RETRO REVIEW: Labryinth

More than one reviewer has talked about the fantasy of the beautiful and dangerous man who represents the scary but intriguing side of coming into one's own sexuality, especially when it comes to everyone's favorite punching bag. I don't think this fantasy is a bad thing, especially if put into its proper context, like a villain. And thus, for once we move away from Edward Cullen and come to Jareth, the Goblin King of Jim Henson's late film Labyrinth.

Unlike many girl geeks of my age I do not have fond childhood memories of this movie, although I remember very much remember wanting to see it when I saw an ad on HBO. It never happened until a few weeks ago, and while it probably would have blown me away more back then, it's certainly more interesting to me now.

The film follows Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), a 15-year-old girl obsessed with fantasy worlds who is having a hard time with her father's new marriage, particularly her new younger brother, Toby. Told to look after the crying baby for the night, Sarah in a fit of rage calls upon the Goblin King (David Bowie) to take him away. He does that, arriving in a puff of glitter, and when Sarah fails to be seduced by him, he tells her she'll need to complete his labyrinth in 13 hours.



The HBO ad I saw (unlike the trailer I posted above) really played up the "Sarah must save her brother" angle. This intrigued me as a kid, because I'm a big sister with a little brother. (Plus, I remember reading a picture book with a similar plot that seemed more about the sibling relationship.) Yet quest tales are never about the object, but about the journey. Toby will be saved, but he's not the important part.

Jennifer Connelly is a great actress ... now. I loved her in Requiem for a Dream and The House of Sand and Fog and thought she was one of the saving graces of Ang Lee's Hulk. That being said her acting here is kind of rough and somewhat shrill. Of course, she was young, but it makes her performance somewhat distracting. Nevertheless, I did like Sarah, and enjoyed her journey. I liked that she was a protagonist who remained feminine, using her lipstick to mark her path (even if it didn't work).

And of course, Sarah meets very strange creatures and even stranger perils along the way, and makes some friends, as one does on quests. I felt a particular attachment to Ludo, a giant hairy beast who is also an Earth Bender.

Yet the real conflict on a both surface and metaphorical level is between Sarah and Jareth, and about how Jareth tries to seduce Sarah throughout the movie. As a growing young woman, Jareth's seductions upon Sarah are twofold. He tries to entrance her with the delights of childhood. At one point a goblin takes Sarah to her room and entreats her to stay with her old toys. In a scene that probably still makes Harry Knowles cry, Sarah breaks away when she exclaims, "It's all junk."

But there's also the enchantments of adulthood. Jareth, played by Bowie at his glam-rock best and wearing very tight pants that leave little to the imagination, remains a romantic figure to Sarah. He's perfect for the job, of course. Others have spoken about how androgynous males appeal to young ladies because they seem "safer" and less scary, and Jareth walks that scary/safe line perfectly. The sexual awakening elements of the story are left appropriately in subtext, but that makes them no less powerful. I'm by no means a hardcore Bowie fan, but I don't know who wouldn't find this fantasy ball sequence enchanting.



But one can't really give into the sexy/scary type, whatever Twilight tells us. Edward Cullen can raise the spectre of being scary only to has his author forget about it, but Jareth must remain in the realm of fantasy and Sarah must return. Even if Jareth offers to be her slave, she must reject him.

Although perhaps not completely. Even though we must all grow up, one can still return to childhood for visits, as Sarah assures the friends she made in her fantasy world when they turn up in her room in the final scene. Meanwhile a barn owl, the avatar of the Goblin King, remains tantalizingly watching through the window. He's still not Edward Cullen, though. He does fly away.

RETRO REVIEW: Hellraiser

(Heavy spoilers below.)

One of the many things my high school writing teacher, Mr. Harvey, said that I'll never forget was his criticism of the Tomb Raider movie. Unlike Indiana Jones, who gets knocked about and dirty during his movies, Lara Croft spent her movie clean and things came just a bit too easy for her. There was no sign of struggle. The very opposite can be said for the heroine of Hellraiser, Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence), who fights tooth and nail through most of the movie and ends up dirty but completely successful. Of course, that's not exactly uncommon in horror movies, but it's surprising that movies about superheroines have dragged their feet on this "bloody struggle = humanizing" ideal when it comes to women.

