Grrrl on Film

Having spent the weekend filling my freezer with late summer goodness from my local farmer's market and finding out about Lisa Jervis’s new book Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating, the Grrrl on Film has nourishment on her mind.

And I’m not the only one, the recent release of Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia has placed Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking back on best seller lists. And last weekend marked the kickoff of Canning Across America – an event organized by a nationwide ad hoc collective of cooks, gardeners and food lovers committed to promoting safe food preservation and the joys of community building through food with how-to classes, demos and home canning parties in cities around the country.

As a result, I’ve been thinking about women and food in film and have come up with a short list of women preparing and/or enjoying food on screen. Some of these I’ve seen, and some I haven’t, but here’s a delicious sampling to whet your appetites!

Thank you all for a great conversation this week regarding the question “Is Quentin Tarantino a feminist?”

Responses were as varied as could be expected and ranged from expressions of the power and strength one may feel after watching Zoë, Abernathy, and Kim, and a desire to adapt Beatrix Kiddo’s better qualities; resilience, confidence and physical prowess.

Many thoughtful points have been made regarding Part 1 of this discussion both at the Bitch Blog website and on Bitch’s Facebook Page.

Before we head on to Part 2, I’d like to encourage y’all to check out an excerpted sampling of comments . . .

 

After several years, a lot of script work and much trademark frenetic verbosity, writer/director Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited Inglourious Basterds – his “bunch of guys on a mission” film set during the Second World War – finally premieres on the 21st of this month.

With a nearly all-male cast it’s arguably a return to the tough-guy roots of his earlier movies Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), where manly-men bantered over such topics as the meaning of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and the global appeal of hamburgers – regardless of whether they’re measured in imperial or metric units.

But the famously fast-talking cinephile’s works of the past decade have not been meditations on masculinity, rather they are odes to women warriors of B-movies past – women we've been highlighting and exploring to some extent in this blog. Tarantino drew influence from such iconic characters as the hot-headed go-go dancer Varla of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965), the vigilantes Coffy & Foxy Brown, and the Samurai, Lady Snowblood, (as well as his own mother), to create some of the most intriguing and racially diverse female characters in contemporary American film.

Though they often repeat the contradictions inherent in representations of women in Exploitation films, and thus come from already problematic source material, the kick-ass heroines of Jackie Brown (1991), Kill Bill (2003 & 2004), and Death Proof (2007) still show visceral examples of female power that women can get excited about.

So this week we’ll take an in-depth look at these characters and Tarantino’s work, and hopefully have a discussion regarding the question: “Is Quentin Tarantino a feminist?”

 

“You can still be feminine and have balls.” – Tura Satana

Like Jean Seberg, who was profiled here last week,Tura Satana is an actress with a larger than life biography. She was born in Hokkaidō, Japan in 1935 to a silent movie actor and a contortionist . . .

Stretching the definition of “film” just a bit for today’s Grrrl on Film Actress Spotlight as Nichelle Nichols (1932-) is most recognized for her television, and later film, role as Lt. Nyota Uhura.

 

 

The trailer for the long-awaited movie adaptation of Greg Rucka’s and Steve Lieber's Whiteout premiered last week, and the crime-thriller starring Kate Beckinsale looks pretty damn good. But why, oh why, did they need to include a shower scene in the freaking trailer?

Jean Seberg is one of those fascinating Hollywood stories that reads like the plot of a dark Hollywood movie. Her tragic story is lesser known than say, Marilyn Monroe’s – though she was just as great a beauty. And her politics caused more damage to her life than that of her acting contemporaries – ultimately leading to her death at the all too young age of 40.

 

More attractive than tough, the sexually progressive and confident space adventurer, Barbarella was played by Jane Fonda in an eponymous 1968 film. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis and directed by her then-husband, Roger Vadim, the movie was based on the early 1960s erotic comic created by Jean-Claude Forest– who served as a set consultant on the film.

I promised that one of the themes we’d be exploring in this blog is bad movies with feminist potential. You see, in my research I’ve found that some of the most interesting female characters, particularly female action heroes and/or proto-feminists, are to be found in some of the most poorly-produced movies. Considering this, it is perhaps ironic that many better funded action films with A-list actresses have been flops.

Since I've been able to spend a lot of time with popcorn and a notepad, throughout the summer I’ll share with you some of the most empowered (if all too often also problematic) women of the best low-budget classics of sci-fi, horror, blaxploitation, and action in a series of Grrrl on Film Cult Movie Posts!