Recently in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years

TRIGGER WARNING for this film. Really. This film contains explicit scenes of graphic sexual violence. I almost walked out, so please be careful. I am going to mention that it happened in this review, though not discuss any specific details.

A while back, Heroine Content reader -J- shared a trailer link in the comments and wondered what we would think of the main character Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor in Swedish, which means Men Who Hate Women). Since I am easily suggestible and it was playing up north at the art house theater, I set off one fine Sunday afternoon to relax with a little Swedish film entertainment. I had tried to avoid reading any reviews in much detail so as not to spoil the plot. What I knew: goth looking hacker girl investigates crime. So far, so good.

About halfway through the movie, I leaned over to my husband and whispered "I'm so sorry, I didn't know." We both managed to stay in our seats, though it was touch and go. By the time we left, we both felt like we'd been kicked in the stomach repeatedly.

Remember back in my review of Kick-Ass when I was all "I don't know if I can really get behind this character even though I thought I would want to?" Hit Girl, meet Lisbeth Salander. You two have a truckload in common.

Salander is one of two central characters in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Played by Noomi Rapace, Salander is a tattooed, pierced, bisexual hacker prodigy who is currently under the legal guardianship of the Swedish human services system. (I'm seeing comments online that in the book from which the film was adapted, she has Asperger syndrome, though this isn't clear in the film. In the film it's presented more as having a possible history of mental illness or possibly just being labeled as such due to a specific childhood incident. I don't know enough about Asperger syndrome to speculate based on her behaviors on the movie.)

To give you a quick plot summary, Salander becomes involved in an investigation by a disgraced former reporter, Mikael Blomkvist. Salander was originally hired to investigate Blomkvist himself when he was on trial for libel. As she learns more about him, though, she can't resist spying on his latest project and starts to offer him clues. They work together to solve the disappearance of a young girl 40 years ago. As they get closer to truth, someone is trying to stop them from revealing the dark secret, yada yada yada.

Figuring out how I feel about the film, separating that from how I feel about Salander as a character, and also how I feel about the choices she makes, has been really difficult. She is far more complex than 99% of the "heroines" I've reviewed on this blog. Of course, with my usual diet of shoot-em-up whizzbang action movies, that's no surprise. This is a real movie, not a Hollywood action movie, though Salander rides a motorcycle and hits people over the head with the best of them. I really enjoyed watching her work. She's obviously brilliant, magnetic, and she looks really cool. The film might be trying to place her as Blomkvist's sidekick, but it totally does not work. He's following her around as her mind puts pieces of the case together. Loved it.

But Salander is brutally raped in TWO extremely graphic and drawn-out scenes. She then recreates a similar scene to punish the rapist. I was appalled by all three scenes. I couldn't figure out why the people who made the film felt like I needed to watch it. Or in my case, listen to it, as I was covering my face. (The soundtrack was bad enough, I don't want to know what was actually shown on screen.) Was I really not going to understand how bad her situation was just from the beginning of an assault and the aftermath?

Other people's mileage varies significantly. (And none of these have trigger warnings, by the way. ) The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: Why, oh why, is everything filled with rape? by Elizabeth of Kills Me Dead was really helpful to me in sorting out my thoughts for this review, but for other takes on the rape issue in this film:

• A Rose By Any Other Name... Looks Less Thorny To American Eyes at Thus Spake Zuska
• Elizabeth reminded me of this one which had slipped by me: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo at Women & Hollywood

These assaults do give some context for one of Salander's later decisions in the film, where she condemns a murderer to death. In both situations (and in a third which I will not reveal to avoid spoilers), she chooses to have grave bodily harm visited on the Men Who Hate Women of the film's title. If that works for you, then so be it.

But showing in explicit detail all the bad things that Men Who Hate Women do to those women, before having a woman punish them for it, does not end up feeling female-friendly to me. A lot of screen time that could have been spent showing Salander's coolness was instead used to show men beating the crap out of her. Whether or not I agree with Salander's actions as an avenging vigilante, I can't get past my disagreement with the filmmakers on whether it was necessary to go to these lengths to establish that violence against women is wrong. I'm pretty sure we can establish in a film that murder is wrong without showing a 5 minute scene of him bludgeoning someone to death with a baseball bat.

