If you have to choose between seeing Haywire and Underworld: Awakening, you should see Haywire. If you don't have to choose, I recommend that you see both.

(Two action films headlined by women opening in one weekend. WHY DOESN'T THIS HAPPEN MORE OFTEN?!)

I have big love for Selene, the vampire Death Dealer from the first and second Underworld films. The second film was kind of a mess plot-wise, and the third was a complete train wreck in which Rhona Mitra was tragically misused, but oh, the first one... it has my heart. And I have been waiting for Selene to come back for a long, long time.

In Underworld: Awakening, she does come back. There's a war on, but this time it's s different one. Humans have discovered both vampires and werewolves, and they're executing all of the "infected." We get a taste of Selene's full power in the first few minutes of the film as she fights her way through human assault teams to reach her lover, Michael, at a getaway boat... and then things go wrong.

I hadn't read a lot of the film beforehand, so I got a few pleasant surprises. African-American actor Michael Ealy plays Detective Sebastian, a cop who suspects there's more to this Lycan thing than someone's admitting. (And the filmmakers don't do that thing that filmmakers like to do with the one black guy, so I was pleased.) Sandrine Holt, whose father is Chinese (and who played the reporter in Resident Evil: Apocalypse) plays a female scientist... who has less sense than my dog and is a complete gender stereotype, but at least she has lines.

And then, hold the phone, there are actually TWO female action roles in this film! India Eisley plays an unnamed-in-the-film teenager who rips a werewolf's head in half with her hands. Which is pretty damn useful if werewolves are chasing you. Selene and unnamed girl (who grew up in a research lab, hence the lack of name) have quite a few conversations that aren't about men, unless you deem all conversations about the male werewolves chasing you to be about men.

By the way, if anyone can tell me why all the werewolves are men, that would be swell. I've sat through four movies now and I still don't have a good answer. (And where are the vampires who like light colors and modern home decor? The vampire virus changes your personality to goth, or they just go along to get along?) I also don't know why we've spent several films building up sympathy for the werewolves as wronged by the vampires, then we throw all that away here and they're all evil.

Bad things? Well, I could have lived without having Selene naked except for strategically placed mist, right near the beginning of the film. It didn't make any sense in Kate Beckinsale's character in Whiteout, and it doesn't make much more sense here. It's also incongruous with how Selene was treated in the first film. Boo.

My esteemed viewing companion was not impressed with how the film held together, or how much Selene got "thrown around like a rag doll." His first example: "She can jump off a building, but she gets hit by a truck and it lays her out?" To which I responded "But she planned to jump off the building. The truck was not a planned move. And she lay in the street for about 30 seconds and then got up and kicked ass." He was wrong, I was right, I won, and then we finished eating dinner with our four year old son who wanted to know why all the werewolves were evil.

I also think that it's fine for Selene to be a little disoriented and not at full strength after being held captive for an extended period of time. She gets her game back together. But the film does feel more ragged than the first one, less fluid, and Selene is less of an unstoppable force than an outnumbered warrior fighting for her life against some really bad shit. I was okay with that difference in tone.

It has been really hard to write this without spoilers. Just so you know.

I can't give it four stars, because it doesn't rise to the iconic level of the other four star picks, even with two heroines and finally some diversity in casting for this series. I want to give it four stars on Heroine Content grounds, but if I made a list of the films I was most in love with that I could call Greatest Hits with complete certainty, this would just not make the cut. It is, however, a Very Strong Contender. Lacking a 3.5 stars rating, I give it 3 stars.

Posted by Skye in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders
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If Haywire is opening in your city on Friday, please cancel any other plans you have and buy tickets immediately.

Unless you already know that the way Steven Soderberg directs his actors often drives you up the wall... okay, no, you should still go. The spare script combined with the somewhat flat-affect acting will probably be bothersome for about ten minutes, but then I bet you won't notice anymore.

The basics: Gina Carano, a retired Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter, plays Mallory Kane. Kane is an ex-Marine who has gone into private security contracting. She does a job in Barcelona rescuing a reporter who's made some folks uncomfortable and delivers him safely to the U.S. government. Unfortunately, things aren't as they seem and she ends up on the run from her former employers.

The cast also includes Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, and Bill Paxton. So while I like a lot of those guys, I can't tell you that the casting is diverse. Anthony Brandon Wong plays Jiang, the reporter, but I don't remember any lines. One of the guys on Kane's Barcelona team may have been a person of color and I missed it, and there are a couple of minor bad guys who look like they're men of color, but again, little or no dialogue. (The film only has three good guys - Kane, her father, and Jiang - so any additional casting diversity was basically going to make the people of color bad guys.) Sadly, too, Gina is the only woman, aside from a waitress at a diner.

