Filed under: Industry, Movies, Numbers | Tags: action movies, Movies, women in film
First, a New Year’s Resolution: I may or may not post a whole lot, but I will at least stop promising posts that don’t materialize.
Anyway, here’s your next linkspam, themed around film. I still have a ton of links on other topics, so more will be coming eventually. However, I’ve got a handful of other things I want to write about (as opposed to copying-and-pasting about), so things will get done as they get done.
The first lot relates to women in action movies:
- Faster Pussycat! Kill! Bill!, on Kill Bill as a milestone, and standard plotlines
- The “people won’t watch female action movies” myth, breaks down the numbers behind action movies with female protagonists
- In Audiences Won’t Go to See an Action Movie That Stars Women, Robert Elisberg further breaks down those numbers.
- (Not about women, but this one was spawned by similar ideas: Why Don’t White Audiences Go See Black Movies?)
- Token female characters in ensemble action movies is about exactly what it sounds like
- The actress behind an iconic action heroine reflects in Sigourney Weaver on the Legacy of ‘Aliens’ & Her Sequel That Hollywood Won’t Make
Next, some technical/behind-the-scenes articles:
- A short course in A video primer in shot-making from Majestic Micro Essays
- Piracy: Enforcement Isn’t Working, Prices Need to Come Down – some interesting ideas about intellectual property
- The “Gray Ones” Fade to Black – notes from a film teacher
- One More Glass Ceiling Shattered: Patty Jenkins Signed to Direct Thor 2 – article also explains why this is important
- Warner Brothers Talk About Plans for Ultraviolet, Flixster, and Johanna Draper Carlson points out the myriad problems with what they’ve said
- Hollywood hooked on sexualizing women and teen girls, a new study from the University of Southern California
- Women Make Up Only 33% of Speaking Roles in Films, commentary on the USC study
- Breaking Dawn Scores 5th Highest Opening Weekend Ever – numbers, numbers, how I love numbers~
- The Good New Days Are Over – discussing the merging of publishing and distributing companies in a variety of industries
Uh-oh. I thought that that would take care of a hefty chunk of the links I’ve stored up, but no such luck. Maybe I’ll get them all done by next year…
One of the oddest parts of a doctorate, at least at the beginning, is that you enter the program because you want to help people learn, but then you basically ignore undergraduates in favor of studying like mad. It can be very isolating; you sit in your apartment and study most of the time, unless you leave your apartment and study. Plus, you have all of the normal household duties (dishes, laundry), and since you probably moved to a new city for your program you also have to set up a new apartment and adjust to a new city. Last year, my biggest “hobby”, time-wise, was shopping for new furniture and household goods. I brought a lot of stuff across the country with me, but most of it was of the clothing-and-books variety.
Postcard advertising tonight's event
All of which is to say that I didn’t feel like I had much of an impact on anything last year. I wasn’t really helping anyone or creating anything, just ingesting books and discussing them. That’s important, and I learned a lot last year, but my background is in the educational non-profit sector. It was odd to be not helping people. I’m already working on changing that this year, but yesterday something great happened. I was wandering around whiling away the hours between classes when I ran across a fellow student from a different department as he was showing a pair of visiting Japanese artists (collectively called Tochka) around. I tagged along for lunch, and suddenly it was seven hours later and I had helped translate subtitles for a short video and a set of informational cards for an exhibit of the artists’ work that is going on today and tomorrow. I had a blast, I got to help some great people, and (I hope) I helped make a suite of pieces that will explain Tochka’s art to the students who show up tonight and tomorrow.
Example of PiKA PiKA
Tochka uses long exposure photography to create gorgeous images of light (usually made by volunteers holding LED flashlights), then brings the photographs together to create short, animated films. They call these works “PiKA PiKA” in reference to the Japanese onomatopoeia pika, which means the sound of light flashing. (And yes, that’s where the pika in the name of Pokemon‘s Pikachu came from. After all, his power is lightning, right?)
