Recently in 1 Star: Typical

I usually include the most widely promoted movie poster when I do a review here. But for Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, I'm using the one that best communicates how unsurprising Paula Patton's role is in the film. Unless you can say any of these lines with a straight face, there is nothing here that will impress you in any way:

"She's a team leader and one of her men got killed and he's secretly in LOVE with her, which we learn from his poignant deathbed confession? Never saw that coming!"

"Once Tom Cruise's character shows up, she'll never be a team leader again, because he's so much better than anyone ever? Really?"

"The team ends up being 75% white guys? Seriously?"

"She ends up fighting the only other woman in the cast? That is so totally unexpected!"

"The only way to get the codes to stop the nuclear missile is to put her in a tight evening dress and have her seduce a rich criminal? That NEVER happens in movies!"

"Right before one of the critical mission events, she gets shot and a man has to do her job? Why would they write it that way?"

The film lost me in the first 10 minutes, when Patton's character and Simon Pegg's character decided it was totally fine to let some Russian prisoners beat half a dozen guards to death in order to spring Cruise's character from jail. I never found anything after that to change my mind.

(This film was not making the argument that incarcerated people need to rise up against he prison-industrial complex. I promise. Murder was just a convenient distraction for saving Tom Cruise.)

Am I glad that Paula Patton, as a woman of color, had some acting work in a movie? Sure. Does this film do anything for anyone that needed doing? No.

Typical. One star.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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I didn't expect The Three Musketeers to be a good film. Some guys in 17th century(ish) France fight a lot with swords, check! Milla Jovovich, check! That was all I had on my agenda.

I'm also no film scholar. I took one film class in undergrad and all I remember is to pay attention to Alfred Hitchcock's camera angles because they are often amazing. However, any person on the street who has seen even a handful of films could easily offer a handful of suggestions on how to improve, because wow, there was a lot of room for improvement.

For example:

Replace all the music. If I want to be hit over the head with a shovel by someone screaming THIS IS DRAMATIC, I don't have to pay $10 and drive to north Austin. We have a shovel in the garage and I can probably get someone to do that for free as long as I let them film it and upload it to YouTube. Seriously, people, you used up the "stirring" quota for this and any possible sequels by the time D'Artagnan was leaving home for Paris, which is to say before anything stirring had a chance to happen

Knock off the fat hate. If you want to sell me some good guys who drink too much, have a tendency towards picking fights, and can't find any productive way to occupy themselves if there isn't a war on, I can probably come with you. If you're also going to include them relentlessly verbally abusing their servant, James Corden's Planchet, because it's supposed to be funny (?), then I would rather go clean my aforementioned garage. Don't tell me that the actor's size had nothing to do with the casting here. I'm sure it was deliberate, filmmakers, and I'm sure it was because you thought it would be more hi-larious if the "comic figure" (read: victim) were fat. Fuck you. Also note that the Musketeers are the king's own guards, however down on their luck financially, and they're picking on a man who's working as a servant. That to me says rich guys picking on poor guy. So double fuck you.

More Milady working for herself... and more than two minutes of Queen Anne. The time period they're (loosely) referencing was one where men held most of the power, but Jovovich's Milady spent an excessive amount of time bouncing from one man to another. Given her formidable skills as spy, thief, and assassin, I'd have liked her to be a player in the game, not just a tool for others to use. Juno Temple as Queen Anne completely nailed her "young and scared, but not a pushover" performance during a confrontation with Christoph Waltz's Cardinal Richlieu. Why didn't we get more of that? She and the King were besieged on all sides, young and inexperienced - but if she had that kind of steel, why couldn't we see her actually use it? Heck, lady in waiting Constance (Gabriella Wilde) had to figure out a plan for how to save everything once Anne's two minutes of fame were over. (And her plan included kiss a guy to motivate him, risk her life as a distraction so the Muskeeters can escape, and get tied to the masthead of a ship as the damsel in distress. That middle one was okay.)

