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If Haywire is opening in your city on Friday, please cancel any other plans you have and buy tickets immediately.

Unless you already know that the way Steven Soderberg directs his actors often drives you up the wall... okay, no, you should still go. The spare script combined with the somewhat flat-affect acting will probably be bothersome for about ten minutes, but then I bet you won't notice anymore.

The basics: Gina Carano, a retired Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter, plays Mallory Kane. Kane is an ex-Marine who has gone into private security contracting. She does a job in Barcelona rescuing a reporter who's made some folks uncomfortable and delivers him safely to the U.S. government. Unfortunately, things aren't as they seem and she ends up on the run from her former employers.

The cast also includes Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, and Bill Paxton. So while I like a lot of those guys, I can't tell you that the casting is diverse. Anthony Brandon Wong plays Jiang, the reporter, but I don't remember any lines. One of the guys on Kane's Barcelona team may have been a person of color and I missed it, and there are a couple of minor bad guys who look like they're men of color, but again, little or no dialogue. (The film only has three good guys - Kane, her father, and Jiang - so any additional casting diversity was basically going to make the people of color bad guys.) Sadly, too, Gina is the only woman, aside from a waitress at a diner.

Could I have wished for more on both of those fronts? Absolutely. But while the film may not achieve in these areas, I didn't notice any grievous insults that would have started it at a disadvantage when I was figuring out its rating. The only thing that I could point to would be Jiang's disposability. He's a plot device, not a character, and he's the prominent person of color. Compared to some of the epic stereotyping and fail in other films I've reviewed here, though, this seems like a minor sin.

That said, what rocks about this film?

A LOT!

First, Haywire an actual movie, not a video game feed of constant explosions and ass-kicking. It has a spy / espionage feeling to it, enhanced by the film's old-school secret agent score. After watching so much flash-bang stuff lately, the gritty realism and slower pace was a welcome change. The space between the action scenes gives them more intensity, and also allows for some reality. When Kane misses a jump and hits the edge of a roof with her ribcage, then crashes to the ground on her back, she's visibly hurt and limps away to hide while she gets her breath back.

We watched some of Carano's MMA highlights when we got home, and it was obvious the fight choreography was based on how she actually fights. It shows, and I mean that in a good way. These are not glamour shots fight scenes or music video dances. They're uncomfortable and brutal. And she wins. Her first two fight scenes did make me a little nervous because her opponents seemed to get the jump on her. Her third big fight involved a triangle choke, in which she suffocated a man by crushing his throat between her thighs. The triangle choke is a legit fighting move, but my guy pointed out that she most prominently uses it in the only fight where she's wearing a dress - and that's probably not a coincidence. He did say that the scene redeemed itself when Kane then paused for one deep breath and did the next thing she needed to do. I won't spoil but let's just say, this gal is hardcore. And whatever my anxieties were at the beginning, they were more than cleared away by the end. In her professional field, she's thought of as an expert, a "valued asset," and she proves that valuation repeatedly as the plot unfolds.

(Warning, though: I would guess that the first fight may be especially triggering for some folks. The beginning initially may look like a domestic violence assault.)

I also loved looking at Carano. This is not the casting revolution we dream of to make the overall pool of action movie heroines more diverse, since Carano is a pretty, thin white woman with no obvious disabilities. But she looks so solid compared to the typical action movie casting of women. Carano's 5'8" and was reported at about 145 pounds during her fighting career. I don't want to insult the women who usually get these parts, especially the ones who train hard and become capable of doing a lot of their own stunts. I'm not going to say their bodies are wrong. But even when you know there's a serious lack of body type diversity in these roles*, it's a shock when your eyes are presented with something else. And it says a lot about the usual casting when a 5'8" woman who might be 150 pounds causes that much of a visual shock.

(* There's a lack of diversity even if you only compare action heroines to the range of body types among professional athletes, which surely no one could argue is an inappropriate comparison group.)

With action films starring women, there's often a "one hand giveth" problem where you get a lot of great stuff, and then there's pollution. Not so here. The filmmakers didn't fall back on ridiculous tropes just because Kane was a woman. When she's asked to be the eye candy on a supposedly easy "babysitting" job, she shows up in an elegant black cocktail dress that's appropriate for the social situation. They didn't manufacture that plot point as an opportunity to put her in the most revealing outfit they can find. I'm pretty sure Kane took a shower at one point, but I don't remember an extended shower scene, or any gratuitous stripping off of clothing. By a certain point, I could actually relax and enjoy rather than waiting for the filmmakers to betray the character. How novel!

Haywire is my first Heroine Content film of 2012, and it sets a pretty high bar. It's not flashy, but it's extremely competent and felt deeply respectful of both Mallory Kane and Gina Carano. Four stars, but I'd also love to hear what y'all think if you get a chance to see it. Which you will, right? Right?

Posted by Skye in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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Colombiana is not perfect. But it's coming out on DVD on December 20th, and I think you should see it if you missed it in theaters.

Colombiana is the story of Cataleya, a young girl whose father is murdered due to his involvement with some kind of criminals in Bogota, Colombia. She escapes and makes her way to family in the U.S., where she learns to be an assassin. She works for her uncle... and on the side pursues a personal vendetta against the men who ordered her family's murder.

