Too many dicks on the dance floor, part eleventy-million.
I may go see Salt. I'm not sure about anything else. I kind of want to see Inception, just for the sake of the dreamscapes, but I've been dragging my feet on that all month and I don't know if I'll get around to it.
Here's the thing: I am sick of movies. Specifically, I am sick of a) movies that are full of people doing things that I dream of doing, only those people all have penises, and b) movies that are full of people with vaginas! only they are doing things that bore me fucking senseless. I am tired of accepting half-measures, and cheering for tiny improvements like "hey, this woman had sex with a guy and wasn't slut-shamed!" or "hey, the villain goes after the hero's love interest because she is a threat to him all on her own, not just to motivate the hero with fridge logic!" that are too far-and-few between. I honestly just don't feel like rewarding Hollywood with my money when they persist in utterly refusing to make movies that I want to see.
So in the context of my current grouchy, a review like this makes me rage so hard my head feels like it's caving in. Immediately, it claims that the film in question is "a movie that takes seriously (or for that matter has fun with) a woman’s autonomy, her creativity, her desire for something other than a mate." Please note, this is about a movie where a (rich, white) woman is dumped by her husband, has her self-esteem dented by the divorce, and then travels around the world in order to heal herself up enough to, eventually, get into a new relationship. I'm aware of how movies are structured: the thing that closes up the movie is generally (unless it's a really wacky kind of avant garde movie) the conclusion to the arc, the answer to the question, the solution to the problem. If the movie opens with the woman being wounded by love and ends with her being healed enough that she can have new love, I don't care what the tools are that she uses to get from point A to point B, this is not a movie about something other than a woman's quest for love.
(And don't get me started on the paragraph on the first page where the reviewer announces that the class consciousness that makes one aware that traveling around the world for months without having to worry about money is "a way of trivializing her trouble on the grounds of gender without having to come out and say so". Dude. Look up "kyriarchy". Look up "intersectionality". Now look up your own ass and discover that this is where your head has been this whole time. People saying JESUS CHRIST RICH WHITE SOLUTION TO PROBLEM MUCH is not the same as saying WOMEN ARE TRIVIAL CREATURES AM I RITE. I can divvy out the rich from the white from the woman just fine here, and mocking two out of three doesn't mean I'm dissing the third.)
I think the main thing is that I am really, really not thrilled by having the current movie-made-for-women! being all about the romantic travails of some rich white chick who eats boring food (no, really, apparently she stays within recognizable white American boundaries by eating spaghetti and pizza) and thinks it's made profound by the fact that she's in Exotic Lands and is supposedly doing stuff about herself, only it's still just to heal herself enough to hook up with another man, even while it's claiming that it's SO TOTALLY NOT ABOUT GUYS but it clearly is. I am bored stiff by the idea.
Hollywood is just plain not giving me what I want. You know what I want? I want to watch women having adventures, in pursuit of not-romance things that they are passionate about, being heroic and doing things that they are skilled at, having a hell of a time and coming up grinning with blood in their teeth and joy in their hearts because they are doing the thing they love most in the whole world. When am I going to get to see a female superhero instead of another Batman movie where he is full of brooding manpain because the woman he's promised himself as a reward for being such a good guy has moved on and is going to marry someone else is dead by Joker? Where is my female version of Apollo 13, or Moon? (Seriously, that last, you can drop women in it and barely change the script and it would make even more sense in a profoundly hideous way.) Where is my female version of All the President's Men? with two intrepid female reporters, one of whom will in time grow in stature and pompousness to the point where she can be on the side of another Republican president who's lying his ass off to America? (YES I AM LOOKING AT YOU, WOODWARD, YOU PRICK.)
Just, goddamn, fuck this shit, I am so over it. It's bad enough that I have to deal with having pretty much every movie in existence being made for someone who's not me, now I have to have some poor excuse for a feminist trying to tell me that some dumb rich-white-American-woman-travels-to-Other-Lands-to-heal-her-lovesick-soul is what I've been longing for. It's not. It's just the same old, same old.