I did not see that coming. I have to admit to being tired and behind in my homework, but I can handle it. I’m just excited for tonight. If you’re in the Los Angeles area, Tochka will be leading a workshop tonight, and there will be a showing and a Q&A with the artists behind Tochka, Kazue Monno and Takeshi Nagata, tomorrow. Here are some links with more information:
Details for the event tonight
Tochka’s English-language blog, which has sample video files
Filed under: anime, Movies, Reviews | Tags: From Up on Poppy Hill, Kokurikozaka kara, Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli
Umi raising flags in Kokurikozaka kara
Studio Ghibli is best known for those of its films which were directed by Hayao Miyazaki, one of the company’s two co-founders, but its other films are hardly low quality. I may be generalizing a bit too much, but those films not directed by Hayao Miyazaki seem to stray into slightly more adult territory – for example, the possibility of an affair is alluded to in Poppy Hill. The newest film melds this material with a kind of elegiac tone that made for a nice afternoon. Beyond that, I don’t really want to say too much about the film. Being in Japan, I watched it in Japanese, of course, and while I understood enough of the dialogue to enjoy the film, I didn’t quite get enough to feel good about analyzing it to closely. Luckily, Aaron Gerow also saw it and has written an interesting analysis which I suggest you read.
Incidentally, I’ve been saving up interesting articles for awhile now, and I’ll probably be unloading a link spam on you soon. If you’ve got any suggestions, feel free to leave them in a comment.
I thought about writing a best-of list towards the end of the year, but it didn’t seem quite right. Between leaving my job, moving across the country and starting grad school I had a pretty topsy-turvy year, and that would be reflected in any list I came up with. Still, I’ve been thinking about all of the things I watched, read and did over the last year, and some kind of review is in order. Here are the things – TV shows, books, movies, activities, whatever – that gave me peace on those evenings in 2010 when I was still not packed/hadn’t finished finals but was sick again/was sick of looking at mattresses yet another time.
No surprise here, I love my NCIS:LA. Totally aside from the characters, writing and other aspects of art creation that the creators can actually control, over the course of the first season I went from thinking about maybe applying to grad schools… somewhere to deciding on a university in LA. NCIS: Los Angeles was there the whole time, and occasionally suggested neighbourhoods I should not live in.
This is a new series, with new episodes posted to Hulu on Fridays as they air in Japan. It’s sort of like The Big Bang Theory, at least in its broadest strokes, but in reverse. A house full of female otaku becomes enmeshed with a super-stylish cross-dressing guy with predictably hilarious results. Through the laughs though, I’m reminded constantly of some of my best friends – in a good way.
An over-the-top romance comedy that teeters juuust this side of horrificly insulting by Yuki Yoshihara.
4. Inception
The big-budget Hollywood action flick that got people all across America arguing about what reality is, this movie just warms my little, post-structuralism-infused heart.
I loved the book, so I would probably have liked this adaptation regardless of how it was done. But then they went and turned it into an action film bildungsroman with a heroine as the lead… and I love it! The movie topped a year where Alice references were everywhere, and it just warmed my soul.
I read this one for a Japanese literature class the past semester. I don’t particularly like a lot of modern Japanese literature, but this one knocked my socks off. Briefly, it’s about a female reporter as she takes off on a trip with a trucker she picks up in a convenience store. She may be going insane, regaining her sanity or something else entirely. I’m not going to spoil it for you. Michael Emmerich is an experienced translator, and his skill is evident in the way the text sings.
7. RED
It looked like a fun action flick, and it was, but it also surprised me by failing the reverse of the Bechdel test. Since it’s the only action movie I can think of that would fail such a test, I’m rather pleased with it for stretching the genre.
8. Fried Green Tomatoes and Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
The movie and the book made me happy in a variety of different ways, and the post I made about them shot up to be my most-viewed post by far, which made me happy in a whole new way.
The more I study in school, the more apparent my academic weaknesses become. One of those is reading ability. In the course of clearing my stuff out of my parents’ house, I came across my old (old, old oldoldold) copy of the Basic Kanji Book. Even back when I bought it, its contents were mostly review for me, but I swallowed my boredom – at least for a little bit. In the ensuing four or five years I developed a pattern of doing some chapters and then dropping it for months or even years. I finally decided to finish it so that I don’t have to tote it to California and I don’t feel like a failure over a really basic kanji book. I’ll finally be done sometime in the next week or two. However, this book has served as a way of judging my progress over the years, so it is reassuring now to realize just how far I have come, even if I’m not as good a reader as I should be.