Here's why I think you should see it:

A woman of color was headlining an action film. It's her film. She's not a sidekick, not a love interest. A guy doesn't show up halfway through to bail her out. The bad guys are terrified of her. No offense to Ellen Ripley, Tank Girl, Sarah Connor, and some of our other icons around here, but leading action heroines are usually in a very narrow spectrum of skin color. Zoe Saldana's Cataleya blows the doors off that club, and I could only wish there were half a dozen more women after her.

There's a girl who kicks ass. And I actually mean a girl, Amandla Stenberg's young Cataleya. We don't normally see portraits of young girls with extreme physical prowess, such as Cataleya's parkour-like evasion of her pursuers. That's reserved for boys, especially for "chosen one" boys. Hopefully we'll see Stenberg in her own action films in 15 or 20 years.

It's an intense portrait of fury in a female character. Cataleya is heartbroken and grieving and traumatized and almost beyond anything but hurting the people who hurt her. To be sure, the revenge motive is too often used to explain women becoming warriors. But this is the real deal, not just backstory thrown onto some chick who's standing in the corner with a sword, to explain how a nice young woman like her is in a place like this. The scene where she holds an FBI investigator hostage in his own home, threatening his family, was absolutely chilling - especially because we don't usually let women act like this in films. They get to seduce and betray, they get to be the weak link, but rarely do they get to coldly calculate and threaten innocent bystanders for their personal interests. And succeed.

Cataleya's portrayal definitely fell into the "beautiful girls with guns" category that we knew it would, given who made the film. Compared to Saldana's seductress role in The Losers, though, I felt like Cataleya is far more her own person and the film treats her as much more than eye candy. This is a subject where other Heroine Content readers may disagree, though. "How male gaze-y is this?" is a question that good people can have different answers to and that's okay. If you're rolling your eyes at the first scene of grownup Cataleya getting herself arrested in a minidress so she can change into a somewhat pointless full-body catsuit to do her crime, then whatever comes after that is probably going to add insult to injury.

(For example, see When is Zoe Saldana going to get to the fireworks factory? on FemPop. But the author recommends The Losers as an alternative because she or he is very offended by all the sexification in Colombiana, so we have feminists going in opposite directions.)

The plot holes were many. Here is a truck, please drive through them. I'll wait. The quasi-boyfriend could have been dispensed with entirely for as much sense as that storyline made. But I loved Cataleya. I give it four stars. Not just for bringing a little more diversity to the action heroine ranks, but because I felt the film treated her with respect as a person and an adversary.

I wish the box office had blown up on this one. It looks like it may have covered its budget, but that's about it.

I didn't see as much coverage of this film in my usual haunts as I would have expected, but I also may have missed it since I was buried in work at the time. If you saw or wrote something good, feel free to share. Here are a few things I did find:

• Here's Why You Should Ignore The Critics And Give "Colombiana" A Chance at Acts of Faith in Love and Life
• Why This "Colombiana" Is Going to Watch Colombiana discusses some controversy around the film among Colombians
• The Color of Colombiana by Dr. Tukufu Zuberi at HuffPo Black Voices

Posted by Skye in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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Attack the Block surprised the heck out of me.

My husband said "hey, do you want to go see this, it's kind of like Battle Los Angeles mixed with Shaun of the Dead." Since I liked both of those films, I agreed to go. However, I made sure we set it up for the theater that serves dinner. I only see films there that I don't think I'm going to be super engrossed by, because it hurts my suspension of disbelief to have the wait staff interrupting the movie to ask if I want a refill.

Luckily for me, suspension of disbelief wasn't a crucial element to enjoying this film, but I was absolutely engrossed by it. I had hoped for a smidge of Heroine Content from seeing a woman with a baseball bat in the preview, but I got so much more.

Attack the Block tells the story of one night in a low-income neighborhood in London, centered around one particular housing project known as the Block. A group of young men who live there, mostly young men of color, encounter an alien. The charismatic leader of the group, John Boyega's Moses, kills it. Unfortunately, it's not the only one.

Earlier in the evening, the group had mugged Sam (Jodie Whitttaker), a mid-20's (?) white woman who works as a nurse and who also lives in the Block. As more aliens show up and converge on the Block, she falls in with Moses's group, figuring it's her best chance for survival.

I highly recommend you read these three pieces on Attack the Block, all published on Racialicious:

• Streets Afire: The Racialicious Review of Attack The Block by Emma Felber
• All In The Same Gang: Examining Attack The Block's Approach To Race by Kartina Richardson, cross-posted from Mirror: Motion Picture Commentary
• Attack the Block Proves You Don't Have to be Epic to Be a Hero by Latoya Peterson

I didn't want to write about this movie until I had a chance to read them, because I was worried Attack the Block might be too good to be true. That I missed something crucial, and this wasn't really a kick-ass movie where a multi-racial group of youth and a white woman take on alien invaders and win. Felber's, Richardson's, and Peterson's pieces, and the folks commenting on them who had seen the film, reassured me that, yes, it was okay to love this movie. (I'm happy to read negative commentary on it, too, as soon as I find some.)

Here's what I liked about it, specifically:

The young men of color are humanized as they become Earth's protectors. It turns out their survival skills from growing up in a violent setting make them pretty damn qualified to defend their neighborhood. But they're not just turned into a pack of soldiers or attack dogs. They're kids. And they're each their own kid. We see them as "muggers" first, but we stay with them throughout the film and get to know them as people.

