Recently in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders

If you have to choose between seeing Haywire and Underworld: Awakening, you should see Haywire. If you don't have to choose, I recommend that you see both.

(Two action films headlined by women opening in one weekend. WHY DOESN'T THIS HAPPEN MORE OFTEN?!)

I have big love for Selene, the vampire Death Dealer from the first and second Underworld films. The second film was kind of a mess plot-wise, and the third was a complete train wreck in which Rhona Mitra was tragically misused, but oh, the first one... it has my heart. And I have been waiting for Selene to come back for a long, long time.

In Underworld: Awakening, she does come back. There's a war on, but this time it's s different one. Humans have discovered both vampires and werewolves, and they're executing all of the "infected." We get a taste of Selene's full power in the first few minutes of the film as she fights her way through human assault teams to reach her lover, Michael, at a getaway boat... and then things go wrong.

I hadn't read a lot of the film beforehand, so I got a few pleasant surprises. African-American actor Michael Ealy plays Detective Sebastian, a cop who suspects there's more to this Lycan thing than someone's admitting. (And the filmmakers don't do that thing that filmmakers like to do with the one black guy, so I was pleased.) Sandrine Holt, whose father is Chinese (and who played the reporter in Resident Evil: Apocalypse) plays a female scientist... who has less sense than my dog and is a complete gender stereotype, but at least she has lines.

And then, hold the phone, there are actually TWO female action roles in this film! India Eisley plays an unnamed-in-the-film teenager who rips a werewolf's head in half with her hands. Which is pretty damn useful if werewolves are chasing you. Selene and unnamed girl (who grew up in a research lab, hence the lack of name) have quite a few conversations that aren't about men, unless you deem all conversations about the male werewolves chasing you to be about men.

By the way, if anyone can tell me why all the werewolves are men, that would be swell. I've sat through four movies now and I still don't have a good answer. (And where are the vampires who like light colors and modern home decor? The vampire virus changes your personality to goth, or they just go along to get along?) I also don't know why we've spent several films building up sympathy for the werewolves as wronged by the vampires, then we throw all that away here and they're all evil.

Bad things? Well, I could have lived without having Selene naked except for strategically placed mist, right near the beginning of the film. It didn't make any sense in Kate Beckinsale's character in Whiteout, and it doesn't make much more sense here. It's also incongruous with how Selene was treated in the first film. Boo.

My esteemed viewing companion was not impressed with how the film held together, or how much Selene got "thrown around like a rag doll." His first example: "She can jump off a building, but she gets hit by a truck and it lays her out?" To which I responded "But she planned to jump off the building. The truck was not a planned move. And she lay in the street for about 30 seconds and then got up and kicked ass." He was wrong, I was right, I won, and then we finished eating dinner with our four year old son who wanted to know why all the werewolves were evil.

I also think that it's fine for Selene to be a little disoriented and not at full strength after being held captive for an extended period of time. She gets her game back together. But the film does feel more ragged than the first one, less fluid, and Selene is less of an unstoppable force than an outnumbered warrior fighting for her life against some really bad shit. I was okay with that difference in tone.

It has been really hard to write this without spoilers. Just so you know.

I can't give it four stars, because it doesn't rise to the iconic level of the other four star picks, even with two heroines and finally some diversity in casting for this series. I want to give it four stars on Heroine Content grounds, but if I made a list of the films I was most in love with that I could call Greatest Hits with complete certainty, this would just not make the cut. It is, however, a Very Strong Contender. Lacking a 3.5 stars rating, I give it 3 stars.

Posted by Skye in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders
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Dear Heroine Content readers,

I don't want to write this review. What I want to do instead is take you out for coffee, or brunch, or whatever works for your schedule, so we can hang out in person for a change.

Then I can say things like "Oh my GOD that was SUCH A GOOD MOVIE! OH MY GOD! Is Avengers going to be that good? I has no investment in this character and I FINALLY understand Steve Rogers now! And Derek Luke didn't die first! And he spoke three languages because he was in college before the war broke out! And when someone assumes Kenneth Choi is a Japanese POW and he's all "I'M FROM FRESNO, ACE" it was totally awesome! Hayley Atwell may not have been all action all the time, but she was tough and smart and never got captured! And the woman guarding the secret lab is awesome! She has a machine gun and I know a Hydra agent got the jump on her but it's a Hydra agent what can you do?! And I really want them to do the Winter Soldier storyline later because Sebastian Stan will be PERFECT!"

Such things are fun to say in person, but they make a terrible blog post, so you can see why I'd much rather do this face to face.

Was Captain America a breakout film in terms of diversity in casting, challenging canon and assumptions, reaching the highest ranks of the Heroine Content pantheon? Of course not. It's the Captain America movie. It's full of white men. (Including Howard Stark, and now we can totally see where Tony gets some of his issues with women.) Does it pass the Bechdel test? No, and it could have with just a little more effort. Could we have done with fewer dancing girls? Probably.

