Interstellar Trailer: Women and Movies

Interstellar opens November 7. Christopher Nolan is writer/director. Thought I liked his work, but this week after checking, I like Batman Begins for the cinematography, so Wally Pfister is the appreciated one. Watched the Interstellar trailer and in less than 3 minutes got the gist of this storytelling. The trailer is a microcosm of what is egregious about the automatic treatment of women in movies. Fade in: Earth is a dust bowl. Check. Need to find another planet to f--k up. Check. Enter Our Hero. Socially responsible dad. "Now go out there and save the world." Seated demurely behind him on the journey is The Damsel. She may have been crying. On the distant planet there are the mountains seen from the sea. No, wait. Not mountains, waves. The woman is in the water, don't know why. Our hero is in the ship. She says "I'm not going to make it." Cut to hero in the ship. "Yes, you are." It would take more time than I'm willing to donate to check off the many things that are wrong about this trailer. The damsel is clearly defined as the weakling, and it took only 2 minutes and change. I don't really care about the guy. I do care how easy it is to position the man as strong, socially conscious, good parent AGAINST the crying, I can't make it female. And I'm furious and offended. The trailer makes no pretense of even trying to trick me into watching this film. To balance, I send appreciation and encouragement to the person/persons attached to this project who thought of women viewers and what they might think.

The Sapphires Is Not About a White Guy

The Sapphires is a 2012 film made by Goalpost Pictures and distributed by Hopscotch Films in Australia. It is based on a play produced in 2004. It is about four indigenous women who formed a singing group and toured Vietnam in 1968. Now the DVD is being released in the US, distributed by Anchor Bay Entertainment. You can find it on iTunes. I'm not going to post the Anchor Bay DVD cover here because it makes me crazy mad to look at it. Instead of the 4 women of color that the movie is about (as beautifully shown in the Goalpost poster here), the Anchor Bay cover features Chris O'Dowd who plays the manager of the group front and center. In the back under a blue screen are the women, whitened and obscured for the American audience. So far, I've tweeted a couple of times about this, written to Anchor Bay and outed The Weinstein Company, which owns 25% of Starz Media - Anchor Bay's parent company.  Some of us have been eager for the DVD release. This is a movie about women - about women of color. We need this movie. What we don't need is a bunch of white boys deciding what the image for America needs to be. Sexist, racist, maddening, infuriating - I'm exhausted from the anger. The American entertainment industry is a cesspool of misogyny, and I can no longer accept that this is normal, and that this is the way entertainment will continue. Whitewashing women. Disappearing women. What can we all do to encourage women filmmakers, discourage Hollywood from their anti-women practices, and bring some measure of equity to the industry? Keep shouting foul when foul is delivered. I won't buy this film until the cover is changed. I won't buy anything distributed by Anchor Bay Entertainment until the cover is changed. Or Starz Media, or - I am unhappy to write - from The Weinstein Company. 25% complicit is too much. I'm out 100% until this nonsense is corrected.

The Throwaway Woman Plot Device

Watched Ides of March last night. Decent writing, great acting, but I felt twitchy at the end. Today I'm bothered. A couple of lines trouble me. A young woman confesses she's been out to f--k the man she's with, expects nothing, and won't tell anyone. Dialogue ensues, he tells her she's quite mature. It's a clinker line, doesn't make any sense. Mature? And once more we have what I'm going to start calling a Throwaway Woman part. A construct, a plaything, a victim, a plot device; completely erasable. Ides of March compounds the fault by introducing a replacement Throwaway Woman at the end. This is a cynical movie, full of steely jawed guys and dolls out to get what they want from everyone and everything, squeeze out the juice and toss the pulp away. The woman journalist is salivating like a junkie for the scoop in every scene she's in. Power and glory addicts. That's fine. Humans are a greedy bunch, politicians moreso, and I like that Marisa Tomei gets to chew up the scenery with the boys. I know I'm hypersensitive to women roles in movies, that there are movies I don't want shown on the same planet I'm on, movies I will never watch. I choose for potential good writing and elevated story sense. Even in the movies I do watch, too high a percentage have a Throwaway Woman. Usually she's in the credits as First Victim, or Dead Girl, no name. Cannon fodder. When Throwaway Woman is a major player in the piece it reminds me that our culture is like that. Filmmakers probably don't give a single thought to this lazy plot device. It's more than lazy, though. It's insidious.

Why Am I Talking to YOU?

Lynne Morgan Spreen [Any Shiny Thing] first YouTube video.