Monday, May 17, 2010

Jessica's "Daily Affirmation"

Now here's a good on-screen female role model for you!



Video found on red letter daze.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

10 Chick Flick Cliches

This is pretty funny, first of all. Secondly, it's an interesting marketing strategy to convince guys to see a "chick flick." (I'm sure you can guess how I feel about that term, though.) Finally, this kind of speaks to the point of my last post about how movies that are overly traditional when it comes to gender tend not to be that creative when it comes to other important aspects of the film.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Thoughts on Lost

I watch Lost. I'm not the kind of fan who thinks and talks about it all the time, though. I don't love it. In fact, I only like it. I like it just enough to stick with it until the finale in a couple of weeks. If the show was going to go on for another year, I'd be out.

Lost is not a movie. But I had an epiphany last night as I watched it that has to do with the portrayal of women and girls in film.

I think Lost is guilty of some pretty obnoxious gender portrayal. The show is dominated by white males to an embarrassing extent. And women tend to have two defining qualities in Lost's world: long flowing hair (because that's totally practical on a dangerous tropical island) and baby fever. Oh, and low-cut, sweaty shirts.

What hit me during the most recent episode (in which we were introduced to two NEW long-haired, baby crazy women and learned that two white brothers are the universal embodiments of good and evil) is this: I have yet to view a truly high-quality tv show or movie that is thoughtless about the portrayal of gender.

Here's what I mean by that. First, Lost is less of a show because women are represented poorly. It makes the characters less realistic and the relationships between them less believable.

And second, an unthinking, overly traditional portrayal of women and girls signals, I believe, that the creators of a show or movie aren't paying attention to detail the way they need to in order to make their work truly excellent. I see examples of this kind of laziness in Lost all the time. And many of these examples have nothing to do with gender. Some of the sets look fake, for one. And the dialogue often gets sloppy and obvious. There's also plot padding. (I remember one season that seemed to consist entirely of Michael criss-crossing the island yelling "Walt!")

I think the quality of gender portrayal in television or film is a good indicator of a lot of things: how nuanced a set of characters will be, how much time and research will go into a set and a script, and, in the end, whether a film/tv show will be a masterpiece or a missed opportunity.