Not all abuse looks like a black eye. Waitress also acknowledges the extremely precarious position Jenna’s pregnancy forces her into. Take Jenna’s observation about her unborn baby:

It’s an alien and a parasite. It makes me tired and weak. It complicates my whole life. I resent it. I don’t know how to take care of it.

It’s frank, it’s candid. She later says to her friend, “Not everybody wants to be a mama, Dawn, that doesn’t make me a bad person.” These are poor women. They are uneducated women. They are diner waitresses who expect to be diner waitresses forever, because there are no other choices. The ending of the movie (Spoiler Alert) also reinforces how trapped they are. Jenna is given a whopping financial gift from a dying customer and is able to rescue herself and her baby from her situation. It’s a fairytale, but through the transparent rosy glow of Jenna’s happy ending, it’s all the more evident how few happy endings real women in her position would have.

So yeah, it’s a movie about pie. There are lots of pastel colors, and Cheryl Hines cracking jokes, and Nathan Fillion looking dashing. But really, it’s a movie about what happens when you’re trapped and how hard we’ve made it to rescue yourself.

Related Post: Another great feminist movie, For a Good Time Call…

Related Post: Beasts of the Southern Wild

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February 21, 2013 · 3:46 am

Bechdel 101

alisonanddrawingI was out to dinner last week with two new friends who are awesome, smart, talented, progressive in-the-know feminist ladies. Like seriously, they are rock stars. We were talking politics and media, gender studies and feminism (you know, the $1 taco usual), and I mentioned the Bechdel Test. In response, I got blank stares. It was a great reminder that even in a community where we know our values align so well, there are often tools and memes, instruments and concepts that don’t permeate from group to group.

I’ve written about the Bechdel Test before, but I think it’s worth recapping in honor of the upcoming Oscars. This is one of those “lightbulb” moments in my own education, one of those ideas that, once it had been gifted to me, permanently colored everything I watch. For you visual learners, Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency has a great overview, but here’s mine:

History Lesson: From 1983 to 2008 Alison Bechdel wrote a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For that followed an array of queer characters through twenty-five years of relationship drama, parenting, and political upheaval. In one panel of a 1985 DTWOF, a character created a “rule” to gauge gender bias in movies. The rule has three parts:

1. There have to be two female characters with names

2. They have to talk to each other…

3. About something other than a man.

That is an offensively low bar. It doesn’t say anything about how women are portrayed in film, it just tests the most basic presence of ladies on screen. Are they there? Do they have a teensy, tiny bit of substance (i.e. names?). Do they have some non-man related agency? The bar is so low, we should all be shocked when a film doesn’t pass it, and yet, here are a few 2012 movies that don’t pass: Battleship, The Avengers, The Campaign, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit, Jack Reacher, Life of Pi…

Putting It Into Practice: Take Lincoln, for example. The only conversation between women in this movie is a brief comment by Mary Todd Lincoln to her companion Elizabeth Keckley, but the comment is only about Representative Stevens’ speech. In other words, they’re talking about a man.

Another Oscar nominee, Django Unchained, also fails the test. The primary female character, Kerry Washington, never speaks substantially with any of the other minor female characters.

Remember, the point with the Bechdel Test is not to create some sort of false parity just for the sake of parity. Lincoln and Django are both set in male-dominated environments (Congress and the American West, respectively). You don’t fake female Congresswomen or add a token lady bounty hunter, that’s not the point. The point is that the female characters are not decoration, are not foils or objects. They have agency, autonomy, and lives that clearly exist independently from the male characters on screen. When the women exist only as backboards for male characters to react to, use, rescue, lust after, or discuss, they are not real characters; they are props.

The Bechdel Test doesn’t check for feminism in movies, or equality, or progressive values. It doesn’t ensure that women are treated well, or fairly, only that they are treated as human at all. Why is this important? Half of humankind is female, but the stories that get told (the movies that get made, etc) are overwhelmingly male in both subject and execution. There is nothing wrong with male-dominated movies (many of them are great films), but there is something wrong with a pattern of creative output that ignores female stories or female voices.

Want to try? Start applying the Bechdel Test to everything you watch (television and movies). You may find some things that pass on a technicality, but the exercise of asking yourself these questions is valuable in and of itself.

Related Post: Does Parks and Rec out feminist The Good Wife?