But does it treat the speaking female characters and people of color as people, not stereotypes or plot devices? Yes. Does it visually include some of the real history of World War II, which is that men of color were fighting? Yes, and I had been afraid it wouldn't. And it was GOOD. Really good. Good acting, good pacing, good casting. I am recommending it even to people I know who don't care about comics or action films. I thought Tommy Lee Jones would grate on me even though I love him. I didn't want him screwing with my suspension of disbelief by being Tommy Lee Jones. He was perfect. I was afraid Chris Evans would do Jensen from The Losers, in a Captain America uniform. He didn't. I was afraid that having Cap and Peggy start falling in love would render her character annoying, warp the storyline, or result in her turning into bait or a damsel in distress. It didn't.

It's also the origin story this character needed. It had the right tone. The 2002 Spider Man was the beginning of an epic, it felt legendary. But Captain America needed something more humanizing, honestly. Spider Man turned Peter Parker into a legend. Captain America needed to turn a legend into a human being you could care about. And it did. It's an emotionally honest vision of how one man went from being picked on himself, to standing between the aggressor and the victim.

Speaking of the victims, though, here is my biggest issue with the film: I don't take kindly to movies about Nazis that barely mention genocide. The evil of the Nazi regime went far beyond just trying to conquer the world. Not mentioning that is like having a Civil War film and not mentioning the evil of slavery, as if that's just a side note Badly done, y'all.

With that in mind, and because the film doesn't break any ground in casting diversity or a leading action heroine, I'm going to give it three stars.

And let me know when you're free for that brunch thing so I can gush about it some more.

Posted by Skye in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders
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Battle: Los Angeles was not a great film. It was a solid war/invasion movie with a little bit of science fiction glued on. The performances were fine, though some characters were a little hackneyed and the "touching moments" and "stirring moments" were a little predictable. But now that it's out on DVD, I'm recommending you rent it. Here's why.

The cast is extremely diverse - and the people of color are not the Marine equivalent of redshirts. The deaths appeared to be distributed fairly evenly across racial and ethnic groups.

Wait, did that sound grim?

There's also an even distribution of competence and heroism, I promise. No one in the unit turns out to be a weak link, and everyone has each other's back. Ramon Rodriguez, Ne-Yo, James Horoyuki Liao, Cory Hardrict, Adetokumboh M'Cormack, Neil Brown Jr., and even Michael Peña in his role as a civilian and caring father who has to pick up a gun - it was so nice to see all these men of color with speaking parts.

Yes, the central character and hero is an older white guy, and the film is about his attempt to prove himself. They are going to write the film so that he ends up leading a unit so he can be properly redeemed. But if you can take that as a given, there are a whole lot of other characters to enjoy. The cast reflects the over-representation of people of color in today's military without turning the soldiers into victims of circumstance. Whatever their reasons for joining up, they are here to serve. There's even a nod to military service being a route to U.S. citizenship.

Michelle Rodriguez plays an Air Force "tech sargeant" which means she's not normally in a combat position. She falls in with our Marines after her unit is massacred by the invading aliens. There are some questions about her competence, but they related to her training as a tech. A couple of the guys in her unit give her a hard time when she wants a space on the firing line, but that's related to her being Air Force and a tech, not because she's a woman. That challenge is quelled instantly by her competence, instead of the audience being subjected to an ongoing "is she good enough" bunch of bull. For her character, Elena Santos, there is a time to fight, a time to use her brain and technical skills, and a time to kick a dead alien and yell "THAT HURT!" I was satisfied.

Even beyond the positive treatment of Elena Santos, Battle: Los Angeles almost entirely lacks the homophobic and sexist trash-talking usually found in military films. (It may completely lack, but there also may have been some quick thing we misse hearing?) I sometimes give military films a partial pass for this kind of thing, especially if they're set in reality and not while aliens are bombing our coastal cities 20 minutes into the future. However, fictional films are not documentaries, obviously, and filmmakers can make choices about what they include in their scripts. These folks decided to skip the gender policing. It was refreshing.

I'm not sure what else to say, since the film itself was enjoyable but not one I would buy for watching multiple times. Sometimes you need a palate cleanser of an action movie, though, one that isn't going to slap you in the face every once in a while with some egregious insult - and I think this would be a good candidate. It's respectful of everyone involved, and I appreciated that.

(Okay, so it's not respectful of the aliens, but they bombed out cities with no warning to steal all our resources. So I'm not as worried about them.)

Three stars.

Also see: Battle: Los Angeles And It's Betters on tinyheroes

Posted by Skye in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders
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So, Thor. He's a god, or maybe a space alien (same difference) from a magical realm called Asgard. He's going to be king, except he's a bit impulsive and loves a big fight, so his dad sends him to Earth in hopes that he will grow the fuck up.

I did not have high hopes for Thor, mostly to avoid them getting dashed. It's a good thing, too. If the second about-half of the film had been like the first about-half, I would have come home and written a review full of bleak despair for the future of Marvel adaptations. The low expectations cushioned the disappointment.

