Wanted Poster
Let's keep in mind that the character Angelina Jolie plays in Wanted was a woman of color in the comic book.
Who would you have rather seen in this poster?
May 5, 2008
April 11, 2008
We'll Bring The Cotton Candy: 21st Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans Will Be Here
The 21st Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans will be hosted here. Our specific topic suggestion is "Who Do You Love?" but anything blogged between February 7th and April 28th is game, as long as it is a feminist perspective on fantasy and/or science fiction.
Submissions can arrive by email to Grace or Skye, or through the submission form. Extra credit if you skip all those modes of communication and transmit directly into our brains. Less clutter that way.
Get 'em in by April 28th, and the carnival will be posted May 1st.
January 16, 2008
Doomsday Trailer
Kevin Kelly at io9 says "It looks like 28 Days Later meets 28 Weeks Later plus a serving of Mad Max on the side with a couple of dashes from the I Am Legend shaker. In other words, it starts out with a ton of promise and promptly devolves into something that leaves you feeling like you might throw up." But of course I'm going to see it anyway. I just hope it isn't one of those movies where all the best parts are in the trailer.
Since Rhona Mitra's backside gets such a prominent shot in the trailer itself, I'm a little afraid.
November 1, 2007
Wanted
Trailer for Wanted, on Yahoo Movies
Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman, lots of guns. Can I get a hallelujah?
October 11, 2007
Near Misses
A few comments about films that could have been so much more. You'll notice that none of the posters show the female characters, though each movie has a woman in it who could have been an action heroine.
First, In the Line of Fire. How did this happen? In Lethal Weapon 3, Rene Russo played internal affairs cop Lorna Cole, who holds her own against Mel Gibson's wisecracking cop Riggs and kickboxes the hell out of the bad guys. I gave it four stars. In the Line of Fire gives us Russo as Secret Service agent Lilly Raines, who serves as the target for Clint Eastwood's sexist jokes that magically cause her to fall madly in love with him. We don't even get the satisfaction of seeing Lilly do anything, even though she's supposed to be a highly trained agent and she even wears shoes that allow her to run. If only she'd have punched someone out, just once... perhaps Eastwood?
In I, Robot, Bridget Moynahan plays The Uptight Scientist. She has a name, but she doesn't really need one, because she's the classic "smart" woman who can't see two feet in front of her without The Man to explain what's going on in the real world. The most irritating part is that the film's creators try to make you think Moynahan's character is going to grow. Once she accept's Smith's revelations, she suddenly starts dressing more like an action heroine. Leather pants, touselled hair, much more bad girl than lab coat. But then Smith hands her a gun, and she shoots with her eyes closed. Damsel in distress status follows.
Finally, Point Break. Do yourself a favor, and don't compare it to Tank Girl. Lori Petty as Tank Girl is bold, independent, and doesn't take shit from anyone. Lori Petty as Tyler in Point Break has so much potential - she's athletic, stubborn, and fiery - but in the end she only exists in the film for various men to fall in love with and use as a pawn.
August 16, 2007
Zoe Bell
In what we're tentatively referring to as good news, it's been announced that fantastic stuntwoman Zoe Bell has been signed for her first action-adventure lead role.
I wrote about Bell in my review of Grindhouse, in which she plays herself in the Tarantino segment, "Death Proof." She completely owned that movie, with her real person body, fun dialogue, and badass Dodge Charger-related stunts. You've also seen her stunt work in high-profile heroine content roles including Kill Bill I and II and Xena. I can't wait to see her in her own film.
August 13, 2007
Get your Heroine Content sticker!
Ever wished you could have something of your very own with which to proclaim your undying devotion to Heroine Content? Well, today is your lucky day! For a limited time only, we have some lovely high quality Heroine Content stickers, just like the one shown here, that we're willing to mail out to our loyal readers. These are perfect for laptop decoration, day planner spruce ups, car window adornment, or basically sticking anywhere you like to stick things.
To get your very own Heroine Content sticker, just shoot an email over to avengingophelia@gmail.com with your mailing address. If you're moved to do so, add a recommendation for something we haven't reviewed here yet that you think is worth a gander.
Happy stickage!
July 31, 2007
Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan
I am reading a lot of the academic literature about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and, to a lesser degree, Angel) and have come across something that might be of particular interest to Heroine Content readers. Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan is a gender analysis of Buffy written by British American Studies scholar Lorna Jowett. As the word "primer" in the title indicates, the book is written for an audience that does not necessarily have a background in academic gender studies, and is very accessible. It does, however, offer some fairly advanced analysis of gender roles in Buffy, and is particularly strong, I think, in its discussion of masculinity and men.
