A celebration of popcorn fare, girl rockers, and female friendship with Kentarō Ōtani's 2005 film adaptation of Ai Yazawa's NANA, apopular shōjo manga series.
In the wake of critical interest over Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, a comparison between Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock and Dario Argento's Suspiria, two mid-70s features about how young women escape a Victorian-era boarding school and a European ballet conservatory.
My thoughts on Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence, an adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara's book about her mother and female Aboriginal relatives, who escaped an Australian re-education camp in 1931.
A discussion of 2009's Toe to Toe, writer-director Emily Abt's full-length feature debut about two teenage lacrosse players who develop an interesting relationship despite differing racial and class backgrounds.
We close week five of our series of movies that pass the Bechdel Test with the first star-making vehicle for a lead actress. Honduran American novice America Ferrera charmed audiences with her feature debut in director Patricia Cardosa's 2002 indie sleeper Real Women Have Curves, which was distributed by HBO Films.
A consideration on the politics of revolution and widow's ashrams in Deepa Mehta's Water, which takes place when Gandhi was rising to power and India and closes the director's elements trilogy.
Today's entry marks the first official selection of the horror genre. It isn't my intention to project ill will toward familial bonding the Friday after Thanksgiving, as I'm having a fine time with my partner and parents. However, maybe this post will entertain those waking from food comas or folks heading back home.
I'm a recent convert to horror movies. I started my master's program in media studies four years ago dead against them. Apart from being an easy scare, I was convinced as an avowed feminist that there was nothing salvageable about such a violent genre. I was quickly put in my place by some members of my cohort, whose feminist identity was defined in part because of their horror film fandom. My appreciation began with reading portions of film studies professor Carol J. Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. I learned a great deal from her theorization of the archetypal Final Girl, a smart, resilient, often androgynous protagonist with feminist potential for whom Halloween's Laurie Strode serves as an exemplar. A smart commenter brought up the Final Girl in my recent post on Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl. The influence of Clover's ground-breaking book continues to be felt in the academy, and insinuates itself in movies like Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. I continue to be inspired and challenged by commentary from sites like Dark Room and Fangirltastic.
Another important aspect of horror movies that needs more critical inquiry is the foregrounding of female homosocial bonding. Recent releases star groups of women engaging in physically exhausting or extreme activities. British writer-director Neil Marshall's 2005 feature The Descent focuses on six women who go spelunking in an unmapped cave system in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina.
Reception is important when thinking about movies. So far, the titles I've selected played in a theater at some point, whether on a festival circuit or during a theatrical run. This wasn't always the case with the work of Toronto-based queercore pioneer G.B. Jones. Though her movies were screened at festivals, some also played in galleries or make-shift event spaces.
I have some misgivings about entering into the fourth week of the series and only now addressing a picture with a transgender protagonist. These concerns are made worse by the cruel dramatic irony that the main character in Southern Comfort is a man who dies of ovarian cancer. It is complicated by the fact that the selection in question is also the first documentary I have considered for the Bechdel Test Canon. I meet most documentaries with incredulity, encountering components like editing with skepticism rather than regarding the finished product as truth.
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