Moses, the leader of the group, is strong, and afraid, and self-centered, and a leader, and responsible, and thoughtless - just like most high school students. And adults. He grows up quite a bit during the film, but on his own. Not because he's being bludgeoned over the head by an after-school special. I would watch Boyega in just about anything at this point, too, because he did an amazing job in this role.

The white woman, Sam, grows from "eek!" screamer to valuable team member. I thought she had a lot of backbone while she was being mugged, but the arrival of aliens did throw her for a loop. She pretty quickly figures out who the right people are to stick with, though, and sets about making herself useful in the group. She's a nurse, so that's good, and she's also willing to stab aliens. Go Sam!

When there's a reveal about Moses's background, it's not overdone. He doesn't get a free pass for mugging Sam and a vale of tears about how much he's suffered, making him into a victim/symbol rather than a person. His past puts his actions into context, though, and Sam is able to finally return his apology with understanding and appreciation for his attempt to grow.

The film contains lots of commentary on class and race, but it's not preachy. We saw it with friends who are good people but don't have a burning interest in class and race issues, and they had a good time too. I love putting a little social justice messaging in front of people who aren't already thinking about those topics as a personal development project.

The only thing I wished was different was that the young women of color play only supporting roles. They are super and competent, but couldn't any of them have gotten involved in the action beyond one scene? Sam's involvement was crucial to some of the story the filmmakers were trying to tell, and I wouldn't have had her replaced, but the story was big enough to accommodate a little more screen time for young women. Or there can be a sequel where it's their turn, I'm not picky.

Four stars. The DVD would make a good holiday gift, y'all. Just sayin'.

Posted by Skye in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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Ninja Assassin is the story of Raizo, an assassin raised from a young age by a ninja clan. It's equally the story of Mika, a researcher who discovers the secret of the clans and is therefore marked for death. As their story unfolds, we meet Ozunu, the leader of the clan; Takeshi, Raizo's chief rival; and Kiriko, Raizo's friend and quite possibly savior.

If you were to click through and check who played all of those characters, keeping a tally, you'd end up with a list of five people of color, including two women of color - Harris being black, of Jamaican background. There is only one other character in this movie who gets much screen time at all, and that's Mika's boss, played by Ben Miles, who is white. So if you want a film that brings some diversity to your action movie queue, this is a great choice.

alianora of SilverSpiral.net is one of my favorite people on the internet. So when she offered to pitch in on a review of this film we both adore, I knew it would be a lot of fun. Thanks alianora!

Skye: So, when was the last time you watched an action movie where it was the man's clothes that couldn't seem to stay on?

alianora: You know, I can't recall a single one. I mean, there are plenty where the guy ends up shirtless once or twice, but that's usually it. But in Ninja Assassin, it seems like Raizo is shirtless almost every other scene. The dvd was worth every penny for that alone.

Even rarer, I can't think of any scene where Mika is gratuitously naked. She showers once, but we don't see much. How often does THAT happen? The guy gets nekkid and the girl reveals nothing more than her shoulders? It's kind of awesome!

Then again, Rain is hilariously awesome when it comes to being shirtless. I'm not sure he can even make it through one of his music videos without ripping a shirt in half at least once.

This a question worthy of deep thought: Where would you most like to lick Rain?

Skye: I suppose I should have expected that, given that we started off this project by emailing each other pictures of the gentleman in question. They're definitely trading on his looks in this movie, and that's okay with me because they also give Raizo abilities and a personality - two things women in action films so often lack. He has a good heart, a quiet sense of humor that I enjoy, and he kicks ass. I can't say that every instance of shirt removal is 100% necessary to the plot, but that's not the only thing he gets to do. And he's not just ripping it off in the middle of making dinner or something.

It's surprising me how nervous I feel discussing someone's hotness in an email that's going to be published on a feminist blog. I spend so much time blogging my ire about gratuitous hypersexualization of women in action movies, I'm sure it looks like I'm the stereotypical feminist anti-sexy police. But I swear I'm not anti-sexy! It's just tiresome to see men idealized as athletes while women are idealized as porn stars (thanks to 1979 Semi-Finalist for that very useful summation), and also tiresome to see the exact same women's body type being held up as perfect over and over again. My frustration with that whole mess doesn't mean I can't appreciate a good-looking person.

I'm not going to answer the licking question, though. That's personal. ;)

alianora: Heh, I did take the feminist blog into account before asking that question. I actually wrote it and deleted it several times, but ultimately, I was entirely too curious as to what you would say to it. I will ask my question about Mika, instead. :)

Skye: It's like you know me!

alianora: If Rain was just trading on his good looks and his abs in this movie, I have to admit I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much as I do. Raizo has a very subtle sense of humor that I really like (I'm thinking of the scene in the warehouse when Mika is trying to unlock his chains), and Mika has snark all of her own. And the movie/Rain isn't afraid to tease about his boybander status. So, yes, there is much more to this than Rain's abs. I do have to point out that the idea of him gratuitously ripping his shirt off in the middle of dinner is a fanfic I need to read.

And yes to the idea that most women in action movies have the exact same body type. I watched Transformers 2, for some reason I don't remember, and there is a scene in a college classroom and I swear all of the girls looked EXACTLY THE SAME. Long straight hair, short shorts and tank tops over a very thin body with big boobs. Couldn't the background girls at least had some diversity?