If the movie hadn't included the Musketeers picking on Planchet, I still might have given it a reasonably high rating. The female characters do have spines, and have their own personalities, even if they live in a world that revolves heavily around the actions of men. Milady is a badass, though the scene where for NO APPARENT REASON she strips down to her underwear did leave a bad taste in my mouth. When I say "for no apparent reason" I really mean it, because in all her previous action scenes she was doing exactly the same stuff but in full dress. And while I'm sure there were probably some Moors in Paris in the time period of this film, I'm not going to pick on it for being a white cast. Especially because if a person of color had showed up, it probably wouldn't have gone well.

However, the Musketeers' behavior towards Planchet just poisoned the film for me. I'll give it one star for Milla, and that's it.

(Whether or not you've seen the film, or plan to, you may enjoy At The Movies: The Three Musketeers, or Markgraf Loses It on Bad Reputation. It's a more coherent overall look at the film, and I especially liked the part about glitter.)

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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I'm sorry, this is full of spoilers. Can't be helped.

X-Men: First Class felt like a big "what If"? What if, instead of the way they told it in the comics, the X-Men had been formed like this?

What if Charles Xavier (Professor X) and Raven (Mystique) had grown up together? What if Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto) was hunting Nazis on a personal quest for vengeance? What if they had begun recruiting young mutants in cooperation with the CIA just as the Cuban missile crisis was about to erupt, fueled by evil mutant Sebastian Shaw?

What if Moira MacTaggert was an American CIA field agent instead of a Scottish Nobel prize winning geneticist? What if she had to seek out Xavier's expertise in genetics?

What if it were crucial to the plot that she take off her dress and walk around in lingerie within five minutes of her first appearance on screen?

What if, out of the first group of recruits, the only woman is a thin, conventionally pretty woman of color... who is working as a stripper? What if she's based on comic writer Grant Morrison's Angel, who was not thin, and certainly not of a disposition to flatter men for money? What if film Angel was the first one to defect to the forces of evil? What if she wore leather hot pants after she defected, and never got another line of dialogue (as best I can recall)?

What if the other recruit who was a person of color was a black man, and he died first? What if the only purpose his death seemed to serve was to motivate his teammates?

What if Havok practiced his aim on headless female mannequins, and Henry McCoy groped one of them for an audience laugh?

What if Emma Frost wore tacky underwear and had no personality? (Paging Greg Land...) What if Sebastian Shaw's other lackeys were a red Russian demon (with terrible clothes and terrible hair) and a guy who makes tornadoes, played by a Spanish actor who I'm pretty sure is supposed to look "exotic" and who never speaks?

What if Charles and Erik were basically in love, but Hollywood couldn't possibly allow them to kiss when they realize they're breaking up and will only meet as enemies hereafter?

What if the filmmakers made sure that by the end of the movie, the First Class of X-Men was a group of white American men (one who had turned blue and furry) and Magneto's "brotherhood" was composed of everyone foreign and female?

There were good things about this film. The aerial battle between Angel and Banshee, the arrogance of Charles, the evolution of Erik's goals. It was a solid film in terms of plot and pacing, much better than that third X-Men film or that horrible Wolverine Origins nonsense.

But at the end, I was just tired. Tired of race fail, tired of gender fail. I couldn't enjoy the movie as much as I wanted to because they kept poking me in the eye with a stick. If you're going to ask the question "what if?", it would be nice if your answer wasn't even less diverse and more objectifying than your source material.

One star.

(If you're going to comment and try to school me on "but in the comics," please know that the X-Men/Wolverine comics I have read in the past year must be measured in LINEAR FEET. I'm not joking. I will send you a photograph of my shelves. You may have read more than I have, but I'm a fairly well-read fangirl with a huge love for the X-Peeps.)

Also see: X-Men First Class Leaves No Breast Un-Ogled by Sarah Arboleda at Zelda Lily

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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Combining guns, property damage, and a Satanic cult that kidnaps babies isn't likely to get you a good movie, but if you do it right, it can be a lot of fun. The people who made Drive Angry set out to make something very specific, and they succeeded. If you want to see Nicolas Cage shoot people while driving a flaming car that's flying through the air, this film will 100% meet your needs. The DVD is out today.

