Anchorman

Ha ha ha ha ha HA HA HA HA. I just saw Anchorman in its entirety for the first time last night. I laughed HARD through the whole thing. Here are my few gender-related comments about it:

- I loved how it made fun of the everything 70s, including the sexism of that decade. I think comedy is a wonderful tool for social change because it points out ridiculousness in a fun, non-confrontational way.

- That being said, I was frustrated there were really only two speaking female roles and like A HUNDRED roles for male comedians. A truly subversive movie would have found a way to incorporate more females while highlighting the gender disparities in the newsroom.

- I'm always suspicious of films that allow themselves to use really offensive language (how many times did Ron call Veronica something along the lines of "whore?") by acknowledging that they're really offensive. So, the logic in Anchorman says that Ron's news crew can say terrible things about their female colleague because that's how sexist guys talked back in the 70s. Another example of this kind of logic was used in Superbad (substitute "Seth and Evan" for "Ron's news crew," "classmates" for "colleague," and "talk when they're teenagers" for "talked back in the 70s"). I'm not 100% against this practice because you CAN make a really good point with it, but I believe it should be used sparingly. Maybe a little more sparingly than it was used in this movie.

Go to Anchorman's website.

Avatar

Yay, James Cameron! Thanks so much for Avatar! Not only did I love it, but I'm hard-pressed to find ANYTHING to complain about in the gender portrayal department.

But, of course, I will, because I'm almost impossible to please. I was a little bothered by the fact that, on Pandora, the man was always the political leader and the woman the spiritual leader. I guess it did fit in some ways as the Na'vi people worshipped a goddess. Their logic might dictate that a female could more easily commune with "Eywa." Also, I really do appreciate so much the fact that women and men always led together and that leadership seemed to pass on to a child regardless of gender. But man as dominant, rational, political and woman as emotional, intuitive, spiritual is a little too on the stereotypical side for me.

Also, once again, the protagonist of a big-time action movie was a man. As I always say, that's not a problem on a movie-by-movie basis. OF COURSE it's okay to make a male your lead character. The problem is, as a group, there are very, very rarely action or sci-fi films that cast a woman in the biggest role. Sure, there are plenty that have strong female characters in them, but the women aren't the main characters - the characters whose names you'd say first if someone asked you what the movie was about. Avatar, of course, would have been an entirely different movie if it had featured Jane Sully, ex-marine and avatar who finds a smart forest boy to help her appreciate the beauty of the planet she's come to exploit. And I will say that James Cameron was doing so much that was different in this film that an unexpected gender twist might have made the movie too much for a mainstream audience to handle. But I did want to raise the point. I'm waiting for a great action/sci-fi flick that focuses on a female first.

Now, on to the many, many things I loved about the film.

- Wow. I was so pleased with gender ratios. Except for in the army, I think I saw as many females as males on screen and with speaking parts. There were also really great named female characters. Grace (played by Sigourney Weaver), the head scientist, and Trudy (played by Michelle Rodriguez), the rogue fighter, were particularly terrific roles.

- I was really annoyed when Neytiri jumped on the back of Jake's whatever-it-was (dragon? banshee? dinosaur?). I felt like, "Okay, here we go with the lady on the back of the motorcycle." But then (thank you, thank you, thank you again James Cameron!), she got her own untamable beast! The very animal that just about cost Jake his life at the beginning of the film. Nice.

- In general, I just loved Neytiri's toughness. How great of a moment was it when the villain had stabbed that cat-like animal she was fighting on, she was stuck underneath it with no hope of survival, and the first thing she did was hiss at him? Yes! And well-done, Zoe Soldana.

- I liked the contrast between the sexist soldiers from Earth (who more than once referred to a group of men as "ladies") and the nearly perfect gender equity of the Na'vi. Women were warriors and hunters alongside men. Both sexes could tame banshees and fight off a pack of Pandora wolves. Also, in one of the two societies they went to to gather more soldiers, a female was the one acting as leader and rallying the troops. I feel that in a lot of action flicks, the love interest, if she's tough, is seen as a gender exception - an especially cool female. In this case, all the Na'vi women were portrayed as strong.

- The natural world was equitable. Animals, if I heard correctly, were sometimes called "her" and sometimes called "him." That's a small detail that means a lot to me. It would have been so easy to just default to the masculine, especially when these pronouns were only used in a couple of scenes. Also, as mentioned above, the deity the Na'vi worshipped was a female. That's a nice counterpoint to the male God we hear about 99% of the time both in film and real life.

- I went to learnnavi.org, the website where you can learn the Na'vi language online, and the language looks very solid, gender-wise. For example, unlike Spanish, where a group that includes both males and females is referred to with the masculine pronoun, Na'vi, like English, has a gender neutral option. It's the difference, basically, between something like "you guys" and "you all."