There are four films out this week. Film A looks like a decent way to pass two hours, but I don’t want to see it because it’s an effects-filled extravaganza with little in the way of plot, and I’m in the mood for something with a bit more heft. Film B looks like a decent way to pass two hours, but I don’t want to see it because it’s a horror film and I think it’ll be too scary for me. Film C looks like a decent way to pass two hours, but I don’t want to see it because its female characters are all scantily-clad idiots whose only aim in life is to find hot guys, all of whom are smart and fully dressed, and I find that personally insulting. Film D looks like a decent way to pass two hours, and I end up seeing it.
I tell Random Man why I didn’t see film A, and he says okay.
I tell Random Man why I didn’t see film B, and he says okay.
I tell Random Man why I didn’t see film C, and he incredulously bursts out, “You’re boycotting it?!?”
I’ve had this conversation many times. I have, as yet, restrained myself from pointing out the sheer idiocy of comparing my not wanting to use my limited funds and time to buy something I’m not interested in to the great boycotts so well-utilized by the twentieth-century civil rights movement. But I may, next time, respond with my own incredulous outburst.
Filed under: Movies, Reviews, theory | Tags: Bechdel Test, Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Mary-Louise Parker, Movies, RED, Reviews, theory
I was all set to post about Mechademia, but then I saw RED today and somehow my plans changed. (I also saw a soccer game at which they gave away red scarves, but I didn’t get one, so who cares?) Anyway, on with the show.
Slight spoilers, though not too bad.
RED is the story of Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), a retired CIA assassin who is having trouble adjusting to civilian life, but also beginning to find love – until he is suddenly attacked by assassins. Bada bing, bada boom, he is back in the game. In short order he collects his lady love Sara Ross (Mary-Louise Parker) – to keep her safe, of course – and a handful of old comrades (or at least pleasant enemies) and sets about finding out who wants him dead/stopping them. It’s a fun movie that I would encourage you to see. For all the violence of the premise there’s not a ton of gore. There are plenty of explosions, which always pleases me, but your mileage may vary on that one. No, what I want to talk about here is the Bechdel test. For those of you who don’t know it, the Bechdel test came out of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip. It’s gained notoriety because it showcases cleanly and clearly how badly women are represented in films. The test has three parts, as follows.
A movie must have:
1. two female characters
2. who talk to each other
3. about anything except men.
It sounds so simple. Women constitute about half the population. We talk to each other often at work, at home, on the phone, in locker rooms and restrooms… Topics of conversation include our jobs, our bosses, our kids, our hobbies, our yoga classes, new recipes, plays… You would think films would capture this as a matter of course. But they don’t. If you want to see how your favorite films stack up, head over to The Bechdel Test and search for them. You might be surprised. Then again, you might not. The Social Network failed, for anyone who’s been following the hubbub about that.
Now, you’re probably thinking “So, does RED pass?” and really, I’m not sure. There are four named female characters with speaking parts that I recall*, and of them I think two do speak together about something other than a man. That being an exchange along the following lines:
Boss: “What are you doing?”
Employee: “Nothing. Just… nothing.”
Not much, but enough to pass. Remember, this test is a basic measure; it’s not meant to be the be-all and end-all of realistic portrayals of women. There might have been more such exchanges, too. As I said, I didn’t pay that close attention. (I was too busy having fun.) What I did notice was how multiple characters pulled aside Frank Moses and spoke to him… about a woman.
There isn’t a reverse Bechdel test – two men who speak to each other about anything except a woman – because we don’t need one: practically every movie would pass it with flying colours. RED is a little different. It works Moses’ progress in falling in love to his progress in settling into retirement. In other words, it realistically suggests that, for a male character, a girlfriend isn’t merely a person the bad guys can kidnap at the appropriate moment or a fun roll in the hay while waiting for an assassin to come. She’s someone to talk to, someone you have to work with – and occasionally someone you really, really want to like you even though you effectively kidnapped her. In short, she is a part of your life. So we have Moses mentioning the woman he collected so that she wouldn’t be killed to his old friend, and then his other friends ask him about her, repeatedly, and then when the bad guys kidnap her (as you knew they would) naturally they have to mention her on the phone to him and again to each other. She’s central to the movie, as she’s central to Moses.
