Recently in 2 Stars: So Close

First, the warning: this film includes a fairly graphic, though short, rape scene. It's also graphically violent in a way kung fu is often not.

The basis is this: Madame M (Almen Wong Pui-Ha) runs a high-end assassin business. At the beginning of the film, she kidnaps a load of young teenage girls with special martial arts and athletic talents, taking them to remote island to train them up to become the next generation of assassins. This is not your friendly Kill Bill-style assassin school, though--the girls are pretty well tortured, culminating in a competition in which they have to kill each other or be killed, with the winner(s) coming out as the new top killers.

The film's lead, Charlene (Maggie Q), a martial arts prodigy who was abducted from her politician mother in Hong Kong, develops a very close friendship on the island with an orphan street boxer, Katherine (Anya, called Kat). When it comes down to it, Charlene and Kat, as well as one other girl, Jing (Jewel Lee), are the only ones left standing.

The fairly plot-less film follows Charlene and the other two assassins through a few kills, interactions with Detective Jack Chen (Daniel Wu), who is investigating the "China Dolls" assassins, and Charlene's brief reunion with her mother. All the things you expect to happen do: the romantic relationship between Charlene and Jack; Charlene being forced to kill Jing; Kat's death and Charlene's avenging it; Charlene's struggle with who she was and who she has become; and so on. And then it ends.

As far as plot and acting are concerned, I have nothing good to say about this movie. It's bad. The martial arts, too, are something less than I'd have expected, especially since the director, Siu-Tung Ching, is a former choreographer who worked on Hero and Shaolin Soccer. There are some good fights, but the best one takes place in the film's first scene, so you spend the rest of the movie waiting for the next great one and coming up disappointed.

The women in the movie aren't treated terribly, though. The assassins are basically slaves, and at first I was indignant about that, but now that I think about it, the trope is used in male-centered action films regularly as well (that horrible movie Unleashed comes to mind), and at least the captor is just as female as the captives. I hated the romantic relationship between Charlene and Jack, but Charlene is totally the one in charge of it, and in charge of walking away from it, which is a pleasant change. I am also always a fan of friendships between women being highlighted, and that happens here, with Charlene and Kat.

Racially, the film is about as diverse as could be expected. The group of girls that Madame M gathers on the island are supposed to be from all over the world, and that seems to be the case. The major characters are all Asian, and they are a fairly diverse representation. Maggie Q is a Hawaiian native of Polish-American-Vietnamese descent; Almen Wong Pui-Ha is Chinese; Daniel Wu is Chinese-American; and Anya is Taiwanese. Sadly, the only black person I saw in the film is one of the men who gang rapes the new assassins as part of their training, which I could have lived without.

I had to really give some thought before I decided on the rating for this film. Ultimately, I'm going to give it two stars, one for cool female martial arts, which somehow never gets old, and one for the relationship between Kat and Charlene. If it were a better movie, or didn't include an unnecessary gang rape scene, or had somebody black in it's multi-racial cast who wasn't a rapist, it might get one more.

Posted by Grace in 2 Stars: So Close
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I saw Whiteout by myself, in a nearly empty theater, in the afternoon. My perfect film-viewing experience. I'm likely giving it a more positive review than it's getting in most forums, and that may be why.

Whiteout's main character is U.S. Marshall Carrie Stetko, played by Kate Beckinsale. That would make her the heroine (it also makes her the only woman in the film). Her first scene, for absolutely no plot-driven reason, features her stripping out of full cold weather gear and taking a shower. Not exactly an auspicious beginning.

It does get better. The beginning shower scene is very much in the same vein as Sigourney Weaver's stripping down to her underwear at the end of Alien--a single gratuitous moment for a character who is otherwise nearly completely sexless. Beckinsale spends the majority of the film in her parka. She is, after all, at the South Pole, and she's working. She's the law in these parts, and she's got murders to solve. No argument from me there--there isn't a ton of physical fighting, but Marshall Stetko does her job, puts herself at risk to keep other safe, and performs in a generally admirable way. I just wish she could have done it without the survivor flashbacks from the botched job that sent her to the South Pole in the first place. Without those moments, she'd have been cool and competent--something like Ripley, or even a bit like Frances McDormand's Marge from Fargo. With them, she's not entirely trustworthy and seems just a second away from needing rescue.

Posted by Grace in 2 Stars: So Close
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If you've been reading Heroine Content for long, you know that I have a thing for movies about female athletes, and a particular love for boxers. I'm picky, though--I gave Million Dollar Baby only one star, but I loved Girlfight and gave it full marks. Keep that in mind, as I am about to tell you a lot of nice things about a really bad film.

