Pixar & Garden State Discussions

If you're a Pixar or Garden State fan, you might want to check out a fun back-and-forth my smart and movie savvy friend Mike and I are having. Head to this post on Up or this one on Garden State to check it out!

Write the future

This is a really cool commercial. I can appreciate a good commercial.



I liked this one so much I called my husband over to the computer last night and made him check it out. Then I joked, "I'm glad the World Cup is giving us an extra opportunity to worship 18- to 22-year-old men this year."

Now, I don't begrudge people their sports (often... ;). But have you ever seen a commercial like this about female athletes? I haven't. I'd love to.

The Bechdel Test

Wow. Wow. Wow. How did I not know about this?



Also, this:

http://bechdeltest.com/


Also THIS! I need to meet this young lady. She even goes to my old college!

http://thebechdeltest.blogspot.com/



Thank you to my wonderful friend Sarah for pointing out these sites to me!

Jessica's "Daily Affirmation"

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



Video found on red letter daze.

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.

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.

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.