I didn’t keep track at the beginning of the movie because it’s so rare, but I wonder if this movie could pass a reverse Bechdel test? It might not. If Sara Ross is involved in all of the scenes where they’re planning how to find the bad guy, I don’t think it would.
This left me thinking, if a movie failed a reverse Bechdel test, would I care so much if it passed the actual Bechdel test? After all, if a movie solely included mixed-sex group scenes it would be incapable of passing the test, but at the same time it would be putting female characters front and center throughout the entire film, which is what the test was made in hopes of. I could go for that.
Final note, for those who are skeptical that the short dialogue above should give any proof of a movie’s seriousness about depicting women: I’ve noticed, over the years, that some TV and film pieces manage to work in small hints that yes, there are these creatures called women out there. A short scene in NCIS where the head of NCIS, an agent and a forensic pathologist – all female – discuss the most appropriate courtroom attire to ensure that one is taken seriously. Use of a sanitary pad to staunch blood flow from a bullet wound in Salt. There is such a moment in RED. I’d be happy to tell you about it, but it alone of all the scenes in the movie (and there were many funny moments) got the entire audience laughing as one. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but I assure you that it’s there. In addition, please note that I have written this whole post without mentioning Helen Mirren’s Victoria. This is because she is so fantastic I didn’t feel I could do her justice in the context of a Bechdel test-related post. And someone chose to make the most noticeable assassin female. Good choice. Offhand, for major characters I’m counting seven male and four female. For an action movie, that’s rather astonishing. Go take a look and see if you don’t like it.
*I should note that some people only count named characters for the test. For the purposes of this movie, I only recall the named characters + one unnamed woman who only spoke to men, and there wasn’t a huge speaking cast besides, so it shouldn’t have an impact.
Filed under: Movies, Reviews | Tags: Christopher Nolan, Ellen Page, Inception, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Marion Cotillard, Roger Ebert, Steven Boone
I saw Inception this past Friday, but couldn’t come up with a way to write about it until now. As pretty much everyone has already noted, the movie is meant to make you think, which doesn’t lend itself to immediate blogging. I was trying to come up with some sort of angle to tie together my observations when Roger Ebert pointed me to Steven Boone’s review. Ebert’s point is that Boone’s review is useful even if you don’t agree. Well, I’m certainly going to get some use out of it.
I don’t think Inception is a perfect film, but I do think it is fabulous. I don’t want to entirely recap Boone’s review (I encourage you to read it), but I will summarize the points that I want to respond to. First, Boone argues that there is too much exposition – characters speak too much when the actors could show more. Then, the dream worlds are too slick, with no messes along the lines of naked people suddenly showing up. In combination, you get a slick heist or caper film that doesn’t reveal all that much about anything.
This is totally not how I read the film.
Arthur and Cobb
You might respond that this is a cop-out, and that one needs to address what dreams are really like in order for this questioning of reality to work. But Nolan does answer that: the dreams in the movie are not set up to be actual, what-you-see-at-night dreams. Inception‘s dreams are, in fact, almost anti-dreams. They do not leap and dodge across times and places like real dreams. Inception‘s dreams are carefully made in a maze-like pattern by a dedicated architect. The movie reminds us many times of how hard it is to build a dream correctly. The target of these dreams only peoples them with projections of her subconscious, she does not create the locales. And those projection-people are characterless.
That leads to Boone’s other criticism, that the actors explain too much without showing us all that much. I think the actors show us quite a bit (there was a great moment when Cobb saw how quickly Ariadne was learning to manipulate dreams and was clearly uneasy, for instance), but he’s right that there is a lot of explaining going on. However, we have the projections to consider. Inception is similar to your slick caper flick in a variety of ways, and Nolan exploits that where the character Mal is concerned. Not a “real” character, Mal is a projection of Cobb’s mind, his subconscious exerting itself to keep her alive in some way. Everything about Mal’s introduction in the film screams femme fatale of the caper flick variety. They’re at a party thrown by a wealthy man, she’s wearing a slinky dress, Arthur’s comments suggest that she has tripped up Cobb in the past and that there is romance involved… we trip through the standards of caper flick femme portrayal throughout that dream, even getting in some light bondage when Cobb ties her up, until the betrayal we all knew was coming. Mal behaves like a stock character because she is a stock character. As Cobb finally admits to himself at the end of the movie, Mal is not his wife. She does not have a fraction of the complexities his wife had. She is just a character in his mind.
