feminism

Feminism in Media

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

In modern North American society, feminists have about as bad a rep as a man goosestepping down the street with a Swastika on his shoulder. That’s not to say that everyone necessarily thinks that women should get back into the kitchen and collectively make us a sandwich. Rather, it would seem to me that both men and women are sick of feminists shoving their agenda down the public’s throat. I’m sure there’s a good deal of failed communication which is at the root of this problem (this is a huge generalization but from my observations, feminists don’t bother to explain their views to the uninitiated and get really angry when anyone goes against them). There’s also the issue that many people think that feminism is beating a dead horse – after all, aren’t women equal to men in society now more or less? I’m not exactly versed in women’s studies so I’ll leave that particular question to someone else to handle.

In any case, despite the stigma which is attached to feminists, I do have to say that I have really noticed considerable sexism and misogyny recently in the media I have been viewing. Three 2013 releases have gotten me thinking about the state of feminism in film today: World War Z, Gangster Squad and (to a much lesser extent) Machete Kills. World War Z is what really kick-started this entire article for me. If you saw the movie, then you probably know what I’m talking about – the entire first half hour of the film features Brad Pitt protecting his useless wife and equally useless daughters who seem to be doing their damnedest to get them all killed. I can guarantee that no one walked out of that film thinking “wow, I really liked Gerry’s wife and kids, they were great characters!” Now I’m not saying that the women should have suddenly picked up machine guns and blown away the zombies while making an obtuse point that women are as good as then men (a la 80s action films). Rather, it would have been nice if they had done… I dunno, anything. Sure, Karen can try to keep her children safe, but she can do that by trying to fight off the zombies sometimes. Or maybe she can not call her husband in the middle of an important life-threatening mission (and subsequently getting a lot of people killed). Oh and when Karen and the kids are holed up on the aircraft carrier, maybe they could try to help out? Hell, read up on the original ending of the film – it was supposed to be even more misogynistic than it ended up being.

Clearly the writers only threw the female characters into World War Z to be plot devices. In a movie like World War Z which feels like it was written and directed by committee, it’s clear that the studio didn’t give a damn about how the women were portrayed in the film or that casual misogyny would affect their bottom-line. In fact, I’m surprised by how well it did and was received in spite of this glaring issue. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Chinua Achebe’s essay “An Image of Africa”, where Achebe decries Joseph Conrad for reducing Africans and the continent of Africa in Heart of Darkness to nothing more than a plot device. While I don’t entirely agree with Achebe on his criticisms, he does make a good point, that reducing people and places to plot devices strips their history and identity away, making them little more than a reflection of the male protagonist.

If World War Z kicked off this article, then Gangster Squad sealed the deal that I was going to have to write about it. I was actually very surprised by how Gangster Squad handled women, although considering that it was a rip-off of The Untouchables I probably shouldn’t have been. I’m not really referring to Emma Stone’s character either, the generic femme fatale love interest (and plot device to add some tension for good measure). Instead, I’m referring to basically the only other female character in the film, O’Mara’s wife, Connie. Like World War Z, the women in the film are reduced to plot devices who the male characters don’t seem to actually be all that invested in. The film tries to be uber-macho, with the protagonist O’Mara dealing with organized crime the only way he knows how – by shooting it in the face. Of course, Connie whines to him that he shouldn’t be risking himself because she can’t live without him. Obviously, the point this puts forth is that violence is a man’s realm and passivity is for women… and according to the film and it’s hilariously hamfisted finale, violence is the only thing that gets results. Of course, the whole movie’s a complete fabrication, although you might have figured that out when you saw some of the over the top action in play. Regardless though, it seems that the whole “action gets results” message the film tries to get across is total bunk, making the entire film even stupider in retrospect. That said, I will acknowledge that Connie does get one surprisingly interesting scene where she actually helps O’Mara pick out his “gangster squad”.