Related Post: Is Parks and Rec the most feminist show on television?

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January 13, 2013 · 7:56 pm

Sunday Scraps 90

sunday90

1. HOLLYWOOD: It’s the piece everyone was talking about this week, so if you missed it, play catch-up with the Lindsay Lohan/James Deen/Bret Easton Ellis/”The Canyons” how-the-sausage-is-made essay.

2. INDEX: This is Indexed blogger/writer/drawer Jessica Hagy is interviewed for Fast Company about how she found her 3×5 sized internet niche.

3. WRITERS: The Rumpus interviews Zadie Smith about her novel NW, and why she doesn’t write autobiographically.

4. TINA + AMY: How pumped are you for tonight’s Golden Globes hosting-duo? Not enough? Get more so with NYMag’s recap of their friendship.

5. INDIA: I can’t even begin to describe how dead-on this opinion piece by Sohaila Abdulali is, so I’m just going to quote it: “Rape is horrible. But it is not horrible for all the reasons that have been drilled into the heads of Indian women. It is horrible because you are violated, you are scared, someone else takes control of your body and hurts you in the most intimate way. It is not horrible because you lose your “virtue.” It is not horrible because your father and your brother are dishonored. I reject the notion that my virtue is located in my vagina, just as I reject the notion that men’s brains are in their genitals.”

6. FRIDA: A closet full of Frida Kahlo’s personal items has been locked and guarded for 85 years and has just now been opened and explored.

Related Post: Sunday 89: Avalanches, Mr. Wright, pickpockets and Matt + Ben Forever.

Related Post: Sunday 88: Russian gymnasts, the Rockaways, origins of “doubt”, Moloch

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November 29, 2012 · 6:25 pm

Raunch Humor and Feminism

Today’s Role/Reboot piece was inspired by my dissatisfaction with Bachelorette, the Lizzy Caplan/Kirsten Dunst/Isla Fisher/Rebel Wilson wedding comedy that I was so looking forward to.

I watched it by myself, which might be why it made me so sad, but I just couldn’t find the heart under the coke, vomit, and mean-girl one-liners. On the one hand, I want women to be allowed to behave “badly” on screen–I think it’s humanizing compared to the many one-dimensional, shellacked, lingerie-sporting sidekicks we often see,–on the other hand, what’s the difference between this and Real Housewives? Women treat each other like crap, friendship is mostly a platform to act out your envy, and filling the gaps in your happiness with drugs and sex is normal.

I think Bachelorette was supposed to have more substance, but it felt told instead of shown. You drove your friend to the abortion clinic? That must mean you care about each other. Too bad nothing you do reflects that you like each other, much less any deep wells of emotion.

Anyway, I was thinking about the relationship between potty humor, raunch culture, and feminist media, which is what inspired this, which is mostly about Bridesmaids and not Bachelorette, but whatever…

Related Post: Why this Emmy season rocked for women.

Related Post: Does The Good Wife out-feminist Parks and Rec?

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November 5, 2012 · 9:24 pm

Don’t go see Cloud Atlas

You know what’s the worst (besides global warming, poverty, rape jokes, and Mitt Romney)? When Hollywood ruins a book you love, pulverizing whatever is subtle and delicate about it into a pulpy, preachy mess.

I loved Cloud Atlas. It wasn’t a perfect book, a desert-island book, or a book that I will pass on to my children, but it was a book that I loved for the few weeks I spent burrowing up in its six nested stories. It was complicated, and it asked me, the reader, to do some serious work. I’m a fan of a good YA novel every now and then, something to blow through to distract myself from mundane shit like the future of our country, but I like a book that doesn’t just deliver the goods with a 7th-grade vocabulary.

Cloud Atlas is an adult book about, not to be dramatic or anything, the very essence of humanity. Where the book gives you patterns and correlating stories and lets you come to your own conclusions about that essence of humanity, the movie voices-over the most simplistic, dumbed-down platitudes. God forbid you leave theater not knowing that, dramatic pause, we’re all connected.

Forget big picture, the Wachowskis missed the mark logistically, too. The novel unfolds with the six stories in a simple A,B,C,D,E,F,F,E,D,C,B,A pattern, beginning and ending with the same characters. The movie, on the other hand, ricochets every nine seconds. Before you’ve had a chance to reacclimate, they’ve moved on. Similarly, in an effort to maintain continuity they cast the same actors over and over again for each segment. Imagine Halle Berry in white face and green contact lenses as a 1930s Jew, or Jim Sturgess with artificially created slanted eyes to make him look Korean. Yeah, not good.

