Assume the premise of a movie is to follow a burgeoning relationship between two thieves, one older and male, one younger and female, as they do several jobs together and learn to trust each other. What can we envision going wrong in the film, given this plot outline?

1. A forced and extremely unlikely romantic relationship between the two characters;
2. The older male thief taking on a paternal role towards the younger female, especially when combined with 1;
3.The female thief behaving impetuously and stupidly and the male thief having to correct her mistakes and always be ready with a back-up plan;
4. The male thief behaving constantly in ways that are cool and pre-meditated while the female thief is put in positions where she is either objectified or flustered or both;
5. The male thief eventually being the one to sell the female thief out, and her reacting with screams and tears;
6. The male thief saving the female thief from death and/or imprisonment;
7. The inclusion of a sole character of color, who is the most underhanded and unpleasant person in the film.

The impressive thing--the only impressive thing--about Jon Amiel's 1999 film Entrapment is that it manages not to pick and choose from this list, but actually includes every single possible thing that could make the movie terrible. Established high-profile thief Robert MacDougal (Sean Connery) acts not only as a patriarchal teacher to much younger female thief Virginia Baker (Catherine Zeta-Jones), but also as a lecherous watcher (that scene where she is practicing slithering through lasers while blindfolded and he's all but drooling?) and unwittingly seduced potential lover. He not only saves her in the end (a couple of times), but is constantly shown to be the man with the plan while she rushes into things unthinkingly. And, eventually, he is the one who has pulled the wool over her eyes, not the other way around. All in all, he's smarter, more in control, and more suave. Even though she's the one who has spent five years under cover planning the big job, she is played as the hapless apprentice. Upon first meeting her, Mac steals Virginia's clothes and then complains about her being naked, and it doesn't get any better from there.

The film's failures on race are just as spectacular as those on gender. There is a single character of color, FBI agent Aaron Thibadeaux (Ving Rhames). His function in the plot is mainly intrigue (whose side is he on? whose side is Mac on? etc.), but really he's just plain annoying, and also prone towards sexist remarks, as when he first observes Virginia swimming and says that she is probably a size 6, but would look better in a size 4. Everybody in the film is underhanded, but the single Black character gets to be underhanded and obnoxious.

I have nothing good to say about this movie. There was not a single moment in it where I thought "hey, that's kind of cool." Nothing. It was, beginning to end, a sexist, racist crime caper movie. So it gets one star for its overwhelming typicality.

Posted by Grace in 1 Star: Typical
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When watching Disney's Mulan, there are really two questions to consider: Is Mulan feminist/anti-racist? And, is Mulan more feminist/anti-racist than the typical Disney film?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'd say no to the first and yes to the second. While Mulan herself is undeniably a better and less stereotypical heroine, in terms of both gender and race, than previous atrocities like Pocahontas, Ariel, Jasmine, and Belle, and the portrayal of the culture and people of China is nowhere near so infuriating as previous Disney racism (as seen in Aladdin, or earlier in Peter Pan, or in dozens of other Disney films), I would be hard-pressed to describe Mulan as a feminist or anti-racist film.

Mulan is a re-telling of a Chinese legend about a young woman who goes to war for her country in the place of her ill father. To do so, she has to dress as a boy. This heroine, Mulan, ends up being outed as a fraud, but also saving her country. This premise is all fine and good. However, the film is still chock-full of stereotypes of both women and Chinese folks. In her Salon review of the film, Katherine Kim says she is thankful for Mulan's being in drag for most of the movie, so she won't be sexualized inappropriately, but goes on to say:

She is a banana -- yellow outside, white within. With her anglicized name, her perfect unaccented English and her wild gesticulations, it is easy to see she is not a Chinese woman warrior, but an Asian-American feminist.

While seeing Mulan as an Asian-American feminist is not necessarily a bad thing, making her more "white," in order, one presumes, to be more accessible to Disney's Western audience, doesn't garner them any points for anti-racism. Kim goes on to argue that the film portrays Mulan's victory as a victory of Western ideals over those thought to be more traditionally Chinese. She concludes her review with:

Of course, the film ends with a triumphant Mulan in the Forbidden Palace, throngs of Chinese bowing to her reverently, after she has sent the villain rocketing in the distance on a firecracker. In Disney, goodness will prevail. In Disney, the West will always win.

I can't disagree, and I think it rather rude, if typical, of Disney to usurp a traditional Chinese legend and use it in this way.

Another Salon reviewer, Andrea Quong, points out another problem with Mulan, and it is my biggest issue with the film an attempt at feminism. She writes that Mulan is shown throughout the film to be more competent and more heroic than any of the men, including her commanding officer, Shang. Still, Shang is at the end presented as a possible romantic interest for Mulan. The message, Quong writes, seems to be "Girls, you can do with or without men, but be prepared to accommodate some pretty childish behavior." She goes on to say:

For all the film's feminist messages, they are being broadcast into a world in which the relationships between the sexes are still far from ideal, and women as a matter of course compromise their own personhood to accommodate the damaging insecurities of the men in their lives.

It is here where the film really loses me. Throughout the story, Shang is in no way heroic. He likes Mulan when she proves herself as a man, but is immediately horrible to her when he finds out she is a woman, even after he's seen what she can do. Then, when she goes out of her way to try to help him even after he has rejected her, he is too stupid to figure out that she's right. So why in the world would the film end with him coming to "claim" her as a suitor? I just didn't get that.

All in all, Mulan is a pretty lousy movie in terms of both gender and race. The fact that it has been hailed as the first "feminist" Disney film says much less about how good it is and much more about just how poorly the rest of Disney's movies treat women and non-white characters. When taken as representative of all films, though, and not just the drivel produced by Disney, I can't see any reason to give it more than the "typical" one star.

Posted by Grace in 1 Star: Typical
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I love the movie Hellboy with a passion. When I saw it in the theater, I did a little dance on my way out. But I don't want to be a woman in the Hellboy-verse unless I can be evil.