Note to filmmakers: that much exposition and backstory right up front? Not welcome, and not necessary. Condense! Every minute you're using for lead-in is a minute you don't have to make the rest of the film compelling.

For example, five more minutes of time actually spent on Thor would have been super helpful. His character development is given such short shrift! Scenes that could have given us some insight into his personality and relationships, such as Thor convincing his posse to invade the Frost Giants' kingdom, feel barely completed before we rush to the next thing. And while we understand that he's profoundly affected by being exiled and then denied his hammer, it's unclear how a day later he's cheerfully serving breakfast to other people and fully aware of the importance of self-sacrifice. He was a good person at heart before his banishment, just hotheaded and immature, but surely it would take more than a crush on Natalie Portman to get caught up and start prioritizing the well-being of others instead of his own goals? Give me a little more to work with, please.

Loki fares much better, and that's in part because Tom Hiddleston did such a good job. When you first meet him, you can actually believe that he might be just on this side of the light instead of walking deliberately into darkness. You're being pushed to root for Thor, but early on you also sympathize with Loki, because he's RIGHT about Thor, even if it's awfully convenient for Loki's own future. His slide into evil is well portrayed, especially his visit to Thor in the S.H.I.E.L.D. holding facility. Chris Hemsworth's performance as Thor in that scene convinced me he could have done the job of showing the character grow and change, so it was doubly frustrating that he wasn't given as much opportunity.

I'm not sure how to explain why the second half of the film felt so much better than the first, aside from "less talk, more action." It also felt less uneven as the "haha Thor on Earth" comic relief fell away and we spent less time with Natalie Portman complaining. So I left feeling pretty good about the movie as an entertainment experience.

As a Heroine Content experience, though, I was surprised at my mixed feelings.

The casting of Idris Elba as Heimdall, guardian of the bridge, garnered a bit of attention when some racist white people decided to protest it long after he had been cast and the movie was already filmed. That bit of casting, and all the press I saw from people involved with the film about the controversy, had given me a warm fuzzy feeling. If you want to cast someone who no one's going to fuck with, of course you cast Idris Elba! Because who would fuck with him? He's awesome! Beyond that, Thor's posse includes Jaimie Alexander, a white woman, as Sif, and Tadanobu Asano, an extremely accomplished Japanese male actor, as Hogun.

Does Sif get her fair share of fighting time? Yes! Yay! And I liked her personality, though I would wish for some actual arm muscles too.

Is Hogun a ninja? No! Yay! Like with Agent Zero in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, it's nice to see an Asian man playing a fighter without being the stereotype. He doesn't get a lot of dialogue, but I enjoyed his presence.

But... does Sif, the only woman, need to be saved early in the first fight? Yes! And when Thor shows up in New Mexico, a state with an extremely large Hispanic population, can you spot any people of color in the whole town? Umm... (If you saw it and noticed something I didn't, please let me know.) I don't want to discount Heimdall, Sif, and Hogun. They could easily have been replaced by white male characters. Natalie Portman's character is an astrophysicist, whereas she could have been a waitress in town and still the love interest. But as almost always, it would have been nice to see a little more reality in the faces on screen.

However, for a story about a white guy, it does include an ass-kicking woman, and some men of color being awesome. The filmmakers did some casting against audience expectations in a film based on a source material with a lot of rabid fans, and for that I give them credit. My expectations were just too high given the Idris Elba incident.

I'm not sure I would recommend this unless you're a Marvel fan, since there is that first half to contend with, but I'll give it three stars.

Posted by Skye in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders
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In films full of teenagers, you almost have to assume that the leading couple will be very pretty and also fairly bland. A lot of the characters will do the rebellious, dramatic, and often shortsighted things that many teenagers do. But if you're lucky, you'll get the cinematic equivalent of fluffy cotton candy and you will be distracted from the humdrum details of your daily existence for about two hours.

Perhaps it was the power of my low expectations, since I had heard I Am Number Four described as "Twilight, but with aliens," but I felt like it was excellent cotton candy. Not Twilight. More like Step Up 2: The Streets. But with aliens, and less dancing, and more stuff blowing up.

AND A TOTALLY KICK ASS ACTION HEROINE!

I Am Number Four is the story of alien orphan "John" (Alex Pettyfer) a.k.a. Number Four, a.k.a whatever his fake identity is today while he lives in hiding from the Mogadorian hordes who sacked his planet and killed everyone but nine of the special-est children and their bodyguards. Three of those surviving kids are now dead, and John is next on the list if he can't keep his head down... which he can't, since he's in desperate need of contact with anyone other than his bodyguard. Being a teenager, he is prone to do foolish things while pursuing this goal, like insist on attending school. That never turns out well.