Ultimately, Jowett does not categorize Buffy as a transgressive show when it comes to gender roles of the characters, but does identify it as a program wherein traditional gender roles are called into question--sort of "pre-transgressive." Though I don't agree with every detail of Jowett's analysis, I think this conclusion is more-or-less correct. Even if you completely disagree, though, there are likely to be elements of Jowett's argument that appeal to you, or at least get you thinking (there certainly were for me), so if you're a Buffyophile who is interested in the ways in which the show plays with gender, it is definitely worth picking up. Jowett is also fairly cognizant of the race and class issues the show has (its white middle-class norm), which strengthens the book considerably.
July 27, 2007
A Year of Heroine Content
A year ago, Grace and I were feverishly working to get Heroine Content up and running in time to publicize it at BlogHer 2006. We're both at BlogHer 2007 today, and it seems almost impossible that an entire year has passed.
For those new to our blog, here's an except from our first post, imaginatively titled Welcome to Heroine Content:
Heroine Content is a feminist and anti-racist blog about women kicking ass. More specifically, we write about women kicking ass in action films, with a side order of television and video game commentary as things catch our eye.
What does feminist and anti-racist mean to us? It means that we look for portrayals of women and people of color that show them as people, not caricatures of what women or people of color are "supposed" to be.
Action films and other cultural products aren't always about reality, and that's often why we like them. We're not asking for campy action flix to become high art. But even in the silliest of action films, there's no reason that the woman always has to be a damsel in distress or an evil seductress, the African-American always has to be a thug or a prostitute, the Asian always has to be a martial arts expert, and the Latino/a always has to be a gang member or a maid.
Why do we care? Well, every genre has to start somewhere. Science fiction began as a stereotypical white man's paradise, full of gadgets and scantily clad women. Now it gives us a range of stories and experiences. Just as there were women avidly reading the early science fiction and hoping to someday see themselves represented, we hope to see ourselves and others represented well in the films we enjoy.
Since then, we're reviewed and rated about 40 films. Here's a list of all the movies that one of us has reviewed on this blog in the last year, organized by the rating we awarded. The link for each rating should take you to the page of reviews with that rating, so you can catch up on any you missed. You know, in your copious free time.
- Alien (Director's Cut)
- The Long Kiss Goodnight
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- Terminator 2: Judgment Day
- Mr. and Mrs. Smith
- Tank Girl
- Underworld
- Set It Off
- Paycheck
- Grindhouse
- Resident Evil
- D.E.B.S.
- Bandidas
- So Close
- King Arthur
- The Island
- Aeon Flux
- Underworld: Evolution
- V for Vendetta
- Transformers (although if Skye did a re-write, it would probably get fewer stars)
- The Mask of Zorro / The Legend of Zorro
- Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World's End
- Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
- Bad Girls
- Lara Croft: Tomb Raider / Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
- La Femme Nikita
- 300
- Alien (Director's Cut)
- The Fifth Element
- Blade: Trinity
- Elektra
- The Chronicles of Riddick (Director's Cut)
- Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
- Blood and Chocolate
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
- Point of No Return
- Ultraviolet
No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
- BloodRayne
- Strange Days
- Bandit Queen
- Van Helsing
- Domino
- Daredevil
- My Super Ex-Girlfriend
To those who are already reading Heroine Content, thanks for a very enjoyable first year. To new folks, we invite you to sign up for updates by RSS feed, LiveJournal, or email. And as always, we welcome comments, questions, and lively debate!
July 20, 2007
The Power of Expectations: Addendum to "Transformers" Review
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!
June 5, 2007
Heroine Content's Summer Film Preview
Grace reviewed Pirates 3 and then went out of town, and I'm sitting around waiting for Rise: Blood Hunter to open in Austin. So, I thought I'd gather our list of the other summer films we're excited about.
(crickets)
Just kidding, there are a couple of possibilities:
- As mentioned, Rise: Blood Hunter, starring Lucy Liu as a vampire vampire-killer. I don't predict great things, based on the reviews from the Tribeca film festival, which mostly rejoice in the amount of nudity and lingerie. Could it surprise me?
- I cannot see Fantastic Four 2. I still have nightmares from the first one. Maybe on DVD, so it's small and not as threatening.
- Transformers opens July 4th. It does have a woman in the cast (Megan Fox), but I doubt she'll have an action role. I'll let you know.
