All blog posts in Film Fridays - Shameless Magazine - your daily dose of fresh feminism for girls and trans youth

All posts in Film Fridays

Page 5 of 7

- Film Fridays
Puzzled by Enchanted

November 30, 2007 • Megan Griffith-Greene

Enchanted, the new Disney kid-flick, is being sold as a kind of post-modern fairy tale, inverting the stereotypes that Disney has helped construct about femininity. Sound progressive? Well, it’s still more enchanted than empowered.

The first scene paints a familiar Disney picture. Our classic heroine is singing to the forest creatures in her living room and dressing a dummy like Prince Charming so that all the animals can recognize her one true love. Her waist is the size of her neck, her eyes are wide and doe-like, and she’s pluck and perky as she trills about dreams and true love and her perfect prince.

One can’t help but picture the scene in YouTube parody: how completely insane-o, desperate and sad such a scene would seem un-animated. Which is, as it turns out, exactly where this is headed: into live action (and into parody). (more inside…)
- Film Fridays
is there such a thing as a responsible rape scene?

November 30, 2007 • Thea Lim

Research. It always gets you into trouble. This review was supposed to say “Empowering! Feminist! Realism! Actually Tough Women of Colour!”. But then I did a little googling, (damn you google!) and now I’m confused.

The movie Bandit Queen is based on the story of the real life Phoolan Devi. In the 80’s in India, Devi led groups of bandits to pillage high caste villages for money. She was notorious and fearsome, and this was a big, shocking, deal - not only was she a woman, she was a low caste woman.

A kind of Robin Hood with a gender twist: at 11 Devi was married to a 30-something man who raped and mistreated her. As an adult she found him and stabbed him in front of his village, as a warning for old men who marry young girls.

Devi was always described to me as a hero for poor people and women. Separate from who she actually was, Devi became a legend and a symbol of the one woman who just wasn’t going to take it anymore. She was tough shit! She was brutalised, pushed around and dehumanised by patriarchal culture (more on that later) - but she actually pushed back!

So a movie about the life of this feminist hero - ok, the violence she committed makes her a problematic feminist hero - would definitely be a feminist movie wouldn’t you say? Well, this is where the confusion kicks in.

What I liked most about this movie was how it is such an unflinching, unsentimental portrayal of life for women in a patriarchal culture. The violence against women in Bandit Queen is essentially constant and blatant (I didn’t say it was a fun movie to watch), but that amazed me. Because the movie seems to be saying, look, it’s not just that some men are bad apples, and it’s not just that women will experience gender violence once in their lives. It’s that under a patriarchal system the threat of violence and the incidence of violence against women is constant and total.

For example, often “rapists” and “wife beaters” in North American cinema are portrayed as dirty, creepy, foul-smelling and poor. The men who assualt Devi in Bandit Queen however, are just regular, average men. This seemed to say to me that, it’s not just lower income men who don’t wash their shirts who are capable of violence, it’s all men who’ve been socialised by rampant sexism.

BUT, that’s exactly the problem with Bandit Queen: the constant gender violence. (more inside…)
- Film Fridays
Searching…

November 23, 2007 • Tuval Dinner

I’ve been wanting to watch this movie since I heard about it a couple of years ago but never seemed to be in the right place at the right time. Last night I finally made it happen.
“Searching for Angela Shelton” is a curious film that is never quite what you think its going to be. This is one woman’s quest but she takes a lot of other people along for the ride. Angela Shelton (the film-maker) decides she wants to drive around the USA and meet all the other Angela Shelton’s that are willing to talk to her. Its all filmed in a straight-forward documentary style but what unravels makes for riveting viewing.

What the central Angela finds out is that, including herself, 24 out of the 40 Angela Shelton’s she talks to have been raped, molested or abused in their lifetimes. Her attempt to find out the state of American women by using her name as a tool to generate a random sample serves as a powerful setup for exploring violence against women.

While the other Angela’s provide a way for the film to move forward this is really the central Angela’s story and her journey through her own pain. Moving, funny, and brimming with courage I encourage everyone to watch this and to show it to at least one person who claims they don’t care about violence against women.

You should be able to find it in your local library system (I did!) or cool movie rental establishments.
- Film Fridays
Jesus Camp

November 16, 2007 • Allison Martell

I’ve been catching up on documentaries lately, which is a mostly depressing activity. Most recently, I Jesus Camp, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s look at an evanglical Christian summer camp.

This is no ordinary camp, and it makes for pretty disturbing viewing. Camp director Becky Fischer berates the kids for being dirty hypocritical sinners until they’re sobbing and speaking in tongues. Then she brings in a children’s entertainer to teach them that abortion is wrong, giving everyone their own fetus doll to hold. And that’s just the beginning. Fischer freely admits that she is buliding an army of God.

Lots has been said about this doc (here’s a discussion with the filmmakers) so I won’t go into whether this is brainwashing, indoctrination, abuse, etc. (I think it pretty clealy is.) I took something different and sort of strange from the documentary.

Early in the film, we meet one of the campers in her room at home, where she’s dancing in her mirror and talking about her favourite music. She’s listening to Christian rock, which she likes because it isn’t always about sex - Britney Spears and friends, she tells us, don’t really share her values.

There’s an urge that feminists have in common with even the most radical arms of the Evangelical movement, I think, and it has to do with building an alternative culture. I see something poisonous in contemporary culture, just like that girl does. I wish I could build a universe for my loved ones without that poison. And there are other things we agree on. The kids in Jesus Camp are encouraged to give their own sermons, which seems kind of cool and empowering to me.

But most of the documentary is, obviously, not cool at all. So here’s my question for you, dear readers: What went wrong at Jesus Camp?
- Body Politics
- Film Fridays
Smushmortion: Hollywood’s preoccupation with “keeping the baby”

November 16, 2007 • Wesley Fok

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 <em>Juno</em>. (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.

