Recently in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years

If my husband and I ever divorce, I have no doubt that he will itemize "made me see Immortals" as one of his grievances. He's usually very patient with seeing movies for the blog. But on this one, he almost refused. "It's going to be horrible," he said. "I mean, I want to spend time with my wife, but..."

The logic he finally used to convince himself? "It will be better than seeing the Adam Sandler movie." Of course, there was an addendum: "Then again, spending two hours staring at the wall would be better than seeing the Adam Sandler movie."

(Just so we're clear, I knew it was going to be bad. But I had managed to get a babysitter and I wanted to get out of the house, and it was marginally on-topic for the blog. These are the factors that drive our out-of-the-house cinema consumption, which is why we rarely see a good movie in the theater.)

Immortals was to The Three Musketeers what Cowboys and Aliens was to Priest: a movie we saw right after another film that we thought wasn't that great, that turned out so bad, we almost wanted to pre-order the box set of the first one because it looked so good in comparison. At least in The Three Musketeers and Priest, we weren't bored. To be fair, though, we weren't as bored in Immortals, because we spent a lot of time laughing and whispering to each other.

Let me break it down for you. Immortals is about Theseus, who is a nice young warrior type from a small village. His mother is killed by the forces of Hyperion, a neighboring king who wants to kill everyone. This is Hyperion:

Hyperion is mad because Tony Stark's dad beat up his dad, or the Gods didn't save his family from dying from the plague, whatever. Basically, he's an asshole and he's going to wipe out anyone who isn't related to him? Unclear.

He wants to find the Virgin Oracle so she can tell him where the Gods' bow is, so he can unleash the Titans, so they can kill everyone. How will this help him? Again, unclear. The Virgin Oracle is one of four women who all stay together so no one will know which one is the real one. (Think Padme Amidala.) They basically look like this:

Except their hats are red, and one of them has votive candleholders hanging from it. They're also more diverse than British royalty tends to be. Frieda Pinto is from India, and she plays Phaedra, the actual Virgin Oracle. Mercedes Leggett (said to be Canadian, and her parents were Scottish and Filipino), Kaniehtiio Horn ("a native of Kahnawake, a Mohawk reserve outside of Montreal"), and Ayisha Issa (seems to be Canadian, with Ghanaian and Jamaican mother and father, also she's a martial artist) play the others. The diversity was a nice touch in a movie populated by mostly white men. Or, it was done to make the Oracles look "exotic." Ugh. In any event, the Oracles are captured by Hyperion's forces, but they are packing deadly hairpins and small knives, and they mess up their guards something fierce so the Virgin Oracle can get away. Then they get beaten up and locked in a metal cow. So much for that.

Meanwhile Theseus is traveling with Phaedra, the Virgin Oracle. She insists that he goes back to his village to bury his mother, whereupon he finds the Gods' bow. Which he cannot seem to hold without dropping it for more than five seconds. Not that this is foreshadowing or anything. After Theseus saves Phaedra's life, she decides that she doesn't care for having visions thankyouverymuch and would rather sleep with Theseus to get rid of them.

You have no idea how much I was hoping for a reveal here, something like "oh it turns out the whole virgin thing was just a myth, she still has visions and we're going to use them to totally kick ass." Unfortunately, Andre Norton was not writing this movie circa her 1963 Witch World, so Phaedra loses any possible relevance to the plot after this encounter.

Speaking of things that are about 50 years old, have I mentioned how this movie's look reminds me of this:

It was like filmmaking had not advanced at all since 1958. Or possibly had gone backwards. My husband opined that the movie had five sets, and I think that was generous. It looked a lot like this thing we did at my church in junior high, where the gym and the racquetball courts were turned into "A Night in Old Bethlehem" and everyone dressed up like they lived in that time period. Kind of.

(Yes, the church I grew up attending had racquetball courts.)

With the Oracles out of the way, the other possible source of Heroine Content coolness in this film is Isabel Lucas's Athena. All four of the Gods we see do interfere with the mortals even though they're not supposed to, but her intervention is the tamest. She gives Theseus some horses. After he's dropped the f---ing bow again, and a DOG grabs it and runs off to take it to Hyperion.