- The Invasion, starring Nicole Kidman, is supposed to be released August 17th, but I don't think it's an action role either.
- Then it's pretty quiet until Resident Evil: Extinction on September 21st. (Hopefully the baby I'm expecting will wait until the due date of September 28 so I can actually see this one in the theater!)
You have to look pretty far ahead for anything else. Some of these are probably just me wishing they would have heroine content.
In 2007, we can look for The Sarah Connor Chronicles television series on Fox. Here's hoping it doesn't make us sad.
There's also Doomsday. As written up on IMDB:
Great Britain, 2007. A deadly plague, known as the "Reaper Virus," has broken out, killing hundreds of thousands in its wake. In desperation, the British Government evacuates as many survivors as it can out of the infected area, and then builds a wall, preventing the remainder from escaping. Thirty years later, with the wall still up and the victims all but forgotten, the virus breaks out again. The Government decides to send a crack team of operatives, led by Major Eden Sinclair, into the hot zone to investigate the possibility of a cure.
In 2008, we'll see Christina Ricci in Speed Racer (2008), though my guess is that this will be an action movie but she won't have an action role.
Angelina Jolie in Wanted offers more possibilities. Jolie's character is supposed to be an assassin, though apparently on the evil side. From a summary posted on IMDB:
A young man (McAvoy) finds out his long lost father is an assassin. And when his father is murdered, the son is recruited into his father's old organization and trained by a man named Sloan (Freeman) to follow in his dad's footsteps.
The official site for The Mutant Chronicles has a promo photo that has two women out of ten characters featured, so that sucks. I was going to say "at least there are two women" but honestly, it just sucks even though Devon Aoki is one of them and I'm looking forward to seeing her. If only the writeup about her on the site didn't spend as much time discussing her modeling career as her acting...
In 2009, there's The Mummy 3, now that Michelle Yeoh has signed on as a wizard. Sigourney Weaver's role in Avatar (2009), a science fiction movie, probably won't be an action role. And perhaps Wonder Woman will ever get made.
All in all, there is a little hope, but I don't think Netflix should expect me or Grace to drop them anytime soon!
May 22, 2007
Reminder: Two Upcoming Blog Carnivals
Heroine Content is hosting the 14th Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans, which will be published on May 30th. The deadline for submissions is May 27th! Please submit via email to skyekilaen@gmail.com, or in the comments of this post. We're looking for posts, web comics, and art with a feminist perspective on science fiction and fantasy. This can include TV, Movies, Books, Comics, Games, etc. For more information, see the Carnival Guidelines.
Also check out the new People of Colour SF Carnival. The first edition is scheduled for June 15th, see their site for more details.
May 8, 2007
Resident Evil: Extinction Poster
Via The Movie Blog:
April 15, 2007
In Defense of Ripley
Nerve's blog Screen Grab did a Top 10 list called Chicks With Guns. I'll post about it tomorrow, but check out what they had to say about Ripley in Alien and Aliens:
Don’t get us wrong — Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley was a pretty tough cookie in Ridley Scott’s masterful Alien, but that toughness was mostly mental, an ability to maintain a cool head amidst the chaos and carnage. Bearing that in mind, it was more than a little shocking to see Ripley re-made as a stone-faced warrior in James Cameron’s second installment in the horror sci-fi series.
Grace reviewed Alien at the end of January and she was less than impressed. I think the Screen Grab folks are on to one of the reasons. Alien is not an action movie, it's a horror movie, and Ripley's basic challenge is simply to survive. This may sound strange, but the science fiction setting of Alien is more like reality than most action movies that are set in the here and now. Ripley is betrayed by her crewmates, betrayed by the mega-corporation she works for, and fighting for her life against a vicious predator. She also chooses to accept the burden of protecting humanity by eliminating the predator before it can get to Earth. That makes her a heroine in my book, but there are definitely no "right hook and sassy quip" combos.
It's better to see Alien as an origin story, to let us know where the Ellen Ripley who achieved icon status was born. It's a whole different story in Aliens, so I hope Grace gives it a chance.
Revena had this to say on Hathor Legacy in response to Grace's post:
I’m a little bit more enthusiastic about Ripley than Grace is, but I think she’s absolutely right that it’s kind’ve sad that Ripley seems to be “at least 50% of the population’s example of a female action hero.” I think most people could name quite a few male characters or actors when asked to provide good examples of action heroes. We should have more than just Ripley to fall back on when trying to talk about action heroines.