I would caution you, though, to armor up if you're annoyed by the use of naked women as plot gags.

Surprisingly given the film's promo poster, leading lady Piper (Amber Heard) is NOT the naked woman in question. As you can see in the poster, Piper is the Action Movie Babe. She's white, skinny, conventionally pretty, wears short shorts, blah blah blah. Piper's character, though, is treated pretty well in the film. When it begins, she's stuck in a dead-end job and a dead-end relationship. She's prone to assaulting people who piss her off, which didn't impress me, even though the film was telling me that her victims deserved it. (I prefer my entertainment violence meted out to bad people who are an imminent threat, not just because you're mad they cheated on you.) Overall, Piper just doesn't seem to have much of a life.

Then she meets Cage's John Milton, a damned soul escaped from hell on a mission to save his infant granddaughter from being sacrificed to Satan (yes, really). At first, Piper is unwittingly drawn into Milton's pursuit of cult leader Jonah King (Billy Burke), and she's mad as hell that Milton has screwed up her life. What she finds, though, is a purpose, albeit a short-term one, and a way to harness all that fight for something bigger than herself. This is a solid origin story for a female heroine. I ended up liking Piper quite a lot, because she was never afraid to pick up a weapon and get into it when the bad guys needed a beatdown. She grew and changed as the film went on, and she kicked some major ass for great justice.

Really, how can you not like anyone who hears "I'm going to kill you and send you to hell" and responds with "Between now and then, I'm going to fuck you up!"

What I can't abide is how many big moments of the film involve other women being badly disrespected. From Piper's attack on the woman involved in her fiancee's affair to the ludicrous gunfight/sex scene with Milton and waitress Candy, even down to the female cult members dancing naked before their eagerly anticipated apocalypse, the humor centered around women in this film is overwhelmingly about disrobing them. I was going to write a whole big thing arguing why this isn't okay, but I'm just too tired to include a 101 right now.

I am convinced that there is a way to make a trashy, cheesy, ridiculous action movie without doing this to women. I don't think that degrading women in sexualized ways is inherent to the subgenre, just as I didn't believe it was inevitable for women to be treated so badly in Machete. But unless the people who are making these films go into them with an anti-sexist sensibility, even if they create a character like Piper, there's going to be fail everywhere else.

Given that, I'm somewhat glad that there wasn't more diversity in the film. It probably saved us from whatever tropes we would have fallen into with more people of color involved. Sometimes lack of representation can be a blessing, if the creators involved aren't both concerned and skillful enough to create appropriate characters. (Hat tips to both Womanist Musings and Digital Femme for this idea, though I can't immediately lay hands on their specific posts that got me thinking about this scenario.) There were a couple of African-American men who played police officers, and one Hispanic man who played a bartender, and they all died before I noticed anything terribly offensive about the way their characters were handled.

The best I can say is that if you like this kind of film, and you're not having a bad day, you might like this film. I had fun, myself, but I like Nic Cage when he isn't doing random shit like The Sorceror's Apprentice (wtf?). I also have huge love for William Fitchner, so getting to see him for so much screen time as The Accountant was a real treat. His mix of cold calculation, brutality, and whimsy gave me chills. Why doesn't he get more work?

I can't give it more than one star, though, because it really is so damn typical on Heroine Content criteria. Ah well.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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Thus spake the Creator:

Listen closely, my son. I will tell you a story that will become the movie known as Tron: Legacy.

I was separated from you because I became fascinated by a world beyond our perception. A shiny world full of glowy lights, where all the women wear five inch heels and lots of makeup and not quite as much clothing as the men.

In this shiny world I found you a princess I mean girlfriend! She is terribly important. She could change the world. She can drive and run and fight and fly planes. But do not fret, my son. She is just competent enough to be sexy to geeky guys like us, but not so competent that she can get much done on her own. She is charmingly naive at times, haha she thinks Jules Verne is alive! She's never seen a sunset, how sweet!