Once Hyperion uses the bow to release the savage black people, oh I mean the Titans, from their cage-

Okay, we have to stop and discuss that part. The Titans. Supposedly evil as evil can be, though all we're told about their evilness is that they lost the war with the Gods. We don't have any evidence that they're actually evil, they just didn't win. And they're black. And in a cage, in chains. With bars of metal in their mouths. (Husband's comment: "I'm pretty f---ing sure they didn't have REBAR in anything B.C.") Sure, they look like they're covered in the ashes of their dead wife and children like Kratos from God of War; it doesn't look like actual blackface. But they're black. And when they're released, they go wild and try to kill everything in sight, until the very white Gods show up and start chopping them to bits.

It looks really, really bad, y'all. Like Resident Evil 5 bad.

I don't think I need to say any more on that front.

In that battle, Artemis does kick some ass, though the awesome of that is totally negated by the squick factor - and she gets impaled anyway, then uses her dying breath to implore her father to be a nice guy. Whereas Poseidon uses his dying breath, as Titans are chewing his leg off, to yell "GO!!!!" to Zeus who is about to pull down Mount Tartarus to stop the Titans.

So yeah. I can't find a star anywhere for this mess.

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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[Trigger warning on this film for rape by deception and an attempted gang rape. It's mentioned in the review but not discussed in detail.]

I saw Wing Chun years ago in a theater in Austin. If I'd been asked to describe it from memory, I would have said something like "Michelle Yeoh totally kicks a bunch of guys' backsides with her awesome kung fu."

IF ONLY I HAD LEFT IT THAT WAY.

Michelle Yeoh does totally kick a bunch of ass with her awesome kung fu, but beyond that, this film is a big ol' mess.

It starts out promisingly enough. Michelle plays the title character, Wing Chun, the former town beauty who took up kung fu and now defends the town from bandits as needed. Wearing men's clothes. She lives with her aunt, an unmarried businesswoman, and her father. They operate the family tofu shop. When a young widow named Charmy is being married off to the highest bidder to pay for her late husband's funeral, Wing Chun and her aunt take the girl in. So far, so good. Two strong, independent women watching out for a younger woman. But then the skeevy "scholar" who wanted to marry Wing Chun so he could get free bandit protection instead sets his sights on Charmy, and Wing Chun's childhood sweetheart returns to town to marry her only to mistake Charmy for her...

You see how this could go downhill, don't you?

Like Red Sonja, Wing Chun got backstabbed by her own film. For a while, it looked like she was going to come out ahead. She spends most of the film being true to herself, despite being relentlessly insulted by the local men. They benefit from her protection, but why let that get in the way of a good misogynist resentment? They accuse her of lusting after Charmy (hello, projecting much?) and even show up at the tofu shop to take Wing Chun down a peg. When the local bandit threatens that she'll have to marry him if she loses a fight, the crowd laughs at her. If she's going to be humiliated, they'll probably bring popcorn.

None of this seems to matter to Wing Chun, though! She has power, she has a business to help run, and she likes to win her fights. Go Wing Chun!

Until her old boyfriend shows up. I was really hoping she would let him continue to think that Charmy was her, because then Wing Chun could have kept on with her awesomeness. Instead, the filmmakers sell her out! Damn you, filmmakers! He figures out the mistaken identity, pledges his affection for her even though two days ago he didn't even recognize her and knows nothing about her current personality, and they hook up again. And she starts wearing pink. Argh! It even sounded like they subbed out a voice actor, or else Michelle Yeoh does sweet and girly way better than I suspected.

Her kung fu master, a woman, apparently missed the memo on women's self-determination. "No matter how strong you are, you still have to settle down. You're secular," she says, "Go get married." To a man who peeks in windows when women are getting undressed. He's also more than willing to have Wing Chun fight the climactic battle with the bandits, but after that? "Be gentler" he says when she jumps onto a horse. And she apologizes.