Skye: When I was thinking about writing this review on my own a while back, I was very focused on Mika and Raizo. When I re-watched the film recently, though, it was Kiriko who really grabbed my attention. What did you think of her role?

alianora: I have to admit that I was disappointed in Kiriko. Not because her actress wasn't engaging or her role wasn't important, but her role was very much as a nurturer. And she was a ninja! I really wanted to see more of her kicking ass and taking names to show us why she was still with the family. I find the idea of her much more interesting than the reality - How did she manage to hide herself for so long in a place that relies on breaking people down? And you know she had to be both fierce and asskicking to get as old as she did without a) dying or b) letting any of her heart show.

I did enjoy her character, don't get me wrong, but I wanted MORE. I wanted to see both her nurturing and her ninja skills. Because the way she was presented was almost "mothering" to Raizo, which was interesting and had a huge impact on him, and goodness knows the boy is fucked up enough emotionally, so let's add in a love interest who has some mother/nurturer qualities. I think I wanted so much more of her backstory. It would have made her defiance so much more effective, I think.

But my girl Mika? My girl Mika is FIERCE, and she shows it. Going in, I was expecting her to end up being the typical damsel in distress who gets rescued by the hero, etc..but I feel that Mika was a character who never was going to wait around to be rescued. She rescues herself and Raizo on more than one occasion, and never becomes the weepy girl who has to be dragged along for her own good. She has some close calls, and yes, Raizo rescues her several times, but she keeps her head in dangerous situations, thinks her way through things, and never loses her bite or her snark.

Skye: Kiriko didn't have much of an impact on me the first time I watched the film. What grabbed me this time was how obvious they made it that she's not incapable of succeeding in her environment. She wins her fights. She just absolutely rejects the value system she's being brought up in. Yes, the filmmakers chose to play that in a stereotypically gendered way as far as Kiriko being a nurturer, but she's also not about to sacrifice herself and her own goals to take care of someone else. She could have chosen to stay because she couldn't bear to pull herself away from Raizo. Instead, she didn't even look tempted. He can go with her, or not, but she's going to do what she needs to do.

I felt like Mika could have fallen into a stereotypical role, the sidekick, but like you said, there is no waiting for rescue here. Only awesomeness.

alianora: Ooh, I like your thoughts on Kiriko, and next time I watch, I will be looking for all of that. I definitely see your point about her not waiting around for Raizo but leaving for her own reasons. Nice.

How did you feel about the level and portrayal of violence in the movie? The first fight really had me worried that I was going to end up watching a gore-porn flick with ninjas - a guy is severed at the JAW.

Skye: The spattered blood on the poster was one of the things my husband found most amusing before we'd even seen the movie. I think he was expecting the splatter aspect more than I was. I did cover my face quite a few times on my first viewing. The next couple of times, I knew what to expect, so I was less shocked, but it's still a LOT. The first fight reminded me a lot of John Carpenter's Vampires, honestly, which was one of the goriest films I'd ever seen. In Ninja Assassin, they did seem to calm it down a little after the first fight, but it was still like "spurting blood" was one of the characters in the film. It wasn't as bad as BloodRayne, but for me it was kind of distracting.

I also had a hard time reconciling it with the whole "silent but deadly" ninja mystique. If you cover several square yards in your opponents' blood, does that really count? I know the black outfits hide spatter, but still.

What would you love to see Naomie Harris (Mika) do in the future? Women of color are extremely under-cast in the action genre and in general. And we obviously love Rain in this role, but "ninja" is one of the movie roles that Asian men get stereotyped into pretty often. What other roles would you enjoy seeing Rain take on that would break stereotypes?

alianora: I love love LOVE Naomie Harris as Tia Dalma in the Pirates movies, and love her in Ninja Assassin, so really, I think I'd like to watch her in anything. She's done a good bit I haven't seen, but I can't tell if that's because a lot of it is English or indie films, but I like that she's picked very different roles from the typical female leads and is doing more than chick flick romantic comedies. As much as I like chick flicks, I like that what I've seen of her hasn't been, you know?

I would really like to see Rain do more English speaking movies. He is a very good actor (in my opinion), and I'm saying that as someone who has watched a good bit of his acting in Korean movies and tv shows. It's hard for me to say anything about him acting and breaking stereotypes because I've already seen him in things that break the ninja stereotype. The very first thing I saw him in was a tv show called Full House (no, not with Uncle Jesse), where he played a bratty, immature actor with the worst fashion sense on Earth. This is also the reason that when I hear he's been voted the most influential anything, I laugh and laugh and laugh. (I've attached a gif from the show of him doing "The Three Bears Dance" to show you just why I can't take him seriously. And a screen cap of him in an apron, just because.)

[Skye's note: someone did NOT attach anything even vaguely resembling a Three Bears Dance to the email. I think the apron is plenty, though. Yikes!]

He also has a tendency to wear very shiny clothes and shirts pre-notched for tearing in half in his music videos (my favorite is Love Song, which is a touching video of him in love... and then he's wearing glittery boots and ripping his clothes off and I laugh forever). I do think he would need to get stronger in the English language still. He does well, but (warning, ninja stereotype) ninjas don't have to worry about dialogue. And Speed Racer wasn't exactly challenging in the dialogue department. To see him do other things than action movies or ninja parts in the US, he needs to be stronger in English. Don't get me wrong, I do think he did a great job in Ninja Assassin - Raizo's dry sense of humor cracked me up, but still.

