Recently in Odds and Ends

We'd love to have some guest posters to help us fill out the rest of 2010 and early 2011, so here's the list of what we're looking for someone(s) to cover:

• Prince of Persia (taken)
• The Princess Blade (Shura Yukihime)
• The Incredibles (taken)
• Princess Mononoke
• Ghosts of Mars (taken)
• Monsters v. Aliens (taken)
• Sin City (preferably someone familiar with the comic)
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (taken)

Leave a comment if you're interested, and we'll get in touch! Or, you know, feel free to make a suggestion that's not on this list, we might just take you up on it.

Posted by Skye in Odds and Ends
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While everyone's busy tearing up Book of Eli, one of the comments did bring something to mind.

In our reviews, would it be necessary / appropriate / appreciated that if there is a scene involving sexual violence, for us to disclose that in our review?

In both Watchmen and Book of Eli, I have not commented on those scenes because for various reasons they weren't major factors in forming my overall opinion of the films. However I'm finally starting to catch the clue train here, several years late, and realize that this may be information that our readers would want to know before they watch a film based on our recommendation. If anyone actually does that.

Thoughts?

Posted by Skye in Odds and Ends
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I thought I'd take a look ahead at 2010 and see what may be coming down the pike. IMDB's list of action films slated for 2010 is undoubtedly a hazy look into the future, but I did find some items of interest while going through it. Here are some notes, and I'll probably check the list again late this year to see what else has emerged. If you know of anything I missed, let me know!

Films with a scheduled release date:

• The Book of Eli, January 15th: Post-apocalyptic. I think I saw a woman wearing a sword in the trailer, so I'm putting it on the list. Here's the official site with the trailer.
• Takers, February 19th: Bank robbery film, Zoe Saldana is in the cast, no idea what her role is but I'm hopeful.
• Legend of the Red Reaper, March 10th: "For a thousand years, the Reapers guarded mankind from the demons that wait in the dark. Now, at the beginning of a new age, the Reapers are betrayed and slaughtered. Only one Reaper remains - Red, and she's out to exact revenge." Here's a really terrible trailer on YouTube. I like it when the blood spatters on the camera lens. Does anyone use the term C-Movie?
• Clash of the Titans, March 26th: With all the goddesses around, here's hoping at least one of them is actually badass.
• Iron Man 2, May 7th: Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, May 28th: A prince and a princess (theoretically) working together to save the world. No sign of the princess in the trailer on YouTube, though. [Update 9.24 - see Zahra's comment below about the race issues here.]
• Broken Blade, June 4th: There's a hint of a female assassin in the brief plot summary for this one.
• Resident Evil: Afterlife, August 27th: I can't imagine this series is going to get better on Heroine Content criteria.
• Red Dawn, September 24th: Remake of the 1984 film.

Films without a scheduled release date:

• Agustina: "Agustina de Aragón, (1786 - 1857) was a famous Spanish heroine who defended Spain during the Spanish War of Independence. First as a civilian and later as a professional officer in the Spanish Army." Adapted from a graphic novel, here's the official site.
• Armed Robbery: Lesbian lovers rob a bank and run for the border.
• Arena: "A group of soldiers find themselves transported to a strange, terrain-shifting landscape where they must fight the best warriors from different eras and histories in a gladiatorial, kill-or-be-killed battle." Surely there's a woman in here somewhere.
• Dead in the Head: Bounty hunters and zombies. one of the bounty hunters, known as The Babe (haaaack) is played by a woman.
• Her Vietnam: A nurse serving in Vietnam when her base is attacked.
• Jennifer Government: "Welcome to paradise! The world is run by American corporations [...] Jennifer Government, a legendary agent with a barcode tattoo, is the consumer watchdog from hell." I know i read the book, but for the life of me I can't remember anything about it.
• Kick-Ass: Superhero movie (kind of), adapted from the comic book written by Mark Millar who also wrote Wanted. Chloe Moretz plays "Hit Girl." You can find io9's coverage here. I suspect this one will be a bit much for me.
• Kungfused: Some kind of action comedy, there are a lot of women in the cast.
• Maximum Ride: "Six kids who are pretty normal - except that they're 98 percent human and 2 percent bird. They grew up in a lab, living like rats in cages, but now they're free." Adapted from a young adult science fiction / fantasy series.
• Opponent: Alien crash lands in junkyard, owner of junkyard offers a reward for someone to kill it, mayhem ensues. A lot of women in the cast.
• Red Sonja: Still shows a release date of 2010, although news reports say filming won't start until then. The posters are horrifying.
• Roadkill: Female assassin is mentioned in the plot description. Supposedly an action comedy, the guy who directed Blue Crush is slated to direct.
• Sin-Jin: No information, just a couple of visuals on the IMDB page that I find intriguing. Chinese film.
• The Assassin: Taiwanese film about a female assassin in eighth century China who wants to retire.
• The Story of Bonnie and Clyde: Hilary Duff leads. Oh my.
• Witchblade: The television show almost came together for me, we'll see if the film ever appears.

