First, I should let you know that Faster was a fail for Heroine Content. If you saw it, can you also let me know what the point was of the dramatic car thing he did when the cops were chasing him after the bank job? Thanks.
Okay, first up, the film that changed its name so the boys wouldn’t stay away: Tangled.
Tangled: A Celebration of White Femininity by Renee at Womanist Musings:
The world is anything but equal and this is evidenced by what bodies we choose to celebrate and what bodies we choose either to denigrate or ignore. Each day that a little White girl turns on the television, or opens a book, she can see multiple representations of White Womanhood.
Movie Review: Tangled (with a note on Megamind) on Viva La Feminista:
As a feminist parent, I wish I could pre-screen every movie and TV show before my daughter views it, but I just can’t. Thus this review is more for that purpose as opposed to whether or not it is a good movie. In otherwords, if you kid is begging you to see this movie, but scream at the thought of another princess movie, this is for you.
Next up, Sucker Punch, which came up when we asked what new releases we should be watching. I had a few links saved already from when the first trailer came out in July, none of which reassure me at all:
- Can Zack Snyder floor his critics with Sucker Punch? at The Guardian‘s film blog.
- Genderlicious: Zack Snyder and Sucker Punch at the Bitch blogs, which linked to:
- Sucker Punch: Stilettos, Booty Shorts, and Machine Guns at Feminist Fatale.
Finally…
We never posted about this spring’s post Do Kick-Ass Action Heroines Move Gender Stereotypes Forward or Just Perpetuate The Current Ones? on Women and Hollywood. It discussed Violent Female Action Characters in Contemporary American Cinema by Katy Gilpatric from Kaplan University, published in the journal Sex Roles. I never could figure out what to say about it because I just didn’t think the study’s DRAMATIC! FINDINGS! were all that dramatic, or previously unknown to anyone with even a passing familiarity with action movies. Or, well, movies.
As I’m cleaning out my bookmarks at the end of the year, though, I looked at it again and I did find some of the numbers interesting. Gilpatric analyzed 300 top moneymaking action films between 1991-2005. If I’m reading this right, about 1/3 of those films had at least one woman who did some kind of ass kicking, but only 7% of those female characters were what Gilpatric calls “a true action heroine” meaning the lead action character.
Just so you know.
This post was originally published on Heroine Content, a feminist and anti-racist movie blog that ran from July 2006 to May 2012.