(more inside…)
- Film Fridays
“You’re never too old to go to space camp dude.”

November 9, 2007 • Catherine Hayday

So as it’s nearing the end of 2007, it seemed appropriate to review a film that came out in 2006. Retrospection and all that.

No, not really. I’m just way behind on my movie watching. And catching myself in a moment of honesty, I’m going to review what I actually rented and watched this week, rather than misrepresenting my lifestyle by going out and intentionally renting something more… Shameless.

Stranger Than Fiction

Actually it was a bit of a banner movie week for me, as I saw not one, but two new movies. One which served the other actually. Because in a blindly determined bid to go to a matinée, I ended up seeing Bee Movie. Which was so exceptionally poor, that it made Stranger Than Fiction look (possibly much) better than I might have found it otherwise.

Stranger Than Fiction is a story about a story: Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is an IRS agent who, while brushing his teeth one day, begins hearing the voice of a narrator, narrating his life. Which rattles and annoys him, but which he starts taking very seriously when the narrator casually mentions his imminent death.

Stranger Than Fiction was likable for many reasons (art direction on the calculations graphics; an implausible variation on our regular world quietly accepted as plausible), dislikable for others (the story does not live up to the metastory; inconsistencies in how the narrative threads fit together).

But what makes Stranger Than Fiction worth watching are the understated admirable everyday female characters.

(more inside…)
- Film Fridays
- Film Reel
Oh no, not the Curse!

November 2, 2007 • Anna Leventhal

Remember those books, classes and films you had to experience as a kid that explained how your body was soon going to be undergoing some “changes”? How you’d be growing hair in new places, getting flesh where no flesh was before, and feeling “special” feelings you’d never experienced? Oh, and let’s not forget the matter of the blood. All in the name of becoming a woman - if you didn’t know any better, it would sound like a horror movie.

Ginger Snaps is a curious, quirky horror flick that deals with exactly that - how puberty is, in fact, like becoming a werewolf. The film follows Ginger and Brigitte, two outcast, goth-y sisters who are more interested in taking gory photos of each other in death poses than shopping, looking cute, or hooking up with boys. Although they’re 15 and 16, they seem to exist in a state of permanent pre-pubescence - a very snarly, sarcastic pre-pubescence, where they equate “becoming women” with turning into brainless hormone-puddles who’d do anything for a date with some pimply knuckle-dragger on the football team, and thus they swear to each other never to become the sexy, mindless examples of womanhood they see all around them.

(more inside…)
Confessions of a Recovering Cinephobe

November 2, 2007 • Elle E.

In a past life, before Amélie, I passionately hated the movies. For a while I thought it was a sign of ADD: I couldn’t sit still for a 2-hour film without chipping the concrete floor with my impatiently tapping toe. More recently I’ve realized my aversion to movies was one of the many bruises I suffered at the hands of the stifling jockocracy in which I was raised. The road to recovery is long. Even last weekend, when the opening credits of a wonderful, low-budget, gardening documentary came up, I had a flashback of helicopter blades, machine gun fire, plastic cleavage and fart jokes.

When I was growing up, going to the movies was in the same category as watching the guys play sports - it was the only thing to do. It was also an activity where my girl friends and I were expected to be passive, but still flirty, spectators. Sure, it was more fun than hanging out alone, but it was far from fulfillment and far from fair.

(more inside…)
- Film Fridays
- Film Reel
I love the NFB

October 27, 2007 • Megan Griffith-Greene

Sorry that my film Fridays post is late, but I wanted to write about a screening I attended last night at the National Film Board. It was a selection of recent animation, part of their World Animation Day festival.
(Regina Pessoa)

(more inside…)
- Film Fridays
A Supernatural Work/Life Balance

October 26, 2007 • Stacey May Fowles

“Those ivory shoulders are a throwback to Old Hollywood. Even though her body is tiny (5‘1”), it’s plush and lush. In fact, she embodies all the best contradictions. Half luminous angel, half tomboy… Sultry as a torch singer and shy as a convent girl.”

Nerve.com had this to say about Patricia Arquette when they crowned her “crush of the week” back in 2005. Her title was specific to her role on the television show Medium, which they described as “a suburban wife who channels an otherworld of violence,death, grief..no surprise either that she makes supernatural powers seem natural.” Medium is indeed a show of dualities, insisting that one side can never exist without the other.

I’ve just spent the last few days working my way through the third season of Medium on DVD, and although deep in my heart I always knew the show was somewhat groundbreaking in it’s potrayal of a wife , mother and professional woman, I am now certain that it’s my favorite depiction of domestic life/work balance on television today. Add to that the joy I experience via the thoughtful, realistic and often hilarious writing of Allison and Joe Dubois’ relationship, and I’m smitten. Believe me when I say I think this show is feminist, and I give credit to the show’s writers. I’ve never seen a husband and wife couple written in such a realistic, sympathetic and progressive way on mainstream television.

On the surface Medium is your typical prime-time supernatural crime drama, based on the real-life Allison Dubois, a self-proclaimed medium who uses her psychic abilities as a jury consultant and to help law enforcement agencies solve crimes. But from its inception, the show has focused not only the psychic solving of often brutal crimes, but on Allison’s family life with her aerospace engineer husband Joe and her three children, Marie, Bridgette and Ariel (who also, often problematically and humourously, share the beginnings of Allison’s gift.)

It’s a case of truth being better than fiction; coupling a scientific mind grounded in reality (Joe) with a woman with a “special gift” often faced with skepticism. Her family dynamic is always fundamental to the solving of every crime, and rather than Allison being the image of wifely and maternal perfection, she is flawed in ways most women can relate to.(more inside…)