Posted by Skye in Odds and Ends
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Since the best part of doing this site is the comments from all of you, we've set up a comment feed you can subscribe to if you want to see what everyone else is saying. Try it out, let us know what you think! We went with a sitewide feed instead of per entry for now, since it shouldn't be super high volume.

Posted by Skye in Odds and Ends
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I just updated the Heroine Content template to have three columns, for possibly evil plans as yet unformulated. I'm going to keep tweaking over the weekend, but if you see any rough edges right off the bat, please do let me know.

Thanks!

And I do apologize if 15 posts now show up in your feed reader. I am so bad at avoiding that when I do these things.

Posted by Skye in Odds and Ends
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We just received a comment on the Wolverine review that I'm not going to publish because it doesn't even begin to respect our comment policy. However, I had to share this one bit of it:

Of course it's a bunch of men, most of the movie was set in times before women were allowed in the army, much less help with anything non-medical or teacher related.

Let's leave aside the incorrect statement that "most" of the movie was set in times before women were allowed in the military. The part that interests me is the appeal to historical accuracy in a movie about a man with magical self-healing powers who has big metal claws sticking out of his hands.

During the part of the movie where Wolverine is in the mutant ops team that I mentioned in the review, the commenter is correct that in the military, women were not allowed in combat roles. I find it hard to believe, though, that Bad Guy Stryker would really care. Unless you specifically make the argument that he would have been just as sexist as his compatriots, despite his embrace of any and all means to his end in every other way, I just can't respect objections like this. If his attitude is your argument, I can probably respect that, because sexism does have the tendency to result in bad decisions - in this case, not using a powerful mutant as a weapon just because she's a woman. But I can't go with the argument based solely on historical policy, as if Stryker was thinking "Gosh, it's too bad that women aren't allowed in the military, because otherwise this mutant who can shred metal with her mind would come in really handy."

A similar came up in the comments on the review of Van Helsing, with commenter kira saying this:

i liked the movie. it kept with the era the film was suppose to be in, if the woman were stronger it wouldn't have fit right. i mean u cant have a caveman with a car it just doesn't fit. i do agree that Dracula's brides could have been tougher,but in the context of the time once again women not being string blah blah its fits. plus they would have been turned earlier in time when women were way timid.

Again, we have to leave aside part of the comment, in this case the part where it's argued that women living in rural areas in the late 19th century were "way timid." (Though I am not a historian, it doesn't seem likely to me given the demanding lives people led at the time.) The filmmakers aren't to blame for their sexist movies because history was just like that! It's not their fault there just weren't any women!

In a movie that's set in reality, I am usually down with this (though I would also argue that we need more movies depicting what everybody else was doing while the white able-bodied men were Making History). In the scenes in Wolverine that were supposed to be set during regular military operations during World War I, for example, I would not have expected to see a fully integrated team, because that was not how things worked.