I should want to be good, since the good guys win. If I'm good, I get to be Liz Sherman (played by Selma Blair). Liz could be cool. She's a firestarter. In a fantasy movie, starting fires can be fun. (In real life, it can lead to the entire state of California going up in flames, which is not fun.) She spends a lot of her time with a team of superheroes who "bump back" at things that go bump in the night, which is way fun.

Unfortunately for us, Liz is unsure about whether she wants to kick ass. She would rather be normal. It's understandable, since she's not actually in control of her powers. She starts one accidental fire and one purposeful fire during the movie, excepting a childhood incident we see in memory. The accidental fire is started when the bad guy breaks into her room and puts her under mind control, and she can only start the purposeful fire by asking a man to HIT HER. So it seems that men pretty much run her show. (Would this be different if she embraced her power and learned to use it?) In fact, given how little relevance she has to the main plot, it could be argued that Liz is actually just The Girlfriend with a quasi-superpower tacked on as an accessory. She gets manipulated by the bad guys, abducted, stripped, held hostage, and finally rescued by the hero. Yawn. Why would I want to be that?

If I'm Liz, I also have to deal with the insult of the DVD cover. In the movie, I would dress like a normal person. On the DVD cover, I would be turned into a vamp. No thanks.

So I would like to be bad instead. If I'm bad, I get to be Ilsa Haupstein (Bridget Hodson), devoted military servant of evil. I'm not saying I want to help Rasputin bring god-monsters into the world to destroy it. I definitely don't want to be in the position of resurrecting my boyfriend with someone's blood. I'm just saying I want to be bold, confident, committed, and dish out a pistol-whipping when necessary. Ilsa is also The Girlfriend, but she has taken a side and she is giving it everything she's got. The good guys don't give her any quarter because she's a woman, and she doesn't let being a woman stop her from kicking their butts.

For a woman in a movie to be a heroine, the viewer should want to be her. In Hellboy, Liz just doesn't cut it. Ilsa wins.

Despite Ilsa, though, I can't dredge up more than one star for my beloved Hellboy based on Heroine Content criteria. Ilsa and Liz, the only two women in the film, are attached to men. The only people of color are... wait... hang on... right, I don't remember any. It breaks my heart to give it one star because I have such love for it, but it's only fair since this is typical Hollywood fare.

I'm hoping Hellboy II: The Golden Army does a better job. The trailer, which I'm including below, makes me a giddy fangirl. However, we'll have to wait and see about the gender and race issues.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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I didn't think I would like Million Dollar Baby--that's why it took me so long to see it. Although I have an admitted soft spot for movies about boxers (one of these days I'll review Girlfight and you'll see what I'm talking about), I have whatever is opposite of a soft spot (a hard spot?) for both Clint Eastwood and Hilary Swank. Between this, the ridiculous hype the movie generated when it first came out, and the fierce criticism leveled at it by the disability community, I wanted nothing to do with it. But alas, I thought we needed some more movies about female athletes on Heroine Content, so I put my preconceptions aside and put it on my Netflix queue.

There were a couple of things I liked about Million Dollar Baby. I liked how the film used Morgan Freeman's character, a retired boxer named Scrap, to get into the way the boxing industry has historically used and thrown away black men. I liked the explicit way in which class background and class transition were addressed in the relationship between Hilary Swank's Maggie and her family, though I could have lived without the heavy-handed way in which Maggie was painted as a martyr and her family as greedy white trash. And, surprisingly, I liked Swank herself, whose physical transformation (she reportedly gained 19 lbs of muscle in 9 weeks while training for the film) made her believable as a boxer, something I never would have expected.

There were, however, many more things I did not like about the movie. I really hated the paternal relationship Eastwood's character, Frankie, had with Maggie. Is it not possible for a man to coach a woman in a sport without becoming her daddy? I despised how Maggie's path to becoming a respected boxer was to become as little of a "girl" as possible--surely we ought to know by now that denying your gender and becoming an "exception" that can be considered one of the boys is not truly heroinism. More than anything, though, I absolutely loathed the turn the movie took after the accident in which Maggie sustained her spinal injury.

After Maggie is injured, she is paralyzed, unable to move anything but her head or to breathe on her own. After several months of recovery, a major fight with her family about her financial assets, and the amputation of one of her legs due to a bedsore, Maggie asks Frankie to kill her. After some soul-searching, he does. That's pretty much the end of the film. The message is clear: if you can't move, you're better off dead.

Many disability activists and bloggers wrote about Million Dollar Baby when it came out, arguing vehemently against this perspective. They articulate much better than I ever could what's wrong with it. If you haven't read any of them, I suggest starting with this essay by Diane Coleman. Another good start is this essay by Mary Johnson at the Ragged Edge. Basically, the film gives no time or space to any argument for how or why Maggie's post-accident life could be worth living. It is a foregone conclusion that her life is over once she loses her ability to move and breathe independently. This is not only ridiculous, given the number of people in similar situations that continue to live full and happy lives, it's also incredibly irresponsible filmmaking.

Maggie isn't the only character in Million Dollar Baby who is discarded for being disabled. There is also a cognitively impaired character, Danger, played by Jay Baruchel, who may not be meant to exist only for the sake of comedy (much is made of his "big heart"), but comes off that way. And even Freeman's character Scrap is portrayed as someone whose life was tragically altered and somehow devalued when he was partially blinded. This combination leads to a film that feels like nothing so much as an embodiment of Clint Eastwood's disdain anybody who isn't the physical and mental specimen he thinks they should be.

I am giving Million Dollar Baby one star, mostly for the nod it gives to racism in boxing, and also for its attempt, though only partially successful, to address class transition. I am not, however, suggesting that you watch it.

