Traditionally, women only have a couple of roles to play in action movies. If you want to be fair, I suppose men only have a couple of roles to play in action movies too, since the genre seems only so open to nuanced, complex characters. But based mostly on personal experience, the ass-kicking female characters fall into a scant few stereotypes: there’s the butch “plays with the boys” type role, the glam lipstick assassin, and finally the most enduring and perhaps most respected of the stereotypes: the protective mother. You know the type: think Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (“Newt! NEWWWWT!”) or Jodie Foster in Panic Room.

Linda Hamilton’s portrayal of Sarah Connor in the first two Terminator movies ranks as one of the most visible examples of the role. And maybe it’s just my fetish for all things to do with nuclear armageddon, but she’s always been one of my favourite characters as well. How can you not relate to a woman who’s thrown into a mental asylum because she says her son will be humanity’s last hope in a post-nuclear war against a malevolent artificial intelligence and its army of killer robots? We’ve all been there. Sort of. Connor is arguably one of the more complex characters we’ve seen in an action flick, even if her motives are fairly simple. As all good heroes are, she’s essentially plucked out of her normal life by powers beyond her control and forced into a role she never expected to have—and transforms into a determined, cynical, hard-as-nails fighter who willingly sacrifices her own humanity in order to keep the human race safe, though she will never reap the benefits personally.

Lena Headey as the new Sarah Connor.

I just finished catching up with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a Fox series that just wrapped up its first season and has somehow avoided cancellation on the Network That Kills Anything Remotely Good. Moving Sarah Connor to the small screen is a bit of a challenge, partially because there’s no way you can recreate the blockbuster-sized explosions and action sequences of the movies, nor can you rely on Arnold Schwarzenegger to take time off from his governor’s duties to utter his deadpan cyborg lines. Neither does Linda Hamilton does not return in the role of Sarah Connor, instead leaving those duties to a very capable Lena Headey. Thomas Dekker takes on the role of future human resistance leader John Connor, and Firefly‘s Summer Glau inherits Arnie’s task as a friendly Terminator sent from the future to protect John.

The nine-episode first season starts fairly slowly, setting up its pieces deliberately but failing to bring much in the way of writerly polish; you have to wait until about the halfway mark of the season before things pick up dramatically. But even in the first few episodes it’s clear that the producers of The Sarah Connor Chronicles intend to flesh out the mythology of the Terminator franchise. And once the show’s set up the plot properly, it’s a lot of fun to watch how it all goes down. Old-school Terminator fans may balk at the new Sarah Connor, but after a while you get used to Lena Headey’s portrayal; her Sarah Connor is still determined, still cynical, and still a reluctant hero, while in some ways seeming more personable than in the movies.

Having just finished its first run on Fox, it’ll be a while before DVD sets show up, but if you’re in the mood for some decent sci-fi drama, keep an eye out.

Miranda July teaches you how to make buttons.

Try it the next time you’re at a button factory.

Yes, this is my third post regarding a movie starring Ellen Page, but stay with me on this.

The Tracey Fragments has a fairly simple premise: take a fifteen-year-old girl who’s tormented at school, shackled with an ineffectual psychiatrist, and living with a family barely held together with emotional duct tape. Then rip the tape off and see what happens. One day, Tracey’s kid brother goes missing, and like all teenagers teetering on the brink of emotional collapse, she takes the one action that makes sense: she runs away from home and towards Winnipeg in the hopes that she’ll find her brother. From that basic foundation, McDonald spins a complex multi-tracked narrative, told largely through an almost-literal kaleidoscope of images that serves as the film’s calling card. Nearly every scene in the film consists of multiple video images, arranged and re-arranged in often-hasty compositions designed to put the viewer inside Tracey’s cluttered, mile-a-minute mind.

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Diana Rigg has had a long and storied career as an actress. She’s performed in numerous stage plays, married James Bond, and had her prized diamond necklace recovered by Muppets. But the role she’s best known for is the surefooted, quick-witted British agent Emma Peel on the 60s-era landmark spy series The Avengers.