You have to wait a long time for Number Six (Teresa Palmer) to show up in John's story. You see a few glimpses of her early on, like when she blows up a house. I actually wondered if we might run out of film before she had any action scenes. Oh happy day, no! Six is better trained than Four, has big guns, and seems a lot more interested in kicking alien oppressor backside than lurking around small towns being unhappy with not having a life because she's being hunted by the genocidal invaders who destroyed her home planet. She may be all the movie cliches of action girl in terms of her appearance, but I loved Six, and the movie definitely left me wanting to see more of both the character and of Palmer's other action work if she does any. The combination of her power set and John's in the final confrontation made for lovely action scenes, and aside from one sexist joke from her, I was impressed by the equal footing and respect the filmmakers gave both characters.

The casting diversity is a complete fail, depressingly. This is actually a film where I could be okay with a mostly or all-white cast if it didn't reinforce the overwhelming whiteness of almost all movie casting. There are some film settings that are always made of fail if they're cast as all white, like, oh, anything happening in a large urban area (*cough* Batman Returns *cough*.) But I could forgive a small town in Ohio setting for being a little on the pale side in a world where films as a whole were incredibly raciually diverse. What I also didn't see, though, was anyone with a disability, any identified GLBT characters, or any women larger than a size 6. I'm prett sure everyone in Paradise, Ohio is middle class, too, and all the children are above average. There has to be a way to portray a small town in the Midwest without lapsing into these stereotypes of places, that in turn limit the diversity of what we see on the screen. Even if you need to give your teenagers something to rebel against.

I will warn you, there is a very long (very very long) spell in the middle of this movie when it's just Number Four a.k.a. John falling in love with a girl who is not very interesting. That got a bit old, and it was a relief when the action started to pick up again. But I am willing to forgive this in exchange for all the small moments throughout the film that were so well done. If you see it, keep an eye out for these two: the girlfriend's father rebuking her mother with a look for her too pointed questions of John at the dinner table, and then the camera comparison between dynamic Number Six and suddenly pale by comparison love interest Sarah (Diana Agron) - and Sarah's priceless reaction take a beat later.

We have covered so many films at Heroine Content whose crimes against diversity are far worse than erasure, but I'm still not willing to give a film four stars anymore unless it positively contributes to fixing the white-and-other-washing of film in general. Having a conventionally skinny white chick kick ass just doesn't cut it for me anymore. So I Am Number Four gets three stars as a strong contender. See it!

Posted by Skye in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders
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I loved the original True Grit. It's been probably 15 years since I last saw it, but I remembered it well as I was watching the new Coen brothers version, and afterward it seemed only fair to watch it again. Turns out I still love the original. The new version? Even better.

The two films are quite similar, with very few changes in the storyline (though there is one important one), some of the same dialogue, and quite a few cinematic similarities. What's more, the three main characters are played similarly by both sets of actors. It's clear that the 2010 cast (Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, and Matt Damon) were pretty heavily influenced by the 1969 cast (John Wayne, Kim Darby, and Glen Campbell). And that's to the credit of the Coen's version. The film--and its characters--are still odd, but their oddness is less Coen's brothers bizarreness and more an homage to 1969, when movies weren't afraid to be a little bit cheesy.

True Grit is a fairly simple story--Mattie Ross' father is killed and his killer flees into Indian Country. Mattie sets out to apprehend his killer, assisted by Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon). They have adventures. The end. The details are far less important than the characters themselves. And the important character, the one that brings us to heroine content, is Mattie.

Mattie Ross is, for my money, among the best female characters ever put to film. She's smart, she's stubborn, she's brave, she's determined, she's scared, she's loyal...and she's 15. Why is it, I wonder, that filmmakers seem to find it easier to make strong characters from girls than from grown women? I'm not complaining--I love a great teenage girl character--I'd just like to see women treated similarly. Mattie's quest is based not on her ego or want of adventure, but on her sense of responsibility. At one point, Mattie is asked, "Most girls like play toys, but you like pistols, do you?" "If I did," Mattie replies, "I would have one that worked." She's not out for blood for its own sake, she wants justice. She's an honest, dyed-in-the-wool heroine.

What makes Mattie even better? Hailee Steinfeld. The 2010 version is all well-acted (I love Jeff Bridges, and Matt Damon is absolutely the perfect LaBoeuf), but Steinfield, only 13 at the time of filming, knocks Mattie completely out of the park. She steals every scene, she makes every one of her fairly unbelievable lines believable, she's just completely wonderful. I was blown away.

The 1969 True Grit is fairly glaringly racist, with stereotypical Black, Chinese, and Mexican minor characters all included. Not much I can say about that. The 2010 version isn't really any better, with most of the same stereotypical characters included and no attempt made to flesh them out or to make any of the other supporting characters people of color. The one thing I will say is that the 2010 version skips the token stereotypical Native American character that you find in the earlier one, and I always appreciate that in a Western (it almost never happens).

I'm biased, obviously, in reviewing a movie made by my favorite filmmakers, in my favorite genre, and having it be a re-make of one of my favorite childhood movies. That said, I really highly recommend taking the time to see True Grit 2010. I'd love to give it four stars, just because I think it's so great, but I can't quite see doing that based 100% on one character, especially given the problems with race, so I'm going to go with a more conservative three.