Posted by Grace in 1 Star: Typical
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Since Resident Evil: Extinction, the third movie in the Resident Evil trilogy, opens next week, I thought I'd gear up by reviewing the second movie, Resident Evil: Apocalypse. I remember feeling somewhat bored and fidgety when I saw Apocalypse in the theater, but I did not have the same reaction when I watched it again at home. The pacing felt good, there was plenty of action, and I didn't have to yell at the characters even once to stop talking and get on with it.

Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed in its treatment of gender and race. I gave the first Resident Evil movie three stars because of its diverse casting and respect for its female characters. Apocalypse could have followed that pattern, but the film's creators choose instead to rely on stereotypes for the people of color and sexualization for the women.

Men of African descent can be either expendable muscle or flashy streetwise hustler. There's one other person of color with a speaking part, named Oliveira, and he's also muscle. There are no people of color among the technicians and scientists that make up the evil Umbrella corporation - and while I wish I could believe that this was some kind of statement about how white men run the world and often do bad things, I think it's just racist casting. I had noticed in the first film that there were few, if any, people of color among all the Umbrella employees who are killed by the virus. I put it aside because the more substantial characters who show up soon thereafter were much more diversely cast. But by the second film, was it too much to ask that ONE person of color might have been included in the Umbrella machine? Does the Raccoon City university really have this much trouble recruiting diverse candidates into their hard sciences?

Women, and by this I mean white women (no Michelle Rodriguez in this one), don't fare much better than people of color. Alice (Milla Jovovich) and Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory) do kick major ass, but who is dressing them? Alice's outfit in the first movie was a dress that I would not pick for being beset by zombies, but at least it made sense in the storyline since the outbreak happened while she was getting ready to go out to dinner. This time around, she leaves the hospital and quickly finds Guns N Tank Tops R Us to suit up in this mesh number that looks like one of those strangely named bathing suit "cover ups." Jill Valentine is first shown in stiletto heels, which thankfully are discarded in favor of boots. However, I can't be expected to suspend my disbelief far enough to believe that someone who is aware that zombie bites are infectious is going to choose to fight them while wearing a bustier. Seriously, people.

Don't even get me started on the scene where the African-American hustler character crashes his car because he's distracted by topless zombie women. I'm not sure how that scene could have been made more offensive.

I give Apocalpyse just one star, and that's just because there are strong female characters who kick ass and shoot zombies. Truthfully, I had fun watching it, but I'm not sure the fun was worth the eye rolling.

Now I will await Mad Max Beyond Resident Evil Resident Evil: Apocalypse to find out whether it follows this pattern, or returns to the higher standards set by the first film.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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I did not re-watch The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in the most receptive frame of mind. I saw it in theaters when it came out, and I thought it was terrible. Really bad. A jumbled, confusing mess. A bunch of heroes get together in an alternate Victorian Age to save the world. Then the city of Vienna spends half an hour falling down, building by building, before the heroes finally stop the buildings from falling through the clever trick of... blowing up a building. Then they go to an icy castle and fight a bunch of different Bad Guys. The heroes win and prevent a world war. The End.

To make things worse, League has essentially one female character (Peta Wilson) and one person of color (Naseeruddin Shah). So when Netflix brought the DVD to my door, I settled down to re-watch a bad movie full of white guys. Yawn.

Despite my bad attitude, though, I didn't find it as bad as I expected. This might be because I was simultaneously ironing quilt blocks rather than being held hostage in a theater where I had to focus my entire attention on the movie.

So on first viewing I hated it, and on second viewing I found it reasonably entertaining and inoffensive. Unfortunately, then I spent some time Googling while writing this review. Now I'm back to feeling disappointed.

Let's start with Peta Wilson's character. Wilson plays Mina Harker, vampire, vampire hunter, and chemist. Good combination, right? Beauty, brains, unnatural superpowers? Also, a team of hairstylists that apparently follows her around to give her different looks depending on which of her facets is dominant at the time. (I would not mind this myself. Hey, now I'm a government relations professional in a suit. Hey, now I'm a groovy South Austin chick in jeans and a tank top. Hey, now I'm really pissed off and my hair's all wild!)

Unfortunately, though, Mina spends a lot of her time in the movie revolving around the men. I saw it coming when the team asks Mina to explain her background. She starts like this: "My husband was Jonathan Harker. Together with a professor named Van Helsing..." Her explanation of her own life begins by identifying men. It's a perfect reflection of how Mina is treated by film's creators. She has several roles: ex-girlfriend, love interest, obsession, target for sexism, and finally, a body to grab as a joke for the other team members and the audience. Rarely is she just herself.

On the other hand, Mina often rocks. She doesn't function as either damsel in distress or bait. When the first fight the team is ambushed by at least a dozen gunmen, and everyone fights... except for Mina. She is removed from the action for her safety, then reappears at the end of the fight as a hostage - but then she says she doesn't need protection and she sucks the hostage-taker's blood. In case you were wondering, at least two of the heroes do find that quite sexxy, which annoyed me because it put the focus back on the men - but I still enjoyed their collective shock at her transformation from proper lady to bloodthirsty vampire. Oops, I'm sorry, did we break a few of your assumptions?

For this, and for some followup scenes where Mina takes care of business (with bats! and a sword! and science!), it's almost worth listening to Sean Connery's Allan Quatermain make cracks about how women are useless for the first half of the movie. I didn't fully appreciate Mina's good scenes when I first saw League, probably because I was so sick of hearing about how hot Peta Wilson was in La Femme Nikita.

However, when I was searching for the exact wording of the quote above, I accidentally refreshed my memory of the comic book. I read some of it after I saw the movie and didn't like it very much, so it hadn't really stuck with me. In the comic book from which League was adapted, Mina is the leader of the group, instead of Quatermain being the boss. She also goes by Mina Murray, not Mina Harker, because she and Jonathan are divorced. Not a big deal in today's society, but notable in a story that's supposed to be set in the late 1800s.