Skye: ARGH, my American is showing. I was totally thinking about American movies when I asked that question about Rain, but I didn't bother to specify. Of course Rain has quite a background in entertainment already. Thank goodness other countries don't follow our stereotypes when making their own movies, or it would be a disaster. I would just love to see some Asian guys becoming leading men in more mainstream American films in a broad range of roles. I was imagining Rain as a doctor. If he needed a certain quota of shirtless scenes in the film, he could be a doctor who goes jogging or something.

For Naomie Harris, as you said, I would love to see her in just about anything. But I would *really* love to see her playing what my three year old would call a Bad Girl. High tech, high evil kind of thing - but without the side of seductress that usually gets stapled onto those roles. She was so tough in 28 Days Later, and there are so few awesome female villain roles.

alianora: Single favorite moment from the movie for you?

Mine is when he's been captured and the guards are staring at the live feed of him standing there chained up, and the guard says, "He doesn't look that tough. He looks like he belongs in a boyband," and then Raizo opens his eyes and looks straight at the camera.

Skye: Mine has to be one of the scenes you mentioned earlier, where Raizo is chained and Mika shows up to free him as the evil ninjas are infiltrating the building. He's not panicking, she's not panicking, even though they're both about to die if she doesn't get those shackles off - and she had the presence of mind to bring him a jacket and a weapon as well as the keys. Girlfriend is PREPARED, and Raizo is so impressed and quiet and funny about it. Her competence and his humanity were on full display, which is the opposite of a typical action movie scene with a man and a woman.

Four stars, obviously.

Posted by Skye in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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All I knew about Hanna before seeing it was that Saoirse Ronan played the title character, a young girl trained to be an assassin by her father (Eric Bana), and Cate Blanchett played the "bad girl" (as my three year old would put it).

The basic premise made it unavoidable for Heroine Content. I was worried, though. I assumed dad trained Hanna to set her on one of his enemies, using her like a tool in his toolbox. Ronan's appearance in the trailers and stills was so etheral and slightly creepy. I thought they would play her as isolated and emotionally stunted by her upbringing.

I was so wrong.

I hate to explain if you haven't yet seen it. I hate to spoil any little bit, even non-plot aspects. But this is a review blog, so I suppose I should at least try.

First, it was refreshing to watch a taut action film with a smaller budget and no special effects. You know that I love explosions, spaceships, and aliens as much as the next girl. (Okay, probably way more than the next girl.) But those things don't substitute for tension, danger, and drama in an action film. Hanna nails all three of those aspects. The pacing is incredible, leaving space for character development without sacrificing any momentum.

Second, Saoirse Ronan... I don't even know what to say. She brings Hanna to life as this strong, growing, vibrant young woman who is willing to take enormous risks for freedom. Where I expected ethereal and creepy, I found affectionate and hopeful. Where I expected a tool in a toolbox, I found someone creating her own life. She doesn't start as a victim, as too many female action roles demand. And any of her social naivete isn't played for comedy at her expense.

The relationship between Hanna and her father also isn't just the cold master-student training regime I had imagined. They're both fully fleshed out human beings who obviously care about each other (though neither are big talkers.) He sacrifices his entire life so she can have the space and freedom to choose her own path instead of being controlled by other people.

The cinematography is beautiful. There is at least one single-shot scene that blew our minds (when Erik gets off the bus, through the subway fight scene.) I usually dislike soundtracks that are laid on so thick, and most of the music was something I wouldn't care for on its own - but I loved it. My co-viewer did not was rhapsodic over the fight scenes, but said they were quite respectable.

There are a few missteps. Cate Blanchett was not as compelling as I had hoped. I spent a lot of time wondering why she was doing all this stuff. The film does give a sketch of the plot backstory, but no real insight into her personality. Given the careful portraits of Hanna and her father, Blanchett's Marisa Wiegler seems more like a cartoon. Her henchmen also seem a little goony. Skinheads, really? A couple of scenes drag on a bit too long, like Hanna's escape from the holding facility which seemed to loop a couple of times. But these are minor complaints against the overall quality of the film.

The cast is very white. John MacMillan plays Lewis, one of Wiegler's agents, and he meets one of the predictable fates of any African-American fellow in a movie with guns. Did I wish for something a little better? Sure. Due to the small scale of the film, though, I'm not going to ding it for not advancing the cause of casting diversity. It didn't include any nonsensical casting of white people where it doesn't make sense, such as ALL of an urban population, and as far as I could tell it didn't manage to insult anyone.

So holding that neutral, what we have is Hanna and Marisa squaring off against each other, and Hanna's father in her court out of love, not duty, and not for his own agenda. You want to see a teenage girl grabbing agency and running with it? This is what you need.

Go see this movie, people. It's going to lose a lot on a small screen, so I highly reocmmend catching it in the theater. Four stars.

Posted by Skye in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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Trigger warning: This is a review of films which contain graphic sexual violence.

In June, Skye wrote a review of the first installment of the Millennium film trilogy, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Put simply, she hated it. Though she liked Lisbeth Salander, she though the violence, particularly the sexual violence, was gratuitous. She nearly walked out.