The other two films in the trilogy apparently will be released in the U.S. this summer. I have no idea whether I'm going to see them. But this one gets no stars from me.

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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I knew nothing about the comic before I went to see the Jonah Hex movie. I hope I still don't. Because if the comic is anything like the film, it goes something like this.

Once upon a time there was a man name Jonah Hex. He fought for the Confederacy because he was a libertarian, not because he supported slavery. He even has a black friend, so we know he's all right. After he married a woman from the Crow Nation and had a child with her, the Crow put him under their protection forever and ever. You never have to see them, but they use their powerful magic to save his life sometimes. That comes in handy when the man is called upon to assist the U.S. Government, which is obviously known for its good relationship with the indigenous people of the North American continent.

After Jonah Hex's wife and child were murdered, he took up with a prostitute named Lilah, except that her name is actually Tallulah, a detail thrown into the film for no apparent reason. (By the way, it is vitally important to the historical accuracy of a story about a man who can talk to dead people just by touching their bodies that Lilah wears a corset to make her waist about the same circumference as her neck.) The man likes her because she is the only other woman left in the world after his wife died. Also, her world revolves around him.

Jonah Hex finds out that the guy who murdered his wife and child is still alive and wants to blow up the United States. He rides around the country trying to stop this nonsense. And he gets a dog, but then he abandons it somewhere I think.

The End.

p.s. It was really BAD, too. Don't go.

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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Oh. My.

So I love a good farce. Thoughts like these, at Racialicious, had me hoping that Bitch Slap would be a good farce:

Satire by its very nature is something that disarms you, most often through comedy or ridicule, and makes you take a hard look at yourself and your fears and biases. The ultimate purpose of satire is to bring about improvement by bringing ones flaws to the surface.

Like Racialicious guest poster Marisol LeBron, I loved the Tarantino/Rodriguez double-feature Grindhouse, in part, for exactly this reason (see just how much I loved it here). And, pre-viewing, I had high hopes for Bitch Slap on those grounds. The trailer was ridiculous. The quotes were filthy and hysterical. It was unrated. Plus, my girl Zoe Bell is in it (really really briefly, it turns out) and was the stunt coordinator. It should be fun, right?

So not. It's terrible.

Posted by Grace in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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I thought it was bad when I was seeing films that were adapted from video games. Then I saw Mutant Chronicles, which was adapted from a role playing game. So not good.

Mutant Chronicles takes place on some kind of 28th Century steampunk Earth that feels like it's an alternate World War II. Corporations rule the world and spend all their time fighting, until they are unlucky enough to break open an ancient machine from space that turns human beings into zombie mutants with primitive scimitars grafted to their right arms.

What's not to love?

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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Jennifer's Body was not on my must-see film list. I saw the previews, was skeptical, and agreed to take it on because I love Heroine Content. Then I started reading other people's reviews--lots of mentions of Heathers, even a few of Buffy-implications that it was self-aware, if a bit thin, farce. I can handle that, I thought. I liked writer Diablo Cody's Juno well enough, and loved director Karyn Kusama's Girlfight (reviewed here). By the time I actually saw Jennifer's Body, I was almost excited about it.

That excitement was so very misplaced. This movie is terrible. The Willamette Week review called Jennifer's Body "Heathers as a Maxim photo spread," and I'd say even that is too kind. It's not just the stupid teenage sexuality that the film centers around that makes it so bad--I was expecting that. And it's not just the fact that Megan Fox (Jennifer) can't act at all, not even a little bit--I was expecting that, too. But that farce I was promised? It never showed up.

Posted by Grace in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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I've long wanted to see 2004's Catwoman because it is so often cited, along with Elektra, as one of the low grossing films that has somehow magically ruined it for everyone who wants to see more strong women in action films. I say "magically" because as we know, rarely has a low grossing film with a man in the lead caused Hollywood to stop making that kind of movie.