Could I have wished for more on both of those fronts? Absolutely. But while the film may not achieve in these areas, I didn't notice any grievous insults that would have started it at a disadvantage when I was figuring out its rating. The only thing that I could point to would be Jiang's disposability. He's a plot device, not a character, and he's the prominent person of color. Compared to some of the epic stereotyping and fail in other films I've reviewed here, though, this seems like a minor sin.

That said, what rocks about this film?

A LOT!

First, Haywire an actual movie, not a video game feed of constant explosions and ass-kicking. It has a spy / espionage feeling to it, enhanced by the film's old-school secret agent score. After watching so much flash-bang stuff lately, the gritty realism and slower pace was a welcome change. The space between the action scenes gives them more intensity, and also allows for some reality. When Kane misses a jump and hits the edge of a roof with her ribcage, then crashes to the ground on her back, she's visibly hurt and limps away to hide while she gets her breath back.

We watched some of Carano's MMA highlights when we got home, and it was obvious the fight choreography was based on how she actually fights. It shows, and I mean that in a good way. These are not glamour shots fight scenes or music video dances. They're uncomfortable and brutal. And she wins. Her first two fight scenes did make me a little nervous because her opponents seemed to get the jump on her. Her third big fight involved a triangle choke, in which she suffocated a man by crushing his throat between her thighs. The triangle choke is a legit fighting move, but my guy pointed out that she most prominently uses it in the only fight where she's wearing a dress - and that's probably not a coincidence. He did say that the scene redeemed itself when Kane then paused for one deep breath and did the next thing she needed to do. I won't spoil but let's just say, this gal is hardcore. And whatever my anxieties were at the beginning, they were more than cleared away by the end. In her professional field, she's thought of as an expert, a "valued asset," and she proves that valuation repeatedly as the plot unfolds.

(Warning, though: I would guess that the first fight may be especially triggering for some folks. The beginning initially may look like a domestic violence assault.)

I also loved looking at Carano. This is not the casting revolution we dream of to make the overall pool of action movie heroines more diverse, since Carano is a pretty, thin white woman with no obvious disabilities. But she looks so solid compared to the typical action movie casting of women. Carano's 5'8" and was reported at about 145 pounds during her fighting career. I don't want to insult the women who usually get these parts, especially the ones who train hard and become capable of doing a lot of their own stunts. I'm not going to say their bodies are wrong. But even when you know there's a serious lack of body type diversity in these roles*, it's a shock when your eyes are presented with something else. And it says a lot about the usual casting when a 5'8" woman who might be 150 pounds causes that much of a visual shock.

(* There's a lack of diversity even if you only compare action heroines to the range of body types among professional athletes, which surely no one could argue is an inappropriate comparison group.)

With action films starring women, there's often a "one hand giveth" problem where you get a lot of great stuff, and then there's pollution. Not so here. The filmmakers didn't fall back on ridiculous tropes just because Kane was a woman. When she's asked to be the eye candy on a supposedly easy "babysitting" job, she shows up in an elegant black cocktail dress that's appropriate for the social situation. They didn't manufacture that plot point as an opportunity to put her in the most revealing outfit they can find. I'm pretty sure Kane took a shower at one point, but I don't remember an extended shower scene, or any gratuitous stripping off of clothing. By a certain point, I could actually relax and enjoy rather than waiting for the filmmakers to betray the character. How novel!

Haywire is my first Heroine Content film of 2012, and it sets a pretty high bar. It's not flashy, but it's extremely competent and felt deeply respectful of both Mallory Kane and Gina Carano. Four stars, but I'd also love to hear what y'all think if you get a chance to see it. Which you will, right? Right?

Posted by Skye in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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Thanks so much to Bonnie Norman of A Working Title for sharing her post about this film!

Trigger warning: This movie contains scenes of violence and rape. Also, Spoiler Alert for the book and movies.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a complicated story to break down. The book the movie is derived from is 480 pages long according to Amazon and that's a lot to try to condense into a movie; I'll be making a lot of comparisons to the book. (I haven't seen the original Swedish adaptation, but you can read two different reviews here on Heroine Content: Skye's and Grace's.) On the one hand, we have Mikael Blomkvist, played by Daniel Craig, a journalist recovering from a conviction of libel after botching a story against a major business tycoon published in the magazine Millenium. On the other, we have Lisbeth Salander, played by Rooney Mara, a young woman with a troubled past, a photographic memory, and a whip-smart intellect. A ward of the state since she was 12, she was declared mentally incompetent at 18 and is now under guardianship.