Wing Chun, I am so sorry.

I also started off hopeful for the character of her aunt. Early in the film, she and Wing Chun struck me as two strong, nonconforming women. Auntie likes money more than men, and she's not averse to negotiation, intimidation, and outright scheming to get the upper hand. Except that she's also happy to use Charmy as the sex appeal to sell more tofu. And when the possibility is suggested that Charmy may be raped by her bandit kidnappers, Auntie says "She's not a virgin anyway, what difference does it make?" I didn't expect a cash-obsessed future tycoon to have the same honor her niece does, but when she's throwing other women under the bus, I'm about done.

She also pretends to be Charmy in a successful plot to seduce the scholar. The fact that he doesn't mind when he finds out, because he realizes he'll get her money if he marries her, doesn't make this any less of a rape. The whole thing is played for laughs, which is totally not okay.

Wing Chun's childhood sweetie is supposed to be a good guy, but he's not. In addition to the privacy violations and inability to recognize the woman he claims to love, he's more than happy to accuse various women of bad behavior without any evidence. The scholar is without any moral fiber. The bandits are, obviously, bad guys. I can tell the filmmakers were going for "romantic mixup comedy" but isn't there a way to do that without all of the men acting like assholes?

The problem with assessing films from another country or culture is that I lack context. It may be that this film actually shattered gender stereotypes for the time and place it was made. In 1994. Maybe? Were they actually trying to say that it's so great Wing Chun's boyfriend will still marry her even though she has better kung fu? Oh, wait, that's not a good message either.

No stars.

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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Friends, internetcountrypeople, thank goodness for Native American characters. Without Native American characters, the plot of Cowboys & Aliens would have completely collapsed.

Without Native American characters, who would have given Daniel Craig a magic drink to bring back his memory of where the aliens' ship was?

Without a Native American character, who would have given a testimonial about the good heart hidden within Harrison Ford's racist, hateful, torturing, arrogant, oppressive rich bastard character who fucks with anyone who crosses his path? He "adopted" an orphaned Injun boy and treated him like a servant for years, he can't be all bad!

Without Native American characters, who would have comforted Harrison Ford when his servant sacrificed his life to save his master? Who would have then decided to follow Ford into battle, affirming his true role as a military leader?

And thank goodness for women of color, as well! They get kidnapped so their husbands are motivated to go save them! Okay, so, one woman of color (Ana de la Reguera). She did get some lines, though... doesn't that make it better?

I almost couldn't write a review of this film on Heroine Content because of the distinct lack of female ass-kicking, but then Olivia Wilde jumped one time. And she hit Daniel Craig on the head from behind with the butt of a pistol, so I guess that counts. Beyond that, though, this film offers less than nothing. Unless you like to hear women who may have previously done sex work referred to repeatedly as whores.

No stars.

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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Trigger warning on this post for mention of sexual assault.

Dear Director Zack Snyder,

I saw your film Sucker Punch today. Based on the premise and the posters, I had decided not to go. Then I saw the trailer, and it didn't strike me as badly as I'd thought it would. I didn't see as much cleavage as I had feared, and I saw a lot of young women doing extremely fun stuff like sticking a sword through the head of a dragon. I had heard some bad shit about your movie 300 (Jehanzeb Dar on racism in 300, Grace on ableism in 300), but I enjoyed Watchmen aside from the incredibly wrong ending. So I thought I would give Sucker Punch a shot and try to keep an open mind.

First, let me say, you made a very pretty movie. The music was also phenomenal. Stories about female resistance can be fantastic, and I particularly appreciate films that show the strength of young women. You had the raw material to make a truly cool film.

But this is where you failed: You care more about yourself than you do about who your characters really are.

Let's talk about Baby Doll (Emily Browning). When her mother dies, her evil stepfather tries to sexually assault her, then turns his attention to her little sister. Baby Doll tries to kill him but accidentally kills her sister. This works fine for the stepfather, who commits her to a mental institution to be lobotomized so he can grab all her cash.

