Hey, all y'all out in LA-la Land . . .

[omorka]

So I was reading Fametracker hunting for, uh, well, half-naked shots of the sweet hobbit boys (*shame, embarrassment*) when I stumbled into a discussion on their Forums about feminism in film. (Hey, decent intellectual content after all! Even if it is about celebrities and Hollywood, I mean . . .)



One person, a woman of size and color, posted that she was essentially drummed out of USC's film school because, well, she had three strikes against her. The movie she was describing making for her senior project was essentially the Boudicea story glammed-up and romanticized a la Gladiator or Braveheart. Her profs said it would never sell because (a) it was automatically a chick flick, since the protagonist was a woman, and (b) there wasn't enough "production value" (in the Tapeheads sense) in the story. Her explanation that it was a gory action film cut no ice with them.

Add that to the fact that Sofia Coppola was only the second American female director ever to be nominated for an Oscar, and we have a pretty sorry state of affairs.

Is it really all that bad? Are there women directors/producers in the indie movie scene who are up-and-coming, maybe? I'd been ticked when I watched all the extras for the two released extended-edition LotR films about how few women were involved in the project - but now, with Fran, Philippa, Richard Taylor's co-head of WETA (who I think is his SO or ex-SO), and the co-head of the art department (who is married to the other co-head) all being women and pretty influential, it's looking like it might be one of the more egalitarian outfits in film these days . . . heck, they even bothered to interview one of the female stuntfolks.

This reminds me that I was impressed that the female characters in The New Guy, while far from strong characters, were at least as well-fleshed-out and assertive as the male characters. The Slut even changes to a Sacred Harlot in the course of the movie, instead of reforming and becoming a Secondhand Virgin. Remarkably egalitarian for a throwaway teen comedy. (For that matter, one of the strongest characters in Drumline is female, although she does go all soft for a guy who isn't worthy of her. No, not the main female character; she shows serious doormat tendencies. I mean the drummer girl.) In contrast, every single female in >Magnolia goes completely to pieces over the course of the film, or is an absolute bitch while at the same time being a doormat. (At least most of the women who fragment aren't doormats.) And where is Stanley's mother? And I didn't even think the film was misogynistic, just that the female characters weren't very strong. Claudia's mother (Rose? Is that her name?) is as close as we get - maybe the interviewer, too, but we don't see much of her. If it weren't for the misogynist asshole clearly being made fun of throughout the movie (man, Cruise was the perfect choice for that role), I'd be worried - but the film's heart is clearly in the right place.

It's hard to find a movie that makes serious money with strong female characters. Again, LotR has Eowyn, so it gets a by from me (also, it's Tolkien's fault, not Jackson's or New Line's, that there are really only three female characters and two of them are elves). The female lead in Lost In Translation is realistic, at least. The women in Big Fish are rewards; they don't move the plot, although they have a certain psychological power within the film. Perhaps criticizing what is clearly a son/father film for not having strong women is unreasonable, but where are the mother/daughter films to fill the other half of that niche? Or, hell, mother/son films? (Does Mary count in Passion? Anybody seen it yet?) We do get a few daughter/daddy films for the teen-girl set, but they're usually not very good - the last good one I saw was Beauty and the Beast.



I can't help but notice that even SmallWorld is short on strong female characters. It only has three - four if you count Help, I suppose. (Oh, wait, the head of Network 23 is female, too. Okay, five.) I suppose my way of making up for that is for one of them to occur over, and over, and over again . . . ;)

Comments

[memeslayer.livejournal.com]

It may interest you to know that the Matrix video game(which takes place alongside the latter two movies) has you play Niobe, the captain of one of the other ships(black woman with a funky hairdo played by Jada Pinkett Smith), who is actually one of the few good female characters in video games. She's essentially the "good captain"(as opposed to Morpheus), and aside from one silly joke about women driving(better), gets more respect than most people in the Matrix universe.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Niobe kicks serious butt. Female, of color, and while she's conventionally pretty, at least she's buff rather than skinny. I found it a little strange that the second movie tried to set her up as the prize in a romantic conflict between Morpheus and That Other Guy, but it was obvious that she didn't like that, and in the end she didn't put up with it. Most female movie characters would have preened on the attention. Instead, she eats the tension for lunch and just drives like a motherf**ker.

One of the best things about the second and third Matrix films, and I'm very glad she got to play lead in the video game. (And yeah, I knew about it - I'm a DVD extras junkie, and they talk about the video game on the documentary part of Reloaded.)