Oh, and did I mention it’s over three hours? Yeah, you can read half the book in that amount of time! Do it, I promise, you’ll be better off.

Related Post: Why I like YA books.

Related Post: Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman.

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October 14, 2012 · 10:28 pm

Sunday Scraps 78

1. FRISK: A 17-year-old in New York City secretly recorded two cops harassing him for his race and appearance and threatening to beat him, all part of the legal policy known as “Stop and Frisk” (The Atlantic).

2. WEIGHT: Roxane Gay writes for the Wall Street Journal on how, despite the recent rash of plus-sized women on  screen, their weight is still the punch line to a joke instead of just one feature of many.

3. KISS: You know that famous VJ Day kiss photo? Turns out that the story isn’t quite what we thought it was, and a whole lot less romantic (Mother Jones).

4. INTERWEBZ: Reddit’s #1 creeper (creator of such subreddits as “jailbait” and “creeshots”) was recently outed by Gawker. Given the guy has made his name posting other people’s photos and claiming “if they didn’t want us to see it, they wouldn’t have put it on Facebook,” it seems ironic that he’s so pissed about being exposed. Dude, if you didn’t want people to know you’re a creeper, don’t be a creeper.

5. GIRLS: This week’s International Day of the Girl had the likes of Melinda Gates, Christiane Amanpour and Oprah offering advice to their 15-year-old selves.

6. INIGO: Homeland standout Mandy Patinkin was interviewed by NPR about the 25th anniversary of The Princess Bride. He said, “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed…”

Related Post: Sunday 77 – the worst bride ever, Urban Cusp, replacement refs

Related Post: Sunday 76 – Zadie Smith, xkcd founder, Vice 

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September 24, 2012 · 9:42 pm

For a Good Time, Call the Ladies of “For a Good Time Call”

If you are a cheapskate freeloader like me, Spotify frequently interrupts your 90s R&B jam sesh with some annoying ads hawking this product or that service. Most annoying of all? The back-and-forth breathy giggles of Ari Graynor and Lauren Miller as they hype their new movie, For a Good Time Call. It’s about phone sex, you guys, so you know it’s going to be edgy and hip.

As I am the definition of edgy and hip (on edge and wide of hip?), I took Graynor and Miller up on their invitation and by golly, a good time was had by all.

Top 5 Things to Like About For a Good Time Call

1. For us, by us: You know what is definitively better than old men talking about women’s vaginas (looking at you, GOP…), young women talking about vaginas! You know why? They have them! Call was written by two women in their twenties, Miller and Katie Ann Naylon. Ari Graynor was also the executive producer.

2. Happy endings come in all shapes and sizes: No, not those kinds of happy endings. Without giving away all the juicy details, let me just say that according to Call, there’s more than one way end up on the winning side of a two-hour movie about women in their twenties. Dudes are well and good and all, but they  are not the only ticket to a happy ending. Career success counts. Friendship counts. Emotional wellness counts. Oh haiii, women are complicated and men do not solve all the problems!

3. Sexual reputations = complicated: Avoiding spoilers, one of my favorite elements of Call was its willingness to play with stereotypes of female sexuality. What begins as a straight-up, boring, been-there-seen-that slut/prude dichotomy takes some fun twists and lands in a much more nuanced space. Wait, you mean you can’t tell shit about a person’s sexual history by the way they dress? Mind blown.

4. Female friends are not just sidekicks: More attention lately (thanks to Girls and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be) has been to paid the specific intensity of girl on girl friendships. In my opinion, phone sex is just the backdrop for a pretty excellent exploration of the potent combination of admiration, devotion, jealousy, insecurity, and love that form the bedrock of most uber-tight lady bonds.

5. Jumpsuits:

Related Post: I saw Beasts of the Southern Wild

Related Post: Best documentary I’ve seen in quite some time….

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September 7, 2012 · 4:40 pm

Hushpuppy

I left the movie theater Wednesday night exhausted and a little weepy. I wasn’t sure exactly how I felt about the movie we’d just seen, Beasts of the Southern Wild, but I knew I felt something. All I was certain of was that the star 6-year-old actress, Quevenzhane Wallis, is the most photogenic child on the planet.