The ScreenGrab team isn't falling down on that job:
But we would be remiss if we were to overlook the film’s other tough woman — Private Vasquez, played by Jenette Goldstein. [...] In retrospect, it strikes us that Vasquez may be the most badass character of any gender in any of James Cameron’s films — and when you consider the films he’s made, that’s saying something.
Indeed.
March 28, 2007
Rape by any other name: Addendum to "300" review
I am disappointed, though not surprised, that there have been comments on my review of 300 indicating that I am either stupid or didn't actually watch the movie or both, since what transpired between Theron and Gorgo wasn't actually rape. These comments won't be published here at HC, because we've decided there is enough bile spewed on the Internet and it doesn't need to be added to in our space. Feel free to disagree with us in the comments, but do it respectfully, please. Keep an eye out on the sidebar for our new comments policy in the near future.
That being said, the issue that has been brought up is one that is probably worth discussing, as there are apparently a lot of people out there who didn't see Theron rape Gorgo in 300. After all, Theron certainly couldn't be convicted of rape in a U.S. court, right? Well, no, he probably couldn't, but that doesn't make it not rape. When a man forces a woman to have sex with him, with the consequence of refusing being her husband's likely death, and then says "This will not be over quickly. You will not enjoy this" while thrusting into her, that is certainly rape enough for me. Rape is not just what happens when a woman is attacked in the dead of night by a stranger with a mask and a gun. Rape is what happens when a man forces himself on a woman that does not want to have sex with him. She does not have to fight for it to be rape. He does not have to threaten her with death for it to be rape. It does not have to be prosecutable for it to be rape.
What Theron did to Gorgo probably represents one of the most common types of rape around. He had something she needed, and he held it over her head until she "consented." But consent in the face of dire consequences otherwise is not consent. Consent to protect one's loved ones, or in the face of blackmail, is not consent.
It has been suggested that what Gorgo actually sold herself to Theron in exchange for his promise of cooperation in the council, and thus it was more prostitution that rape. To me, this is a pretty meaningless distinction. Theron had already made it clear that he was going to get what he wanted from Gorgo one way or the other, threatening to strangle her only moments before. Gorgo was facing the death of her husband and the fall of her country if she didn't stop it. There wasn't another option. That's coercion.
It honestly blows my mind that people are so confused as to what does and does not constitute rape, in the moral realm if not the legal one. It's very, very simple. Rape is having sex with an unwilling partner. Whether that partner fights, or screams, or cries, or whether you have promised that partner something in return is, in the end, meaningless. And Theron raped Gorgo, just as much as if he'd physically forced her or held a knife to her throat. That a viewer could watch the scene and not see that honestly disturbs and saddens me, and makes me wonder how we're ever going to get to a place where rape is eradicated, when the men and even the women in our society don't even see it for what it is.
January 4, 2007
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July 27, 2006
Welcome to Heroine Content
Heroine Content is a feminist and anti-racist blog about women kicking ass. More specifically, we write about women kicking ass in action films, with a side order of television and video game commentary as things catch our eye.
What does feminist and anti-racist mean to us? It means that we look for portrayals of women and people of color that show them as people, not caricatures of what women or people of color are "supposed" to be.
Action films and other cultural products aren't always about reality, and that's often why we like them. We're not asking for campy action flix to become high art. But even in the silliest of action films, there's no reason that the woman always has to be a damsel in distress or an evil seductress, the African-American always has to be a thug or a prostitute, the Asian always has to be a martial arts expert, and the Latino/a always has to be a gang member or a maid.
Why do we care? Well, every genre has to start somewhere. Science fiction began as a stereotypical white man's paradise, full of gadgets and scantily clad women. Now it gives us a range of stories and experiences. Just as there were women avidly reading the early science fiction and hoping to someday see themselves represented, we hope to see ourselves and others represented well in the films we enjoy.
Why call it Heroine Content? First, not every woman who gets into a fight on screen is a heroine. All too often she's an imitation, dressed up to look like a heroine but just taking up space until the hero comes along to Save The Day. That's crap. But we keep going to the theater and giving them our money because we're hoping to see the real thing. A guy named Vincent Flanders used the term "heroin content" to describe what makes people keep coming back to a website, whether that's products they want, information they need, or whatever. What keeps us coming back is that we sometimes see the real heroines, or hints of them.
And we like seeing stuff get blown up.
We'll probably do a better job on calling out the sexism than the racism, because we're both white women and that means we were raised with some fucked up thought patterns about race. But we'll do our best. Let us know how you think we're doing.
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