Hellraiser is not a perfect movie. For a movie that's supposed to be about S&M demons it's one of the unsexiest things I've ever seen. (And at the risk of sounding cruel I'll just say Clare Higgins, who plays the femme fatale/evil stepmother was maybe possibly just a teeny bit of a poor choice for her job as attractive seductress. Also, her acting is rough.) Plus it seems to be the product of its time in the effects. The movie is short at a little over an hour and a half but spends a lot of film showing off the reanimation of Frank as a monster, mostly because I think they were amazed they were able to do it. Still, a lot of the scenes that I think were supposed to be scary just elicited a "yuck" reaction from me.

Yet I had to admit Kirsty earned my sympathy far more than heroines of better movies, such as Laurie Strode of Halloween or Nancy Thompson of Nightmare on Elm Street. (And of course she is better than whoever the hell was the "Final Girl" of Friday the 13th but almost all movies period are better than Friday the 13th so that's pretty easy.) The story begins in an unspecific foreign land, where sadist creeper Frank buys a puzzle box, takes it back home, and solves it, which sends him to an alternate reality where he's tortured and killed by Cenobites, the aforesaid S&M demons. Later his milquetoast brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Larry's wife move into the house. The wife, Julia, is still obsessed by her masochistic passion for Frank but the husband is trying to make their sour marriage work. The marriage is bad enough that Larry's daughter Kirsty has moved away, even though dad and daughter still love each other.

It was this part where both the movie and Kristy won me over. Kirsty and her father have a sweet relationship built on mutual caring for each other. For a few brief shining moments I would have said Larry reminded me of my father, but then Larry cuts his hand pulling a mattress up the stairs and almost has a fainting fit and I thought, "No, actually, my Dad is not a complete wuss."

Anyway, Larry's blood drips onto the floor and revives Frank into little more than a talking skeleton with eyes. Julia finds Frank later, and their mutual attraction is enough to convince Julia to go out and find human sacrifices so he can be whole again. Yet Frank wants more of Larry's blood, and while Julia tries to dissuade him, it'll ultimately come down to Kirsty to defend her father's honor, even if she can't save him.

I came into this movie completely blind beyond knowing what the head cenobite Pinhead (Doug Bradley) looked like. The male iconography, while striking, does the movie something of a disservice, because I feel it's essentially the struggle between two women. The movie follows Julia before moving onto Kirsty. Julia is motivated purely by a man, and while it annoys me a bit because I think S&M relationships are more complicated than that, it means something that Julia is kowtowing to Frank while Kirsty's main goal is to protect her father.



Since Kirsty won me over in her first scene I spent a lot of the movie worried she would get killed, and grateful when she didn't. This is a good thing, because a hero looks better if their safety is at first in doubt. Kirsty survives her first confrontation with Frank, even stealing the puzzle box. However, the situation gets worse when she solves the box, not knowing what it is, and unleashes the Cenobites, who will kill her with their games. She offers to return Frank to them if they spare her life.

At this point Kirsty has already fought off Frank the first time and then been chased by a monster through a labyrinth, but she returns to the house and Frank has peeled off her father's skin and is wearing it. In the final confrontation Kirsty not only has to fight Frank-as-her-father, but all of the Cenobites, and while her mostly-a-nonpresence of a boyfriend helps her out a bit, it's mostly her that does the fighting, and she's also the one who solves the puzzle, defeating monster after monster and a collapsing building as she does.

And throughout the fight, she gets messy. Kirsty's a bit more glamorous than the average heroine, but she gets dirty and banged up in a way that's both realistic and not exploitative. And, of course, even with the set-up for a sequel, she still saves the day and comes out with her boyfriend by her side. It's not much, but considering how rough the genre can be to women, it goes a long way.

Why I am Not a Harry Potter Fan ... (A Remix)

In 2007, when I lived alone in a new state where I had almost no friends, I learned what it is to be a geek and be alone: It really sucks. If you haven't gone to a comic book convention by yourself I wouldn't recommend it. Sure, you might pick up nice swag but what's that without a friend to show it to and compare your bounties? Same with going to a showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show without another Virgin to buoy you. Half-way through throwing toilet paper at the screen from your empty row you'll realize you're not having fun.

