Monday, April 26, 2010

Oceans

Oh Disney. I give you a good review for The Princess and The Frog and then you go and make some silly, silly gender mistakes in Oceans. I guess the film was made by Disneynature, and another Disney-owned studio, Pixar, has not won my seal of approval for gender portrayal. Maybe I should have expected this.

And yes. Yes I did find things to criticize about gender in a documentary about the ocean.

Okay. The summary. Lots of beautiful, beautiful shots of the ocean and sea life. Shallow (ha) information about said ocean and sea life. Sometimes they didn't even tell you the name of the creature onscreen. As a major aqua-geek (I once dreamed of being a marine biologist), I was more interested in this film than an adult should probably be and really wanted to be able to Google some of the animals they featured. Disappointing in that respect, but definitely cool overall.

The problem I had with gender portrayal has three parts.

1) The narrator was male.

2) The film opens with a group of children running on a beach toward the water. A young male stops and looks out pensively. The voiceover says, "When a boy asks, 'What is the ocean?'..." That's the only mention of human gender we have in the whole film. Why not, "When a child asks...?"

3) Every time the narrator refers to an sea animal, he calls it a "he." Unless - you guessed it - the animal happens to be a mother with young offspring.

Okay. The first two choices, by themselves, would have be fine. Even 1) and 2) together wouldn't have been horribly offensive (although I probably still would have complained about it). But all three, together, are totally unnecessary and unfair. Gender-wise, the movie felt really old-school to me. In a bad way. It reminded me of a world I've never had to live in where only men are scientists and only women are parents.

All this, by the way, was preceded by a trailer for a new Disneynature film called African Cats. The tagline for the movie is something like, "Every mother has one goal. To protect her family." I mean, okay. Probably a lot of fathers feel the same way. And maybe some mothers actually have more than one goal? Maybe?

Garrrrggghhhhh. Come on, Disney! Get your underlings on-board with your sometimes admirable gender portrayals!

Click here to go to the website for Oceans.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

The Hurt Locker

This is the kind of movie you don't love - you appreciate. It's the story of a bomb diffusing squad in Iraq and how the adrenaline that comes with their job (and with watching this movie!) makes war a kind of drug.

I don't have much to say gender-wise because there were no female characters in the film (except for a brief, inconsequential cameo by Evangeline Lilly). I would have loved for Kathryn Bigelow (remember, she won two big-time Oscars for this film) to make at least one of the bomb squad members female, but I understand why she chose not to. I don't know if women are even allowed to fill that role in the military.

I've been thinking about the fact that a female finally won the Best Director Oscar through a film cast only with males and about a subject - war- that tends to be associated with male viewership. Here are a couple of ideas I've had:

- Did she win the Oscar partly because people were impressed a woman could make a war film?

- Are there elements of the experience of being female that caused her to make this movie differently than she would have if she had grown up male? In the film, there's an interesting tension between a glorification of war and an acknowledgment of its horror, and also between the excitement and tedium of bomb diffusing. And the main character, Sergeant James, a kind of arrogant cowboy, is portrayed ambiguously. He seems at times like a hero and at times like a careless idiot. Do any of these choices have their roots in the fact that Ms. Bigelow likely didn't grow up doing things like playing war video games or dreaming of following in the shoes of fathers and grandfathers who were in the armed services? In other words, does that fact that she may have a little more distance between herself and the the idea of war make her more able to portray it in a novel way?

These are really just items for debate. We can't know the answers to them, of course, Just food for thought about a really well-made film.

Click here to go to The Hurt Locker's website.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

The Princess and the Frog

Fabulous. No complaints. Disney, a lightening rod for controversy over the portrayal of gender and race, really outdid itself, gender-wise, in this film. (Race might be another story. I've heard some criticisms. But that, my friends, is a topic for another blog.)

The Princess and the Frog is a fun animated film that reminds us twenty- and thirty-somethings of our childhoods. The filmmakers use old-school hand-drawn animation and incorporate songs the way they did when we were kids (the characters themselves sing, Little Mermaid and Lion King style). The plot goes something like this: Hard-working Tiana lives in New Orleans and dreams of opening her own restaurant. A frogged Prince Naveen mistakes her for a princess and convinces her to kiss him so he can be human again. It doesn't work the way they hoped. Hijinks ensue.

I am notoriously hard to please but have no problems with this film. I got worried at one point that it was going to follow the tired romantic comedy formula in which a highly ambitious but highly stressed female is taught by a cool, laid-back male that her drive is keeping her from being happy.

Nope. Disney flips that narrative on its head and makes the cool guy look pretty pathetic next to the tough, no-nonsense heroine. Tiana has to teach him how to be an adult, and he happily learns. This culminates (spoiler alert) on him following her into the restaurant business - not whisking the new princess away to his kingdom.

After I was satisfied with that, I got nervous that, because of the goofy male animal companions (a required part of any great Disney film, apparently), only guys were going to get to be funny. Tiana, with all of her strengths, isn't exactly a barrel of laughs. But the sweet and hilarious character of Charlotte, Tiana's best friend, solves that problem.

And speaking of Charlotte, I like that her character is used to make fun of the princess obsession caused in large part by the very company that produced this film. :)

I could go on, but my reviews are always too long. Let me just end by pointing out that although this film uses older, less exciting technology, I'll take a good story FREE from silly stereotypes over a disappointing (at least from a gender perspective) but fancy animated flick. (I'm looking to you, Pixar division of Disney.)

Click here to go to the website for The Princess and the Frog.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

An Education

Stay in school, girls. That's what An Education is telling you.

Because I hadn't heard a lot of controversy about the film, I didn't expect to be weirded out by this Lolita-like story. I guess I figured that if I wasn't hearing gossip, the filmmakers must have portrayed the relationship discretely. But they didn't, really. It was weird. And disturbing. And kind of gross.

But it's all in the service of a really interesting and well-communicated message that has a lot to do with girls, but more to do with young people in general.

The story goes something like this. A precocious (and adorable) 16-year-old Jenny is seduced by an older man. She becomes enthralled with his exciting, grown-up life, and gradually becomes something very different from the excellent but bored student she once was. Her parents are also charmed by David and become kind of blindly complicit in the relationship. When David proposes, Jenny has to decide whether to go to Oxford as planned or marry him.

And then, there's this perfectly written and acted argument between Jenny and Miss Stubbs, one of Jenny's teachers, where Jenny makes a pretty convincing case for the relationship with David. I want to quote it because it's so good, but I'd rather you go and watch it. The dialogue actually had me, a by-all-accounts devoted student and happily responsible young adult, questioning the decisions I've made in my own real life.

I won't let on what Jenny decides, but by the end the film has reminded you that a life you make for yourself is priceless and that, as much as we young people may want to, we only short-change ourselves when we try to fast-forward through the difficult, uncomfortable, or boring parts of our teens and twenties.

The portrayal of female characters is perfect. Jenny, played by Oscar-nominated Carey Mulligan, is a heroine all young people, female or male, can relate to. Miss Stubbs becomes an unexpected and understated role model any girl would be lucky to have. And Jenny's mom, dad, and headmistress remind us that our expectations for young women are many times unfair, unrealistic, and nothing like what we would hope for boys.