Lisbeth becomes involved in Mikael's story (and it really is his story) after first doing a background check on him for Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) of the Vanger Corporation, in order for them to hire him for a special investigation into the long-ago disappearance of Henrik's favorite niece, Harriet Vanger. After Mikael hits a wall in his investigation he requests a research assistant, and Lisbeth is recommended. The two of them work together to uncover some long buried secrets of the Vanger family and find out what really happened to Harriet.

I did not like the opening credits of the film. The scenes of ink and women being hit and torn open into flowers was very off-puting and just icky. It had an almost James Bond feel to it, (perhaps a nod to Daniel Craig's other acting work?) but with a surreal quality that made it more nightmarish then sexy. Perhaps that was the point, but I think it set the tone for the rest of movie as women as victims being acted upon, rather than avengers meting out justice as Lisbeth has been touted. Lisbeth herself feels like an empty character. Her emotions and thoughts aren't clearly readable by the audience, so someone coming to this without having read the books won't get the same connections and background that I have. In the books it's made clear that she does not feel like a victim when bad things happen to her, and she quite rationally plots out ways to get back at those who have wronged her. Here, the thought process seems much less calculated, and I think the true sense of how Lisbeth's mind works is lost.

The much talked about rape scene with her guardian was very uncomfortable for me to watch but I think a rape scene should be uncomfortable for the audience. It isn't sexy, and it's clearly painful. We are not meant to be titillated. The fact that Lisbeth then turns the tables on her attacker is an interesting conundrum for me. I don't think rape is justified, ever, but in Lisbeth's mind, it is do unto others what has been done to you, because nobody else will ever do it for you. Nils Bjurman is a vile rapist, taking advantage of a situation where he has complete power over someone the state has deemed mentally incompetent. But I don't think it's right to condone her raping and violating him in return, even if he might have deserved retaliation of some kind. If we follow "An eye for an eye" we all end up blind. (They do not flash back to either scene even once in the film, it's one and done for both scenes.)

What else can I say about Lisbeth? If you haven't seen the official movie poster for the U.S. release, it's above. The poster I think misrepresents how Lisbeth is portrayed in the film, sort of a bait and switch. I don't think at any time Lisbeth comes off as the sexy leading lady. She seems much more like the bizarre eclectic goth girl, exotic and strange and possibly to be pitied. I don't think they did enough to imbue her with the bad-assness that is present in the books or seems to have been present in the Swedish version. Also, her blonde eyebrows against the black hair really bother me, and make her seem almost alien at times. Her character isn't as relatable or heroic as I'd hoped for, and that's disappointing to me.

The other female characters in this movie are so incidental to Mikael, even though it is full of them. The development of even the main focus of the mystery, Harriet, is barely touched on. And I have a serious problem with the resolution of her story. After finding out that Harriet's father and brother are serial rapists, torturers, and murderers, Mikael and Lisbeth realize that Harriet is in fact alive, and they track her down and confront her, eventually reuniting her with her uncle Henrik. In the books, Harriet escapes the cycle of incest and rape with the help of her cousin Anita, fleeing from the family island and eventually emigrating to Australia, where she falls in love with and marries a man who makes her very happy, has children with her, and makes her a full partner in his very successful ranching business.

Book-Harriet is shown to be capable, healed, and happy, although she still feels the pain and emotional scars from her childhood. The U.S. movie shows Harriet alone and in hiding, leading a lonely life that seems almost cold. It seems to imply that the rape and abuse she suffered has tainted her life forever and she will never be the woman she could be. I prefer the book version of Harriet myself. I'm not sure why they made the change; perhaps they thought the addition of another foreign country would confuse the story even more for an American audience? I don't know how the Swedish film portrayed her, but I wish the U.S. version had stuck closer to the print version.

Two other female characters that received short shrift were Lisbeth's sometime lover, Miriam Wu (Elodie Yung), and Mikael's lover and editor of Millenium, Erika Berger (Robin Wright). Miriam plays a larger role later in the trilogy, but here she had one line and no connection was made between her and Lisbeth other than as a one night stand, unfortunately. She's also the only character of color, but considering Sweden has a 95% homogenous population that isn't really surprising. Elodie Yung is of French and Cambodian descent, while Miriam is I believe half Swedish and half Chinese.