Crosspost from Dreamwidth, where there are
comments. You can comment here or there.
Here's the thing: I am sick of movies. Specifically, I am sick of a) movies that are full of people doing things that I dream of doing, only those people all have penises, and b) movies that are full of people with vaginas! only they are doing things that bore me fucking senseless. I am tired of accepting half-measures, and cheering for tiny improvements like "hey, this woman had sex with a guy and wasn't slut-shamed!" or "hey, the villain goes after the hero's love interest because she is a threat to him all on her own, not just to motivate the hero with fridge logic!" that are too far-and-few between. I honestly just don't feel like rewarding Hollywood with my money when they persist in utterly refusing to make movies that I want to see.
So in the context of my current grouchy, a review like this makes me rage so hard my head feels like it's caving in. Immediately, it claims that the film in question is "a movie that takes seriously (or for that matter has fun with) a woman’s autonomy, her creativity, her desire for something other than a mate." Please note, this is about a movie where a (rich, white) woman is dumped by her husband, has her self-esteem dented by the divorce, and then travels around the world in order to heal herself up enough to, eventually, get into a new relationship. I'm aware of how movies are structured: the thing that closes up the movie is generally (unless it's a really wacky kind of avant garde movie) the conclusion to the arc, the answer to the question, the solution to the problem. If the movie opens with the woman being wounded by love and ends with her being healed enough that she can have new love, I don't care what the tools are that she uses to get from point A to point B, this is not a movie about something other than a woman's quest for love.
(And don't get me started on the paragraph on the first page where the reviewer announces that the class consciousness that makes one aware that traveling around the world for months without having to worry about money is "a way of trivializing her trouble on the grounds of gender without having to come out and say so". Dude. Look up "kyriarchy". Look up "intersectionality". Now look up your own ass and discover that this is where your head has been this whole time. People saying JESUS CHRIST RICH WHITE SOLUTION TO PROBLEM MUCH is not the same as saying WOMEN ARE TRIVIAL CREATURES AM I RITE. I can divvy out the rich from the white from the woman just fine here, and mocking two out of three doesn't mean I'm dissing the third.)
I think the main thing is that I am really, really not thrilled by having the current movie-made-for-women! being all about the romantic travails of some rich white chick who eats boring food (no, really, apparently she stays within recognizable white American boundaries by eating spaghetti and pizza) and thinks it's made profound by the fact that she's in Exotic Lands and is supposedly doing stuff about herself, only it's still just to heal herself enough to hook up with another man, even while it's claiming that it's SO TOTALLY NOT ABOUT GUYS but it clearly is. I am bored stiff by the idea.
Hollywood is just plain not giving me what I want. You know what I want? I want to watch women having adventures, in pursuit of not-romance things that they are passionate about, being heroic and doing things that they are skilled at, having a hell of a time and coming up grinning with blood in their teeth and joy in their hearts because they are doing the thing they love most in the whole world. When am I going to get to see a female superhero instead of another Batman movie where he is full of brooding manpain because the woman he's promised himself as a reward for being such a good guy has moved on and is going to marry someone else is dead by Joker? Where is my female version of Apollo 13, or Moon? (Seriously, that last, you can drop women in it and barely change the script and it would make even more sense in a profoundly hideous way.) Where is my female version of All the President's Men? with two intrepid female reporters, one of whom will in time grow in stature and pompousness to the point where she can be on the side of another Republican president who's lying his ass off to America? (YES I AM LOOKING AT YOU, WOODWARD, YOU PRICK.)
Just, goddamn, fuck this shit, I am so over it. It's bad enough that I have to deal with having pretty much every movie in existence being made for someone who's not me, now I have to have some poor excuse for a feminist trying to tell me that some dumb rich-white-American-woman-travels-to-Other-Lands-to-heal-her-lovesick-soul is what I've been longing for. It's not. It's just the same old, same old.
Crosspost from Dreamwidth, where there are
comments. You can comment here or there.