After reading Skye's review, I didn't exactly run out to see the movie. By the time The Girl Who Played with Fire came out on DVD, though, my interest was piqued. And clearly Skye wasn't going to want to watch it, so, one night, I grabbed it from the Red Box.

And this is where, for those new to Heroine Content, you learn that Skye and I are quite often NOT of the same mind.

I was floored. I think I watched the majority of The Girl Who Played with Fire without blinking. I thought it was fabulous. As soon as I finished it, I got The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from Netflix, and only a few days later I was in the theater watching The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

There is one point on which I do agree with Skye: it's difficult to separate my feelings about the films from my feelings about Lisbeth Salander. I'm going to do the best I can to address them separately, but they really aren't separable.

First, about Lisbeth. She's amazing. She's one of the better heroines I've seen since...ever. She's a real, flawed person--selfish, egotistical, occasionally heartless--but she's also an endless bad-ass. She's a tiny woman who has lived through a terrible ordeal (several, actually), and she's come out of it tough as nails, smart, and absolutely determined to be in charge of her own life. These characteristics follow her throughout the three films--she grows, but she remains true to herself. And she acts, for the most part, in the interest of her own self-preservation. Women so rarely get to do that in films.

Lisbeth is also my perfect heroine because she's just as impressive in the trilogy's last installment, in which she has almost no action, as in the first two, where she kicks ass and takes names. Her toughest moment, to my mind, was walking into the courtroom in the last film with her chains and her mohawk and her sneer--no fists or guns needed. It's all about presence. As I haven't read the books, I have no idea how much of that presence is written in and how much is Noomi Rapace's incredible performance, but either way, it works.

Lisbeth is not, however, a benign presence. She's violent. She punishes. In the first film especially, but really all the way through the trilogy, she's willing not only to kill, but, to some extent, to torture. As Skye mentioned in her review, Lisbeth reenacts her rape, putting her rapist in the role in which he put her. It's difficult to justify that. I can't, on a moral level, say it's OK. What I can say is that it's powerful, and it strikes me as a reasonable response to what has happened to Lisbeth, and one we normally wouldn't get to see. I was also very glad to see Lisbeth maintain her sexual autonomy as the trilogy progressed--so often, women who have suffered sexual abuse in films and television shut down sexually, unable to be touched or touch. This is not, in reality, the only response anybody ever has to sexual abuse, and I'm glad to see another possibility shown in Lisbeth.

Lisbeth is not the trilogy's only strong female character. Though her role is fairly small, and she disappoints me somewhat in the last installment, I also really liked Millennium magazine editor Erika Berger (Lena Endre). Erika doesn't have Lisbeth's badass factor, but she's a smart, brave woman. She's also a woman in her 50s who is honest and unembarrassed about her sexuality--another thing we never get to see. The other minor female characters are also well done, including Blomkvist's attorney sister Annika (Annika Hallin) and Lisbeth's friend and lover Miriam (Yasmine Garbi).

Skye's biggest criticism of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was how much violence was shown, rather than implied. "A lot of screen time that could have been spent showing Salander's coolness," she wrote, "was instead used to show men beating the crap out of her." This is a legitimate criticism. All three films, but especially the first one, are graphically violent, Lisbeth is often the target, and the worst scene, in which Lisbeth is brutally raped, is returned to several times. For me, this worked, though it was awful to watch--had the horror of Lisbeth's rape not been shown, I wouldn't have felt so understanding about her retaliation. The graphic way in which all the violence towards Lisbeth was shown seemed to clarify her own need for brutality. I thought it was appropriate. However, I will admit to having a higher-than-average tolerance for cinematic violence, including sexual violence. It's not something of which I am particularly proud, but there it is.

My agreement with the way the filmmaker's chose to show graphic sexual violence goes beyond my having been able to watch it without being sick, though. I think the film's violence, and in particular Lisbeth's rape, which is a centerpiece of the entire trilogy, needs to have been graphic and shown repeatedly to work the way it does in the story. Lisbeth uses her rape, as horrible an experience as it obviously is, to obtain her freedom. It's her ability to do this, both in direct confrontation with her rapist in the first film and in the court system in the last film, that makes her so exceptional. If we hadn't seen and heard, more than once, the horrible things that happened to Lisbeth, the moment when we realize that it's those very events that are going to finally win her freedom for good wouldn't be so amazing.

The stories of the three films are, to me, of less interest than Lisbeth's character. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is more or less a who-done-it mystery, while The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest are more procedural type investigative journalism stories. All three are decent enough stories, but they aren't anything I'd be particularly interested in watching without Lisbeth. That said, even without the heroine, there is a common theme that, while I can't quite call it feminist, at least acknowledges that horrible things happen to women (rape, murder, sexual slavery, parental abuse, medical abuse, you name it). Though Lisbeth's primary motivation is maintaining her own autonomy, she, along with the male protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), also works to identify, expose, and punish those who harm other women. I can't fault that.

I'm not really sure what to make of the films' treatment of race. They major characters are all white, with Miriam Wu being the only meaningful character of color I noticed in any of the films. However, the films are also Swedish, and Sweden's population is over 95% white, so I'm not sure what sort of racial diversity should reasonably be expected.