Still, I have an affection for the night I went to the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows at the Borders in Newark, Delaware. Uninterested in any of the contests or most of the rigmarole going on within the center of the store, I hunkered down in the Shakespeare section along with two preteen girls with braces on their teeth and a guy inexplicably dressed in a black t-shirt and red clip on bow-tie getting a backrub from his Goth girlfriend. I drank hot chocolate from the Seattle's Best Coffee and chatted with the girls. After midnight hit I still had to wait until they called my letter (which was J or something) to get in line for my book, and ended up taking a nap on the floor, my head on a copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker that would also be coming home with me. I left that night happy to have experienced a special event the likes of which probably never would be seen again. Okay, so the midnight release of Breaking Dawn quashed that dream, but it was nice while it lasted.

If you actually read the title of that post, I am sure you are confused. I like Harry Potter. I've read all the books and seen all of the movies, about half of them when they came out in theaters. In one memorable instance I went to the movie of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with my college buddies after an afternoon wedding/civil union ceremony and ended up sitting in the theater in a ball gown. I think the books are a lot of fun and occasionally quite clever. The movies a bit less so (what the heck happened with the sixth?), but I still like them just fine.

Yet I am not a Harry Potter fan. I know Harry Potter fans, I have walked among them. I know who they are and what they do and how they think.

Harry Potter fans hate Harry Potter.

The main focus of the fans' hate is J.K. Rowling, the author and mother of the franchise and Richer Than The Queen of England (TM). Unlike Twilight fans, who are quick to shun any who speak badly of Stephenie Meyer, in the Harry Potter fandom hatred of J.K. Rowling is encouraged if not required.

They hate that J.K. Rowling got it wrong from the beginning, making Slytherin a house that was always more evil than ambiguous. They hate that Harry didn't get together with Hermione, his actual true love, instead dating Ginny, who is a whore because she dated TWO GUYS before bestowing a kiss on Harry Potter's pure lips. They hate Hermione and Ron together, which is sure to degrade into domestic violence for some reason. They hate that the books didn't focus on the true protagonist of the series - Ron, Hermione, Snape, Neville Longbottom or Draco, depending on who you talk to - and instead focused on a rules-breaking athlete who got fame for not dying.

Harry Potter fans hate Harry Potter.



(These excited children are not Harry Potter fans. The average Harry Potter fan is 30 or something.)

Harry Potter fans hate Harry Potter books. They hate that the first book was too reminiscent of Roald Dahl's writing, and believe the increasing size of the books was not due to a world growing more complex, but due to the writer's own increasing ego. J.K. Rowling needed a better editor. Nevertheless, the books could have always been longer, if only to get in all the parallels between Snape, Dumbledore and Tom Riddle. Do you know all the parallels? J.K. Rowling doesn't, and this makes Harry Potter fans angry.

This is the crux of Harry Potter fans' complaints with the series. J.K. Rowling does not understand her own work. Did you know that Blaise Zabini should have been Italian instead of black, and also possibly a woman? Did you know that werewolves are a metaphor for homosexuals? Did you know that when the centaurs took Umbridge out into the woods they raped her? J.K. Rowling doesn't, and this makes fans angry.

Harry Potter fans hate Harry Potter.

There is also material supplemental to the books, and Harry Potter fans hate this too. Why should Crookshanks' origin be revealed in a charity book? Who does J.K. Rowling thing she is, making books primarily to raise money for charity? And don't even get them started on the upcoming encyclopedia, whenever that will come up.

Harry Potter fans hate Harry Potter.

There have also been seven going on eight movies based on the Harry Potter series, and fans hate these too. They hate the first two movies, directed by that over-literal dork Chris Columbus, and that they never got to see Rik Mayall as a ghost. They also hate Alfonso Curazon for putting the kids in street clothes instead of robes, as well as for making it okay to actually cut things. They hate the sixth movie for blowing up the hollow, and the seventh movie for being two parts, and it will probably still not get in all the details that they want.

Also, Pottermore will probably suck.

Yes, Harry Potter fans hate Harry Potter, which of course begs the question: why do they read and watch and consume and write fanfics about Harry Potter? Why the real life Quidditch games? Why the cosplay? Why the bands? Why?

I don't know. Ask a Harry Potter fan. I'm not a fan of Harry Potter.

This post was stolen heavily based on The Complex and Terrifying Reality of Star Wars Fandom by Andrey Summers. I still haven't seen Green Lantern and thought it needed adaptation.

A few belated thoughts on X-Men: First Class ...

I know the comics blogosphere has moved on to bashing/playing apologist for Green Lantern, but work and the odd business that comes with going on vacation has prevented me from being on time and possibly relevant. So let us travel weeks back in time and discuss X-Men: First Class.