For some more feminist perspectives on True Grit, check out:
"True Grit: A Feminist Perspective" from Newscoma
"True Grit: Okay But Unnecessary Remake" by Iris at Films for Women
"Parents, take your daughters to see Cohen brothers beautifully crafted True Grit remake!" by Alicia Sowisdral at Filmcatcher
"Bamboo Review: True Grit" by Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon

Posted by Grace in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders
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"Okay," I say to my husband, "I lined up the Netflix queue with a few things that are NOT for Heroine Content. I need a break."

"Sounds good," he says.

"The next thing coming is District B13. That's great, I won't have to review it."

"Assuredly not."

So one night after the kiddo is in bed, I relax on the couch for a night of notetaking-free entertainment. Some French guy with spiky hair destroys a bunch of heroin in a bathtub to mess with the local drug lord. So far, so good. There's some jumping around on and off buildings, very entertaining. The drug lord sends minions to capture spiky-haired guy's sister. Well, yeah, when your sister works at the local grocery store she's pretty accessible for kidnapping. Especially when your neighborhood has a giant fuck-off wall around it and no one's allowed to leave.

Sister, whose name is Lola, is not happy about being kidnapped. Lola does not seem intimidated by the room full of threatening underlings. Not one bit. Now spiky-haired guy is coming to get Lola. She's not crying. She's not even the least bit nervous. She gets a gun to go with her nerves of steel, then brother and sister fall effortlessly in tandem and they're getting the hell out of there.

Kind of blew my whole "just relax, there will be no quiz" vibe.

Lola, played by Dany Verissimo, did not have a big role in this film. She was the only woman with a speaking part that I can recall, too, so in that regard this is a typical action film. If typical action films were full of French people. And white drug dealers. But y'all, I loved Lola. She didn't start the war, but she's backing her brother all the way, and she's not afraid of a fight.

Lola is kidnapped. Twice. Her second kidnapping starts a chain of events that brings her brother Leïto (parkour master David Belle) back into their home/prison/war zone with an idealistic cop from the outside, on a mission to bring down drug dealer Taha. With a setup like that, it's hard not to think "fridged much?" but that's not the score here. Leïto was already on the warpath against Taha. You don't pour cleaning chemicals over that much heroin without being ready to rumble. Lola's abduction isn't done to give her brother an impetus to action, it was just adding insult to injury, where injury is the destruction of his neighborhood from outside and inside both.

While held captive, Lola is turned into Taha's pet junkie, leash and all. In plenty of other films, this would have been taken as an opportunity to show her sexually degraded, assaulted, and otherwise abused. Graphically. In District B13, it's not. You see her on the floor, totally out of it, with a dirty face and messy hair. I think she's even wearing the same clothes, just badly rumpled and a little torn? The difference between Lola before and Lola now is so striking, the filmmakers don't need to give the audience a bunch of abuse scenes to make their point.

When she comes down out of her last high and wakes up, she's chained up on a rooftop with a rocket and a can of gasoline nearby. She looks at the rocket, the gasoline. She has a matchbook hidden in her shirt pocket. And she thinks "Allright, let's do this thing."

I like that in a girl.

I'm not going to spoil the bit after the rocket, gasoline, and matchbook, but the end of that scene was a pleasant surprise too.

And I really love this shot.

Here's my issue, though. A film about the abandonment and militarization of poor neighborhoods in France... stars three heroic white people [update 1/21, see comments to this post for more info on Dany Verissimo.] I'm not saying all poor neighborhoods in France are inhabited by people of color, far from it. But if you know much at all about modern-day France, you know there's a significant amount of tension between mainstream white "secular" French culture and immigrant populations who are mostly people of color, and many of whom are Muslim. Riots in 2005 and 2007 were in part triggered by this tension, and by a lack of economic opportunities for youth due partly to discrimination. The reality of ghettoized, stigmatized neighborhoods in France isn't just a bunch of white people segregating a bunch of other white people into specific neighborhoods. It's racism and xenophobia. If someone made a film about Cabrini-Green in Chicago being walled off by the military, it would be a little off for all the protagonists to be white, and I'm pretty sure this is the same thing. Critiquing a social issue by misrepresenting the populations involved distorts the sins being committed and in this case, lets the perpetrators off the hook easier IMHO. No need for the audience to confront racism here, and a lost opportunity to critique it. It's just some bad guys being mean for no particular reason.

If you're knowledgeable about the French situation, please correct me if I'm misunderstanding anything.

So I'm going with three stars. Small role for Lola, big impact. However, wish for a little less whitewashing.

Posted by Skye in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders
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Let's talk about Red. Bruce Willis plays Frank Moses, a retired CIA wetworks operative whose fairly boring suburban life is suddenly interrupted by a hit squad arriving in his kitchen. Since he's not particularly interested in being killed, he reassembles his old team to track down who's gunning for them and why. Beyond that I'm not sure I can manage to de-spoiler this one, so if you haven't seen it and plan to, you may want to come back later.

Let's talk about the flies in the ointment first, because I enjoyed this movie quite a lot and I would like to end on a high note.