John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) track down a killer who’s fond of kittens. No, really.

Every bit the equal to her crime-solving companion John Steed, Emma Peel was far from the typical damsel in distress of most spy fiction. She knew several martial arts and could dispatch any number of evil henchmen with ease. But more than just a lethal weapon, she also had a solid scientific background and often proved herself more intellectually capable—and quicker with a finely turned witticism—than Steed. Rigg played the part of Mrs. Peel with an elegant charm, lending her character a certain dignity that raised the show above its occasionally camp origins. Though Honor Blackman was the first to star opposite Steed as one of his female partners, the very capable and independent Catherine Gale, it’s Emma Peel that everyone remembers so fondly.

Sadly, though the producers of the show were ahead of their time in creating a liberated female protagonist, they weren’t bright enough to extend that same philosophy to Diana Rigg herself. She left the show after two successful seasons partially because she was fed up with how the producers treated her. It’s said that twelve episodes in, Rigg discovered that she was paid less than the cameraman. Reportedly, Rigg also had few friends on set. One of her defenders was none other than John Steed himself, Patrick Macnee, who tried to convince Rigg to stay—but to no avail. And though Rigg eventually moved on to other marquee projects, The Avengers lasted just one more season with the somewhat naive and innocent spy-in-training Tara King by Steed’s side—in many ways a watered-down wallflower version of Emma Peel.

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We’ve already touched on how many media outlets have been playing the Hillary Clinton v. Barack Obama battle for the Democratic presidential nomination as Blacks v. Women, and how that leads to unproductive infighting. So consider this today’s antidote and a sign that not all is lost.

CNN posted a story earlier today about the tough choice black women voters in South Carolina apparently faced as the state primary draws near: “should they vote their race, or should they vote their gender?” Though the story itself says that “most women here say they plan to vote based on the issues,” the message of the story boils down once again to Blacks v. Women.

Not twelve hours later, CNN posted another story, this time about the backlash CNN faced in the wake of that article:

CNN received dozens of e-mails shortly after posting the story, which focuses largely on conversations about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that a CNN reporter observed at a hair salon in South Carolina whose customers are predominantly African-American.

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An e-mailer named Tiffany responded sarcastically: “Duh, I’m a black woman and here I am at the voting booth. Duh, since I’m illiterate I’ll pull down the lever for someone. Hm… Well, he black so I may vote for him… oh wait she a woman I may vote for her… What Ise gon’ do? Oh lordy!”

So thanks, Tiffany, for a hearty laugh at the expense of Wolf Blitzer and company, and for reminding everyone that people vote for candidates based on issues, not demographics.

Previously, on the Shameless blog: Judd Apatow’s keeping mum on abortion. At the time I wrote that post, Juno hadn’t yet arrived in theatres, though if you were lucky you could’ve caught it at the Toronto International Film Festival or at one of many test screenings across North America. Since then the movie has raked in decent box office and a whole lot of accolades; Roger Ebert named Juno his favourite movie of 2007, and whether or not you agree with Ebert’s reviews, it’s a pretty hefty bit of praise.

Now that I’ve seen the movie twice (including just now, which is my excuse for why this Film Friday’s going up on Saturday), it seems like a good time to come back to Juno and see how it measures up. Let’s get that abortion issue out of the way first, since I brought it up so many months ago: Juno is not a movie about abortion, and whether you appreciate the movie’s treatment of abortion as a possible choice for a pregnant teenaged girl will probably depend on whether you want it to be a movie about abortion or if you’re willing to let Juno stand on its own merits.

(Quick note: the post is spoiler-free, but the comments aren’t!)