In stories about monsters and demons, though, where we're obviously not dealing with reality? Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Posted by Skye in Odds and Ends
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Have you missed me?

More importantly, have you missed Zoë Bell?

If yes, miss either of us no more--you can see Zoë in cartoonist Ed Brubaker's Crackle live action series, Angel of Death. And you can see me right here, reviewing it.

Angel of Death is an Internet-only series of 10 7-minute live action episodes. It started last Monday with a new episode each day, and continues through this week with. As of this Friday, March 13, all ten episodes will be up. So, my thoughts on it only pertain to the first five parts.

In the show, Eve (Bell) is an assassin. She's quickly shown to be cold, efficient, and badass. Killing people doesn't keep her up at night and she has no emotional attachments. This all changes, however, when she suffers a traumatic injury on the job (an amazingly gory knife to the skull) and starts seeing visions of people she's killed. These visions compel her to take out the boss she's been killing for, and, of course, chaos ensues.

The strong point here isn't the predictable plot or the low budget film making. This is a live action comic book, and it watches like one. Five episodes in I don't care at all about the characters and there have been moments during which I have had to cringe with the incredible corniness of it all. However, there is one very strong point--Bell herself. This is her show, and she carries it wonderfully. She rocks in every single episode, even when all she's supposed to be doing is recovering from her wound. She kicks, shoots, punches, and swears like a sailor. Angel of Death doesn't ask much of her as an actress, relying instead on her strength as a stuntwoman, and it's candy for the Zoë Bell fan.

I will definitely be watching the rest of the episodes as they are released this week, and I think you should too.

Posted by Grace in Odds and Ends
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Right now, Empire Magazine Online has a list up of the "100 Greatest Movie Characters." Since I'm somebody who loves a good list, I took a gander at it yesterday.

And what I saw surprised even cynical me.

Of the 100 characters listed, 12 are female. The first of these female characters, Aliens' Ripley, appears at number 9. Then we don't see another woman until Mary Poppins (really? Mary Poppins?) shows up at number 41. Mary is followed by:

• annoying stalker Amelie at 45;


• poor pregnant Juno at 56;


• Natalie Portman's child killer Mathilda from Leon (The Professional) at 62;


• Tarantino and Uma Thurman's Kill Bill creation The Bride at 66;


• Marge Gunderson from Fargo at 75;


• animated Jessica Rabbit at 88;


• Princess Leia at 89;


• The Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz at 90;


• Scarlett O'Hara at 91;


• and Jodie Foster's Silence of the Lambs Clarice at 97.

Not only could they only come up with 12 women, 10 of whom were in the last half of the list, but those 12 women are all white (well, except the witch, who is green) and all young (again, with that witch exception, and maybe Marge). Did nobody notice this when compiling this list?

The situation for non-white men (or at least non-white men portrayed by non-white actors) is even worse. The list boasts a grand total of six:

• Samuel L. Jackson's Jules, from Pulp Fiction at 19;


• Red, from The Shawshank Redemption, played by Morgan Freeman, at 22;


• Tequila, played by Chow Yun-Fat in Hard Boiled, at 33;


• Anton, Javier Bardem's character in No Country For Old Men, at 46;


• Wesley Snipes' Blade at 47;


• Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop, at 78.

Six characters, and two of them are murderers?

So what does the list offer by way of comparison? Well, just about every major character from Star Wars seems to be included, and all of them are listed higher than Leia (Darth Vader at #2, Han Solo at #4, Yoda at #25, Luke Skywalker at #54, and Boba Fett at #79). Lord of the Rings is also a favorite, with Gollum at #13, Gandalf at #28, and Aragorn at #31. Both Michael and Vito Corelone from The Godfather movies are included, as are Agent Smith and Neo from The Matrix. There are weird outliers as well, some of which make sense to me and some of which do not. I couldn't fathom seeing Jigsaw from the Saw films at #30 or Tony Stark from Iron Man at #48, but I was thrilled to see nods given to Johnny Depp's Edward Scissorhands (#37) and Hugo Weaving's amazing V from V for Vendetta (#72).