As long as you can battle through these trials (with my help of course) where the outcome and the method of winning are so obvious that no plot tension builds at all, and save the princess I mean last isomorphic algorithm a.k.a your new girlfriend and take her with you out of the castle I mean shiny computer world, you will be the new king I mean revolutionize the software industry for great justice!

Love,
Your Father

[Editors' note: Usually we do not allow guest posts by movie characters, but upon seeing this submission, we just felt that Kevin Flynn could do a much better job narrating his own mythology than we could. Tron: Legacy delivers nostalgia, pretty visuals, and according to some people a good soundtrack. If anyone argues that Quorra (Olivia Wilde) is a fantastic new addition to the action heroine canon, they need to take a nap and try again later. To Skye's bored observation that she could be written out of the movie completely with no effect, the only defense proffered by Skye's movie viewing companion was "But then what would the kid have as a prize?!" Point made. And we can't remember any significant people of color in this film, can anyone else? One African-American guy in a bar urging revolution does not diversity make.]

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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According to Netflix, the movie I watched was called Cyber Wars. An incredibly dull and yet somewhat overwrought title, but what can you do?

Then I went to get details from IMBD, and it turns out this English language film made in Singapore was called Matrix Hunter for the English title on the Japanese DVD, and for the USA video, but Cyber Wars for the USA DVD. The IMDB page has Avatar for the real name, even though Avatar Exile is only listed as the working English title in Singapore. Also, see the poster, which has a mix and match.

I'm going to stick with Cyber Wars, if you don't mind, since Matrix and Avatar are already taken.

Cyber Wars caught my eye because it's based on work by William Gibson. It also looked like a good opportunity for me to start answering the question "if your action movie doesn't have the budget to blow up half a city, am I going to like it?" I don't know this film's budget, but since I had never heard anything about it when it popped up in my Netflix recommendations, I suspected it might be a smaller scale production.

As it got started, I was feeling a near-future but not overly showy groove. Genevieve O'Reilly is Dash, a bounty hunter who specializes in nabbing people who use fake identities online. She works with a partner, Julius (Kay Siu Lim), who is the hardcore hacker support to Dash's run 'em down and cuff 'em missions.

Dash and Julius are drawn into some high-level intrigue when Dash is hired by a megacorp to track down one of their own scientists. Police officer Victor Huang (Luoyong Wang) warns her that there's more here than she knows, but she doesn't believe him until her quarry is shot dead while she's making the grab. She's been used.

So far, so good. Dash is prickly, suspicious, and highly competent. O'Reilly is a culturally-approved attractive, thin white woman and she's the white main character in a near-future Asian city-state, so that's not breaking any boundaries. However, she's not bouncing around in a swimsuit or hot pants for no apparent reason. She wears an oversized vest over a tank top, as I recall, and when she's working she wears a trench coat with a coolant system so she won't be detected on infrared scanners by the cops, who are often trying to jack her bounty. Dash and Julius turn out to be that rarest of beasts in cinema - a man and woman who genuinely love and cherish each other but are NOT romantically interested in each other.

All of that potential, though, started to crumble pretty quickly. I thought they weren't going to sexualize Dash in a gratuitous manner, but of course, we have to throw in the shower scene. It turns out that she can't just have a prickly, suspicious personality, but of course, this is the result of trauma. I thought they were going to let her be a bounty hunter just because she's damn good at it, but no, these were skills she honed trying to find her father. Read: she would be a "normal" healthy woman if her life hadn't been disrupted, just sitting at home with 2.5 kids baking cookies.

My viewing companion also noted that O'Reilly doesn't know how to hit a punching bag properly. Just in case you were wondering.