The plot, if you are unfamiliar, is simple. Beasts follows a girl named Hushpuppy who lives with her father in an off-the-grid Louisiana community called the Bathtub. Sparse of dialogue, lush of scenery, the plot follows Hushpuppy and her father through a few short days surrounding a Katrina-like storm.

I think it’s a movie that grows on you, a movie that digs into the little pockets of your brain and takes root. Images from it keep springing up, unbidden, like Hushpuppy hiding under a cardboard box after setting her house on fire to spite her father. She draws with charcoal, marking her story for future excavators like the cave people she has just learned about. Another scene, in a hospital after the flood, shows the girl stripped of her usual dirty undershirt and shorts and forced into a pretty blue dress, her hair combed into braids.

At Salon (via LA Times), Kelly Candaele argues that Beasts presents this community of misfits with a sort of irresponsible glee, as if their poverty and disconnection facilitates joy and spontaneity that the rest of couldn’t achieve:

Viewers are asked to interpret a lack of work discipline, schooling, or steady institution building of any kind — the primary building blocks of any civilization — as the height of liberation. “Choice,” even the choice to live in squalor, is raised to the level of a categorical imperative. There is no inkling of the economic and social history of the region that had limited these “choices.” We are left with a libertarian sandbox, with a rights-based life philosophy gone rancid.

The film does open up a whole bunch of cans of worms, none of which have I been able to re-close since I’ve been mulling it over. Lots of big questions about community building, about the right to live as you see fit, about parenting, about infrastructure, about nature, about education. There are big questions about the obligations of the state and how far it should go to “assist” marginalized populations. Should they evacuate people who don’t want to be evacuated? Should they force medical care on people who don’t want it? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the upbringing Hushpuppy has, so wrong that the state needs to intervene?

Education, for me, is the hinge on which all of these other questions are resting. Hushpuppy is precocious, inquisitive, imaginative and self-sufficient. She’s everything that most teachers would want in a student, but how much of her curiosity and creativity is fueled by the neglect she experienced and her subsequent self-sufficiency? With formal education and support, she could be anything, but the film portrays formalized assistance as stifling and intrusive. Surely there’s a middle ground, somewhere between turning her into the blue-dressed doll and letting her explore her surrounding for days on end, unsupervised and uncared for.

This is a self-indulgent post, so mad props to you if you’ve stuck with me. I didn’t know what to make of it in the immediate aftermath, but the next morning I chatted my movie buddy and said, “I think I liked that movie” and she said, “I think I did too.” And then we talked about it for a while, so that’s something. If you’ve seen it and can parse out this mess ‘o thoughts into more articulate questions or arguments, I’d love to hear your take.

Related Post: The last movie I loved, The Queen of Versailles.

Related Post: Why I think “higher order thinking skills” are important.

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April 2, 2012 · 7:31 pm

Rosie in the News #5

From College Humor, a series of faux-propaganda posters for the Hunger Games‘ fictional country, Panem, includes this one:

I dig it, don’t you? Hunger Games crossed the 250 million mark in ten days, which is record-breaking for anything other than a sequel (see below). Other records include ”the highest non-sequel opening weekend ever, and the highest debut single day for a non-sequel ever, and the highest March opening ever, and the 5th highest opening day ever.”

So yeah… it’s dominating. And you know what’s pretty cool about that? It’s a movie about a girl. The top ten biggest opening weekends look like this:

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 (Sequel)

2. The Dark Knight (Sequel)

3. The Hunger Games

4. Spider Man 3 (Sequel)

5. Twilight: New Moon (Sequel)

6. Twilight: Breaking Dawn 1 (Sequel)

7. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Sequel)

8. Iron Man 2 (Sequel)

9. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 1 (Sequel)

10. Shrek the Third (Sequel)

I suppose we have to own Twilight as lady-driven, but Katniss is pretty much in a class all her own on this list. Yeah, we’ve got Hermione, but other than that, this list is decidedly lacking in female awesomeness. Scarlett Johansson in a catsuit for 45 seconds in Iron Man 2 doesn’t really count.

Related Post: The entire Rosie in the News collection.

Related Post: Even the weather channel wants in on the Hunger Games fever.

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