- And finally, the overall message of the film was very positive with regard to gender. When Jake chose his avatar over his human body, he chose a lot of positive things: the use of his legs over a wheelchair, harmony with nature over a "dying planet," etc. However, he was also choosing a society with gender parity over one that glamorized the worst traditionally masculine traits: domination by brute force and at any cost and the unbridled pursuit of money (symbolized respectively by the male characters of the colonel and corporate tycoon, played by Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi). Please note that I do not necessarily agree with making both of the villains male. Just as I believe men and women can make equally important productive contributions, I know that females and males are similarly capable of hate and destruction.

I could go on and on, but this post is already too long. I just really appreciated the effort to make women such equal players in this film that, realistically, will probably be seen by more men than women. Also, I think that the gender portrayal choices made this film much more interesting and groundbreaking than it would have been if it had followed action/sci-fi traditions more closely.

To end, there's one gender question about the film I don't have an answer to. We seem as Americans to love to Pocahontas/Sacagawea story - a rough-and-tumble guy discovers a new world with the help of a smart native woman. Is this cultural narrative good or bad for females? The "good" argument would say that these storylines represent men admitting they might have something to learn from a more capable female. The "bad" argument would say that this kind of plot is all about conquest. Any thoughts?

Go to Avatar's website.

Nine

Four thoughts:

First, I don't know why good parts for women in movie musicals always have to involve lingerie.

Second, I'm glad that most of the women Guido used and abused decided to leave him by the end. Yay for having (at least some) self-respect, ladies.

Third, I'm glad the film addressed how a woman can disappear into her husband once she gets married. A lot of people feel that a woman giving up her last name is nothing but an old tradition that has no real repercussions in her life, in society, or in her relationship with her husband. I appreciated the discussion of how Luisa Acari ceased to exist, both literally and figuratively, once Luisa Contini was born.

Finally, I feel that this movie represents in a pretty major way the dominant relationship between females and film. I've been reading recently about the lack of female directors in Hollywood and the discrepancy between what male and female stars are paid. Guido represents all of us, then, in the way he treats the women in his life. He loves to look at women and dress them in sexy clothes and use them as inspiration, but the ladies themselves get zero power. One of them, Lilli (played by Judi Dench), gets some respect, but she really spends most of her time fetching Guido coffee and cigarettes. I certainly related to Claudia (played by Nicole Kidman), when she told Guido that instead of being a muse, "I'd rather be the man." Who wouldn't, when being a woman means, at best, straightening a great director's tie and, at worst, trying to kill yourself because your married boyfriend wants to spend the evening with his wife?

What kills me, though, is even as the movie is making this great, sophisticated point, it's perpetuating the relationship it's criticizing. See my first point on how apparently you need to perform a half-naked chair dance in order to get a great musical role as a female.

Also (completely separate from my thoughts on women in Nine), Rome should not look exactly like Chicago, Rob Marshall. ;)

Go to Nine's website.

(Thank you to my sister Kelly for providing information that was important to this post.)

Two Good Articles on Female Directors

A good friend sent me the link to a great (and long) article on Nancy Meyers, which led me to a second article about female directors in general.

Since I haven't been great about writing reviews recently, I thought I'd get the posting ball rolling again by sharing these.

500 Days of Summer

After hearing mixed reviews from family and friends, I went into 500 Days of Summer cautiously optimistic. I ended up really liking the film. I'm not enthusiastic about it like I was with Away We Go, but it was a fun movie that only posed a couple of minor issues for me as far as portrayal of gender is concerned.

The plot's fine and even a little bit unexpected. The jokes are funny enough. The sets are interesting to look at. The costumes are stylish, although I'm not sure Summer and Tom dress like typical Los Angelans. (I thought Portland or Seattle at first. I wonder if the costumer was more interested in putting hip clothes on the actors and less about what would be true to their characters. But what do I know? I'm from the Midwest.) The music is good. Also, I'm pretty sure about 80% of the people in the theater, guys as well as gals, left feeling a little bit in love with Zoey Deschanel.

On the gender front, I'm glad I watched 500 Days of Summer and Casablanca back-to-back because it highlighted for me an important distinction between these two films and, hopefully, between the way females tended to be treated in popular culture then versus how we can hope they'll be treated more often in the future. In Casablanca, the women are super passive, unable to decide anything for themselves - even if they want another drink or not - while their men make all the major decisions about issues like war, peace, and love.

In 500 Days of Summer, the girl is the one with her act together - the one who has to "do the thinking for both." Tom is pathetic. He works at a job he hates because he's not brave enough to go for one he really wants, takes advice from his kid sister, and waits around for the girl of his dreams to create his life for him. Summer, on the other hand, feels no need for a relationship and has a fascinating inner life of which we really only get tiny glimpses (as does Tom). Just compare the couples' apartments: Tom's is...well, I don't actually remember much about Tom's apartment. Only that it's boring. Summer's is quirky - filled with knick-knacks, color, paintings. She so clearly knows what she likes and who she is that Tom is obviously, from the beginning, not a match for her.