Much as I loved the entire trilogy, I do take Skye's (and others') characterization of it as torture porn seriously. That's not how I saw it, but it's not an unreasonable read, either. In her excellent criticism of the films in the New Statesman, Laurie Penny writes:

It is clear that the author of the Millennium franchise did not intend to glamorize violence against women. Unfortunately, it's rather hard to stop the heart racing when rapes and murders are taking place in gorgeous high-definition over a slick soundtrack: part of the purpose of thrillers, after all, is to thrill. Decorating a punchy pseudo-feminist revenge fantasy in the gaudy packaging of crime drama rather muddles Larsson's message." Misogynist violence is appalling," the series seems to whisper; "now here's some more."

However, the real problem with sensationalising misogyny is that misogyny is not sensational. Real misogyny happens every day. The fabric of modern life is sodden with sexism, crusted with a debris of institutional discrimination that looks, from a distance, like part of the pattern. The real world is full of "men who hate women", and most of them are neither psychotic Mob bosses nor corrupt business tycoons with their own private punishment dungeons under the putting green. Most men who hate women express their hatred subtly, unthinkingly. They talk over the heads of their female colleagues. They make sexual comments about women in the street. They expect their wives and girlfriends to take responsibility for housework and to give up their career when their children are born.

The critique here is two-fold. First, that including the type of horrible violence that is shown in the Millennium trilogy in this type of film does, like it or not, glamorize that violence. I'm not sure I agree--as I said before, for me, it contextualizes Lisbeth's actions and her eventual victory more than adding any sort of thrill to the viewer's experience. The second criticism, though, is spot on. There are only two types of men in the world these films build--the nearly-perfectly sensitive guy Blomkvist (and a few similar minor characters) and the horrific predatory men who commit the crimes. There are no everyday misogynists here, and it makes misogyny look like something other than what it usually is.

I'm not sure I have it in me, however, to knock stars off a review because an action movie isn't realistic enough, and that is, in essence, what the criticism above comes down to. These films are about the very extremes of men who hate women, and the very extremes of a woman responding to that hatred. While it may not be literally relevant to the lives of most women, I don't think that takes away from the power of the stories, or from strength and grace of Lisbeth. I'm giving these ones four stars and Lisbeth Salander a well-earned place in my Top Ten Heroines list.

Posted by Grace in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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I didn't even mean to go to Vulcan, our local video store. Then we saw this poster on their front door. I apologize for the crummy picture of the poster (only one I could find online), but I wanted to show you exactly what I saw - because after seeing this poster, do you think there was any way I was not going into Vulcan? Netflix had never uttered even a peep about this one! So much for the schmancy recommendation engine. Local business 1, online powerhouse 0.

It took us several days of waiting and calling, but we finally got our hands on Assault Girls. I blew off all my plans for productivity and devoted the evening to it. That turned out to be an excellent decision.

Assault Girls follows four players of an immersive multiplayer online game set in a bleak desert, where players test their skills against "natural" elements (read: giant killer worm-monsters). Rinko Kikuchi plays Lucifer. She's a magician that transforms into a bird, and she shoots lightning. Meisa Kuroki plays Gray, the pilot and hand-to-hand combat expert. Hinako Saeki plays Colonel, who would rather kick ass than talk. Yoshikazu Fujiki plays Jager, the lone male player we see. He's a sharpshooter with an extremely large gun.

All four are on the same level of the game, stalking a specific giant worm-monster, and they have to kill it to get to the next level. The film traces their individual attempts to do the deed, and then the decision making for each character after they are counseled by the game itself that alone, none of them will succeed. It's a mix of action scenes, quiet reflective scenes, and interpersonal negotiation between players who are all trying to retain the advantage for themselves.

Some high points:

First, THE CLOTHES. All three of the women look great. They're actually dressed, first of all, instead of wearing chain-mail bikinis or underwear or cut-up handkerchiefs strategically glued to their body or whatever horrible thing the entertainment industry will come up with next for women who are supposed to be warriors. Each player has a color, each has a look, and all three are a mix of practical and fantastical - as one would expect when people are allowed to design their outfits in a virtual world where they can use their imaginations but their avatars still have to do stuff.

Second, the fight between Gray and Jager. She challenges him, they go several rounds, and I fell right in love with her. So cool! The fight structure is also hi-larious for anyone who plays (or has watched) fighting games. That includes yours truly, who has seen more Virtua Fighter matches than should be allowed by law for someone who does not play video games herself.

Third, the film takes all four players and their goals extremely seriously. They are in it to win, no doubts, and they are all shown as exceedingly competent. (And cagey.) I really appreciated seeing the women so ambitious and focused on their accomplishments as serious gamers. They also have their own personalities, amazing! Gray and Jager get the most time for theirs to come through, but Lucifer is even more intriguing, honestly, and the trash talking between Gray and Colonel is not to be missed.

Four stars, my friends, four stars!

Here is a trailer for Assault Girls on YouTube. Otherwise, just rent it already! Turns out Netflix has it (...or as I have re-discovered, there are still local video stores!) It's a short film, at 65 minutes, so it's perfect for a night when you don't want to stay up too late.

A couple of handy tips: If you don't speak Japanese, turn on the subtitles. The actors start out speaking in English, but they go back and forth during the film. Gray and Colonel's spoken English sounds very forced. At first I couldn't tell why the filmmakers didn't have their dialogue in Japanese. As more was revealed about the game, though, it made more sense. (I'm actually now wondering if they speak fluent English but were hamming it up, or speak no English but learned all the dialogue phonetically. Either seems perfectly plausible.)

