People are still talking about Lisbeth Salander and whether or not she represents feminism, whether or not Stieg Larsson represents feminism, and how to make sense of a series that revolves around rape and violence against women, yet has garnered a feminist following and reputation.  Here are some more articles to keep the discussion going:

Lisbeth Salander, The Girl Who Started A Feminist Franchise [forbes]

Would we be as obsessed with the books and this character if a) Larsson were alive and b) if they were written by a woman? No. I am convinced that if the books had a female author they would be dismissed as “crazy chick” lit and not a political look at violence against women and its repercussions. Larsson was so serious about the issue that the literal translation of the title of his first book is Men Who Hate Women.

The Girl With The Lots of Creepy Disturbing Torture That Pissed Me Off: On Stieg Larsson [tiger beatdown]

I am certainly curious, as I think are many ladies, as to why some men hate women so much; that, I believe, is a question worth exploring. And since ladies have had little success so far in answering it, perhaps it is time for the gentlemen to start doing some of the heavy lifting around here. But here’s a hint, fellows: writing a story about a father-son pair who dismember hundreds of women in a “private torture chamber [contrived] with great care” is not a successful answer to this question.

Lisbeth Salander Is The Cure To Elizabeth Gilbert [jezebel]

…it’s the girl’s hyper-vigilant, emotionally unfulfilling life we’re consumed with, just as we were consumed with Gilbert’s hyper-self-consumed search for emotional fulfillment. Is Salander’s hostile, embattled avenger the responsive ying to Gilbert’s sunny, drifting yang? Are we avoiding some golden mean of literary womanhood, or is the appeal their clumsy extremes?

A couple of weeks ago I set out to find an air-conditioned escape from my 90 degree house (hooray for no a/c in the desert!), and lo-and-behold, I ended up at that frigid complex known as “the movie theater.” I faced the daunting decision of choosing a movie I knew little to nothing about in order to eat junk food and not turn into a puddle of sweat on my carpet.  It came down to “Despicable Me” versus “Inception,” and once I took a look at each of the trailers it was clear: Ellen Page for the win.

So there we were: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tommy from 3rd Rock, Juno, and me.  And it was cool, and it was action-y, and it was not overtly disturbing or offensive.  So I walked out cool, happy, and jonesing for an Ellen Page marathon.  This probably doesn’t bode well for the impression that Inception itself made on me, eh?

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While Stieg Larsson’s literary Girl trilogy has received generally positive reviews, reactions to the Swedish film have been mixed.  Having finished the first and second books, and now having viewed the film, I feel ready to throw my two-cents out there.  But first, the disclaimer-y stuff: There are certain to be spoilers, but I’ll try to keep it to book one and the film.  Also, be aware (if you aren’t already) this series contains graphic depictions of violence against women and sexual assault.

I’ll start with my summary and conclusion in case you’re using this to determine whether or not to read the series or watch the film:

If you’re the kind of person who likes psychological thrillers, non-slasher horror films, and murder-mystery style suspense, you’ll probably like this series.  If you like those types of things AND choose to view the themes of the series through a feminist lens, you may well be impressed.  But if you can’t handle violent films on the principle of the matter, this film will overload your system.  If you can’t handle violent films AND choose to view the themes of the series through a feminist lens, you’ll probably be pissed.  And revolted.

Let’s take a look at the first installment in the series. Read the rest of this entry »

The chances of me forking over cash for a ticket to Eclipse is about as likely as me forking over cash to have my eyeballs mauled out of my head by rabid kittens, so don’t expect a review of the film around here until after I can Netflix it in between Ginger Snaps and Buffy (in order to protect me from the crappy mythology and buffer the straight-up misogyny).   However, io9 has a sweet post up on all this Twilight Eclipse stuff, which is full of win.  Here are some highlights:

Why Team Jacob always has to lose in Twilight

Team You Are Not Allowed To Have An Interracial Relationship

Jacob represents humanity, warmth, frank eroticism . . . and an interracial relationship. Though Jacob’s tribal identity has played a part in previous films, it’s in Eclipse that we learn what that means. At one point, Jacob brings Bella to a tribal meeting where one of the pack leaders tells us a story that unfolds in flashback like a cross between Dances With Wolves and Dark Shadows. “When the cold ones came,” he explains, they fought the native wolves. We see a white vampire in European garb slaughtering native wolves. Then when the wolves kill him, his wife comes to their village, destroying everyone in a blaze of fire and imperialist nastiness.

Team You Must Be Controlled By An Older Man Who Hates Sex

Pretty much as soon as they are together, Bella asks Edward if he’ll have sex with her, and tries to get him to take off his clothes. He makes a “yuck” face and refuses, claiming he does want to but that he comes from an era when he would court her and ask her father’s permission to marry her. Then he gets on one knee and proposes, giving her what my great-grandmother would have called a “dinner ring,” a giant, Victorian-style sparkle monstrosity. She says yes, and they hug. Nobody gets laid.