First things first, I did like the movie. I've never liked the X-Men movies as much as the majority of the geek community but it was a large step up from X-Men: The Last Stand. What would have otherwise have been a mediocre reboot was elevated by the characterization of the central characters and the performances of James MacAvoy (Professor), Michael Fassbender (Magneto), Jennifer Lawrence (Mystique) and Kevin Bacon (Sebastian Shaw). I don't think it's a great movie, but it's an enjoyable movie, and considering I had low expectations for this movie given that it takes its title from a solid, unique X-Men comic series that this movie has nothing to do with I was overall pleasantly surprised.

Yet, I always have a certain problem with the X-Men movies ... nay, the X-Men franchise in general, and that's this. Now, let's say you're a preteen girl with limited funds. Let's say said preteen girl is interested in superheroes. She watches the 90s X-Men cartoon but for the backstory largely learns about said superheroes not from comics so much but from the trading cards and profiles she reads on the Internet. Basically, this is how it plays out.

Cards/Profiles: "Hey Kid! Look! We have girl superheroes! Lots and lots and lots of girl superheroes! We have ones that fly and ones that control the weather and ones that make fireworks and ones that fuck your shit up and eat a whole sun! Read us! We are fun! Come play with us forever!"

Actual Stories: "Giant mutant horde fights other giant mutant horde. Wolverine mostly does everything."

That's not to say that I've never enjoyed an X-Men story or never found X-Men stories that didn't follow that formula, but the first three X-Men films, as much as I liked aspects of them, were basically that formula. Also, did I mention Wolverine is my least favorite X-Man and Storm my favorite? Yeah. So I've basically been brokenhearted since 2000.

Still, for all the heavy focus on Wolverine, and as much as I appreciate how this movie focused more on XavierMagneto (they are one word) and Mystique, I still feel like the first three movies had more for my metaphorical preteen self than this one. Did no one in the boardroom go, "Hey, so ... in our metaphor for racism it seems like all the people who end up on the good side are white American males. Should we think about this?"

Granted, I'm far from the first person to complain about this and whatever I write here probably won't be as eloquent as what David Brothers said. But sheesh, we couldn't have even had a good team that spanned the globe, even the white parts of it? I know there were some bad accents in the last films but what is an X-Men story without terrible accents, anyway?

So given that in the end we close with no female superheroes, this is what we do have.

Mystique - Now, despite her small amount of lines, I've always liked the movies' Mystique. I even dressed up as her in high school, which was probably a bad idea given that I was too lazy to add the spines and didn't cut my hair so nobody knew who I was. (Some guys liked my costume, but probably for the wrong reason.) Still, as much as I appreciate what a good sport Rebecca Romijn was for wearing all that makeup and terrible contacts in the first three films, the future Katniss Everdeen was definitely a step up, and her storyline was compelling. It's essentially a tragedy (the girl who could have been good turns evil), although the star of the tragedy doesn't see it as one.

Emma Frost (January Jones) - On the other hand, Emma starts off as a bad girl who is powerful but underappreciated by her boss Shaw, who at one point requests she get him ice for his drink, spends many of her scenes in her underwear and the climax of the movie largely out of the action. In the end she switches to working for the other bad guy, most of her motivations largely unknown. I think the character of Emma Frost has been largely mismanaged in recent years, and this tepid portrayal didn't help. At least she got a decent fight scene.

Angel Salvadore (Zoe Kravitz) - Well, her makeup and the effects for her powers were nice. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, this was the case of the only black female character turning evil soon after the one black male character is killed, and most of her motivations for doing so are not well developed.

Moira MacTaggart (Rose Byrne) - It's kind of standard that the role of the normal woman is diminished in comparison to the heroes, but despite Moira's importance to the plot in a lot of smaller ways, I came away without much of an impression of her beyond when Magneto choked her. Compared to the work done with Pepper Potts in the Iron Man movies and Jane Foster in Thor, I was rather bummed.

I am aware that a two hour movie isn't the time to have an in-depth exploration of every character's psyche, which is okay, but I do wish these movies ostensibly about teams weren't one-man shows. This movie does improve the formula by making it more of a three-person show, but I think my wish for a glorious team movie where all characters - male and female, all different races - get to shine is still a dream for the future.

***

By the way, not that this is related to anything said above, but Good God Internet, you are hard on Xavier.