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I’m not sure how many of you own or play on an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, but if you’re a rabid console gamer you’ve probably heard of Assassin’s Creed. For everyone else, here’s the scoop: Assassin’s Creed is a video game that has you playing a medieval assassin tasked with eliminating nine people associated with the Crusades. Assassin’s Creed is one of the biggest games this holiday season, with a big marketing push from publisher Ubisoft following months of hype. The game is projected to sell over a million copies in the next two months, an amazing feat considering only eleven Xbox 360 games have ever sold more than a million copies.

So why should you care if you’re not into video games? Well, if you’re a Shameless reader, you probably care about how women are faring in traditionally male-dominated industries, and guess what? The producer of Assassin’s Creed is Jade Raymond, a woman. Female game developers are nothing new; a lot of classics were conceived and designed by women. But Raymond’s profile is far higher than any woman before her, mainly because she’s been the public face of the game at a time when the video game audience is larger than ever before. This is both a blessing and a curse; while Raymond is easily the most visible woman in game development today, there’s a suspicion that Raymond’s been asked to promote the game so much because, well, look:

Jade Raymond, producer of Assassin’s Creed.

Which brings me to the utterly bizarre way video game audiences—especially younger male gamers—handle attractive women playing and developing video games. Everyone knows the stereotype of the nerd gamer with no social skills who quakes in fear of women. The truth, however, is just a bit creepier. Something about the intersection of “hot women” and “plays video games” creates in some gamers a strange emotional supernova that produces equal parts nerdish adoration, wanton sexual desire, and hateful bile.

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As a moviegoer whose cinematic diet as of late has been rather heavy on action-packed popcorn flicks (Hello, Live Free or Die Hard! How ya doin’, Bourne Supremacy? I hate you with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns, Spiderman 3 hours of my life I’ll never get back!), I’m looking forward to an unusually high number of indie/arthouse flicks over the next few months. One of them, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, is Juno, an apparently heartwarming comedy about a teenage girl who suddenly finds herself pregnant, and has to decide what to do with the baby. In addition to being an obvious choice for Arrested Development fans, thanks to the presence of Jason Bateman and Michael Cera, Juno looks to be genuinely funny and a great vehicle for young actress Ellen Page, who’s already in the unofficial running for an Oscar nomination thanks to the movie.

Ellen Page as a very pregnant Juno and Olivia Thirlby as Leah in Juno. (Fox Searchlight)

Since this plot point is revealed in the first few seconds of the movie’s trailer, I’ll give it up here: Juno decides to give her baby up for adoption to a childless couple, played by Bateman and Jennifer Garner. The movie hasn’t even been released outside festivals and test screenings yet, so I won’t tell you exactly how abortion is treated in the film, but suffice it to say the option is considered—and then dropped.

This hasn’t escaped the notice of some reviewers. Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek touched briefly on the subject:

The only downside is that although the picture shows no evidence of having a right-to-life agenda, it’s going to spawn a million Sunday arts section stories about the new “trend” — which began, of course, with “Knocked Up” — in movies about women who choose to not have abortions. If either “Juno” or “Knocked Up” spewed any nonsense about abortion being murder, I’d be worried. But in both movies the women simply decide, impulsively, that they’d just rather not terminate their pregnancies. Sometimes a choice is just a choice. But you know how hard it is to come up with those Sunday arts section ideas.

Well, okay, Ms. Zacharek. I’ll bite.

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Two women drive across the country looking for stories. It’s a pretty typical road trip—except these women have a mission. Nona Willis-Aronowitz and Emma Bernstein are criss-crossing the United States in order to interview people about feminism, what it means to them and how it fits into their lives. And they’re blogging about it with the hopes of turning the whole enterprise into a book upon their return.

Some of the people they’ve already interviewed or hope to talk to are names you might recognize, like Andi Zeisler of Bitch Magazine. But most of the people Emma and Nona interview aren’t celebrities or magazine editors. They’re college students, performance artists, working mothers, aspiring actresses, professors and even porn producers.

One of the issues that keeps coming up in the vignettes is calling yourself a “feminist” in the first place. A lot of the women interviewed shy away from the term, and their reasons are intriguing.

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