So even with Mina's sometimes coolness, I ended up with a bad taste in my mouth. Quatermain's comments about women's inferiority seem more like comments from the filmmakers when you realize that they've changed the source material to make the only woman less powerful and independent.

Let's move on to Captain Nemo, played by veteran Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah. I was completely unfamiliar with the character of Captain Nemo before seeing League, except that he came from a classic science fiction novel. I didn't even know he was Indian in the books; I thought the choice of Shah was innovative casting. While I was watching the film, I felt very positive about Nemo. The Captain and his crew are definitely professionals. They are skilled, disciplined, and fearsome in battle. Captain Nemo himself just outclasses the rest of the team. He doesn't bicker, he doesn't swagger, and he shows respect to Mina instead of seeing her as an object.

(Mina, however, doesn't get it. After seeing Nemo in a room with a statue of Kali, she asks whether a man who worships death can be trusted. Is it just me, or is this the typical sort of bonehead comment that people make when they don't know a thing about another religion except a few oversimplified stereotypes?)

As with Mina, though, finding out a little more about the character made it far less satisfactory. The Wikipedia entry on Captain Nemo was my first hint:

It is in the sequel, The Mysterious Island, where Nemo presents himself as Prince Dakkar, the Hindu son of the rajah of Bundelkund and nephew of Tippoo Sahib, having a deep hatred of the British conquest of India. After the Sepoy mutiny, he devotes himself to scientific research and develops an advanced electric submarine, the Nautilus. He and a crew of his followers cruise the seas, battling injustice, especially slavery.

Cynthia Fuchs takes it further in a review of League on on Pop Matters:

In some previous incarnation, Nemo was a truly complicated character (this according to the film's press notes), anti-British Empire and working, by piracy, to restore his own land, India, to independence. To this end, he has created the famous submarine Nautilus, and assembled a stash of weapons and a loyal crew of be-turbaned men. The contraptions and troops are visible on screen, but the backstory is mentioned only in passing, as Nemo (an ostensible worshipper of Kali, the goddess of death, as noted, presumably ironically, by the undead Mina) is offered amnesty for his crimes. And with that, he appears fully willing to throw down with whoever to save Britain.

So he's presented as a great guy, but his politics are completely betrayed by roping him into a plot to reinforce the Empire. Not cool. The movie gives lip service to the idea that a war among the colonial powers will cause suffering to everyone else as well, but I agree with Fuchs that the dominant feeling is more "imperial self-preservation project" than protecting the colonized from the fallout of world war.

(Speaking of stereotypes, I also had big problems with the portrayal of Alan Quatermain's relationship with Africa. There's a big "What These People Need is A Honky" problem here, where Africa seems to only exist in order to be loved by a white man who wants to live there and hang out in a bar where all the patrons are old white men and all the employees are black Africans.)

With all of these contradictions, I can't give League more than 1 star. Mina kicks ass, and I'd have Captain Nemo on my team any day. However, she gets sold out and he's co-opted into reinforcing colonialism, while Africa and India are afterthoughts in the impending global conflict. So if you haven't yet seen it, I think it's safe to leave it off your list.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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Before seeing Stardust, I read a review somewhere that referred to it as "The Princess Bride meets Baron Munchausen." That, for my money, would be a great movie. A movie that in no way resembles the one I saw.

To begin with, Stardust is just a terrible film. The plot is meandering, nonsensical, and absurd in a completely non-fun way, the acting is just all-around bad, and the dialogue is inane at best. It has none of The Princess Bride's self-respecting cheeky humor and none of Munchausen's maniacal glee. One of the friends I saw the film with said he would have really liked, if he were 7. I doubt even that.

Aside from general badness, Stardust does a spectacularly terrible job with both gender and race. Race is just a non-starter--it's an all-white movie, period. And while there may be an excuse for that in the parts that are set in Victorian England, the majority of the film is set in a magical kingdom, so it would hardly have been a stretch to employee some non-white actors. That would imply a social conscience, however, and this movie definitely lacks that.

Gender in Stardust is a study in typicality, with heavy use of stereotypes. Basically, there are four female characters, two "good," two "bad." On the good side, you have protagonist Tristan's (Charlie Cox) long-suffering princess-turned-slave mother, Una (Kate Magowan) and Claire Danes' Yvaine, the film's main female character, who is a fallen star. Oh, Angela Chase, how far you have fallen indeed. Una doesn't get to do much beyond copulate unexplainably with Tristan's father (played by Ben Barnes in his youth and Nathaniel Parker in his middle age) and get bossed around by her witch-mistress. Yvaine, though, is the real disappointment. Though she is a centuries-old supernatural being, she has no powers and no sense, and spends the entire film being rescued and taken care of and doing no small amount of complaining. Her sole self-motivated action is to break into ridiculous shiny light at the movie's end, and even then she clearly states that it is only her great love for Tristan that allows her to do it. Seriously. And without a speck of irony intended.

As terrible as Yvaine is, though, the "bad" female characters are even worse. First we meet Victoria, played by Sienna Miller. For no particular reason, Tristan is in love with Victoria and goes on a dangerous mission to find a fallen star in order to prove this love. Victoria is spoiled, shallow, immature, and selfish, and the film offers her no chance to be anything else. She gets a big 0 in the way of character development or growth of any time, and ends up to be the butt of the joke.

Then there's the very worst part, Michelle Pfeiffer's Lamia. Lamia is the self-appointed leader of three very very old sister witches, who are after Yvaine because her heart gives them youth and beauty. Yes, that's right, youth and beauty motivate the villainess, and she is willing to destroy another woman (or star, I guess) to get it. Shocking, isn't it? Never saw that coming. Particularly not juxtaposed with the villain, Prince Septimus (Mark Strong), who is also after Yvaine, but in search not of youth and beauty, but power. So women are motivated by youth and beauty, men by power. Novel. Add in a boatload of joke's made at the elderly woman's expense (she gets age spots! her hair falls out! her boobs sag! laugh riot!) and you pretty much have the definition of one-star typicality.