Rigged (also know as Fight Night, which is what the DVD I got from my RedBox was labeled) is the story of a shady underground boxing promoter, Michael Dublin (Chad Ortis) and a female underground boxer, Katherine (Kat) Parker (Rebecca Neuenswander). The two strike up a relationship based on mutual need and end up becoming friends as they work their way around the south for fights. Oh, and they also address issues from their pasts, blah blah blah. The story is really nothing impressive.

But these things are impressive:

First, Kat Parker KICKS ASS.

Posted by Grace in 2 Stars: So Close
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Street Fighter, how you confuse me. Let us count the ways.

You are not a very good movie, and most of your characters need a couple dozen more IQ points, but at your core you contain a master-student fighting movie in which the student just happens to be a young woman. Chun-Li (Kristin Kreuk) doesn't get involved in martial arts because she is assaulted or to avenge her family. This is a tiresome trope, see The Forbidden Kingdom for a good example, and you are a refreshing change of pace. Chun-Li's father teaches her wu shu from an early age, and it's so NORMAL for her, it's lovely. You dress in clothes that cover her body despite a fanboy contingent that I'm sure would have preferred otherwise. Cute clothes, yes, but also reasonable clothes. She has strong arms and she is allowed to fight on her own instead of being saved. She is treated respectfully by her teacher, and she is not sabotaged by romantic or sexual entanglement plotlines. No one makes an issue of her gender when she's learning or fighting. She is not treated as a woman, she is treated as an ally and an opponent.

Then you invent Maya Sunee (Moon Bloodgood), a homicide detective, and put her in charge of such important tasks as Boob Display, Being Flirted With, and Getting Shot. Why can't you make up your mind how you feel about women? Are they subjects or objects? Are they capable or eye candy?

You send Chun-Li into the slums of Bangkok, and give her (terrible voiceover) lines like "Every night was struggle. Every meal was a gift." This is supposed to bring us along on her journey from desiring revenge to acting as a protector of the weak. You call upon our compassion for the poor. Yet you ignore the fact that with one phone call, the comfortable heiress could have gone back home to Hong Kong overnight. The people she is developing all this identification with aren't living this way as an exercise in personality development. They're suffering and dying. Do you not have a clue how obnoxious this sounds? A character with ten tons of privilege complaining about voluntary deprivation?

Cantana (Josie Ho), the only female Bad Guy, is really scary. She's not an accessory, she's a force in her own right. But then you turn her into a predatory lesbian, in a scene that loudly telegraphs her lesbianism as perversion and her Achilles heel. Was there no other way to advance the plot?

I appreciate that the casting is so diverse. Kreuk, Bloodgood, Ho, Robin Shou, Edmund Chan, Taboo, and Michael Clarke Duncan outnumber white guys Chris Kline and Neal McDonough handily among the major characters. But you remember that rumor about the possibility of casting Jessica Alba as Chun-Li? I'm not sure that casting Kreuk was that much better. I don't want to invalidate her status as a woman of color. She is. But you cast her as a character that in the original source material was completely Chinese, rather than having a mother who is played by an actress who looks white. (The actress in question is Emilze Junqueira, and she is apparently Brazilian from what I can find online.) Did you really think no one would notice when you selected actresses to play Chun-Li as she grew up and each one looked less Chinese? Starting with a little girl who looked just like her Chinese father, then going step by step until you got to Kreuk, was not exactly subtle. What was going through your mind here? Did you feel like you had to establish her Chinese cred?

I just don't know how to feel. I have struggled with how to rate you, because there is such an amazing mixture of good and bad here. I think Chun-Li is an action heroine that could wake up men who ordinarily dismiss women in action roles, because she is a strong, respectable character. I randomly found this review of the movie on Firefox News that warms my heart a little, especially this part:

Now, don't go thinking this is some featherweight chick flick just because the lead character is a woman. And you should also put that notion out of your mind that this is an "all action, no plot" kind of movie. This film is about a girl who is given the opportunity to right a major wrong. It is a decision that will mark a drastic change in her life. In fact, if she falters this new path could lead to a quick death.

I never thought of Kristin Kreuk as a leading lady. When I heard that she had been cast as Chun Li I was very skeptical, at first. I didn't think the pretty little heartbreaker from Smallville was strong enough to portray the emotional and physical demands of "The Strongest Woman in the World". There are rare (very rare) moments when I am pleased to admit my misjudgments. Take a picture because this is one of those moments. Ms. Kreuk gets my respect for the stunt work she did but I was more in awe of her dramatic chops. I am a major Chun Li fan and Kreuk portrayed Chun Li as the hero I know and admire.

I just wish that there wasn't so much other crap mixed in.