I mean, look, we all agree that the prejudice metaphor has long been a part of the X-Men mythos but as a result of this it occasionally runs up into ideas that are rather retrograde, such as the idea of proving yourself to be the "good type" of minority. It's totally an issue that should be talked about, and is a problem to be expected, given that the principal creators of the franchise were 1960s-era liberal Jewish men and thus saw it through that lens rather than the lens of 21st century progressives. I do think that comics and sci-fi lean on racism as a metaphor in ways that are often uncomfortable and borderline offensive rather than working to make their stories more diverse (i.e. District 9 and James Cameron's Avatar), and X-Men can occasionally fall into the trap.

But are we really going to side with the guy who wants to solve the problem by killing many people and starting a war to kill many, many more? Don't get me wrong, I like Magneto, but the guy's least death-filled plan to solving this problem in the comics is to bring all the mutants to their own island. I do not think the best way to dismantle the kyriarchal system is to kill everybody or take your toys elsewhere. I find fandom painting him as the good guy who knows what's really going on and how to really solve the problems as a bit disturbing.

Yes, I was there when Xavier said things like "We have the chance to be the better man" or "They're just following orders" but Magneto also counteracts this and when he does Xavier has nothing to say. Xavier is a hero who is sometimes wrong, and pays the price for it, losing his best friend and sister. He lives in an imperfect story, but he's an imperfect character who suffers for his beliefs and mistakes, and I don't see how some in fandom seem to not find that compelling.

Just because Twilight is stupid doesn't mean girls are stupid

For a long time I resisted reading the Twilight series, first because I heard it was bad, and then because everyone had read it and said it was bad. What could I possibly add to the discourse that Cleolinda Jones or Stoney or countless other parodies hadn't already said? (This one is the best, by the way.) Yet as I began to listen to the discourse in the geek community around Twilight, I decided I did have something to say: I usually fucking hate it when men/guys talk about this series.

Let me back up. Of course, pretty much everyone knows the story by this point. Sullen average teen girl Bella Swan moves to Forks, Washington and meets a boy named Edward in her class who is really beautiful but is also a vampire and blah blah abstinence metaphor blah blah bad writing blah blah vampire is with her and then leaves her and then the book goes blank and wastes trees blah blah Team Jacob blah blah Edward's back blah blah love triangle goes on forever blah blah Edward takes the engine out of her truck blah blah marriage and horrible death baby scene blah blah imprinting blah blah small perfect piece of our forever.

Okay, look. I have no great love for this series. I think it's problematic on levels of sex and race. Even considering that as a Young Adult novel it is printed in big text and big margins it is still WAY too long for its flimsy content. Stephenie Meyer's plots are incompetent, her sense of suspense nonexistent and she seems to have an allergic reaction to writing anything resembling a fight scene. As a journalist her attempt to write a news article in Eclipse gave me hives. I don't like Edward. I hate Jacob even more. Meyer constantly brings up moral dilemmas ("Is it right to get help from vampires who eat people?") and then cops out on them ("Well, we just won't think of all those people they're killing out-of-state."). And did I mention the length? I know I did, but sheesh that last book was heavier than my copy of Moby-Dick and it's mostly made up of two characters having the same conversation ad nauseum. That's ridiculous.

Still, as bad as the books are, with all their Edward-sneaking-into-Bella's-room-at-night and Jacob-force-kissing-Bella and Bella-turning-into-a-zombie-because-Edward-leaves-her, I don't think they're the world's worst books. They're not even the worst I've ever read. Most people get stuck over the sparkly vampires that don't have fangs, but to be honest there have been so many modifications to vampires I don't in the end think that's a big deal, especially when there's so much more that's discomforting about the series. Plus, there are some genuine high points. I do appreciate how it ends with Bella becoming a vampire and being more powerful than Edward, even if that may be less of a feminist statement and more of me liking girls killing things and getting sick of her whining. Some of the minor characters such as Alice, Aro and Garret are a lot of fun. Finally, when Meyer finally does touch the darker elements of vampirism the book shines. I have to admit when I did decide to read the series I was most looking forward to the terrible vampire birth and in its own way it didn't disappoint. The scene in New Moon when Bella watches the Volturi murder tourists who come into their castle or whatever is another rare moment of powerful writing in the series. There does seem to be something resonant about these books, something that seems to entrance those who love and hate it, in a way that I don't think lesser bad books do.

And, as horrible as these books can be, sometimes people turn the message from "Wow, these books are stupid" to "Wow, girls who like these books are stupid." The commentary thus becomes not how the books fail, but why girls like stupid things. I hate this type of commentary, especially because it comes out as sexism with a feminist mask.