Some of the folks I saw this film with felt it was redeemed, if momentarily, by Robert DeNiro's performance. Honestly, it didn't do much for me--I thought his drag routine was tired, if not homophobic. The only redeeming thing I saw was David Kelly (also the best part of Tim Burton's disastrous Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) in a small role as the wall guard. Oh, and the death by ferrets. Neither of those things, however, equates to a reason to actually see this film. I recommend you don't.

Posted by Grace in 1 Star: Typical
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Like its predecessors, The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum is a very basic, methodical, entertaining action movie. It has improvised weapons, car chases, and hand-to-hand. Matt Damon's amnesiac rogue CIA operative Jason Bourne has been called a 21st century James Bond (though Damon himself bristles at the comparison). When one goes to see the film, one knows these things going in.

But, if one is me, one is still not totally prepared for the invisibility of women in The Bourne Ultimatum.

Basically, there are three female characters in the Bourne movies: Bourne's driver-turned-girlfriend in the first and second films, Marie (Franka Potente); CIA honcho Pamela Landy in the second two films (Joan Allen); and CIA paper-pusher Nicky in all three films (Julia Stiles). All three roles have potential, and all three are portrayed by actresses who can hold their own (and, in the case of Joan Allen, carry the load of the weak performances around them), yet we see very little of any of the women. Allen's Landy is allowed some room to move, particularly in the The Bourne Ultimatum, where we see her come to terms with being part of a CIA of which she is ashamed, but she could have been utilized to far greater ends than she was (replacing some of the screen time given to a very disappointing David Strathairn, maybe?). Potente's Marie also gets some character development before her death at the beginning of the second film, though she, too, could have been used more (I thought there was real possibility in her early interactions with Damon in the first movie). The real tragedy is Stiles' Nicky. We see Nicky in all three Bourne films, but she's never given enough to do for the audience to care about her one way or the other, or to do anything, really, but wonder why she's there at all. Her role in The Bourne Ultimatum is the worst to date--you think she's actually going to get to do something, but all she does is get rescued and stare. She barely even gets any lines.

I have no particular gripe with the Bourne movies being Matt Damon's one-man show. As far as actors go, I like Matt Damon, and I think he does a pretty good job with the confused and angry Jason Bourne. He's believable as both an every man and an action hero, and these films work well for him. I love that Damon's reaction to the comparison between Bourne and James Bond has been to call Bond "an imperialist and a misogynist." But that doesn't excuse a movie with no fleshed out female characters, or an entire trilogy of movies with only three female characters among them.

The real kicker, though, isn't that these films were made this way, with only minor female characters, but that nobody seems bothered by that, or even to notice it. Try as I may, I can't think of a movie featuring a female lead in which male characters just don't exist. In a culture where male is still the norm and female the other, that just doesn't exist. Women are not an exotic commodity to be used sparingly as seasoning in a movie, even in an action flick, filling in mud flap girl-shaped holes as love interest or mother figure. Women are half the world's human population, more or less, and ought to be represented as such. Anything less simply won't do.

The Bourne films have race issues as well as gender ones. Namely, I'm bothered by the "exotic" nature of all of Bourne's would-be assassins. Given that Bourne himself is supposed to have been a CIA assassin, why aren't any of the people who come after him (i.e. the films "bad guys") white boys?

The Bourne Ultimatum earns one star from me, as it is nothing if not typical. Though I appreciate Damon's comments about James Bond, and his wish to separate himself and his character from Bond's mold, I'm afraid Jason Bourne isn't nearly as far from Bond as Damon would like to believe. While the Bourne films are blessedly free of sex kittens and high-heeled villainesses with nasty names, they're also free of women in general, and I'm not sure invisibility counts as progress.

Posted by Grace in 1 Star: Typical
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In 2004, I made a terrible mistake. I mentioned Vin Diesel on my personal blog in a post about The Chronicles of Riddick. For months afterward, that post got traffic from a bewildering number of searches related to Mr. Diesel. Apparently, he has a rabid fan base that is desperate for details of his eating habits, workout schedule, dating life, mother, bare feet, and whether or not he is a gay scientologist or has a cider named after him.

For those of you who were not drawn in by the allure of evil alien cult armies and thus skipped The Chronicles of Riddick, here's a plot synopsis. Vin Diesel's character Riddick was introduced in Pitch Black as an evil incarnate sociopath who nevertheless ends up Saving The Girl. The girl, in this case, was masquerading as a boy named Jack. In The Chronicles of Riddick, we find out that after Pitch Black Riddick dropped Jack off with the other survivor, known as "the Imam," and went on his merry way.

Now an evil alien cult army called the Necromongers is converting and/or killing entire planetary populations, and Riddick is fated to stop them. Not that he cares, since as previously mentioned he's a bit of a sociopath. But the cleric has him kidnapped and brought to the latest planet to be targeted by the Necromongers. Riddick finds out that Jack flipped out, went looking for him, and ended up in a supermax prison, so he heads off to look for her and away we go.

All of those blog visitors looking for Vin Diesel gossip must have been terribly disappointed when instead of dish, they saw my assessment of Riddick and Jack, now calling herself Kyra:

I did not expect much from The Chronicles of Riddick. Pretty spaceships, evil alien cult armies, Vin Diesel's glowing eyes.

But now that I've seen Tomb Raider and Underworld, I'm much less forgiving of weak female characters. Especially when the female characters actually kick tremendous amounts of ass and should be treated with more respect by the story's architects.