Erika Berger is barely touched on at all, which is extremely unfortunate. She's a very competent and intelligent character, and is seen as much more capable than the sometimes flaky Mikael to actually handle the serious business of running an investigative magazine. It's also made to seem as though she and Mikael are carrying on a clandestine affair when she says she'll call her husband to tell him she's not coming home tonight, and that she has an unhappy marriage, as she makes a reference (after waking up to find Mikael not in bed) to usually only waking up in a cold bed at home. I once again must point out the book, where her husband is fully aware and approving of their relationship and Erika is seen as a woman with exceptional sexual appetite that she unashamedly satisfies with the love and support of her husband. I think perhaps the movie execs felt that U.S. audiences wouldn't be able to handle an open and successful and happy marriage.

Finally, one plot hole that seems glaring to me is the resolution of the case against Martin Vanger. He openly admits that he held women captive in his basement torture chamber and eventually killed them. The movie glosses over this fact after his explosive death, caused in part by Lisbeth after a brief chase scene. In the book, Mikael is determined to reveal the heinous crimes Martin and his father committed, but is convinced to remain silent by Henrik, on the grounds that it won't solve anything and will in fact harm Harriet. Against his own moral compass, Mikael agrees, but Lisbeth insists that the Vanger Corp make restitution to every woman's family they can track down, via the extensive records and videos Martin kept as sadistic mementos. The movie seems to completely forget about these women the minute the bad guy is dead, and that does them a disservice, leaving their stories unresolved and implying that they (and their families) don't matter now that they've been avenged. The effects of a crime don't disappear once the perpetrator is gone.

To recap: Even though the movie revolves around the abuse and eventual retaliation of women, the female characters are sidelined for the most part, with barely any lines or screen time. Lisbeth is an unsympathetic character whose original bad-assness is toned down or missing all-together. She's smart yes, but she's also weird and a little sad. Overall, I feel like this movie was so close, but just didn't deliver the same kind of umph that the book or Swedish adaptation are known for.

Posted by A Very Special Guest in 2 Stars: So Close
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I usually include the most widely promoted movie poster when I do a review here. But for Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, I'm using the one that best communicates how unsurprising Paula Patton's role is in the film. Unless you can say any of these lines with a straight face, there is nothing here that will impress you in any way:

"She's a team leader and one of her men got killed and he's secretly in LOVE with her, which we learn from his poignant deathbed confession? Never saw that coming!"

"Once Tom Cruise's character shows up, she'll never be a team leader again, because he's so much better than anyone ever? Really?"

"The team ends up being 75% white guys? Seriously?"

"She ends up fighting the only other woman in the cast? That is so totally unexpected!"

"The only way to get the codes to stop the nuclear missile is to put her in a tight evening dress and have her seduce a rich criminal? That NEVER happens in movies!"

"Right before one of the critical mission events, she gets shot and a man has to do her job? Why would they write it that way?"

The film lost me in the first 10 minutes, when Patton's character and Simon Pegg's character decided it was totally fine to let some Russian prisoners beat half a dozen guards to death in order to spring Cruise's character from jail. I never found anything after that to change my mind.

(This film was not making the argument that incarcerated people need to rise up against he prison-industrial complex. I promise. Murder was just a convenient distraction for saving Tom Cruise.)

Am I glad that Paula Patton, as a woman of color, had some acting work in a movie? Sure. Does this film do anything for anyone that needed doing? No.

Typical. One star.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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I won't be seeing the U.S. remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as the original film was just too violent for me. It opens on the 21st of this month. If you're going to see it and would like to write up a review, let me know.

If you have any other ideas for guest posts you'd like to write, be it an older film or a new release, or a television show, let me know. Or if you post something to your own blog that you think we should link to, recently or further back in your archives, I'm always happy to get those suggestions.

Just leave a comment to get in touch!

Posted by Skye in Odds and Ends
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Colombiana is not perfect. But it's coming out on DVD on December 20th, and I think you should see it if you missed it in theaters.

Colombiana is the story of Cataleya, a young girl whose father is murdered due to his involvement with some kind of criminals in Bogota, Colombia. She escapes and makes her way to family in the U.S., where she learns to be an assassin. She works for her uncle... and on the side pursues a personal vendetta against the men who ordered her family's murder.

Here's why I think you should see it:

A woman of color was headlining an action film. It's her film. She's not a sidekick, not a love interest. A guy doesn't show up halfway through to bail her out. The bad guys are terrified of her. No offense to Ellen Ripley, Tank Girl, Sarah Connor, and some of our other icons around here, but leading action heroines are usually in a very narrow spectrum of skin color. Zoe Saldana's Cataleya blows the doors off that club, and I could only wish there were half a dozen more women after her.