That would all be heartbreaking if Baby Doll were a person. But she's not. She's a cardboard cutout of a little girl, though you make sure to establish her age as 20. She has a little girl name, a little girl voice, and wears her hair in little girl pigtails. Her complete lack of personality allows you to create whatever scenes you want to create, without any regard for her backstory. Under great stress, Baby Doll either creates or retreats to two separate fantasy worlds. In the first, the mental institution is a front for a bordello. Baby Doll's power is to dance sexier than any of the other girls and distract the menz so her friends can steal the items they need to escape.

How does this make any sense for this character? How does this come from anything aside from your desire to dress up girls in skimpy clothes and show them being hurt by men?

If you instead created characters you actually care about, they might be more than cardboard cutouts. They might be interesting. The film might reflect how young women who have been hurt actually think, feel, and act. And yes, one of the things they do is fight back. But they don't always fight back by dressing up in your male fantasy lady-combat outfits of the second fantasy world Baby Doll creates. Strangely, some of them even feel uncomfortable in that kind of clothing. Some don't, and put it on as a way to feel strong. Again, this is you creating the visuals you want, treating your characters as you want to and ignoring who they are. As a result, they feel like paper dolls. They are all form and no substance.

Can you please think about that for a while?

While you're at it, you also might want to work on your racism. White girls in this film have the choice of valiant sacrifice to save friends, or escape to live a long and happy life. Brown girls are support staff, betrayers, and victims. It's ugly and predictable and it's so backwards that I don't even know what more to say. I would also caution you that if you're going to set a film in a mental institution, you might want to know more about the history of mental health treatment in this country instead of just using it as a dramatic backdrop. It's true that women considered troublesome by their families have been "disciplined" by forcible committal, but there's a much bigger picture here and it's callous to use the bit you want and throw the rest away.

My husband is part of your target market, and he was also pretty disgusted. He's in his thirties, plays a lot of video games. He said he would rather see a film by the creators of D.O.A., notorious exploiters of women, since then he wouldn't have to deal with the veneer of respectability you tried to pull over the film with the drama and torment aspect. If you're going to make a film of young girls running around video game fight scenes wearing their underwear, then just do that and stop pretending it's something else.

I am 100% certain that you'll be able to find a lot of white women, and maybe even some women of color, who will embrace Sucker Punch as a girl power movie. That's very sad. I guess as a starting place, it's better than some, but the disrespect for female characters that oozes from almost every scene just breaks my heart. It's not even the clothes for me, it's what the clothes say about how much you just don't give a damn about these girls you created and brought to life. They're not real people, but fictional characters can be inspiring to real people, and you threw away your chance to make that happen.

Sincerely,
A woman who is not as radical fringe as you're probably telling yourself she is

p.s. I noticed when you switched out Baby Doll's shoes in the temple fight scene. If her shoes keep the stunts from working, then why is it so important that she wears them?

(No stars.)

Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years
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(Trigger warning here for a joke from the movie concerning sexual assault, which is mentioned briefly at the end of this post.)

Ah, Machete. What I remember best about Machete, unfortunately, is the phone call I got as the credits started to roll. It was my mother in law, telling me my three year old had fallen off a love seat onto a tile floor, landing on his head, and now he was saying his head was buzzing and his tongue felt funny. Everything turned out okay, but now Danny Trejo will likely always be linked for me with my son's possible concussion and the Dell Children's emergency room. It's a shame, because I really like him. If I could re-link that memory to Jessica Alba, I would, but after Fantastic Four that there just isn't room for more Jessica Alba pain associations in my neural pathways.

Before all of that excitement, though, I'm pretty sure I saw a film that included two things.

First, I saw multiple people of color, including women, as the forces of good in an action film about the concerns of hardworking, decent people who just happen to be one of the most villanized groups in my home state of Texas - Mexicans and Mexican-Americans! In this film, these people are the real heroes, and for a lovely change of pace in media, the U.S. is portrayed with just as much corruption as Mexico, if not moreso because of all the hypocrisy.

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

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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