In Riddick, he's violent because he's an invincible alien with special powers. Kyra's violent because she's broken. He's capable of taking care of himself. She always needs his help at a critical moment. She can only win by sacrificing herself. When he wins, he gets the extra prize of a devoted army of followers. She is strong but also looks like a sex bomb, and is not taken seriously as a threat by men because she's a woman. He is amazingly competent, no questions asked. Her violence is lamentable, a waste of her life that the other characters mourn. His violence is because he's allegedly evil, but we only know that because other characters say so - we only see him making the right choices - and it's necessary to save the world.

Re-watching the movie this year, I did see that Kyra rescues Riddick a couple of times. But overall, she's still a mess. Her distinguishing characteristic is her pathological devotion to Riddick. She's first shown in a cage. She's a badass who suddenly can't fend off an attempted rape by prison guards once Riddick is around to protect her. Her function in the movie is purely as bait to motivate him, and perhaps to humanize him so we can wrap our heads around the "serial killer as messiah" switcheroo.

The other women in the movie do nothing to offset Kyra. Instead of a powerful female Necromonger somewhere in their ranks, we get Thandie Newton's scheming Dame Vaako who can only achieve power through her husband. Judi Dench plays an "elemental," which means that she gets captured and makes prophecies and can't really do anything. The Imam's wife is the only other adult woman of note, and she doesn't get much screen time.

No stars for any of that.

The cast is not a model for what I would like to call "reality casting" - casting that reflects the mix of people who live on this planet? However, there are people of color in major speaking roles. Vin Diesel is listed on IMDB as half African-American and half Italian-American - and hey, was I the only one who didn't know he has a background in theater and made a short film called Multi-Facial about his experiences as an actor? (Oops, veering into gossip.) Thandie Newton's mother is Zimbabwean and her father is white. The Imam is played by African-American actor Keith David.

I was surprised by how much diversity there was in the extras casting for the population of the planet under attack. The planet, Helion Prime, is declared somewhat preachily to be a multicultural world where people of diverse faiths live peacefully side by side. That harmony is a bit shaken when one of the Bad Guys kills a man by allegedly removing his soul, but at least the crowd looks diverse. I'll admit, though, that I didn't do a good job of tracking the mercenaries, prisoners, and prison guards who made up the rest of the movie's secondary cast.

The Necromongers, however, are pretty much white. It's sort of amusing to think of the conflict as a bunch of monotheistic, fascist white men on a convert-or-kill crusade against a diverse and tolerant population with multi-ethnic Vin Diesel as their champion - and to carry that metaphor a bit further to current events - but I don't know if that's what the film's creators had in mind. Even more amusing, I found a right wing blog entry from when the movie came out that interpreted the Necromongers as Islamic terrorists trying to impose their faith on others, and the blogger wondered why liberals weren't outraged by the film.

The Chronicles of Riddick is awful, awful, awful on gender. However, it should probably get 2 or 3 stars for race. So I'm going to give it one star.

My goal for this review is to write it, then not have to publish a correction or update the next day - unlike my recent reviews for Transformers and the Zorro movies. I'd rather admit and correct my mistakes than leave them on the web unacknowledged, but it's still embarrassing. So let's see how this one goes.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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First of all, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow fails the Dykes to Watch Out For test. While there are two named female characters (Gwyneth Paltrow's Polly and Angelina Jolie's Frankie), they don't ever converse, much less about anything other than the man they've been competitors for, Jude Law's Sky Captain. It's all pretty typical--two women (one brunette, one blonde, even) make catty comments to each other about a dude, there's an underlying story about his infidelity to one woman with the other, and so on and so forth. Nothing we need to examine here, really, as we've seen the whole thing a million times before. So the film fails spectacularly when it comes to the two women's interactions with one another.

So what about the women individually?

Paltrow's Polly pretty much makes me crazy. Yes, she's willful and self-directed and career-driven, but she's also severely lacking in common sense and constantly getting herself into things she can't get herself out of. Some of what she does and how she talks and dresses is to expected, since the film is a pre-World War II farce, but the character goes way overboard (Paltrow's fairly terrible acting certainly doesn't help), and writer/director Kerry Conran (for whom Sky Captain is a freshman effort) seems determined to take her down several pegs whenever possible. One good example of this is the scene when Polly is in Sky Captain's plane with him and gives him bad directions on how to fly through New York City. Hello? This woman is a City Metro reporter--she probably knows her streets.

Angelina Jolie's Frankie is a different story. She's tough, sarcastic, and extremely competent. She's a Royal Navy Commander, which is cool in and of itself, and seems to be nearly as cocky and daredevil as Sky Captain. There are really only two things wrong with her character--the first is the ridiculous notion that she'd ever date Sky Captain, and the second is that she only gets about 5 minutes of screen time total, which is not only a tremendous waste, but gives a definite "this character is a token" vibe that I don't like at all.

There is a third woman in the cast as well, Ling Bai's Mysterious Assassin, the only villain you see much of. This, of course, is problematic, mainly because (spoiler) she turns out to be a robot. I can't help but cringe at the portrayal of an Asian woman as not only at the behest of an old white (German, in this case, but still, white) dude, but actually being literally programmed and run by him. Ick. Plus the racial undercurrent--why are the sympathetic women white while the villain is Asian?

Basically, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a movie set in 1939 with gender and racial politics that more or less suit the time period. However, given the nearly animated farcical quality to the plot and scenery, it wouldn't have been too much of a jump to move the female characters and their interactions beyond what would be expected. This is a challenge Conran didn't take, and his film is the worse for it.

Posted by Grace in 1 Star: Typical
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Oh, the disappointment.

Ide Cyan posted a heads up about the movie Blood and Chocolate at the Feminist SF blog back in February. She said "It’s a movie about a female werewolf, directed by a woman, and based on a book written by a woman." So I thought sure, I'll see that, and eventually the magic of Netflix brought it to my house when it was released on DVD.