Which brings me to Machete Kills. I actually don’t have a huge beef against it in regards to sexism or feminism or anything like that – it’s a tongue-in-cheek exploitation film and therefore it gets a lot more leeway than a mega-blockbuster like World War Z or “historical” film like Gangster Squad. However, it did remind me of a Cracked article in which the authour stated that women rarely get shot in the head on-screen in American cinema. To sum it up, the article states that “the reason that we so rarely see women getting their brains splattered? Masculine violation of, and domination over, a woman occurs on her body and not her head”. Machete Kills actually seems to subvert this idea, since in the opening minutes a female character is shot graphically in the head, on-screen. However, near the ending a pair of women fight and the more physically domineering of the pair shoots the other in the head, but this is left off-screen. The implications there are interesting, since that character’s actions seem to make her androgynous (not that she’s really overtly feminine anyway). I don’t really have any real profound conclusions to give in regards to that, but it’s certainly an interesting observation that’s worth keeping in mind and mulling over.

Before I close, I’d like to mention another example in a video game I played recently, called Lollipop Chainsaw. Again, it’s a tongue-in-cheek exploitation venture so it gets more leeway, not to mention that video games in general have a pretty big sexism issue. However, while I found the game to be quite fun, there was one annoying aspect which I found very grating and more sexist/misogynist than any of the objectification in the game. This aspect was that the enemy dialogue almost always consisted of gendered insults – seriously, nearly every time an enemy yells at you they call the heroine a “slut” or “whore” and, on one particularly colourful occasion, a zombie declares he’s going to “fist his ass with her face”. Ahem. Maybe if it had happened once it would have been shockingly funny, but when the game barrages you with that sort of dialogue over and over it just becomes annoying (at best).

Anyway, hopefully this little write-up has shown that as much as we love to hate them, feminists do have a purpose in society. Equality is still a work in progress, and media still has a way to go before it is truly adequate. Besides, equality doesn’t have to equal hamfisted morals, it can be an epic and subtle action romp like Dredd (seriously, buy the damn movie already!!!).

Movie Review; Project X (2012)

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to preface this review with a bit of a personal event which happened to me recently. On Saturday, March 16th around 9pm, I was riding the bus on way home. Shortly into the trip, the bus stopped to pick up a dozen teenagers just dicking around together. When they got on, they were loud, they were brash and they were disrespectful. And that’s before they started throwing ice at the bus driver. The bus driver tried to get them to stop being morons and let him get on with his job, but they started taunting him. Meanwhile, a couple of them which had already gotten aboard started holding the back door open so their friends could get on for free (as if the driver would let them on board after that…). Soon enough, they driver kicked all of the teens off the bus and started driving away as they started to punch and threw ice at the bus. The thing is, I knew when I saw that big crowd of kids that nothing good could come of it. Sure, while that might be prejudice on my part against teens, and while they are subjected to that sort of prejudice on a frequent basis, it’s not exactly unearned. In general, teens (especially groups of teens) are f–king self-absorbed morons.

What does that have to do with Project X? Basically everything, as you’ll soon see.

 

As a bit of background, I had heard about Project X being like the found-footage version of American Pie, but it didn’t really interest me. But then, much like with Noobz, I read an article about how the movie was really, really terrible on multiple levels. Maybe I’m a bit of a cinematic masochist, but I find this sort of indictment irresistible. Nevertheless, even I wasn’t prepared for exactly what it was that I was signing up for.

I’m not even going to mince words or build up any sort of uncertainty about what I thought about this movie, but rather I’m just going to state it upfront and outright: I absolutely loathed it. I was taking notes as I was watching it, and these notes read like a descent into madness – my first note was literally “less than 1 minute in, when the guy does a crotch grab and then starts yelling ‘HEY, I WANT SOME PUSSSSSSAY!!’ I know I am going to hate this”. By the end, my notes have lost coherence, becoming little more than garbled swear words decrying the movie, its characters and the filmmakers. The only consolation is that I get to write this review to try to capture why I hated it so much… I hope you enjoy this, because I know that I am going to.

 