There's a girl who kicks ass. And I actually mean a girl, Amandla Stenberg's young Cataleya. We don't normally see portraits of young girls with extreme physical prowess, such as Cataleya's parkour-like evasion of her pursuers. That's reserved for boys, especially for "chosen one" boys. Hopefully we'll see Stenberg in her own action films in 15 or 20 years.

It's an intense portrait of fury in a female character. Cataleya is heartbroken and grieving and traumatized and almost beyond anything but hurting the people who hurt her. To be sure, the revenge motive is too often used to explain women becoming warriors. But this is the real deal, not just backstory thrown onto some chick who's standing in the corner with a sword, to explain how a nice young woman like her is in a place like this. The scene where she holds an FBI investigator hostage in his own home, threatening his family, was absolutely chilling - especially because we don't usually let women act like this in films. They get to seduce and betray, they get to be the weak link, but rarely do they get to coldly calculate and threaten innocent bystanders for their personal interests. And succeed.

Cataleya's portrayal definitely fell into the "beautiful girls with guns" category that we knew it would, given who made the film. Compared to Saldana's seductress role in The Losers, though, I felt like Cataleya is far more her own person and the film treats her as much more than eye candy. This is a subject where other Heroine Content readers may disagree, though. "How male gaze-y is this?" is a question that good people can have different answers to and that's okay. If you're rolling your eyes at the first scene of grownup Cataleya getting herself arrested in a minidress so she can change into a somewhat pointless full-body catsuit to do her crime, then whatever comes after that is probably going to add insult to injury.

(For example, see When is Zoe Saldana going to get to the fireworks factory? on FemPop. But the author recommends The Losers as an alternative because she or he is very offended by all the sexification in Colombiana, so we have feminists going in opposite directions.)

The plot holes were many. Here is a truck, please drive through them. I'll wait. The quasi-boyfriend could have been dispensed with entirely for as much sense as that storyline made. But I loved Cataleya. I give it four stars. Not just for bringing a little more diversity to the action heroine ranks, but because I felt the film treated her with respect as a person and an adversary.

I wish the box office had blown up on this one. It looks like it may have covered its budget, but that's about it.

I didn't see as much coverage of this film in my usual haunts as I would have expected, but I also may have missed it since I was buried in work at the time. If you saw or wrote something good, feel free to share. Here are a few things I did find:

• Here's Why You Should Ignore The Critics And Give "Colombiana" A Chance at Acts of Faith in Love and Life
• Why This "Colombiana" Is Going to Watch Colombiana discusses some controversy around the film among Colombians
• The Color of Colombiana by Dr. Tukufu Zuberi at HuffPo Black Voices

Posted by Skye in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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I'm sure there's something here for everyone, so pick a link or two and relax for a few minutes.

And if anyone wants to think non-coughing thoughts in my direction that would be swell. That's towards Austin, Texas to be more specific...

ComicsAlliance Reviews 'Catwoman' (2004), Part One and Part Two by Chris Sims and David Uzumeri. Reading these reviews is way better than watching the film, is all I'm sayin'. I think it might actually even be funny if you didn't see the movie.

question of the day: Does 'Captain America' blackwash history? by MaryAnn Johanson at FlickFilosopher

Movies That Hate You: Batman and Robin by Heavy Armor on Loose Cannon

What if Cowboys and Aliens offers the same old message wrapped in a "new" alien package? at Professor, What If...?

Why X-Men: First Class has issues by James on Took the stars from our eyes

'A League of Their Own': A Feminist Classic and 'Tangled' and How Trailers Can Be Deceiving by The Funny Feminist

Is Thor a feminist movie? (Yes) by Rachael at Social Justice League

Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor

What Do You Mean When You Say You Want 'Strong Female Characters'? by s.e. smith at Tiger Beatdown

Step into my film school! The importance of casting in breaking open movie stereotypes by Captain Awkward on Feministe

10 Black Women Making Moves in Film by Arielle Loren at Clutch Magazine

Best wedding pictures ever (scroll down), images by photographer Amanda Rynda, but images posted at Mlkshk (I can't find the whole set on her tumblr, and she commented on the Mlkshk post so she knows it's available there and didn't seem to have an issue with it.)

Studio Ghibli: Leave the boys behind by Steve Rose at The Guardian

Remembering Joanna Russ - Part 1 by Naamenblog at Feminist SF

Posted by Skye in Linky Goodness
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Attack the Block surprised the heck out of me.