For one, I wish we could just call a moratorium on men whining about pretty boy actors. One because being in a culture where if I complain about sexualized women I'm just jealous and men need their jiggle-vision on video games and sex is awesome if you don't like a woman being sexy get the fuck off this messageboard, but if a guy without a beard takes off his shirt and shows muscles it's giving women unrealistic expectations about men and has to be stopped just makes me want to tear my hair out. Also, I was a teenager when Titanic came out and don't particularly like to feel like I'm back in 1997.

However, more irritating is when commentators take the legitimate complaint of "The romance in this book has a stalkery element" and turn this into "This book will lead girls into abusive relationships," or, worse, "Girls who read this want to be abused." To those who think that, are you kidding me? Did I miss all those news stories in the 1980s where Flowers in the Attic led to an epidemic of girls fucking their brothers? Where is the geek community that rails against how shooting people in a video game doesn't have anything to do kids who shoot up their schools when this garbage comes up?

Look, I'm not saying I'm okay with Twilight's messages. My younger girl cousins read them and the first thing I said to them when I heard was, "If a guy comes to your window at night, he's not cool" but I think they know that anyway. Teenagers aren't always the brightest, but a good number of them know the difference between fantasy and reality, and I think girls deserve just as much credit in this arena. And it is still fantasy. Most of the girls who have a crush on Edward Cullen now aren't going to try to find a guy like him, just as most of the women who like Star Wars aren't going to look for a guy who can crush a man's windpipe with his mind. That doesn't mean that there aren't some fans that take their obsessions to the point where they shouldn't, but I don't think in that respect women are necessarily worse than men.

So some girls like things that aren't very good. If movie grosses have taught me anything, quite a lot of people like things that aren't very good. That's no reason to complain harder about when Twilight fans come to Comic Con any more than when Transformers movie fans come to Comic Con. That doesn't mean that they're both above criticism, or that fans in of themselves can't be criticized, but I think this sort of broad brush isn't fair.

Oh, and guys, please try not to paint a picture of Twilight fans by picking and choosing the worst of what the most disengaged from reality say. You hate that when the mainstream media does that to comic book and video game fanboys. Do unto others.

I feel for Rosalie and Leah like I feel for characters in a bad fanfic

(This post has spoilers for the later books in the Twilight series.)

For a long time now I've tried to make my way through the Twilight book series, but it's been hard, mostly because I can't stand them. While I could read 100 pages in one sitting I often feel I do not want to do so. As of this writing I'm a little past the second book in Breaking Dawn, the final novel in the series, and while I've long been planning to write on the series as a phenomenon I figured that while I'm not done I'd like to talk a little bit about two characters whose depictions really bother me, Rosalie Cullen and Leah Clearwater.



Rosalie Cullen. You know she can't be trusted because she's blonde.

Most people who read the Twilight series and don't like them focus on the problematic relationship between Bella and her suitors, and while there's plenty to say about that I find Rosalie and Leah's stories more jarring as a feminist and as an aspiring fiction writer. For those not in the know, Rosalie is one of Edward Cullen's "sisters," a vampire created by their "father" Carlisle to be a companion for Edward, except Edward didn't love her that way and now Rosalie has her own squeeze, Emmett, and Edward is the primary love interest of Twilight heroine Bella. Leah, meanwhile, is a cousin to werewolf Jacob Black, Bella's secondary love interest, and the only female werewolf in a pack of mostly-shirtless men.

Both Rosalie and Leah belong to that class of characters that probably have a cute name on TV Tropes but I'll just call them "dislikable allies." Both characters are coded as bitches by not only the viewpoint characters - Bella doesn't like Rosalie because Rosalie doesn't like her, and when Jacob narrates in Breaking Dawn large portions of the narrative are dedicated to how loathsome the both of them are. None of the characters seem to disagree with them, either. Rosalie has a husband but while he doesn't diss her we never at any point in the narrative see him stick up for her. And Leah is apparently so loathsome that when the wolf pack splits into two and Leah joins up with Jacob's pack of him and Leah's little brother, Seth, Seth is disgusted at having to be in a pack with his own sister again because she's just that much of a pain.

