A few more thoughts on the Transformers movie and then I will move on to something else (which is currently on my kitchen table in a red Netflix envelope).

Over at the Official Shrub.com blog, tekanji put together a post that links to a few reviews of the Transformers movie. She starts it off like this:

Now, despite the pretty CG, I knew I wasn’t going to want to see it because the only woman I saw was The Hot Love Interest, and really that’s an archetype that has been done to death and then some.

Then she links to Nora's post on the racism, Ariel's post about the sexism, and Ragnell the Foul's post about how the "girl" Transformer was left out of the movie.

Looking at Nora's post, and then at what Ariel and Ragnell had to say, I really wondered how I ended up giving Transformers two stars. Two stars, in the Heroine Content rating system, means "So Close." It's above one star, which means "Typical," and no stars, which means "Setting Us Back 20 Years." Nora, Ariel, and Ragnell were on the no star vibe, and I have to say that I agreed with the vast majority of what they had to say.

So how did I end up giving it two stars? I don't have an excuse for missing the issues that Nora raised about race, so I'll be working harder on that in the future. I even forgot some of the characters! I'm a work in progress on the "detecting racism" front, and one of the reasons I wanted to start this blog was to practice that skill, so I'll try not to drop that ball again. (I still like the casting of Anthony Anderson as Glenn, though, even though I agree with Nora that the film treats him badly. I felt like most of the people in the movie who were supposed to be smart/talented/chosen never really showed they were - the filmmakers just told us - so I accept him as a geek even though he didn't get to do much to prove it.)

On the gender issues, I think it had to do with my expectations going into the theater. Like tekanji, I expected Mikaela to be the Hot Love Interest archetype and nothing more. When they threw me a scrap by giving Mikaela a few action tasks and including a hacker who wasn't the traditional pasty white teenager with no social skills, the movie exceeded my expectations. Unlike Ragnell, I wasn't very familiar with the source material and I didn't know there had ever been a "girl" Transformer. I certainly didn't expect any. So I didn't miss them when they didn't show up.

It's funny. I'm more offended by a movie like Van Helsing, which gives us a female action star and then treats her like sh*t, than I am by the Transformers movie, which gives us a Hot Love Interest but occasionally lets her do something cool.

So apparently in order to get a good rating from me, a movie has to do a good job on gender and race, but also not make any promises it can't keep. And if a movie wants to get a higher rating than it probably deserves, all it has to do is set my expectations really low and then exceed them!