First, if there is one measly thing I have learned from writing on this blog for over four years, it's that we don't need any more movies where the black man dies first, especially when he's sacrificing himself for a bunch of white people. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with having the black man die first, just like there's nothing intrinsically wrong with having a culturally-approved-pretty skinny-but-busty white woman as an action heroine. But when it's done so often, it starts to get a little suspicious.

When the black man in question is Morgan Freeman, I doubt anyone sat around thinking "You know what we need here? Someone disposable. Someone we can use as cannon fodder... hmm... who could we get?" But isn't it amazing how in a work of fiction, created 100% by human beings who make choices, this is what we end up with? I don't know what went on in the source material, but y'all? Knock it off for a few years, put out a bunch of movies where the white guy dies first two-third of the time, just to even things out a bit. It also helps with the suspense thing when you're not so predictable.

Second, any time you see "good guy" characters in a film who are or have been part of the U.S. military or government, you need to check yourself as the film is trying to sell those folks as the good guys. Just like with The Losers, just because someone is suddenly the underdog doesn't mean there isn't blood on their hands, and not in that lighthearted action movie kind of way. The technique that's supposed to differentiate the Good Guys from the Bad Guys is usually showing the audience that the Bad Guys don't play by the rules of war - killing civilians, for example - and that strategy is employed here. But Frank is described as having toppled governments. What types of governments does the U.S. have a history of toppling, do you think? As with Lara Croft and colonialism, if you want me to completely accept this person as a hero, they need to get right with justice first.

Third, it's very convenient that Frank is right about who's on the hit list, because otherwise breaking into a woman's apartment, going through her belongings, kidnapping her, duct-taping her mouth shut, and tying her up is really, really horrifying. The term "Stockholm Syndrome" was used in my household in jest, but thank goodness this was a movie so they could make that all okay. Eventually. I would have preferred a serious apology later, though.

Fourth, of course the woman working in the nursing home (Marna, played by African-American/German/Danish actor Jaqueline Fleming) gives Morgan Freeman's character a "you bad thing" look and a half-smile after he's checking out her ass. He could probably get her fired.

Moving on to more pleasant topics.

I really enjoyed this movie! It was funny, well paced, and some stuff blew up!

From the trailer, I had assumed that Mary-Louise Parker played the role of Frank's handler, rather than his girlfriend. Perhaps a slightly green or desk-jockey type of agent assigned as a liaison with the retired operatives? My idea is much cooler than what actually happens, but the sweetness between her character Sarah and Frank in their initial phone calls won my heart. I was a little concerned that this was another case of the too typical older man - younger woman, but Willis is 55 and Parker is 46 so we're cool. (Would have been cooler the other way around... see? I'm full of good ideas.)

Bringing Sarah, a civilian, into the fold with a bunch of ex-assassins produced a strange dynamic for me. I wanted her to be awesome, but it wouldn't have made any sense for her to suddenly be knocking down bad guys or firing the automatic weapons. She was a CSR at the Social Security Administration who read romance novels for excitement. She's not Helen Mirren's fantastic character Victoria who makes time for contract killing between sessions of flower arranging. So I was watching her pretty closely to see how they would play Sarah. When she broke a headboard to escape from a motel room in which she'd been tied up, I was glad. When they decided to send her tumbling into the enemy's hands, I was not so glad. When she didn't start screaming and crying and acting like a damsel in distress, I was glad again. Overall, I think she was a believable strong female character minus any unbelievable skills.

Victoria, of course, was the real star on Team Lady. Warren Ellis said "...if you don't want to see a film with Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle, I'm not sure I want to know you." I would agree. It was unfortunate that the needing-to-be-rescued of Sarah was echoed with Victoria, almost leaving the ending of the film as "three white guys fix everything." There was an attempt at recovering that fumble, though, so I'll let that go.

I was also pleasantly surprised that Sarah and Victoria were not the only women. Rebecca Pidgeon plays the tough CIA boss who's pushing Karl Urban's character to get rid of Frank and get it done NOW. Audrey Wasilewski has a smaller role but with much bigger guns - and she's 43, not in her 20's, which made it even more enjoyable. The last time we reviewed a film where the women kicking ass were over 40, it was... Kung Fu Hustle? And there was only one.

Was the film still a boys' club? Yes. But having these four women around, three of them in large speaking roles, was an unexpected treat.

I can't say as much for the racial diversity in this film. Apparently they thought that if they had Morgan Freeman and one African-American nurse for him to ogle, that was enough? Now if Marna had turned out to be undercover in the nursing home, and she was actually a spy, we would have had something very interesting going on. (See, again, me with the good ideas. Too bad I'm too lazy to write a screenplay.)

I'm going to give Red three stars as a Strong Contender. I wouldn't quite call it anti-oppression, but even without my preferred revisions, the presence of four strong, tough women is an amazing feat in an action film. With more diverse casting, it would have been a Greatest Hit.

Posted by Skye in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders
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Trigger warning on this film for threats of sexual assault.