Aside from reminding me how badly we need curtains in the TV room if we're going to watch movies set mostly at night, I can't say that this film added much to my life. I hoped Vivian, the young werewolf caught in a patriarchal society, would rebel and kick some butt. Instead she spends most of her time feeling bad and watching her boyfriend bust out with mad hand-to-hand combat skillz. Though the young werewolf men are shown with supernatural strength and agility, we rarely see Vivian do anything that requires much beyond average human athleticism.

Her life revolves around various men, following the pattern set by the aunt who raised her. Granted, this is the plot of the story. Vivian is facing a forced marriage to the werewolf pack leader, who has a son who seems devoted to picking on her, but instead she falls in love with a human man. However, I think there's a way to write a story where a woman is in relationships with men without sacrificing her initiative. Vivian just reacts.

The relationship with her boyfriend is supposed to be the positive one, but it wasn't all that impressive. When she's initially trying to get rid of him, she tells him she has a boyfriend. His comeback? "Would you have been in a church at 3 a.m. if you had a boyfriend?" Way to invalidate female agency, bucko.

Blood and Chocolate gets one star. It's not patently offensive, but it's not doing anything for the cause. Perhaps I will read the book someday and see if it's any better.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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Oooh, can you feel the anticipation! Tomorrow's the big day for At World's End! If only taking a look back at Dead Man's Chest didn't make me want to skip it completely...

Keira Knightley has gone on record saying that she felt she had more of a role in Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man’s Chest, than she did in the previous Pirates film. On balance, this assessment is likely true. In Dead Man's Chest, Elizabeth Swann, Knightley's character, gets to do a lot more swashbuckling of her own than she did in Curse of the Black Pearl. However, it comes at such a high expense that I ended up finding Dead Man's Chest to be even more infuriating from the standpoint of heroine content than Curse of the Black Pearl was!

Sure, Elizabeth comes to her own, stowing away in a ship, visiting Tortuga, getting into sword fights, and blowing off Daddy's wishes to go try to find Jack on her own. However, everything she does comes with an undermining caveat. To stow away on the boats, she dresses up as a boy and much gender switch hilarity and homophobic joking ensues. Hahaha. At one point, in conversation with Jack (after she has already shown herself to be a competent swordswoman), she actually says, "You do know Will taught me how to handle a sword." Barf. Later, she finds herself faced once again the threat of sexual violence, swordless and being stared down by the lecherous and leering Pintel and Ragetti. Most horrendously, though, in the film's last big battle scene between the Pearl and Davy Jones' monster, Elizabeth has the important job of shooting a musket at some powder kegs at a key moment. Jack has disappeared. Jack returns, and rather than shooting the kegs herself, Elizabeth gives the gun to Jack and then (literally) cowers at his feet while he shoots. I really wish I could find a still picture of it, as it illustrates the problem with Elizabeth's character perfectly.

Sadly, though, Elizabeth isn't the worst of it. Though the only other female character, Tia Dalma (played by Naomie Harris) is a completely stereotypical sorceress/witch and is infuriating, it isn't even gender that is the biggest issue in this film. Nope, the big issue is the incredible racism.

In an effort to get out of the open water as soon as possible to avoid Davy Jones, Jack and his crew dock on an island filled with cannibal savages. A big chunk of the film takes place on this island, where hilarity and mayhem ensues as Jack, who these "natives" think is some sort of god and are going to release from human form by roasting and eating him, tries to escape his fate. The rest of the crew, as well as Will, is meantime also trying to escape, from cages made of human bones. It's 20 or so minutes of jokes about these horrible aboriginals (all with dark skin, of course) who eat people and talk funny and paint extra eyes on Jack's face. Marc at I Am NOT The Beastmaster called this part of the film, "dull, disturbing, and completely unnecessary," and I completely agree. This type of humor is such an unwelcome throwback that it's almost but not quite shocking it was included this way. Note to Gore Verbinksi: this is so, so not OK. (For some excellent posts on this, see Ally Work, The Angry Black Woman and Gardner Hill.)

And the racism doesn't even end with the cannibals. Tia Dalma, the witch/sorceress character, just happens to be black (and have something that looks like ink all over her mouth--what was that about?). Of her, S. A. Bonasi noted:

Tia Dalma is definitely in "Magical Negro" territory. She's overly willing to help the white characters, often for a smaller price than one might expect and even after Jack steals from her. She is exploited by the white characters, and the film offers no criticism for this. Rather, it's intended to be funny. White people ripping off a black woman who is helping them? Totally hilarious! [/sarcasm]

Furthermore, there was the treatment of Dalma's sexuality. Hey, I'm all for sexuality. If it was just Dalma lusting after Will and Jack, I'd call her an honorary fan and be done with it. My problem is that her sexuality was also treated as a joke. The film made it perfectly clear that there was no way that Jack nor Will would actually be romantically interested in her. A Black woman thinking she is sexually/romantically desirable? Hahahaha! [/more sarcasm]

Exactly.

At the beginning of the film, the members of Jack's crew who are least "with him" are mostly men of color, while the loyal one is white. And on and on it goes.

This is all unacceptable, and I expect more. The Pirates films, especially this second one, are a great example of how being conscious of sexism and racism in films can make bad films less enjoyable. If I'm not thinking critically, I can say I like these movies--they are fun and cute and Johnny Depp is fantastic. However, the minute I start to look the least bit hard at them, they totally fall apart. I believe we can do better. I believe it's possible to make a movie with the same amount of fun without the racist and sexist tripe getting in the way. And I hope Pirates 3 is better. But I have to tell you, I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by Grace in 1 Star: Typical
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In 1990, Luc Besson (The Professional, The Fifth Element) released a film, Nikita, in France. When it came to the U.S. the next year, the film was billed La Femme Nikita. A couple of years later, American director John Badham (Stakeout, Bird on a Wire) took a turn at the same story, and in 1993 released an American remake, Point of No Return. And something tells me you can already tell where this is going, based on the other credits of the two directors, if nothing else. To further illustrate the situation, the French film stars French actress Anne Parillaud, while the American one stars Bridget Fonda.