Chun-Li herself, in another film, with this kind of casting diversity, would have been a Heroine Content Greatest Hit. But she's stuck in this one, and there's only so much I can ignore. So with a heavy heart, I can only give it 2 Stars. So close, my friends, so close.

Posted by Skye in 2 Stars: So Close
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Push has a lot of potential. A secret government agency called Division abducts and experiments on people with special powers? OK, I'm listening. The agency is not all-powerful, instead competing with rivals and even seemingly negotiating truces with some of its targets? More interesting. Then in addition to the expected telekinetics ("movers") and clairvoyants ("watchers"), I was also intrigued by the list of other powers: people who can tell the history of an object by smelling it ("sniffers"), make objects unnoticeable from sniffers ("shadows"), make objects look like other objects ("shifters"), scream to break glass and make you bleed to death ("bleeders"), and of course the folks who can place fake memories or commands in your mind ("pushers"). All very interesting.

(It does mean that the scene on the poster, using the movie's nomenclature, would be called "moving" instead of "pushing" and thus the poster is a bit misleading. Also, that scene did not happen in the film. Also, the opening voiceover MADE ME WANT TO STAB MYSELF. But enough about that.)

So when one of the pushers escapes Division with something they want back, I was hoping for a plot a little more unexpected than the traditional "oh noes, a shadow government agency is after me how will we every survive?" And I got it. The fracas that ensues wasn't the typical "man finally takes a stand and wins his freedom" straight line. There are too many players in the game, and no final victory to make the world safe for the powered among us. Sure, there were some plot holes, like oh, I don't know, THE ENDING. But all in all, it wasn't bad.

(And about that ending, It's nice to know that even seemingly normal people can become amazing tactical masterminds under pressure. That makes me a lot less nervous about accidentally crossing a shadow government with enormous resources at its disposal. I'll just figure out a plan with twenty moving pieces and it will work perfectly!)

(Okay, no more parenthetical asides for the rest of the movie, I'm serious.)

The cast was much more diverse than the usual action film. Alongside white man Chris Grant, white woman Camilla Belle, and white girl Dakota Fanning, we have a number of people of color. Djimon Hounsou is the other primary character, but Xiao Lu Li, Ming-Na, and Cliff Curtis all have decent sized speaking roles. I do wish we could see a better mix of primary and secondary roles within that diversity, especially with most of the white people being Good Guys, so I'm not going to give the film a ton of stars on this issue. However, it's impressive among action films and it was a more enjoyable viewing experience than if I had to sit there thinking "Why is a movie set in Hong Kong full of white people?"

A similar dynamic is present with gender. The women are there, you can count them, but they don't get to be all they can be. Fanning and Xiao Lu Li both play watchers, fighting to get ahead of each other in glimpsing the future so they can change it. Fanning, the 13 year old, is a great character, could stand about 4 more inches on her skirt. (I feel so old saying that, but if even the people on the IMDB message board were complaining that it was out of character...) Xiao Lu Li is made into a Dragon Lady, which left a bad taste in my mouth. Belle plays the pusher who escapes from Division, and she beats the heck out of a Bad Guy in the ladies' room to escape her abductors - and then turns into The Girlfriend. When she's brainwashed into thinking she's a Division agent, they dress her in high heels and a suit with SPARKLES. Sparkles, people!

The preview made me think there were a LOT more action scenes involving women, so I was disappointed near the end to realize I had seen it all. The missing piece, I think, was a female mover. Grant, playing a male mover, goes up against a scary blonde mover dude on the other side (Neil Jackson, a former amateur boxer) and they bash each other around quite a bit - these are the characters who play with raw physical power, along with the bleeders whose screams tear through glass and throw bodies around. While watching Jackson face off with Grant, I couldn't help but think "Why can't there be a woman smashing all this stuff up?"

And then I remembered Kristanna Loken in Terminator 3. Never mind.

Two stars, for casting diversity in both race and gender, but for not using either to its full potential. "So Close" is an apt description.

Posted by Skye in 2 Stars: So Close
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Hell on Wheels is a documentary about the beginnings of the roller derby resurgence in Austin, Texas. Clearly, it was a long time coming--though it was just released this fall, the interviews take place between 2001 and 2004. This is before the A&E television show, Rollergirls (which I reviewed here), which is about the same league. If you've already seen Rollergirls, this makes some of the movie seem a bit redundant. However, it also brings to light a lot of what Rollergirls leaves out.

Hell on Wheels is the story of how roller derby came to Austin, and why one league became two. Basically, four women started the league (it was actually some dude's idea, but he was out of the picture fairly quickly). As it grew, they incorporated it, making it a business, of which they were the owners. Many of the skaters had a problem both with this top-down business and leadership model, and with how the league was being run. After several attempts at compromise, there was a split, wherein most of the skaters left and formed their own skater-run league.