Until Patrick's review of Ghosts of Mars a couple of weeks ago, It's been on the negative side at Heroine Content lately. I actually caught myself thinking "Are we done with this blog? Does the world really need and endless parade of posts about things that suck?"

I watched 28 Days Later, and now I feel better. Let me tell you about it.

Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up in a seemingly abandoned hospital, ventures out into a seemingly abandoned London, and discovers that a zombie plague has infected and wiped out almost everyone, everywhere.

Jim is saved by Mark (Noah Huntley) and Selena (Naomie Harris, who is British and black, her mother was born in Jamaica). Selena is strong, focused, and she is going to survive the apocalypse dammit. When one of their party is infected, she wastes no time in hacking him to death with a machete. She also lets Jim know up front that she is not letting him get her killed. Her outlook is bleak, true, but what she's been through is also far worse than what Jim experienced - or rather didn't, having spent the collapse of civilization in a coma.

When Selena and Jim investigate other potential signs of life, they meet up with former cabbie Frank (Brendan Gleeson a.k.a. Mad-Eye Moody) and his teenage daughter Hannah (Megan Burns). Hannah is quiet, but steady in a crisis. She's a realist in all senses of the word - understanding the dangers of the current situation, but also knowing that if they become numb and lose their humanity, there is no future, even if they are technically survivors. The loving relationship between Hannah and her father starts to draw Selena back towards bonding with other people and the group of four starts turning into a family as they travel towards possible safety.

Selena and Hannah are perfect examples of how women can be kick-ass supporting characters in a movie where the lead character is a man. They don't exist as plot devices to further his agenda, they are not damsels in distress even when they are upset or in danger. (Maybe zombie movies are perfect for discarding gender stereotypes. When the infected are charging toward you, do you really care who is lobbing the molotov cocktails or getting the tire changed so you can get the hell out of there?)

When the three of them are separated, Selena and Hannah do hope Jim survives his own trial and makes it back to help out, but in the meantime they do what they can with what they have at hand - even if they are overpowered physically, they are going to find a way to survive. Though Selena is being held at gunpoint, by that point in the film you KNOW her. You can't believe that she is not just biding her time. She's not going to throw her life away to resist, and she's going to protect Hannah as best she can, and then they are going to get the hell out of there. I also loved watching Hannah turn to Selena for support rather than the whole world revolving around Jim.

Towards the end of the film, there is - to my mind - an extremely realistic depiction of the vulnerability of women and girls, especially, against armed men from a sexist culture in a situation where law and order have broken down. However, it isn't played for gratuitous sexual (or other) violence, which I appreciated. What I also appreciated was the depiction of how this violent, patriarchal new regime is resisted by men. Jim risks his life because he's not willing to benefit from male privilege at the expense of his friends' lives and so does another man with no personal connection to Hannah and Selena. The consequences they endure are a textbook case of how patriarchy has expectations for both women and men, and you flout them at your peril.

Does Jim save the day, and the women? Yes, because he is the main character. But Hannah ends up breaking a bottle over Jim's head, then disposing of the final obstacle to the trio's happiness in an extremely poetic fashion, and I could not have been more in love with her as a character by then if I tried.

There was one fly in the ointment for me. The chained black man. This is an image you should NOT use unless you are specifically making a point about atrocities committed against people of African descent, and even then, in a zombie movie, there's just no good reason to do this. Find someone else to be infected and chained up to study the progress of the infection BECAUSE (are you paying attention?) WHEN YOU DO THAT, YOU ARE UNAVOIDABLY REFERENCING THE TUSKEGEE EXPERIMENT AND A WHOLE BUNCH OF OTHER SHIT THAT WAS REALLY, REALLY AWFUL AND RACIST. I don't care if it's the villain who did it, I don't care that there are other people of color around who are not infected and chained up, just don't. Please.

Beyond the Heroine Content aspects, the film was not at all what I expected. In a good way. From hearing about how fast the zombies were, and a few other details, I was hoping it wouldn't be too scary and gory for me to tolerate. I don't mind violence, but I really don't do horror movies that are parades of screaming and hacking body parts. This was so far from being that. There was some damn scary stuff, don't get me wrong, but the zombies were almost incidental. If we were going to go by stereotypical film genres, this is almost a chick flick zombie movie, more about relationships than brutality.

Three stars. And I really hope that 28 Weeks Later is the further adventures of Selena and Hannah.

(I didn't realize until writing this post that Naomie Harrie also played Mika in Ninja Assassin! That is so cool! And she was Tia Dalma in two of the Pirates movies. Wait, what? An African-American woman who is possibly starting to make a career of supporting roles in action films? Note to self: all is potentially not lost. Also, note to self, perfect excuse to buy Ninja Assassin on DVD so I can enjoy watching Rain... err, review it in a serious and thought-provoking way for Heroine Content.)

Posted by Skye in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders
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Another guest post from our esteemed correspondent Patrick. Enjoy!