These two films are a perfect illustration of how storyline isn't everything. They share the same storyline, and Point of No Return is, for the most part, a scene-by-scene remake of La Femme Nikita. And yet Point of No Return is a cheesy, ridiculous movie, and La Femme Nikita is an absolute classic.

The basic plot line is as follows: a young woman shoots a police officer or officers while participating in a drug robbery. She is convicted and her death (suicide in the French version, execution in the American--what does that tell you?) is faked by some secret facet of the government, who then give her the choice to work for them as an assassin or to die for real. Choosing the former, she enters training. Some time later, she's released from the facility and goes into the real world, where she assumes a fake identity, moves into a shabby apartment, and falls in love. After falling in love, it becomes more difficult for her to do her assassin work, and she tries to get out. Then comes the typical "one last big job," which happens and goes horribly awry, but somehow she remains alive and escapes, leaving both assassin work and lover boy behind.

What really makes La Femme Nikita such a better movie than Point of No Return, though, is that everything that is arty and surreal and strange about La Femme Nikita turns into something cheese ball in Point of No Return. Though Badham tried to imitate Besson shot for shot in much of the film, Besson gets it and Badham just doesn't. This leaves the viewer (at least this viewer) with the feeling that while Nikita is a film about a female assassin, Point of No Return is a film making fun of female assassins.

That being said, neither one of these movies is all that good from the perspective of heroine content. Both films have exactly one really excellent woman assassin scene, and the scene is well played in both films. (But Parillaud is a much more convincing ass-kicker than Fonda is. To begin with, while both women probably worked out for their roles, Parillaud is convincingly muscled and her short skirt rides up legs that look like they've spent some time kickboxing. Fonda is mainly just skinny. She also looks far more comfortable than Fonda with a weapon.) The remainder of the films, though, is taken up with a lot of instruction on how to use one's feminine wiles (yuck) and a lot of soul-searching about whether being an assassin is appropriate for someone who is in love. Very little time in either film is spent on the main character's actual potential to kick ass, and the ass kicking that is done is under strict male supervision. There's nothing revolutionary about it, and honestly I don't know what people are thinking when they trumpet Nikita as a great women's action movie. It's barely an action movie at all.

In the end, I give La Femme Nikita two stars, mainly for Parillaud's performance, which I did quite enjoy. Point of No Return gets one, because really there isn't much good about it. While it's not, for the most part, offensive, it's nothing I'd go out of my way to watch, either.

Posted by Grace in 1 Star: Typical & 2 Stars: So Close
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The Action Heroine's Handbook, by Jennifer Worick and Joe Borgenicht, is supposed to be funny. It's not meant to be taken too seriously. And maybe I just didn't have the right sense of humor when reading it.

But maybe it's a trite piece of sexist crap. That's another possibility.

The premise, basically, is to instruct women on how to be "action heroines" in five categories: Tough Chick Skills, Beauty Skills, Brain Skills, Brawn Skills, and Escape Skills. Each category gives advice for specific situations, drawing on famous action heroines for inspiration. For example, the Tough Chick Skills section draws on Demi Moore's G.I. Jane to advise would-be action heroines on how to "go toe to toe with the guys in your special unit." The Brain Skills section includes "how to survive as a mob wife," calling on Lorraine Bracco's role in Goodfellas for tips.

Those examples may give you a hint as to what is wrong with this book. Most of the advice given is not about being an actual kick-ass heroine, it's about being a sidekick of one type or another, about how to react to men. The whole book is very focused on appearance (beyond having an entire beauty section), and is far less about how to actually kick ass and far more about how to appear to be kicking ass.

Like I said, it's meant to be funny. However, I personally don't find advice such as "go with the boys to a strip club" (from the aforementioned "how to go toe to toe with the guys in your special unit" section) to be all that funny. Nor am I impressed by the first two offerings in the "Brawn" section, "How to Win a Catfight" and "How to Choke a Man with Your Bare Thighs." At least they mentioned Linda Hamilton's amazing T2 physique, though.

Basically, the humor and heroine content of this book is a lot less Tank Girl and a lot more Charlie's Angels. It doesn't, even in jest, advocate any real subversion of traditional roles. Given the authors' previous offerings (Worick's include How to Live with a Man...and Love It! The Gentle Art of Catching and Keeping Your Man), this isn't particularly surprising.

Posted by Grace in 1 Star: Typical
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I knew Ultraviolet would be bad, but I thought it would be funny bad. Instead, it was 88 minutes feels like 200 minutes bad. I know some people who enjoyed it as campy action fun, but I was just bored. I also don't much care for the poster, which is a strange "look at the powerful woman who is the size of a twig" image.

But here's the more interesting question: what does it mean when there is only one woman?

Violet, played by Milla Jovovich, is the only woman among all of the vampires. We never explicitly see a woman among the large number of faceless soldiers she kills, so most people would assume they are men. Her nemesis is a man, her one true ally is a man, and the child that is her hope for a better future is male. There are women in the general public, whom we only see as a backdrop for the action. The only other woman in the film who speaks is a courier, who gets 2 sentences and is never seen again.

When I saw Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones, I was struck by how few women were Jedi. One woman on the Jedi council, 4 or 5 more in the big fight at the end. Annoying, but I knew how to interpret it. The filmmakers just didn't give a damn.

In UItraviolet, Violet is effectively the only woman in the world. I have no idea what to make of this. Is she the only woman badass enough to survive infection with the virus that made her a vampire? Are women only worth viewing if they are the ultimate, most kick-ass people - and since women are weak, there is only one woman like that? Were the filmmakers just trying to highlight her isolation?

At the beginning of the film, Violet says "I was born into a world that you may not understand." No kidding. I can't even figure out what rating to give it.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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