My husband said "hey, do you want to go see this, it's kind of like Battle Los Angeles mixed with Shaun of the Dead." Since I liked both of those films, I agreed to go. However, I made sure we set it up for the theater that serves dinner. I only see films there that I don't think I'm going to be super engrossed by, because it hurts my suspension of disbelief to have the wait staff interrupting the movie to ask if I want a refill.

Luckily for me, suspension of disbelief wasn't a crucial element to enjoying this film, but I was absolutely engrossed by it. I had hoped for a smidge of Heroine Content from seeing a woman with a baseball bat in the preview, but I got so much more.

Attack the Block tells the story of one night in a low-income neighborhood in London, centered around one particular housing project known as the Block. A group of young men who live there, mostly young men of color, encounter an alien. The charismatic leader of the group, John Boyega's Moses, kills it. Unfortunately, it's not the only one.

Earlier in the evening, the group had mugged Sam (Jodie Whitttaker), a mid-20's (?) white woman who works as a nurse and who also lives in the Block. As more aliens show up and converge on the Block, she falls in with Moses's group, figuring it's her best chance for survival.

I highly recommend you read these three pieces on Attack the Block, all published on Racialicious:

• Streets Afire: The Racialicious Review of Attack The Block by Emma Felber
• All In The Same Gang: Examining Attack The Block's Approach To Race by Kartina Richardson, cross-posted from Mirror: Motion Picture Commentary
• Attack the Block Proves You Don't Have to be Epic to Be a Hero by Latoya Peterson

I didn't want to write about this movie until I had a chance to read them, because I was worried Attack the Block might be too good to be true. That I missed something crucial, and this wasn't really a kick-ass movie where a multi-racial group of youth and a white woman take on alien invaders and win. Felber's, Richardson's, and Peterson's pieces, and the folks commenting on them who had seen the film, reassured me that, yes, it was okay to love this movie. (I'm happy to read negative commentary on it, too, as soon as I find some.)

Here's what I liked about it, specifically:

The young men of color are humanized as they become Earth's protectors. It turns out their survival skills from growing up in a violent setting make them pretty damn qualified to defend their neighborhood. But they're not just turned into a pack of soldiers or attack dogs. They're kids. And they're each their own kid. We see them as "muggers" first, but we stay with them throughout the film and get to know them as people.

Moses, the leader of the group, is strong, and afraid, and self-centered, and a leader, and responsible, and thoughtless - just like most high school students. And adults. He grows up quite a bit during the film, but on his own. Not because he's being bludgeoned over the head by an after-school special. I would watch Boyega in just about anything at this point, too, because he did an amazing job in this role.

The white woman, Sam, grows from "eek!" screamer to valuable team member. I thought she had a lot of backbone while she was being mugged, but the arrival of aliens did throw her for a loop. She pretty quickly figures out who the right people are to stick with, though, and sets about making herself useful in the group. She's a nurse, so that's good, and she's also willing to stab aliens. Go Sam!

When there's a reveal about Moses's background, it's not overdone. He doesn't get a free pass for mugging Sam and a vale of tears about how much he's suffered, making him into a victim/symbol rather than a person. His past puts his actions into context, though, and Sam is able to finally return his apology with understanding and appreciation for his attempt to grow.

The film contains lots of commentary on class and race, but it's not preachy. We saw it with friends who are good people but don't have a burning interest in class and race issues, and they had a good time too. I love putting a little social justice messaging in front of people who aren't already thinking about those topics as a personal development project.

The only thing I wished was different was that the young women of color play only supporting roles. They are super and competent, but couldn't any of them have gotten involved in the action beyond one scene? Sam's involvement was crucial to some of the story the filmmakers were trying to tell, and I wouldn't have had her replaced, but the story was big enough to accommodate a little more screen time for young women. Or there can be a sequel where it's their turn, I'm not picky.

Four stars. The DVD would make a good holiday gift, y'all. Just sayin'.

Posted by Skye in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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If my husband and I ever divorce, I have no doubt that he will itemize "made me see Immortals" as one of his grievances. He's usually very patient with seeing movies for the blog. But on this one, he almost refused. "It's going to be horrible," he said. "I mean, I want to spend time with my wife, but..."

The logic he finally used to convince himself? "It will be better than seeing the Adam Sandler movie." Of course, there was an addendum: "Then again, spending two hours staring at the wall would be better than seeing the Adam Sandler movie."