First of all, it should be noted that Project X is a part of the found-footage genre. Now despite what you might think, I actually am not a found-footage snob like some reviewers. In fact I have quite enjoyed the majority of the films I have seen in the genre, such as The Blair Witch Project(which was quite frightening), Cloverfield, REC and Chronicle (which, in my humble opinion, really represented an evolution of both the superhero and found-footage genres). In fact, the only found-footage movie I didn’t really like was Diary of the Dead, but not due to the filming style, but rather because of the weak story and characters. All of these films took a central gimmick (the hand-held camera) and kept it consistent, using it in interesting ways (especially Chronicle). However, I felt that Project X used its central gimmick incredibly ineffectually. For one thing, it feels like it is really nothing more than a gimmick, used because it’s popular right now (a la, Paranormal Activity) and costs less to make. While this is a more minor issue, the use of the camera doesn’t really have consistency – the perspective is largely based around a single camera, but without warning it jumps to someone else’s camera a few times during the movie. In Chronicle this made more sense because the singular camera wasn’t what was important, but rather surveillance in general, but it feels like little more than convenience in this film. Finally, and most importantly, the camera is used in an extremely unnatural way. I’m not talking the Cloverfield-style “put down the camera and run!” sort of unnatural – I can live with that. What I mean is that the cameraman will document stuff which makes absolutely no sense for him to capture as a guy who is filming for a party.The movie forces in “quiet moments” where two characters talk privately to one another (you can tell they’re emotional because no one is talking about banging bitchez) or parts where the camera is watching from far away and yet still perfectly captures the dialogue going on. Even little things like changing angles during a conversation are forced in and just break the illusion of consistency. Then there’s other issues – why do they have a cameraman documenting a party which hasn’t even been planned at the start? Why did they get a cameraman who they don’t even know? Why are they documenting using an expensive camera when they’re just a bunch of teenagers? Honestly, it doesn’t make any sense and really breaks the illusion.

Moving on to the characters, who happen to be some of the most obnoxious douchebags I’ve ever seen in a movie. The most grievous offender is Costa, a loathsome little shit whose only priority and care in life is getting laid. I think he was meant to be endearing in his selfishness, like Stifler in American Pie, but he just comes across as a massive asshole. Maybe that’s because Sean William Scott is a much better character actor than Oliver Cooper, or because Stifler always got his comeuppance, or maybe even because he had redeeming traits. Whatever the case, this does not apply to Costa. He is gleefully irresponsible, self-centred, sexist and homophobic, even playing pranks to get babies to cry for a laugh. Holy shit, no I did not watch the North Korean propaganda version of Project X by mistake, the guy I just described is one of the freaking heroes of the movie.

The other characters aren’t even worth going into detail on because they can be summed up in a sentence or two. The supposed protagonist, Thomas Kub, is basically just a geeky teenager caught up in a party that he can’t control. His friend, J.B. is a fat loser, and that’s literally all you need to know about him. Kirby is the generic love interest who Thomas (and his friends for that matter) somehow doesn’t notice is not only really hot, but also has a crush on him for whatever reason. Finally there’s Alexis, the popular girl at school who, again, wants to bang Thomas for some inexplicable reason. Alexis Knapp (the actors in the film share their characters’ names for the most part) claims that she wanted her character to be more than the typical “hot chick” archetype, but that didn’t come out in the movie at all.

Okay, so by my tally that leaves us with a cast of flat characters and then one massive asshole to round it out. Well that’s fine and dandy, but terrible characters alone don’t sink a movie – after all, I quite liked Final Destination 5, and the majority of the cast there were pricks. So what did I think of the movie itself then? Well let me put it simply: less than 15 minutes in, I wanted to turn it off. The characters were so obnoxious that it was painful to watch. Not only that but there’s also a lot of empty space filled with pointless stuff, such as the couple minutes in the film where the main characters corner Costa in a bathroom stall and dump garbage on him… never before has mean-spirited pranking been more boring. Or how about the part where Costa makes pelvic thrusting motions at a lawn gnome for 10 seconds before deciding to steal it in little more than an obvious plot contrivance (since it turns out that the gnome was filled with ecstasy). Then there’s the pointless stuff which was just plain gross – I thought it was screwed up enough that they decided to film a girl taking a piss on the driveway (which she didn’t seem to have a single problem with), but then they also show another guy getting gang pissed on. BLOODY HELL. Ha ha, teenage antics and all that, right?

Anyway, the party gets ridiculously out of hand, and the neighbours come to try to break it up because it’s 11:30pm and the guy can’t get his freaking baby to go to sleep because of all the damn teenagers being morons. Sounds like a pretty reasonable request to me, but then again I’m not an abhorrent dick like Costa. He basically tells the guy to screw off and then his security team freaking tasers the guy out of nowhere. WHAT THE HELL. This guy is then treated like he’s a massive dick, when he’s acting totally reasonably.