So that's my general impression. Here are a couple little loose ends I feel I need to mention, though.

1) One of Tom's friends makes obnoxious gay jokes all the time. It is unbelievable to me how common "You're gay" or the related "You're a girl" insults still are. I think they're a too-easy, way too-offensive route to a laugh. I will say that 500 Days does eventually expose this character as the loser he is, especially in the love department, hinting that that kind of immaturity isn't usually appreciated. However, people around me in the theater were pretty quick to laugh at him, so maybe I'm being naive.

2) The movie suggests that Summer might not want a relationship because of her parents' divorce. I guess you could argue, then, that she isn't as independent as she claims she is - she's just afraid to get involved because of her personal history. Furthermore, Summer ends up getting married at the end of the film. The authors of some reviews I've read have a problem with this and feel it undermines the character we've gotten to know all along. I don't really agree. I know a lot of people, females and males, that THINK and SAY they never want to get serious, get married, have a family, but it eventually, unexpectedly happens to them.

I was, however, somewhat taken aback by the very traditional hints we got about Summer's wedding - the guy proposes with diamond ring and she wears a blusher, really old-fashioned to my feminist self but maybe just another hipster fashion choice - at the ceremony. Anyway, I'm not 100% sure what to do with the Summer-getting-married plot twist, but I think I'm okay with it.

3) I say above that I hope females are gradually being portrayed more positively in film. "Hope" is the key word there. I'm not totally optimistic this trend is advancing fast enough. The article below is a really good read on how we still keep our movie heroines dependent on men to do their thinking for them:

Shrew vs. shrewd -- chicagotribune.com

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Go to 500 Days of Summer's Website

Casablanca

Embarrassed to say I watched it for only the FIRST TIME last night. As good of a movie, in general, as everyone says it is. Terrible movie for women, though. There are about 4 female characters: a singer with no lines, Rick's kind of erratic girlfriend who he basically baby-sits, a Bulgarian woman who has to rely on either Rick or the corrupt French policeman for help, and the leading lady, Ilsa, whose emotions overwhelm her so much she asks Rick to "do the thinking for both of us." Which he does.

I guess we'll have to chalk this one up to old-fashioned attitudes and just enjoy the awesome combination of Morocco, cocktails, and escaping from Nazis.

Away We Go

Ahhhhhhhhhh. Usually, when I go to the theater, I want to love a film. I really like going to the movies, and I can be entertained by almost anything you put in front of me. However, as much as I may have enjoyed what I just watched, I almost always leave at least a little frustrated about the portrayal of gender. I think, "If they had only NOT done this," or "If they had only been less stereotypical about THAT." After Away We Go, I got to walk out totally happy.

Women are just people in this film, not foils for mens' hijinks or mannequins for clothes or wives, girlfriends, or mothers to more dominant male characters. They actually play roles equal in screen time and complexity to males' parts. Sure, there are flawed female characters. Allison Janney's ridiculous, offensive "Lily" and Maggie Gyllenhaal's judgmental "LN" provide models of the kinds of mother Verona decidedly does NOT want to be. However, in a wonderfully equal way these women are paired with flawed male characters who represent the kinds of fathers Bert also wants to avoid becoming. AND the movie pays as much attention to his conflict as it does hers!

A more interesting, less stereotypical take on gender permeates the film. For example, Verona drives most of the time (and the characters spend a lot of time in the car, so that's not insignificant). In other movies, it's almost always the guy who takes wheel. Also, in a lot of other films (such as Up, the last one I reviewed), the woman is the one who gets upset over fertility troubles and excited about parenting. In Away We Go, the filmmakers undermine that idea again and again. A couple Bert and Verona are friends with seem equally sad about a series of miscarriages and equally committed to raising the children they've adopted. Verona is the one who's hesitant to get married. Bert does most of the preparing for the baby (most adorably, he takes a "family defense class") while Verona just kind of rolls with it. She even says at one point that she doesn't really feel different now that she's pregnant. I could go on and on.

The only conversation I kind of cringed at was the one between Bert and his brother right after the brother had been left by his wife. The brother went on about the kinds of things mothers notice and how his daughter had no chance of being popular because she didn't have her mother to teach her how to dress and to wipe carrot juice off her face before school pictures. It was definitely a little stereotypical, but I realize that he is only one character in a tough moment who expresses one slightly objectionable view of women. Since so many interesting and diverse views of parenting are already represented in the film, I feel okay about his being included as well.

This is a great film for a lot of reasons: great acting, great music, great cinematography, and, most important to this blog, great fairness in its portrayal of females. It's a movie that makes me, a viewer who's very difficult to please when it comes to women in film, feel good on a lot of levels.



***Go to Away We Go's Facebook Page***