(Just so we're clear, I knew it was going to be bad. But I had managed to get a babysitter and I wanted to get out of the house, and it was marginally on-topic for the blog. These are the factors that drive our out-of-the-house cinema consumption, which is why we rarely see a good movie in the theater.)

Immortals was to The Three Musketeers what Cowboys and Aliens was to Priest: a movie we saw right after another film that we thought wasn't that great, that turned out so bad, we almost wanted to pre-order the box set of the first one because it looked so good in comparison. At least in The Three Musketeers and Priest, we weren't bored. To be fair, though, we weren't as bored in Immortals, because we spent a lot of time laughing and whispering to each other.

Let me break it down for you. Immortals is about Theseus, who is a nice young warrior type from a small village. His mother is killed by the forces of Hyperion, a neighboring king who wants to kill everyone. This is Hyperion:

Hyperion is mad because Tony Stark's dad beat up his dad, or the Gods didn't save his family from dying from the plague, whatever. Basically, he's an asshole and he's going to wipe out anyone who isn't related to him? Unclear.

He wants to find the Virgin Oracle so she can tell him where the Gods' bow is, so he can unleash the Titans, so they can kill everyone. How will this help him? Again, unclear. The Virgin Oracle is one of four women who all stay together so no one will know which one is the real one. (Think Padme Amidala.) They basically look like this:

Except their hats are red, and one of them has votive candleholders hanging from it. They're also more diverse than British royalty tends to be. Frieda Pinto is from India, and she plays Phaedra, the actual Virgin Oracle. Mercedes Leggett (said to be Canadian, and her parents were Scottish and Filipino), Kaniehtiio Horn ("a native of Kahnawake, a Mohawk reserve outside of Montreal"), and Ayisha Issa (seems to be Canadian, with Ghanaian and Jamaican mother and father, also she's a martial artist) play the others. The diversity was a nice touch in a movie populated by mostly white men. Or, it was done to make the Oracles look "exotic." Ugh. In any event, the Oracles are captured by Hyperion's forces, but they are packing deadly hairpins and small knives, and they mess up their guards something fierce so the Virgin Oracle can get away. Then they get beaten up and locked in a metal cow. So much for that.

Meanwhile Theseus is traveling with Phaedra, the Virgin Oracle. She insists that he goes back to his village to bury his mother, whereupon he finds the Gods' bow. Which he cannot seem to hold without dropping it for more than five seconds. Not that this is foreshadowing or anything. After Theseus saves Phaedra's life, she decides that she doesn't care for having visions thankyouverymuch and would rather sleep with Theseus to get rid of them.

You have no idea how much I was hoping for a reveal here, something like "oh it turns out the whole virgin thing was just a myth, she still has visions and we're going to use them to totally kick ass." Unfortunately, Andre Norton was not writing this movie circa her 1963 Witch World, so Phaedra loses any possible relevance to the plot after this encounter.

Speaking of things that are about 50 years old, have I mentioned how this movie's look reminds me of this:

It was like filmmaking had not advanced at all since 1958. Or possibly had gone backwards. My husband opined that the movie had five sets, and I think that was generous. It looked a lot like this thing we did at my church in junior high, where the gym and the racquetball courts were turned into "A Night in Old Bethlehem" and everyone dressed up like they lived in that time period. Kind of.

(Yes, the church I grew up attending had racquetball courts.)

With the Oracles out of the way, the other possible source of Heroine Content coolness in this film is Isabel Lucas's Athena. All four of the Gods we see do interfere with the mortals even though they're not supposed to, but her intervention is the tamest. She gives Theseus some horses. After he's dropped the f---ing bow again, and a DOG grabs it and runs off to take it to Hyperion.

Once Hyperion uses the bow to release the savage black people, oh I mean the Titans, from their cage-

Okay, we have to stop and discuss that part. The Titans. Supposedly evil as evil can be, though all we're told about their evilness is that they lost the war with the Gods. We don't have any evidence that they're actually evil, they just didn't win. And they're black. And in a cage, in chains. With bars of metal in their mouths. (Husband's comment: "I'm pretty f---ing sure they didn't have REBAR in anything B.C.") Sure, they look like they're covered in the ashes of their dead wife and children like Kratos from God of War; it doesn't look like actual blackface. But they're black. And when they're released, they go wild and try to kill everything in sight, until the very white Gods show up and start chopping them to bits.

It looks really, really bad, y'all. Like Resident Evil 5 bad.

I don't think I need to say any more on that front.