(Sidenote: In a sense, Marion Cotillard had the hardest job of all. She had to fill out a number of Cobb’s memories, be the personification of Cobb’s subconscious will, be inhuman and yet believable as Cobb’s wife. Well done.)
Mal blurs the line between the other projections and the other characters. Most of the projections never speak; they simply go about their business. When they sense an incursion into the mind they look for it, then at it and finally they chase and “kill” it. Mal is different. She makes incursions into other people’s dreams. She acts on her own to achieve her own objective: the destruction of Cobb. The discipline needed to be a dream thief is hinted at throughout the film. The thieves need to go into others’ dreams while keeping their own subconsciouses out. Mal shows that Cobb has lost that discipline.
As you go through the film, whether or not the “real” characters are, in fact, real people, is called into question, particularly through the filming techniques that Boone decries. Think about a scene, focusing on Arthur, for example, which shows him considering something at length. No words, just pure acting, with a focus on one of the “real” characters who is not Cobb. It suggests, to the viewer, that Arthur is, indeed, a real person, does it not? After all, we’re seeing him outside of his interactions with Cobb. The more we see characters outside of their interactions with Cobb, the more they seem real. The more they express themselves by talking to Cobb, the more indeterminate their existence. It’s not a coincidence that we see characters acting outside of their relationship to Cobb more and more as the movie progresses: even as Cobb’s discipline is breaking down more and more the other characters’ independence reassures the viewer and keeps the scales weighing the real versus the unreal in balance.
To pick up on something else Boone mentioned, the biggest expressive moment in the film featured Fischer learning that his father wanted him to be a better man (than the father). But Fischer isn’t talking to his real father, he’s talking to one of his own projections. Fischer’s change of heart is spurred by himself. Could this be paralleled by Cobb’s change of heart being spurred by himself? Perhaps Ariadne’s insistence on entering the final dream sequence was imagined by Cobb, and her presence there was just another of his projections gone amok? Why not take it farther – could the entire team be projections? Boone wants a slower film, with less cutting from place to place and scene to scene. But we’re cutting from scene to scene, because, as the characters explained to us, one way to tell that you are in a dream is that you don’t remember how you got there. We criss-cross the globe in this film, but how much travel really happened? What, exactly, was real?
Filed under: history, Movies, Reviews | Tags: Chris O'Donnell, Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Jon Avnet, Movies, Reviews
Sorry for the long delay in posts – something great is going on IRL that I will be able to mention shortly. In the meantime, an overdue post on a book and its film, with spoilers.
Evelyn and Ninny, Idgie and Ruth
As (I think) I’ve written before, I am interested in adapting works – manga to anime, for example. Awhile ago I saw the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, which is adapted from the book Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg. Now, I saw it for a reason which is, ultimately, unrelated to why I like it so much. Well, tangentially related. Every so often I see an actress or actor in something and just suddenly realize that whoa, s/he is good. NCIS: Los Angeles spurred that realization for me where Chris O’Donnell is concerned. (Stay with me, I am going somewhere.) In NCIS: LA, O’Donnell plays an undercover federal agent who is supposed to be one of the best. As such, the show often features him, in particular, suddenly changing his character, onscreen, while O’Donnell himself is already in character. It’s impressive to watch.
Okay, so I was inspired to hunt down a bunch of O’Donnell’s previous works. Fried Green Tomatoes was one of the first ones I found (many thanks to my local library and IMDB). It’s one of those insta-classic films, like A League of Their Own, that you watch and pretty much immediately know you want to own. Not because it has Avatar‘s special effects, or Saving Private Ryan‘s gut-wrenching realism, but because you see yourself sitting down to it on a lazy summer evening some years down the road. You need good acting for that sort of impact, but what I didn’t realize when I rented the movie was that O’Donnell’s character dies shortly into the film, after perhaps two minutes on screen. Oh well, those were a good two minutes. (The following minutes were all sorts of confusing, because I had rented the movie for O’Donnell, so they couldn’t have actually just killed him off, right? Right?? … No.)
