Btw. I've been a bad movie blogger. I've seen three movies..three older movies and I've given no notification. My apologies. I've ranted about them so much with friends that I think I'm just going to give you short reviews.
Whip it! 6.5 /10
Similar to the Disney movie Ice Princess, except for the fact that this movie does not force the female lead to move to a more feminine sport. Also the main character Bliss is not required to pick between to things that she's interested in rather she's learning to be honest with her mother about what she likes and what she doesn't. I like it because it makes a variation on films like Ice Priness that show women having to make a choice between intelligence and beauty. Also Ellen Page is in it. Anyway Drew Barrymore Directed it, and for a first time director she did a good job.
Alice In Wonderland.4/10
Now I've never actually read the story/book/whatever so I don't know how that would have effected my movie watching What I do know is that Tim Burton needs to pay The Wachowski Brothers for the Matrix remake known as Alice In Wonderland. I've seen The Matrix [and the rest of the trilogy] hundreds of times so for every second of this movie I knew what would happen. The graphics were [somewhat] cool enough for me to give this movie a five if...the character development made since. I never felt like we saw Alice become the character she was supposed to. Now in The Matrix there is a huge slavery allegory [if your a big Matrix nerd like me] but in this movie there is a similar situation except with the idea of the institution of marriage is much like slavery when it is forced upon women.Granted if Tim Burton ever considered hiring black people in his films that may have changed. [Although with the amount of blood in Sweeney Todd I appreciate the lack of characters... I think] However the acting was good I mean Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are in it so I can't say don't try to watch it. Tim Burton's done better.
Avatar. 2/10
[There will be spoilers if I thought the movie was good I'd spare them from you but um...not the case here. ]
I hope I'm a good enough writer to allow my complete and utter hatred of this movie not to ride roughshod over this blog post. It gets a two because the landscaping is pretty. However every other creative thing that was done in this film: the language and the bodies of this alien land and the avatar allowed the movie to portray racism and sexism in this film. The film is basically [as I've ranted] and updated version of Pocahontas except the Pocahontas like character, Neytiri , is "technically" not grounded from any "historical" events and also Pocahontas was Native American while the actors in this film are black. Other than that the race of the people are given away by the voices and by hair of the tribe. Oh sorry the clan because the people who are in control of this alien group are called c[k]lan leaders which i found dreadfully inappropriate. Structurally speaking however the film has flat characters who seem to have no real motivation. I could go on and on about this um so I'm going to think of five things.
- Black people are constantly told in movies/media that we are not equal to white people. In this film the John Smith type character or Jake is in a wheel chair and part of the reason that he enjoys being in this Avatar body, which makes him look like the aliens, because he gets to have legs. And in a short period of time he becomes able to fight just as well as people who have been for their whole lives.
- There is a lot of sexism. There are two white female characters both of them have some sort of masculine attribute one likes science one just kicks ass and both of them die. However there is this black female character,Neytiri, who is a good fighter but her plot is about understanding and loving this white dude for the [lying, accomplice to murdering sack of shhh] person he is on the inside. Her plot is only about staying within a focused box inside a heterosexual relationship. Her whole being is about making Jake happy and [sexually] fulfilled.
- Although I hate 99.999% of Pocohontas but the movie was still in a way about her here though I'm forced to identify with this asshole that what realizes after he has sex with this woman...er native "wait maybe I shouldn't take their resources and bring death upon them.
- I'm going to try to say this a quickly as possible. Black men in movies are represented as evil murderous rape-y degenerates who if they manage to be honorable will die before you really get to know anything about them There are two black.... er alien men in the film and they die. Surprised? No. So we are left with the white male character Jake who is like this savior of these black females and then the rest of the tribe. There is never a moment in the film where anyone offers the possibility for the women to protect themselves or work with Jake as an equal.
- So in the book Feminist Film Theorist [which I have listed on the side] there is a lot of discussion about the importance of the female voice. Watching this movie made me feel like I was taking a test on the book like "how many things can they do wrong with reference to her voice." well... when she has something important to say they will switch to this new language that James Cameron made up but the movie will tell us that it's not important because we don't get subtitles. & since the langauge is made up there is no way for anyone on the planet to understand what she is saying. She does a lot of screaming and yelling but:
I could go on but I just realized how long this has been. But I'll let you know how Repo! The Genetic Opera is.Kaja Silverman explores the concept of the female voice in her book The acoustic Mirror (1988) [e]xtending her analysis to the soundtrack Silverman argues that 'classic' cinema is obsessed with eh sounds produced by the female voice. Women's voices are invariably tied to bodily spectacle...while women may scream cry, prattle or murmur sweetly int he course of any film they have little or no authoritative voice int eh narrative their speech is characterized as 'unreliable, thwarted or acquiescent'...[T]he female voice is associated with involuntary utterance. The involuntary utterance Hollywood tries most to extract from woman is the scream.. Meanwhile a third strategy ascribes linguistic incapacity to the woman -- giving her voice an accent, speech impediment, or an idiosyncratic flavor, which serves to fix the voice tot he body and also lessens it's discursive authority. (Chaudhuri 45, 53)
Credits
Picture comes from http://www.moviesonline.ca/movienews_13315.html
Quote comes from Feminist Film Theorists by Shohini Chaudhuri.
0 comments:
Post a Comment