Team Don’t Date The Guy Who Wants Sex As Much As You Do

Rejecting Jacob is a way of rejecting the consummation of her desire. It’s a rejection of the man who finds her unambiguously appealing, and isn’t horrified by his own desires either. (Edward is always insisting that if he had sex with Bella it could kill her.) “Being with me would be as easy as breathing,” Jacob tells Bella. But she doesn’t want to breathe, or even be alive. She wants to remain frozen in unrequited desire, lusting after a man who finds lust disgusting.

Team Choose Not To Choose

Her “choice” of Edward is a foreclosure of so many other choices that go beyond losing a chance to make it with wolf boy. And we’re reminded of this constantly, as if the movie itself wants to alert us to how problematic Bella’s choice really is. Her best human friend gives a speech at graduation that’s about how being young means making lots of bad choices before figuring out who you want to be. Meanwhile, members of the Cullen family explain to Bella how they were dragged into vampirism against their wills, and how horrible it is to lead a life that is so devoid of choice and opportunity and hope.

Flippin’ awesome – it almost makes me feel excited about tearing Eclipse apart, and like maybe it will do it in a more interesting and less stomach turning way than New Moon.  Now go read the whole post. READ IT!!!

Splice is a sci-fi horrorish film that is in many ways a modern retelling of the story of Frankenstein.  What Splice does differently from most sci-fi horrorish films is to incorporate complex, intelligent female characters and examine (both directly and indirectly) female emotional and sexual development in an extreme situation.  Until it blows it at the end.

Also, I have never seen so many people stand up and exit the theater so quickly when the credits started rolling, but that might be a Utah thing (more on that later).  If anything, the strong reactions of my fellow theater-goers only made me more thoughtful about this unusual movie.

Here’s what you need to know: Clive and Elsa are a couple (literally) of scientists who have been working on splicing together DNA from different animals to create new species in the hopes of developing cures for livestock diseases.  They think it would be a good idea to take this to the next level – the human level – in order to find cures for human diseases, and pretty much just to test their theory about how awesome they are.  They’re told no, but they do it anyway.  What they end up creating is first a creepy slimy thing, which evolves into a cute rabbitish thing, and finally into a human chimera thing.  Although Clive was recently trying to talk Elsa into kids, she wasn’t interested.  Now she has become very attached to their creature, Dren, and he’s the one with serious second thoughts.  Spoilers ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

I caved and watched the second installment of the Twilight series this weekend.  I thought I hated the first one, but my inner adolescent still compelled me to watch it twice.  New Moon, on the other hand, I could barely stomach just the once.  Because from what I can tell, the Twilight series is entirely about construing relationship violence, control, manipulation, and disempowering women as “romantic.”  Which, to me, means that Stephanie Meyer either has a much sadder background than we know about, or that she has been so privileged and pampered (and brainwashed?) that this kind of thing is the stuff of her fantasies.  And she thinks that we should pass this on to our youth.

Anyone who is reading this probably already knows the plot (and probably has stumbled upon this in a search for more fanaticism about their favorite Robert Pattinson and the Glory of Twilight), but in case you don’t here it is:

Edward’s family throws a B-day party for Bella, who gets the mother of all paper cuts while opening her presents (for serious, who has ever paper cut herself so seriously on WRAPPING PAPER that BLOOD DROPS ON THE CARPET?).  The youngest vampire in their little friendly foster family goes wild and Edward throws Bella into a glass table.  Resulting in more blood.  So Edward dumps Bella the next day under the pretenses that she’ll be safer if they go on as if they’d never met.  Which is a nice way of saying “my family wants to eat you so we (a family of vampires) are moving to Florida.”  Also, “I am a boy and I’m hurting you because I love you so much and I know so much better about your own welfare than you do.”  But not “sorry I threw you across the room into a glass table last night.”

Read the rest of this entry »

“Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn’t a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don’t know. I think it’s a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility. I mean, the best art is made under not an indifference to, but a neutrality [toward] the kind of emotionalism that I think can be a trap for women directors.”

- Bret Easton Ellis

After all the gruesome lady-killing in American Psycho (which was, by the way, directed by a woman), this drivel shouldn’t surprise any of us.

BONUS IDIOCY:

“I’ve always thought that the feminists got it totally wrong on that one. But I can’t go there anymore.”

Because killing women horrifically in an attempt to discuss the pros and cons of being a wealthy hipster is not at all anti-woman.  Feminists should be happy about it!  After all, it was directed by a woman! *headdesk*

From Movieline via Jezebel. (Also interesting: Roger Ebert’s review of the film.)