After seeing it, I was almost willing to agree that if banning women from lead roles in action films could prevent a movie this bad from being made in the future, I was willing to accept that trade off. Then I watched the 1994 Street Fighter with Jean-Claude Van Damme and I realized this hypothetical deal would not protect me anyway.

My friends, the problem here is not that women can't lead an action film. The problem is that there aren't enough women leading action films for any of them to be this awful. Wooden dialogue, flimsy plot devices, wretched "acting" by both Halle Berry and Sharon Stone, and an atmosphere that's much more sexy dance music video than action film: that's what Catwoman offers us. That would be fine if there were five other good films in 2004 with women in action roles, but there weren't.

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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If you wanted to create a film to show that Men Are Awesome! and Women Are Sexy!, you could not do much better than Bollywood action thriller Dhoom 2. It reminds me so much of a 1980's hair band album. Ninety percent of it is about how much men rock. Ten percent of it is the equivalent of the one slow love ballad on every Poison, Warrant, and Motley Crue album, designed specifically to convince the women in the audience that underneath that bad boy, party hearty, slap your ass exterior is a heart of gold just waiting for yoooouuuuuuuuu. And like the videos of songs on these albums, the women don't wear much clothing and they spend a lot of time "dancing."

Dhoom 2 is flashy, colorful, and it goes well with popcorn, but let's take a look at what else you're getting with your tasty concession stand treat. (Or your microwave in your kitchen treat, as the case may be.)

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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Back in March, I gave Charlie's Angels two stars. These stars were given in spite of the massive gender and race problems the film had, based on the relationship between the Angels and Bosley, and in the relationship between the Angels themselves.

The film's sequel, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, gets no stars. The relationship between the Angels is still more or less intact, but there is nothing else to recommend the film, and it is so sexist and so racist that I couldn't give it any stars even if there were.

Full Throttle starts with the Angels rescuing a federal agent being held hostage in Mongolia. The major features of this scene are as follows: 1) mindless hordes of Mongolians running around screaming and setting things on fire for no reason; 2) the first Angel we see, Alex (Lucy Lui), coming on to the scene out of hiding place in a wooden crate, black cat-suited ass and crotch first; and 3) Natalie (Cameron Diaz), dressed up as a Scandinavian tourist, riding a mechanical bull (possibly a mechanical yak) while shrieking "yah? yah?" over and over again.

The really amazing part is that it doesn't get better from there.

Posted by Grace in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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In his Guardian review of Wanted, Peter Bradshaw writes that the film "plays like a party political broadcast on behalf of the misogynist party." I don't disagree with this assessment--it's a truly, truly awful movie--but sadly I don't share Bradshaw's surprise at the film's misogyny.

Bradshaw goes on to write that in the film "womankind is represented by irrelevant sleek babes and obese comic foils, an ugly whorehouse aesthetic which really does sock over its contempt for femaleness very, very powerfully indeed." While this is true, it's hardly unusual. The film gives us three female characters--lead antihero Wes (James McAvoy) begins the movie with both a nagging, cheating girlfriend (Kristen Hager) and a bitchy, always-eating, "comically obese" boss (Lorna Scott), both of whom he resents and immediately ditches when he finds out his other options, coming back only to insult and humiliate them further, in case the viewer missed out on the hatred of them the first time. For the majority of the film, however, the only female character is Wes' assassin trainer, Fox (Angelina Jolie).

Posted by Grace in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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No, this isn't an April Fool's joke. I actually watched it.

If a DVD has a ten minute selection called "Sexy Outtakes" (presumably for those who thought the five minute half-naked Pamela Anderson music video at the beginning of the movie was not long enough), then I think we all know why it was made.

Strangely, though, I didn't hate it as much as I thought I would. It gets no stars, 'cause it's just so horrifyingly exploitative of Pamela Anderson's body, which is really scary looking. I think I may have nightmares. However, Barb Wire the character is really quite competent. I would have been more impressed if her cover wasn't always stripper or hooker, but see previous comment about exploitation.

Also, it produced a good conversation with my husband:

Cody: I think I'd be annoyed with my boyfriend, if this is his idea of helping. Now I'm hanging from a crane over the ocean?

Me: On a car that's stuck to a forklift. With a Nazi on it.

The End.

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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