Posted by Skye in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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If The Last Rites of Ransom Pride ever played in theaters, I completely missed it. It's not like me to miss a western, so I'm guessing it didn't have much of a presence. Finding it in the Redbox was definitely a welcome surprise.

Though it gets a bit disjointed in places, and is interrupted often by sped up footage and grainy images of cow skulls, the film's basic plot follows Juliette Flowers (Lizzy Caplan, who I loved in Mean Girls and shines even brighter here) as she struggles to bring the body of her dead outlaw lover, Ransom Pride, home for burial. Juliette is assisted by Ransom's brother, Champ (Jon Foster), who she helps with some much needed coming of age; a dwarf named Dwarf (Peter Dinklage); conjoined twins Cerce and Solomon (Alfonso Quijada and Rene Quijada); and the mysterious and oddly medically competent Sergeant (Blu Mankuma). Juliette and her crew face significant challenges, though, as Ransom's body is being held by evil and powerful village head Bruja (Cote de Pablo), and they are in constant danger from Ransom and Champ's insane preacher father, the Reverend Early Pride (Dwight Yoakam).

This movie does a very good job with race, gender, and abilities. Juliette is the star, and the film's central badass. I can't fault her as a character even a little bit--she's tough, she wears clothes, and even though she has relatively few lines, everything she says sounds so damn cool. Though she's motivated by a romantic relationship, and though we find out in the film's last words that she's begun another one, neither of them are the point--the point is that she's keeping her word. Women don't get to have honor for a motivation very often. The main villain, Bruja, is also female, and, though she's incredibly bizarre and I'm not quite sure what the filmmakers intended with her character, I can't really complain about it, either.

Taking place in Texas and Mexico, the film has both Mexican and white characters, as would be expected. Juliette herself is described as "half-breed," and I was unclear as to whether that was intended to mean she was half Mexican or half Native American. There is, as would be expected, tension between the white and non-white characters, but it's handled well, and, for the most part, the villains are old white guys. In addition, characters who are neither white nor Mexican are featured, including Sergeant, who is African-American, and Bruja's Native American henchman, El Apache.

The thing that impresses me the most about this movie, though, is the inclusion and portrayal of characters with non-traditional bodies. Peter Dinklage's Dwarf was completely unexpected when he popped up, and he rules. He is accompanied by conjoined twins Cerces and Solomon, who were even more unexpected. You simply don't see conjoined twins in movies, except for comedic effect, and Cerces and Solomon are serious characters in this film (albeit relatively minor ones). I really appreciated that. The best part? It's this trio, not the white, male protagonist (Champ), who save the girl at the key moment near the film's end.

This is an extremely strange movie--while some of is very much in keeping with a typical western (including the minor role played by Kris Kristofferson!), it's clearly been influenced by much more experimental film-making than one usually sees in the Old West. It is director Tiller Russell's first fiction film--his previous work is all documentary, and is co-written by the director and singer-songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard (who also did the music, which is fantastic). After watching it, I still wasn't quite sure what I thought of it as a film--I definitely wasn't bored, and I think it mostly worked for me, but there were elements that left me completely cold, too (that damn cow's skull!). As far as heroine content is concerned, though, I'm giving this one full marks--I can't find fault. An unexpected four stars.

Posted by Grace in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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Netflix sometimes offers me extremely strange suggestions. My favorite one so far was "since you liked Eddie Izzard: Glorious (liberal standup by a transvestite Brit) and Throne of Blood (1957 Japanese masterpiece based on Macbeth), you will like The Motorcycle Diairies (Ewan McGregor riding a BMX bike around the world.)" Because, you know, they're all foreigners. I have mocked Netflix on my personal blog and in conversation for its wacky ways.

Starting today, though, I swear never to complain or even make humorous observations about the Netflix recommendation engine, because without it, I might never have seen Kamikaze Girls.

Kamikaze Girls is not an action film, but rather an over the top comedy drama quasi-fantasy Japanese flick. About teenage girls and fashion.

STAY WITH ME HERE, PEOPLE!

Posted by Skye in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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In October, I gave Whip It! four stars. Previous to that, the last new release movie that received our highest HC honors was Mr. and Mrs. Smith, in January 2007. New movies don't get four stars very often. When I said I'd see and review The Losers, I wasn't expecting it to be a four-star candidate. Sure, Zoe Saldana was on a roof with a rocket launcher in the preview, but it takes more than that, you know?

Luckily, this film has more than that. Saldana's character, Aisha, is indeed a badass. She fights, she shoots, she wears flat shoes, and, in something that you just never see, she comes to the rescue in the nick of time, saving not one but FOUR tough guys. Yes, she is occasionally unnecessarily sexualized (lots of shots of her butt, especially at the beginning of the movie), but honestly, I have a hard time complaining, given how well her character scores on all other counts. I could have lived without the romantic involvement between her and Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and my film-viewing companion cringed at the "music video-ness" of their first sexual liaison, but even then, she was in charge of the relationship--she was the one with the most knowledge and the most control (both literally and metaphorically on top). Can't find fault with that. Also, Aisha is a non-white woman (both the actress and the character are Latina), so seeing her character treated so responsibility and respectfully is all the more encouraging.

Posted by Grace in 4 Stars: Greatest Hits
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