Mars in the 22nd century. A police squad led by Helena Braddock (Pam Grier) and her second.in-command Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge) travels to an isolated mining town to pick up the infamous criminal Desolation Williams (Ice Cube). Since the story is bookended by an inquisitory tribunal (presided over by Rosemary Forsyth), the audience knows something went wrong. And it did: By accident, ancient Martian souls (yes, really) got released and possessed the miners, who turned into bloodthirsty savages intent on killing everybody else. And what's more, if you killed the possessed miner, the "ghost" went airborne to possess another victim. The police unit, a couple of prisoners, and some criminals intent to spring Desolation Jones from jail had to work together to survive. And the story of that fight for survival is Ballard's testimony and our film.

Ghosts of Mars is as diverse as they come. Aside from Braddock and Ballard, the police unit is composed of Clea DuVall, Liam Waite and Jason Statham before he was famous. Later additions to the cast include Joanna Cassidy as the mysterious scientist Whitlock, Wanda De Jesus as a prisoner, and Duane Davis, Lobo Sebastian and Rodney A. Grant as Jones's gang Uno, Dos, and Tres. There are a lot of women in the cast, as well as several black actors and actresses, even a Native American actor (Grant) and an actor of Mexican descent (Sebastian; I assume his descent as I couldn't find anything definite on the net).

And if that sounds promising, it's time for some words of caution. Most of the characters don't get much of a motivation, and no character has an arc to speak of. Ballard, aside from being able to defeat even much larger guys in hand-to-hand combat, is saddled with a drug addiction that her superiors and her colleagues know and don't seem to care about. For some reason, the drug makes her immune to possession, but it doesn't inform her character otherwise. Ballard doesn't grow or change through the course of the film, and neither does anyone else. All they get to do is shoot a lot of savages.

The rest of the cast is clearly secondary. Grier is killed off-screen (we see her severed head on a stick), and we only learn that Uno is Jones's brother after he is killed. Dos has a strange scene where he is high on drugs and cuts off his own thumb.

The thing is, Ghosts of Mars is just not very good. It is neither tense despite its similarities to a horror film, nor does it have exciting action sequences. There's a lot of flat acting, most of all by Joanna Cassidy, who is supposed to portray a conflicted character, but just comes off as bored. The set design, the editing - this film is sadly no comparison to John Carpenter's great films in the 1980s.

There is a scene in the beginning where the idea of a matriarchy (Mars has a matriachical society) is interpreted as being like a patriarchy, only with women. By which I mean there's sexism and harrassment. Commander Braddock says regarding the new Sergeant played by Statham, "I was hoping we'd get a good solid woman we can count on."

Braddock also hits on drugged Ballard, touching her arm, "I need you straight, Melanie." Henstridge responds, "Don't worry, I'm as straight as they come." Statham's character asks her about it (before beginning a long series of inappropriate comments himself), and Ballard tells him, "You know how the service is, Sergeant. If I want to make captain I have to pay the price." So, sexual harassment is alive and well in the 22nd century. Just that women have to look out not for men, but predatory lesbians. In a way, despite living in a matriarchical society, women are still the prey.

I almost missed another role reversal. Not only are the women in charge, but there's a male secretary serving coffee. It's a throwaway scene, and I didn't mind that scene so much partly because of how casually it plays out. So the smaller moment of world-building is alright while the more prominent implications are also more stereoytpical and more clearly based on a male idea of matriarchy.

I mentioned that Statham's character proceeds to make sexual advances towards Ballard, which she repeatedly rebuffs. The scenes made me a little uncomfortable, especially when Statham traps Ballard in a room with him. For a moment it seems that he'll try and rape her, but the implication is also that Ballard would win the fight... and then Ballard kisses him. However, I didn't interpret that as her falling for the harrasser, but more as an affirmation of sexual urges - at that moment, it seems likely everbody's going to die, and I like that Ballard would be okay with casual sex in the face of death. As anyone who watched the Transporter series knows: Jason Statham has a great body, so why not give in? However, the film remains chaste, the kiss is all that happens (and I surely can understand if someone came away from that scene more alienated than I was).

In the end, Jones and Ballard learn to trust and rely on each other and fight off the Ghosts of Mars. It boggles the mind that they decide to survive by killing everybody, which only releases the ghosts and makes themselves susceptible to being possessed, but thinking is not the strong part of the script, anyway. There's more than one decapitation, and then, only these two remain standing to fight another day.

As I said, it's not a very good film. But it is a film with a lot of characters kicking ass who normally don't get to kick so much ass, and Natasha Henstridge taking on a guy twice her size until he admits that she is in charge is its own kind of pleasure, as is seeing a large cast full of non-white and non-male faces. If you can overlook that their solution to a threat that goes invisible and airborne after being shot is shooting it, then maybe you can enjoy the film for what it is, which is a heck of a strong entry for Heroine Content. Based on character diversity alone, this would be four stars, but the film is just not good enough to recommend it that heartily.

3 Stars - Strong Contenders.

Posted by A Very Special Guest in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders
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