Anyway, I liked the movie and found it interesting enough that I returned to the library for the book. Which I also liked, for totally different reasons. Which I also found interesting, for totally different reasons. Okay, to be honest, practically the only attraction the two shared was the Southern accent. In the intervening months, I’ve thought off and on about how the book was adapted, why and to what effect, and now I’m going to share a bit of what I’ve observed. A lot of the differences lie in little details, so the next two paragraphs will be relatively long descriptions of the two properties. If you’ve seen/read them, the jump should take you straight to the analysis.
I saw the movie first, so I’ll start with that. Fried Green Tomatoes is the twinned story of two pairs of women, Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison, in between-the-(World)-wars Alabama, and Evelyn Couch and Ninny Threadgoode in the mid-1980′s in the same area. The movie opens with the middle-age Evelyn meeting Ninny, an elderly woman residing at the same nursing home as Evelyn’s cantankerous mother-in-law. Evelyn and Ninny become solid friends over the course of the film, with Ninny encouraging Evelyn to turn her boring life around and Evelyn eventually inviting Ninny home to live with herself and her husband. This turnaround involves Evelyn’s becoming a successful Mary Kay saleswoman, taking hormones for menopause, exercising, dieting and generally standing up for herself. In part, Ninny encourages Evelyn by telling her stories about the tumultuous lives of Idgie and Ruth, which we see as flashbacks. Idgie was incredibly attached to her brother Buddy as a child, so it deeply changed her when he (O’Donnell) died in a train accident. She runs wild for a few years, until Ruth (depicted as Buddy’s girlfriend) is roped into trying to reform her one summer. Things go well for awhile, but at the end of the summer Ruth marries, and Idgie returns to running wild. Unfortunately Ruth’s husband beats her, and she eventually returns to Idgie. They set up a household in town, and start to raise Ruth’s son, Buddy, Jr., together. All goes well until Frank Bennett’s car is found in the river sans Frank Bennett. Idgie and a black family employee named Big George are taken to Georgia (the husband’s home) to be tried for the crime, and it looks bad until a preacher perjures himself to get them both off. They return to town; Buddy, Jr. loses his arm in his own train accident; Ruth dies of cancer. There are grounds to think that Ninny is actually the elderly Idgie, and we later hear that Big George’s mother killed Frank Bennett while he was trying to kidnap Buddy, Jr., and Big George cooked the body and served it to the locals via the cafe.
Ooookay. The book follows that general structure – scenes of Evelyn and Ninny interspersed with scenes from earlier on – but encompasses much, much more. The movie is increeeedibly simplified in a variety of ways, and the reasoning behind that is clear. In addition to the stories of Idgie, Ruth, Evelyn and Ninny, the book includes an awful lot about Big George’s family: his mother (who we find out adopted him), his wife, their kids and even their grandchildren. Big George and his mother are prominent in the film, but the family as a whole is covered about evenly with Idgie and Ruth in the book.
Idgie, Ruth and Buddy
Aside from that family, Buddy Threadgoode’s story was also simplified rather a lot, as was his impact on Idgie or the reflection of him that you can see in Idgie. In the film, Buddy is portrayed as the perfect son, a bit of a rascal and a horrible flirt, but ultimately a good boy who is devoted to Ruth. In the book he is more complicated. He and Ruth do not have a relationship – he never even meets her. Instead, he has a long-running, serious and somewhat scandalous relationship with a woman called Eva Bates, a loose woman from a lower class who is devoted to him – and is later devoted to Idgie and then Buddy, Jr. She doesn’t show up in the film. The book has many sections about hobos and hobo life, and excerpts from various newspapers and newsletters that illuminate life in that time and place. Finally, the book goes into more detail about Frank Bennett’s character – namely, in addition to beating Ruth, he also impregnated and beat a number of women in his own town, which helped convince a judge to sweep his maybe-murder under the rug. As for the contemporary sections of the book, we mostly learn more about Evelyn’s trials and tribulations, including her time at a fat farm. Ninny is clearly not the elderly Idgie, whom a short chapter shows selling honey at a roadside stand, and she dies at the end. (more…)
This is a bit late, but I wanted to direct your attention to the fact that the Cannes festival this year featured no films directed by women in competition. That is correct: zero. That is also pathetic. Last I heard, eighteen men-directed films are in that competition, and they couldn’t even find one decent woman-directed film to add?!?!
