In honor of Mar. 8 being International Women's Day, I'm posting these 2 articles about women in film.
Jan. 6, 2017 "The feminine mystique of Underworld and Resident Evil": Today I found this article by Tina Hassannia in the Globe and Mail. I have seen a 3 of the Underworld movies and I like the action.
I have seen the first Resident Evil because my friend Leslie brought the movie to my house in 2004 (when I was 19 yrs old) and we watched it together. I thought the movie was average and fun to watch. I later watched Resident Evil: Afterlife on TV. I didn't really like that movie.
Furiosa. Katniss. Foxy Brown. Cinema isn’t exactly devoid of action-movie heroines, but the pickings have been historically slim, and often problematic. For every Ripley, there’s a come-hither Catwoman. Outside of a few notable exceptions, such as Pam Grier and Michelle Rodriguez, few action heroines are women of colour, and rarely are they protagonists. Even more infrequent are action-heroine movies written and/or directed by women.
Which leaves most ass-kicking women as nothing more than ciphers – sexualized plot devices left to act as motivation for the male heroes, when not delivering blows in heels, as if that’s a real thing.
That was a criticism made against Charlize Theron’s Furiosa when Mad Max: Fury Road came out in 2015, triggering a slew of think pieces that either announced or denounced the movie as a feminist masterpiece.
Two of the longest-running current movie franchises featuring action heroines are rarely talked about with that much fervour, though: Underworld, starring Kate Beckinsale as vampire warrior Selene, and Resident Evil, starring Milla Jovovich as zombie-killer Alice. Both are arguably feminist characters. But no one seems to care.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Underworld, whose next chapter comes out this weekend, it’s a vampires-versus-werewolves series that is surprisingly worse than Twilight. It focuses on Selene, a strident blood-sucker who defies the pecking order of her coven to unravel a conspiracy headed by a sinister patriarch.
Over time, the Underworld series developed a few female characters who weren’t necessarily killed off or used as sex symbols, but the focus of the series is mostly on Selene as the lone heroine. (The franchise’s werewolves, a.k.a. the Lycans, have almost no female members, presumably because the idea of hairy women is too scary for movie executives.)
In the first two films, the sole friend Selene made is a guy she rescues named Michael, but then he becomes a hybrid of the two species and … sorry, I didn’t mean to put you to sleep.
It’s a bad movie, and the subsequent films are even worse. Not much changes in this basic feminist formula throughout the series, though. Every film featuring Selene has her fighting the patriarchy in one form or another – if only it weren’t centred on a character constantly clad in a vinyl catsuit.
Resident Evil is more complicated. Unlike Underworld, Resident Evil is teeming with female characters, both good and evil. The story, such as it is, revolves around a zombie virus that has overtaken the world.
In each film (the sixth, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, opens at the end of the month), Alice must fight against Umbrella, the faceless corporation that created the virus, to get back her freedom in one enclosed facility after another, often saving her friends, too – or perhaps her foes.
(The series constantly switches between having characters be good or evil, or back to good again, either because they’re brainwashed, a good clone, an evil clone, or some other sci-fi hack.) Paying homage to the Lewis Carroll classic, Resident Evil also features as its ultimate villain an artificial intelligence called the Red Queen, voiced by a chilly British girl.
But where the Underworld series wants to have its feminism exist alongside its mindless sex objects, the Resident Evil series has, at the very least, inspired some film scholars to argue for its legitimate feminist underpinnings.
Female friendship is a large component of the films, while Alice’s use of silence as a power and survival strategy is the subject of entire essays.
Others, meanwhile, have noted the sexualized nature of Jovovich’s outfits throughout the series (most of whose entries have been directed by Jovovich’s husband, Paul W.S. Anderson). But in the more public sphere of cultural journalism, we rarely encounter such debates, and Underworld is ignored almost entirely. Why do so many mainstream critics care about Furiosa and Ripley, and not give an iota of notice to Selene and Alice?
The fact that the latter two roles appear to be more cipher-ish can’t entirely explain it. Is it that the characters are not just empty, but forgettable? Adding to that problem is the franchises’ lack of critical esteem.
The highest Rotten Tomato Scores either series have received were for their initial movies: Resident Evil (2002) with 34 per cent “fresh” reviews and Underworld (2003) with an even more paltry 31 per cent. Yet they continue to proliferate new films, likely because they still earn enough profit to justify their relatively low production costs, at least compared to more male-oriented blockbusters.
Underworld and Resident Evil are supposedly mindless films, but does that mean their portrayals of women deserve any less attention?
In a way, their mediocrity actually make the movies more feminist. Why must we always focus our attention on representation in quality or prestige pictures, or franchises with legion fandoms like the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
It would be a mistake to think that feminism only belongs in “important movies.” To be truly progressive, feminism should surpass aesthetic quality and cultural significance.
Critically appraised movies like Alien and Mad Max: Fury Road only come along once in a while. And the umpteenth think piece about Wonder Woman has already been written, well before the film has even come out.
Just because we must lower our aesthetic expectations when we watch a movie like Underworld doesn’t mean we should lower our expectations of its portrayal of women, or ignore it entirely.
Selene is by no means an engaging character, but at least she’s fighting against the patriarchy. That’s worth talking about – even if it means discussing vampires and zombie killers in earnest.
Jan. 27, 2017 "Dear Angelica moves viewers to tears": Today I found this article by Lindsey Bahr in the Edmonton Journal:
"Dear Angelica " is a 12-minute illustrated story about memory, movies and grief that premiered at the Festival last Friday. In the film, a girl, voiced by Mae Whitman, lies in bed writing a letter to Angelica (Geena Davis), a famous movie star who we also discover was her mother.
We swirl around in her memories of Angelica, shifting between real life and images from movies she's been in and back again. The viewer spins around taking in all the environs with Angelica, whether she's in a shootout car chase or drifting into space. More than a few viewers shed some tears into the headset by the end.
It's the first animated experience created entirely in VR.
Writer and director Saschka Unseld, also the Oculus Story Studio Creative Director, wanted to tell a story about how both family and films help shape you as a person.
Unseld, who'd wanted to do illustrative VR for a long time, had always struggled with the coldness of computer animation.
"It's really hard to keep the human touch and texture in it," he said. "If something is directly illustrated, you feel more human touch, you feel more hand, you feel more character."
It's why he settled on illustrator Wesley Allsbrook to create the hand painted images. They had a coder develop a custom system so that she could draw directly into the program.
"In VR it's important to counter that tech coldness with artistry and the human touch," Unseld said.
"Dear Angelica" is already available for free for those who have Oculus headsets. For everyone else, it'll be a little more difficult to see, but not impossible.
"It's important to us to always be in places like Sundance or Tribeca or other place where we can show these things to people who haven't had interesting VR experiences yet," Unseld said. "It's still early times and there's a lot of preconceptions about what VR is and isn't."
"Dear Angelica" proves that VR is not just a cool immersive experience — it's also art form that's capable of pulling at your heartstrings.
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