Entertainment Weekly's 25 Greatest Action Films Ever
Entertainment Weekly has put out a list of The 25 Greatest Action Films Ever! (Yes, the exclamation point is theirs.)
Five films with heroine content made their list:
20 - Kill Bill Volume 1
16 - Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
10 - Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Grace's review is here)
5 - The Matrix
2 - Aliens
I found their description of T2 a little odd, since they don't mention Linda Hamilton. Then when I got to their description of Aliens, I found this (emphasis mine):
In all of action herodom, Sigourney Weaver's Ripley is unique. She's a woman, which makes her part of an elite club. And writer-director James Cameron miraculously found a way to treat her gender as both a nonissue and the core of her character. Ripley isn't a vixen like Lara Croft or Charlie's Angels. Yet Weaver wasn't forced to turn Ripley into a man, either. (Remember Linda Hamilton in T2?) Aliens -- a relentless Swiss watch of a war film -- is a movie about women, about the matriarchs of two tribes fighting to protect their young.
Stop this train, I want to get off! Linda Hamilton was a MAN?
Comments
It seems especially odd when you consider that Sarah Conner's motivations were...pretty tradtionally female, if not played out in a stereotypical way. After all, she was a) trying to save her child; and b) considered (I think Kyle says it in the first movie?) to be the "mother of the revolution"--a frigging Mary figure, almost. Except with the ability to kick ass.
Posted by: Reb | June 19, 2007 12:32 PM
Yes, that is an odd thing to say. But you actually do hear that kind of drivel a lot: a woman has muscles, thus she must be a man. The implicit assumption being that muscles and physical strength are the exclusive domain of men. That simply is not the case and never has been, despite the efforts of some to make it so by fiat; the quote above being just one more example of that.
Posted by: Rob | July 20, 2007 4:09 PM