Posted by Grace in 2 Stars: So Close
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Remember how much I hated Million Dollar Baby? Part of what irritated me about the film was how compelling I find the idea of female boxers, and how that idea was wasted in such a bad movie. Given that indignation, I was very excited when Netflix suggested I check out the documentary Shadow Boxers (1999). This short (only 72 minutes) film by Katya Bankowsky is about female boxers in general, but it mostly tells the story of a particular boxer, world champion Lucia Rijker. (Tying it back to Million Dollar Baby, Rijker both played the Billie the 'Blue Bear' in that film and served as Hillary Swank's boxing coach. She has since moved on to play Dusty on The L-Word.).

Like Million Dollar Baby, though, Shadow Boxers was a disappointment. The film seems to go out of its way to not talk about the barriers women face in boxing as anything serious. Near the beginning of the movie, Rijker tells the story of meeting with a potential promoter, who previously said he "didn't promote girls." The reason he chose to promote her? Because she was "sweet" and "feminine" and "wore a nice dress" to the meeting.

Posted by Grace in 2 Stars: So Close
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There was a point during Babylon A.D. when I seriously thought I would buy it on DVD. I realize that coming from someone who voluntarily watched Barb Wire, this may not be enough to send you rushing down to the video store if it's ever released. And actually, I'm not going to recommend you do so, because it only took a few minutes after my half-formed desire before the film collapsed in a pile of bad exposition, cheesy science fiction gadgets, and soap opera plotlines.

I went in with appropriately low expectations, even though the movie had a lot going for it in Heroine Content potential. Two of the three major characters are people of color: Vin Diesel's Toorop and Michelle Yeoh's Rebekah. Toorop and Rebekah really delivered for me as well rounded, strong, determined characters. Granted, Toorop was given about three lines in many of the places where he should have been given one. Not saying that to dis Vin Diesel, but I can't imagine the hardened mercenary feeling the need to make a speech every time he opens his mouth. One cutting comment would have fit much better. But instead of a killing machine, he was a man, with his own emotions and dreams.

Posted by Skye in 2 Stars: So Close
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So Indiana Jones. Four movies, 27 years, four female characters, innumerable racial stereotypes. The franchise manages to move from Nepal and Egypt (Raiders, 1981) to India (Temple, 1984) to Germany and Jordan (Last Crusade, 1989) to Peru (Crystal Skull, 2008) and be racist in every location. Though the racism peaks with the horrific treatment of the Indians in Temple of Doom (they eat monkey brains why?) and gets quite a bit better in Last Crusade, it doesn't much improve from there. When Indy moves out of the 80s (30s in his time line) and into the present day (1957 in his world), he brings his archaic (archeological?) thoughts about hocus-pocus "undead" South American natives and their funny religious beliefs and barbarism with him. Making things worse, Crystal Skull doesn't even attempt a major non-white character, with John Rhys-Davies' Sallah (from Raiders and Last Crusade) absent and no native Peruvian character stepping up to help Indy in this adventure. This is a shame, because even though the franchise fails miserably to fight its racism with this latest installment of the adventure, it makes some pretty good gains when it comes to the portrayal of women.

Posted by Grace in 2 Stars: So Close
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This review of Speed Racer is brought to you by our intrepid commenter known only as "d." Enjoy!

Hi There! I thought I would give our mavens of Heroine Content a little breather and review Speed Racer.

When I saw the trailer, besides being completely impressed by the otherworldly visuals, I was struck by an image of one of the women: she was a woman of color with her hair poofed out into what looked like an afro, but it could have been some other tightly curled coif. Why the big deal? While being the scantily clad woman waving the checkered flag (or holding the gun, in her case) is not exactly what I would call heroine content, those women are supposed to be the epitome of what society deems beautiful. And instead of the usual big breasted, tiny-framed blonde, here we have someone who, in this country anyway, would appear to be the exact opposite of that.

And that's what the Wachowski brothers (the film's writer/director team) get right: they have a true multi-ethnic palate. They don't live in a white universe. That woman in the trailer turned out to be a queen, and the way she starts the race is really played up by the pacing and imagery. Now had she been a token, that would've only counted for so much. Thankfully, there are many people of color both as supporting and background characters (the main characters are the Speed family members - can't do much tweaking with that). There are some stereotypes around (like the ninjas dispatched by the villain to take out Speed and his race team), but there are also Asian enemies, Asian friends, and characters who inhabit that grey area of characterization. And this is the case for all ethnic groups in the film. In fact, there were so many people of color - good, bad and indifferent, that I happily lost track, and that's saying a lot for a racing film!

Unfortunately the female portrayals are more problematic.

Posted by A Very Special Guest in 2 Stars: So Close
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