When I am working on things (big papers and whatnot) I like to have something on in the background, usually a movie or TV show I’ve seen a million times to provide a little background noise. Lately The Princess Diaries 2 has been on my rotation. It’s simple, it’s cute and fun and light and I find all the weird faux-Europeanness of the whole thing mildly amusing.

The more I watch the movie, however, the more I’ve come to realize it is highly problematic, and the more concerned I am for the young girls this film was (successfully) marketed to.

My biggest issue with the movie: Nicolas Devereaux (the male lead) is really inappropriate.

Consider Exhibit A:

Lord Devereaux oversteps his bounds on a number of occasions and it’s played off as cutesy and romantic, thus telling young girls this behavior is not only okay, but charming. According to the movie it’s okay for guys to grab and kiss you and then knock you into a fountain (I still don’t understand how they end up in there).

It’s also okay for him to follow you up stairs (against your wishes and invading your personal space), meddle in your relationships and insult and demean you.

His horrible, arrogant behavior is in part explained by the fact that he’s working with his uncle to usurp the Genovian throne, making him the future king instead of Mia being made the future queen. But this just makes his behavior worse. Throughout the movie, we’re never sure who’s side he’s on. I guess we can pretend he wouldn’t be a jerk if he didn’t have ulterior motives, but either way his interactions with Mia are in the context of dishonesty and disrespect. In fact the first time we, as the audience, really know where he stands is after all their little meet cutes when he officially declares his refusal to take the throne. He never apologizes to her or explains his internal struggle (as though any of that would validate his behavior). Instead he just says he loves her and she jumps into his arms, never getting a whiff of clarity on whether he planted the paparazzo that caught them canoodling by the lake or feels the slightest remorse for treating her like dirt.

The big problem here is that the movie was targeted to tween girls; the same tween girls that watched That’s So Raven religiously and would tune in to Hannah Montana two years later. I use “was” as if this movie has disappeared and never finds itself being rerun on Disney Channel or sitting on the video shelf (both virtual and real) at various retail establishments. The movie ends with a feminist message about how women shouldn’t have to be married to run a country, particularly when their male counterparts would not be laden with the same requirement, but that message (which seems rather unapplicable to the average person’s life) doesn’t make up for the horrible representation of romantic relationships.

I know it seems a little silly to think so much about a movie that came out 6 years ago, but as a fan of kids television I’ve become really sensitive to the messages being propagated by children’s entertainment. It often seems that with lighthearted little romps like this people focus on the wrong things. In the case of this movie it’s easy for parents to glance at it, see that there’s no violence and the most sexual content is a kiss, and notice it has a heartwarming little message about women having equal rights and has the “safe” Disney logo on it and accept that it’s appropriate for their kids.

It’s so easy to think that way about movies like this, and that makes me sad. I feel like entertainment produced for the next generation should be taken more seriously and given more consideration than whether it will be profitable or not.

I have finished reviewing the first and last episodes of each of the televised Star Trek incarnations (with the exception of the animated series, which is barely considered canon anyway) and now it is time to finish up this long, involved endeavor by reviewing the recent J.J. Abrams helmed reboot, titled simply Star Trek.

As the movie is so new there is a lot of easily accessible discussion and analysis of the film. Because of this I find it difficult to comment on it without responding to some of those critiques. Thus, I will offer two reviews–my initial response and then a direct response to some of the criticisms.

As Captain Kirk says near the end of the movie, “buckle up!”

Read the rest of this entry »

The adolescent goth kid in me has nothing but love for Christina Ricci after all these years, although I probably haven’t kept up with enough of her films to really be qualified to defend that position.  Memories of Casper and The Adams family mixed with impressions from Prozac Nation and Penelope leave me excitedly awaiting Ricci’s newest film, After.Life, despite only having known about it for a few days (via i09) and not being the biggest fan of the horror genre.  Although I have some hesitations about After.Life, particularly as a feminist, I’m a little excited.

The possible good: Christina Ricci.  Escaping bad dudes.  Some sort of metaphor for being robbed of power and then empowering oneself.

The possible bad: Little red nightie, sexual objectification.  Misogyny, kidnapping, violence against women.  Damsel in distress, dude to the rescue.

So I’m torn.  My feminist conscience is certainly skeptical, but something in me remains curious.  Although I really hate slashers and torture-porn-esque films (a la Saw series and its bretheren), I have an inkling that this is more of a psychological thriller (a la Hide and Seek), which I am actually kind of into.  It could go either way, and I’m certainly willing to give this one a try (even if I can’t entirely justify it to myself), but I’m not holding my breath that it’ll come to my community as it’s not yet scheduled for wide release and our one and only cool little indie theater closed about six months ago.

What are your thoughts on Christina Ricci, After.Life, and the status of women in horror films today?  Anyone seen this film or know more about it?