In that battle, Artemis does kick some ass, though the awesome of that is totally negated by the squick factor - and she gets impaled anyway, then uses her dying breath to implore her father to be a nice guy. Whereas Poseidon uses his dying breath, as Titans are chewing his leg off, to yell "GO!!!!" to Zeus who is about to pull down Mount Tartarus to stop the Titans.

So yeah. I can't find a star anywhere for this mess.

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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[Trigger warning on this film for rape by deception and an attempted gang rape. It's mentioned in the review but not discussed in detail.]

I saw Wing Chun years ago in a theater in Austin. If I'd been asked to describe it from memory, I would have said something like "Michelle Yeoh totally kicks a bunch of guys' backsides with her awesome kung fu."

IF ONLY I HAD LEFT IT THAT WAY.

Michelle Yeoh does totally kick a bunch of ass with her awesome kung fu, but beyond that, this film is a big ol' mess.

It starts out promisingly enough. Michelle plays the title character, Wing Chun, the former town beauty who took up kung fu and now defends the town from bandits as needed. Wearing men's clothes. She lives with her aunt, an unmarried businesswoman, and her father. They operate the family tofu shop. When a young widow named Charmy is being married off to the highest bidder to pay for her late husband's funeral, Wing Chun and her aunt take the girl in. So far, so good. Two strong, independent women watching out for a younger woman. But then the skeevy "scholar" who wanted to marry Wing Chun so he could get free bandit protection instead sets his sights on Charmy, and Wing Chun's childhood sweetheart returns to town to marry her only to mistake Charmy for her...

You see how this could go downhill, don't you?

Like Red Sonja, Wing Chun got backstabbed by her own film. For a while, it looked like she was going to come out ahead. She spends most of the film being true to herself, despite being relentlessly insulted by the local men. They benefit from her protection, but why let that get in the way of a good misogynist resentment? They accuse her of lusting after Charmy (hello, projecting much?) and even show up at the tofu shop to take Wing Chun down a peg. When the local bandit threatens that she'll have to marry him if she loses a fight, the crowd laughs at her. If she's going to be humiliated, they'll probably bring popcorn.

None of this seems to matter to Wing Chun, though! She has power, she has a business to help run, and she likes to win her fights. Go Wing Chun!

Until her old boyfriend shows up. I was really hoping she would let him continue to think that Charmy was her, because then Wing Chun could have kept on with her awesomeness. Instead, the filmmakers sell her out! Damn you, filmmakers! He figures out the mistaken identity, pledges his affection for her even though two days ago he didn't even recognize her and knows nothing about her current personality, and they hook up again. And she starts wearing pink. Argh! It even sounded like they subbed out a voice actor, or else Michelle Yeoh does sweet and girly way better than I suspected.

Her kung fu master, a woman, apparently missed the memo on women's self-determination. "No matter how strong you are, you still have to settle down. You're secular," she says, "Go get married." To a man who peeks in windows when women are getting undressed. He's also more than willing to have Wing Chun fight the climactic battle with the bandits, but after that? "Be gentler" he says when she jumps onto a horse. And she apologizes.

Wing Chun, I am so sorry.

I also started off hopeful for the character of her aunt. Early in the film, she and Wing Chun struck me as two strong, nonconforming women. Auntie likes money more than men, and she's not averse to negotiation, intimidation, and outright scheming to get the upper hand. Except that she's also happy to use Charmy as the sex appeal to sell more tofu. And when the possibility is suggested that Charmy may be raped by her bandit kidnappers, Auntie says "She's not a virgin anyway, what difference does it make?" I didn't expect a cash-obsessed future tycoon to have the same honor her niece does, but when she's throwing other women under the bus, I'm about done.

She also pretends to be Charmy in a successful plot to seduce the scholar. The fact that he doesn't mind when he finds out, because he realizes he'll get her money if he marries her, doesn't make this any less of a rape. The whole thing is played for laughs, which is totally not okay.

Wing Chun's childhood sweetie is supposed to be a good guy, but he's not. In addition to the privacy violations and inability to recognize the woman he claims to love, he's more than happy to accuse various women of bad behavior without any evidence. The scholar is without any moral fiber. The bandits are, obviously, bad guys. I can tell the filmmakers were going for "romantic mixup comedy" but isn't there a way to do that without all of the men acting like assholes?

The problem with assessing films from another country or culture is that I lack context. It may be that this film actually shattered gender stereotypes for the time and place it was made. In 1994. Maybe? Were they actually trying to say that it's so great Wing Chun's boyfriend will still marry her even though she has better kung fu? Oh, wait, that's not a good message either.

No stars.

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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