Heroine Content Summer 2009 Film Preview (and some thoughts on discouragement)
Here at Heroine Content, we are blessed with a wonderful community of readers. Two of them have become guest posters, and during our email exchanges they have each asked very good questions which I'd like to address today - before walking through our list of films for the rest of 2009.
First question is from d (who apparently is spending her time writing really long comments here and at Women & Hollywood instead of getting me those final Matrix trilogy review edits). She asked this:
Do you ever get discouraged about the state of women in action films? Sometimes I feel like we, we as in the women who want these films, are just a small few screaming in a vacuum and no one hears us. I loved Sarah Conner in T2 and enjoyed Ripley in Aliens and Alien 3, but gosh, why are those still like the only ones we have that are good? Or rather, the ones most can agree are good? [...] So I guess I just wondered if you and Grace ever became discouraged as you saw the state of things, as well as watched all those movies.
BonnieBelle, who represented with her Star Trek review, asked this:
I'm looking at what's coming out this summer, and am not impressed. There are hardly any action movies, let alone girl-friendly ones. Transformers looks like a 2 hour shot of Megan Fox's backside, with 10 minutes of robot fights. :( What are your thoughts?
In 1992, I went to college in St. Paul, MN, and shortly thereafter found a world of amazing women rock stars on the radio. Hearing PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Tracy Bonham was like a revolution to me. I didn't quite realize they were a new thing on the scene, and I didn't realize that they were part of a mini-boomlet of female rockers that would fade away. I didn't realize that something I loved so much would be so limited.
That's part of the challenge Grace and I face with writing Heroine Content. The list of films we could possibly review is quite limited. For the first two years of the site, we were reviewing about 40-50 films per year. We have a list of past films split up between us. Though we don't think it's complete, we think it's pretty close. Each year we review some of those, and whatever new films we can find. In 2009, we've reviewed seven new release films so far, and there are only eight more new films left that we have identified as possibilities for reviewing here. A couple of them probably won't pan out. So let's say at best 12 new films, and then we'd have to pull 25 or more from the "old" list. At that rate, we would basically run out of films to review in the next three years... unless we start mixing in substantial amounts of Hong Kong cinema, which neither of us are particularly qualified to write about.
Can you imagine that happening if were were writing about action movies in general?


