Guerrilla Girls get ready for war on the European art world
A Hollywood producer has created @femscriptintros to expose the majority dolts who bang out this crap.
I would dispute the headline though. This is how it’s done. Not sure about the word “not.”
No one should be crying for Jennifer Lawrence’s bank account, but there is more evidence here of systemic gender discrimination when it comes to money…
Gumpert added, “The current talent deals are: O’Russell: 9%; Cooper: 9%; Bale: 9%; [Jeremy] Renner: 9%; Lawrence: 7%; Adams: 7%.”
MPAA now in the crosshairs…
Soloway directed this year’s Afternoon Delight, a story about a housewife, played by Kathryn Hahn, who discovers she likes to get it on far more and in different ways than she’d previously thought. In a discussion of her film, Soloway reveals that to get the film the R she promised to her distributors she had to cut the scenes depicting women enjoying having sex…
The MPAA is happy to give a pass to “boys being boys,” but any picture that portrays a woman taking pleasure in sex on her terms should be treated like obscene material.
The slow burn of eternity weighs down this effort, which is more of a drama than a thriller. The film fared poorly at the box office despite being well shot and well acted. The media world has been inundated with the vampire menace, and these variety don’t have exceptionally magical powers. They are the working class undead, struggling through afterlife.
Another point that may have sunk the film is that it is a woman’s story, a story of a prostitute and her illegitimate daughter, up against the patriarchy of the old world. Lead actress Gemma Atherton called it a “post modern feminist” story. The prostitute/vampire must adapt to sexism in life as well as in the afterlife. One would think the female movie going audience would support such a story, but it didn’t materialize.
Perhaps prostitution is still so taboo that it repulses the female viewer, although Julia Roberts didn’t suffer much for Pretty Woman. Go figure.
Saoirse Ronan, of Hannah fame, is the main character here, the daughter of 18th century prostitute Clara. The two are very different from one another, with Eleanor (Ronan) raised in a religious orphanage away from her mother’s life for her first 16 years.
Now the female empowerment may have been undermined by the crucial role of a particular male character in the plot. I doubt that this was important to the film’s financial distress. It doesn’t have grand special effect laden, over the top, computer generated nonsense for the trailer. It doesn’t try to outdo Avatar with big “wow” visuals to draw in the largely numbed audience. As a small production, with small people and small lives, it’s more of a specialty film, despite its Young-Adult style main storyline. This combination of an oversaturated vampire market, a numb over-marketed public and a more realistic universe killed the film. Perhaps the hard edged sexual tinge kept away the young audiences as well, as they would need to sneak in to even see it.
But the movie may be vindicated with rentals. Who knows?
Article complains that sex, violence, torture and rape are allowed on US television, but not a girl masturbating. Explanations? (I don’t watch TV.)
From Press Play:
I don’t go in for “torture porn,” and I don’t know if I agree with this series. I’m still catching up with part 2 right now. You can watch and decide for yourselves.
There’s a myopia to some of these articles that irks me. It’s that she doesn’t seem to care what the stories themselves are saying — the entire point of this blog, btw — but only if they are directed by women, produced by women, or about women’s issues. It’s a hard numbers kind of argument, without regard for the actual propaganda content of the films. I tend to see it a bit differently, to say the least. Kathryn Bigelow’s pro-torture opus does not end up in my plus column, least of all because she happens to lack a penis. There are issues beyond who gets to direct, important issues, society-wide issues of war, peace, empire and authoritarianism.
That’s my simplistic response to the article, I admit, but it does cover my main gripe: Hollywood is part of a fascistic system of social control, selling authoritarianism in partnerships with increasingly despotic surveillance states. Whether those hammering out the next propaganda extravaganza possess dicks or not is not my primary concern.
Her myopia is the expected result of issue politics, where support is thrown behind tyrants based on narrow sets of interests and narrow understanding. The counterargument to that will of course cite how this isn’t strictly “narrow” when talking about half the population (gender bias).
The concept holds though. By obsessing over one metric, one parameter, we ignore the rest. This is why Obama can turn America into Orwell’s worst nightmare: at least he’s not Bush.
Now I’ve heard debates over this Hollywood gender problem, the underrepresentation of women in Hollywood,and usually the first thing trotted out by the defenders of the establishment is that the box office dictates the decisions. Is this true? It’s not just perception, they argue, but actual ticket sales that determine these movies getting made the way that they are. After all, these shlock Superfests sell tickets, and they sell them to male and female. Hard to argue against that.
Women do make films about women all the time, but they aren’t the ones raking in the dump trucks of money. Melissa Silverstein:
“… but the sad news is that the numbers have remained consistently dismal for the last decade. In 2012, in the US, women made up 18% of the directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films.”
On the top grossing films???
Well who made that happen?
That’s the audience, not a dark cabal in suits smoking cigars and sticking voodoo needles into Barbie dolls.
Now if an argument could be presented for more marketing dollars affecting this equation, and male movies being typically funded at much higher levels (probably true) then there would be a more solid foundation, but Silverstein doesn’t even bother to go there.
The counterargument will remain that this is what the movie-going audience is “demanding” according to the strict economic dogma of supply and demand.
If women themselves aren’t supporting women up on the silver screen, then how can this be considered some great intractable problem?
“When we don’t see women, and we don’t see women’s stories, we get the message that women don’t matter as much, that our stories don’t count, that our experiences are less valid.”
Ever tried watching TV?
It’s ALL WOMEN ALL THE TIME!
Perhaps women prefer the comfort of their living rooms compared to the excursion to the overpriced, smelly, crowded MultiPlex where you overpay for popcorn, candy, liquid junk and have to endure the cell phones and blather of nincompoops while you try and follow the film. Then you must miss scenes while you head off to pee in the middle, and perhaps some jerk will start a fight or shoot up the place and kill everyone.
Maybe there are other factors involved.