 

You might notice that I haven’t really focused that much on the actual party that the movie revolves around. Well, what can I say? It’s a video of a party. There’s lots of time spent watching people drinking, doing drugs, running around naked and just acting generally irresponsible. It’s like watching a video of fireworks – sure, it might have been cool to watch for real, but do you really care about it when it’s just a video? For that matter though, how the hell did no one die at this party? J.B. does a freaking roof jump and breaks his pinky finger like it’s no big deal (he’s literally laughing about it), and a guy with a freaking FLAMETHROWER shows up and starts torching everything. But beyond the ridiculous things which happened in the movie, there were a ton of ways in which one of these idiots could have killed themselves, from overdoses to the parts where people are blowing up f–king beer bottles on the stove all over each other.

As for other issues with this movie, there are many. I could mention that the only reason that the movie features a midget (or, uh, I think little person might be the proper term now?) is so they can throw him in the oven for a cheap laugh. I could focus on homophobia, but I think that it’s really a minor issue in regards to this particular movie. No, the real focus should be on the ridiculous amount of sexism. With the exception of Thomas’ mother and a store clerk, literally every woman in this movie boils down to two things:

  1. Tits, and
  2. Ass

Remember when I was talking about Kirby being the love interest earlier? Normally in a teen comedy of this ilk, such as American Pie, the love interest will generally be fleshed out as something more than the T&A which most of the girls are shown as in the movie, if only by a little bit (in the case of American Pie, think Heather in comparison to Natalia). Kirby barely falls into this category – she’s completely undeveloped and really only serves as T&A half of the time anyway (quite, uh, literally at one particular moment where she steps out of the pool). Of course, she walks in on Thomas with Alexis, but she gets over it at the end because apparently if a guy’s sorry and you throw an epic party then you can get away with anything. Kirby’s hardly the exception though, since every other girl in the movie is ridiculously good looking and overtly sexualized. As far as we’re concerned, they all came to the party to have sex, full-stop. Even the freaking news anchor at the end of the movie is nothing more than a pair of boobs.

 

By the end of the movie, the characters have caused hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions of dollars worth of damage, but there’s hardly any acknowledgement of the consequences of their actions. Thomas’ dad barely even seems to care that his son burned down his house and destroyed his car (in fact he’s almost impressed). The epilogue claims that Thomas is the only one who actually suffered any sort of retribution for his actions (although it’s softened in that he gets Kirby), whereas Costa and J.B. get off completely scott-free. If you actually threw a party like that, you can be sure you’ll be getting a criminal record and probably arrested as well, which doesn’t exactly look great on a resume (not to mention the lack of a degree due to all the fines you had to pay). Possibly worst of all, Thomas is turned into something of a martyr – he was just trying to have a bit of fun with 1500 other people! Why should he get in trouble for that? Putting aside the obvious, this is an extremely irresponsible line of thought, and has already had its consequences – in the wake of the movie’s release, lots of total dumbasses decided to throw their own Project X Parties. The consequences of this should be pretty freaking obvious: millions of dollars of damage has already been caused and at least one person has died. I will reiterate what I said at the start of this review: teenagers are morons. Especially when they get together.

To put a point on things, Project Xwas horrendous. To people who defend this movie by saying that it’s just fun, that it’s not going for any Oscars or anything, I must say this: Terminator 2 is also fun. The difference is though, that Terminator 2 is an awesome movie, whereas Project X is a massive pile of shit. Why watch Project X when you could watch Terminator 2? If you think that’s an unfair comparison, then try this: Shoot ‘Em Up is a stupid movie, but it’s incredibly fun to watch. Project Xwas abysmal. Rather than try to explain just how bad it was, here’s a link to Thesaurus’ entry for “horrible”. There’s only one other movie I’ve seen that I hated more than Project X (and I’m going to withhold it for now because I want to write a retrospective on it sometime in the future).

 
And worst of all?
 
They’re making a sequel.
 
No words can express how I feel quite so adequately…
 
0/10
 
(If you think my score is pretty harsh, then I’ll consider this – even if I didn’t ding the movie an irredeemable piece of shit because of its ethics and treatment of minorities, I’d still harp on it for its awful characters, poor filmmaking and generic story. I think the very best I could muster if I was feeling generous would be a 2/10. So, either way you slice it, it’s still a cake made of shit.)