The overwhelming white maleness of this list leads me to one central question: is the issue that there aren't sufficiently great characters available to women and non-white people, or is the problem that those characters aren't recognized by lists like this one? Most of the films whose characters featured heavily, like those mentioned above, don't have a lot of female or non-white characters in them. On the other hand, there are some. Why was Keanu Reeves' Neo included from The Matrix instead of Laurence Fishburne's more impressive Morpheus? Why is Dr. Hannibal Lecter #5 on the list while Clarice is #97?

This list is just one more example of female characters and characters of color being both underwritten and overlooked for acknowledgment when they are portrayed. It doesn't seem like a coincidence to me that Ripley, the highest featuring woman on the list, was intended to be a male character.

Who would you have included?

Posted by Grace in Odds and Ends
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Want a sticker? Or two? Or ten? Leave a comment, I still have some left over.

Two years ago, Grace and I were feverishly working to get Heroine Content up and running in time to publicize it at BlogHer 2006. A year ago, we were both at BlogHer 2007. This year, BlogHer got sneaky and moved its conference, so I was actually there last week. But yesterday was in fact our two year anniversary, and I thought I should do another recap post.

In our first year, we reviewed and rated about 40 films. In our second year, we added about 45 more, including our first guest post. (Scattered throughout the two years Grace also reviewed a few television shows and at least one comic book, and if I'd had the sense to make a category for them I'd point you to it.)

I've learned a lot. I've learned that I seriously suck at noticing racism in media and remembering to scan for ability/disability and class issues. I've learned that while I love action movies and I can find a lot of good things in them, they're also way more chock full of evil than I thought in the form of stereotypes and bigotry. I've learned that there's at least one woman of color reading this blog, which totally surprised me, since I kind of see Heroine Content as my remedial space to practice seeing things that people without my privilege would find completely obvious.

I've also learned that while Grace and I are both committed feminists, we will always violently disagree on what rating to give MANY films - which is why it cracks me up when people blog about Heroine Content as if it's one entity issuing its opinion. If you only knew...

So 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.

4 Stars: Greatest Hits

• Firefly and Serenity
• Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2
• Girlfight
• Lethal Weapon 3
• Double Dare
• Alien (Director's Cut)
• The Long Kiss Goodnight
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (movie)
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day
• Mr. and Mrs. Smith
• Tank Girl
• Underworld

3 Stars: Strong Contenders

• Supercop
• Ghost In The Shell (movies/series)
• Chak De! India
• Bonnie and Clyde
• Run Lola Run
• Dare to Dream
• The Quick and the Dead
• Kung Fu Hustle
• The Heart of the Game
• The Replacement Killers
• Drop Zone
• The Heroic Trio
• 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

2 Stars: So Close

• Indiana Jones (all four movies)
• Speed Racer
• The Forbidden Kingdom
• Miss Congeniality
• Doomsday
• Charlie's Angels
• Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
• Alien 3 (Director's Cut)
• Hero (Ying xiong)
• The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
• Transformers
• 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

1 Star: Typical

• Hellboy II: The Golden Army
• Entrapment
• Mulan
• Hellboy
• Million Dollar Baby
• Resident Evil: Apocalypse
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
• Stardust
• The Bourne Ultimatum
• 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

• Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
• Wanted
• Barb Wire
• Blue Crush
• Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
• Resident Evil: Extinction
• Johnny Mnemonic
• BloodRayne
• Strange Days
• Bandit Queen
• Van Helsing
• Domino
• Daredevil
• My Super Ex-Girlfriend

Posted by Skye in Odds and Ends
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Anyone out there attending BlogHer this weekend? If so, look for me! I'll either be carrying a redheaded baby, holding the baby by the hand as he walks around, or grinning maniacally because the baby is hanging out with his grandma and I'm FREE, FREE!

Unfortunately, Grace can't make it, but I'd love to see some of y'all face to face.

Posted by Skye in Odds and Ends
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