I ultimately hope you don't watch this movie, due to the rather terrible plot, acting, and dialogue. (When Dash is yelling "But they're playing with our lives!" I was like "And?" The horrible conspiracy was never sufficiently explained, I felt like it actually might just be efficient urban planning and that's hard for me to get up in arms about.) So I can't feel bound to avoid spoilers and here ya go: by the end of the film, Dash and Victor "fall in love." I put that in quotes because it happened in that horrible way where she ends up falling for him because he was the guy who questioned her about her past! Seeing through her tough gal act to who she really is! Her declaration of love is one of the most horrible lines in the film, even though she only gets halfway through it before supposedly dying. I can't take it seriously at all.

I think it's meant to be a sign of her healing or something? (The falling in love, not the supposedly dying.) I guess it's a fairly common trope the other way around, where the gruff guy is gruff because he lost someone close to him a long time ago, and a woman finally gets through the defenses and finds the still-beating heart inside. Female characters so rarely get to be the gruff ones, though, that I really missed the old Dash when she disappeared and turned into this

I want to say "so close" because I think they had good raw material for Dash, Julius, and Victor. I liked Victor quite a bit, actually, and I think Luoyong Wang can actually act. But they frittered it away. So sad. One star.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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Skye's note: Heroine Content welcomes back guest poster Patrick, who previously shared his take on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. I was quite interested to see someone take on the Lord of the Rings films. My mother is a conservative Christian who got me started on my first science fiction, Star Trek, and she's a longtime Tolkien fan. For various reaons, though, I never read any of his books on my own. So I had no frame of reference for my mother's bitter complaints that the movies had been made "politically correct" by amping up the women's roles. Thanks to Patrick for this review, which gives me more insight. And without further ado...

I debated whether I should do a single post for the Lord of the Rings (LotR) trilogy, or do each film on its own. In the end, as I don't think my assessment would be different for single films, I think the trilogy is the way to go as this allows me to treat each character's story arc from beginning to end.

Also, I don't much care about the books. No, that's not true, I rather like them, but I don't care for an accurate portrayal of them. Just because something's in the books doesn't mean it needs to be on screen. The films must stand on their own, and be an artifact of their own time. So to me, there's not really a reason why Gandalf couldn't have been a woman, Legolas and Gimli couldn't have kissed or Samwise couldn't have been black, for example. All of which to say that I realize that some of my criticism can be traced back to the novels, but that doesn't excuse the filmmakers.

Posted by A Very Special Guest in 1 Star: Typical
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What can I say about Predators? Probably nothing terribly coherent, but here goes.

The scariest thing about it is probably the poster. I've never seen any other Predator movies so I don't know if these things were more intimidating in their previous incarnations, but they lose a lot of their mystery once they ditch their cloaking devices. While I had a good time watching the film, due to the lots of shooting, there was never much dramatic tension for me. Watching a group of elite human warriors battle unstoppable humanoid killing machines who have abducted them to use for game hunting practice should at least get your heart beating a little bit faster. Sadly, no.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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If I actually played video games, the number of video game movies I see would make a lot more sense. Despite my complete lack of playing, I have to admit that I saw both Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation in theaters. On opening day. And I bought the soundtracks.

You can stop judging me now. It's not like I think they're good movies. My schedule was a little more free back then, and some people I know wanted to go, so I went.

Okay, that's only an excuse for the first one.

Rewatching these films made me realize how far I have come in viewing my entertainment with a critical eye. Meaning that I apparently had no critical eye whatsoever back then, despite a bunch of liberal arts schoolin', or I simply declined to think while watching these films because otherwise it would be too depressing.

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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I have seen Conan The Barbarian several times, but somehow I had never seen Red Sonja. Now that I have, I'm really not sure how to rate it. My grasp of Arnold Schwarzennegger's acting career is shaky, so I was stunned to find out this film was made in 1985. I wouldn't have guessed 1960, but 1985 seems so... modern, for a film with such blatant anti-feminist content. (Perhaps I should brush up on my feminist history again, there's probably a good explanation and I'm just not connecting the dots.)

The premise of the film offers an opportunity for something very feminist, especially since few women had picked up swords in leading roles before Brigitte Nielsen portrayed Sonja. But here's my summary of Sonja's origin story. Notice anything problematic?

Posted by Skye in 1 Star: Typical
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