A letter is being sent to the organizers complaining about this, and you can sign it at You Cannes Not Be Serious. It’s easy and quick, and you can add a comment of your own if you’d like. The text of the letter is below.
HT to Women and Hollywood, a lovely blog everyone should follow.
******************************
To: The Organisers of the Cannes Film Festival
As people who care about and are interested in films we must protest the lack of female directors in competition for the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Women make up over half of cinema audiences and we demand a fairer representation of female directors in the main competition.
We are raising our voices in protest in hopes that in the future this will never happen again.
We are watching. We will not be silent.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
Filed under: Alice in Wonderland, Movies, Reviews, theory | Tags: Alice in Wonderland, Anne Hathaway, Johnny Depp, Movies, theory, Tim Burton
I wrote awhile back about the Alice in Wonderland trend. Well, I kept thinking about it, and I’ve decided to do a series of posts on various adaptations of Alice. Most of the posts will be about Japanese variations, but since I saw Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland yesterday, I thought I’d start with that. Fair warning, sailors, spoilers be ahead!
Okay, so what is Burton’s Alice? It is neither Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland nor Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, though it features characters and situations from both. However, the plot is largely new. Burton’s Alice is a 19-year-old lady facing an uninteresting marriage proposal at the beginning of the movie. The new plot involves the Red Queen as a murderous despot, whose fearsome beast Alice is foreordained to slay. Alice, however, is uninterested in slaying anything, and only gets backed into it through her deep friendship with the Mad Hatter.
(I feel the need to insert here that Johnny Depp portrays the Hatter with both charming and convincing insanity; Mia Wasikowska’s Alice is endearingly independent in a rather timid manner [at least at first]; Helena Bonham Carter’s Red Queen is self-centered in a greatly amusing way; and Anne Hathaway’s White Queen is just great – kind, but not all there, if you know what I mean, in a way that strikes me as perfect. And it wasn’t just them. There was a lot of good acting going on.)
*Ahem* Anyway, Alice is made older and the plot involves more action. This is where I got very excited: this film is crazy female character-centric. While TtL-GawAFT had the two kings show up for various portions of the book, the only time either shows up in this film is when we see the Red King’s head (sans Red King) floating in the Red Queen’s moat. Moreover, Alice’s story comes a lot closer to traditional male coming of age tales in this movie than it does in the original. In fact, the original is really more about a daydream (well, a pair of dreams) than about growth as a person.
The new movie is, instead, a bildungsroman. The unwanted marriage proposal creates social pressure which forces Alice to run away for a time to Underland (as it is called in this film). In Underland, she is informed that she has lost her “muchness”, to the extent that she is not even considered to be Alice. The White Queen eventually spells it out for both Alice and the audience: she will stand alone against the Jabberwocky, so she must choose – alone, without the pressure of others – whether to fight.
Once she has regained her muchness, or become self-actualized, Alice can then make choices for herself. She decides to leave Underland, and turns down the proposal in favor of going into business. In our final view of her, she is standing on the bow of a ship headed to China for trade. The implication is that she kickstarts trade between Great Britain and China.
Burton’s Alice is a young woman who begins by being swept hither and thither by whomever is around, but ends by changes the currents of global trade herself. From one who is acted on, to one who acts. And Alice acts kindly. She tries to help an old, delusional aunt, she helps preserve her sister’s peaceful marriage and her business acumen supports herself so that her mother won’t worry. She backs up that kindness with steel: she kills the Jabberwocky that terrified Underland’s citizens into behaving. In other words, Alice becomes the ideal classical warrior. I wonder what Lewis Carroll would say?