What is it that sets these characters so apart? Well, Rosalie doesn't like Bella so she's cold to her sometimes. Also, Rosalie is bitter that she can't get pregnant. As for Leah, she's bitter because Sam, the head of the wolf pack, doesn't love her anymore. And ... that's about it. In paragraphs upon paragraphs in this book, author Stephenie Meyer urges us to hate these characters, loathe these characters, laugh at their humiliations, feel triumph at their sufferings and sneer at their joys, all because they have the gall not to be totally happy with the hand fate has dealt them.



Leah Clearwater. Because she's from the First Nations a werewolf she's forever damaged.

Reading the passages with Rosalie and Leah in Breaking Dawn gave me the odd sensation of reading fanfiction where the fanfic writer clearly doesn't like one of the cast members who were meant in the original work to be protagonists. In this common phenomenon, characters who had once been friends become enemies, what in the original work were annoyances and bad decisions become in the fanfic become cruelties and abuses, and the writer seems hellbent on telling the reader any goodwill they have for these characters is wrong, wrong, wrong and we are meant to delight in their repudiation. (This is a frequent occurrence among both fanfics with original characters AND slash fanfics, and the disdained characters are usually but by no means exclusively female.) For those who don't like these characters, these fanfics can provide vindication, but usually I come away from them feeling sad and pitying the characters no matter how I felt about them in the original work. When the fanfic writer, in this instance the equivalent of God, hates you so much, you're automatically an underdog.

What makes it worse is that Meyer, remembering that even negative characters need reasons for the things they do, gives both Rosalie and Leah tragic pasts. While Rosalie's origin is written with this infuriating rose-colored (pun not intended) view of the past where things were so great back before the Internet and the civil rights movement because people cursed less and wore dresses or something, her essential story is that Carlisle made her a vampire because Rosalie's former fiancee and his friends gang raped her and beat her until she was near death. Since she was dedicated to having a normal life with a family and children, she's not very happy about being a vampire, either. Sam used to be in love with Leah, but after he became a werewolf, he "imprinted" on her cousin Emily, a weird and creepy phenomenon where werewolves become obsessed with their "soulmate" after they meet them and said soulmate, always a woman in Twilight, has no choice in the matter. After Leah also becomes a werewolf, her mind is linked with Seth's and all the other werewolves. So she not only has to hear how Sam no longer loves her and doesn't want her around anymore, but how the other, all male, werewolves, wish she would shut up and go away. Also, she may be infertile because she's a werewolf and the males wish she would shut up about her periods because that's gross.

Of course, one could argue that a bad life doesn't necessarily make one a good person. Yet most of the time being unhappy and voicing their unhappiness is these characters' worst sin. I know many have issues with the second part of Breaking Dawn, where Bella becomes pregnant with a half-vampire baby that may possibly kill her but nevertheless wants to keep it, and see those chapters as implying that women should be prepared to sacrifice it all for a baby. Now, I'm pro-choice and think doctors should have a moral imperative to save mothers when pregnancies become dangerous and should always respect the mother's personhood, but in this instance Bella does want her baby, and Rosalie is the only one who completely supports her in that decision. Carlisle helps medically and Edward worries over her, but Rosalie is the one who acts as 24 hour nurse and does favors for her while Alice, who is coded as Edward's good sister and usually plays the role of Bella's best friend, can't stand to be near her because the baby disturbs her psychic powers. Yet because Rosalie is more invested in the baby and Bella, all that work is considered moot if not actively malevolent. Also, Leah should stop whining about being second in someone's heart because only Jacob is allowed to do that. Although if Leah confronts Bella on stringing him along, that's also evil. Granted, she probably shouldn't have done it when Bella was sick from the deathbaby, but I didn't really want to see two powerful men threatening to beat her up for it.

In fact, only men are allowed to be angry and even vengeful against the ones they love. Jacob can want to kill Bella's baby and Edward can disable Bella's truck, but their acts against the heroine don't count. Even among the minor characters, Sam can disfigure Emily and still be the love of her life. Carlisle can turn a woman who tried to kill herself into a vampire but nobody questions his choice and said woman is now his happy wife. We know their theft of a woman's personhood is just temporary and they know best so it's okay, but somehow a woman being bitter can't be tolerated. It's a frustrating, sexist dichotomy, made all the more frustrating because I had to read more than 200 pages of Stephenie-Meyer-as-Jacob whining about how he couldn't have Bella but talking about how Leah was such a bitch for being upset about Seth, capped off with Jacob being gleeful when he got to beat Rosalie up.

Maybe I'm off-base. Maybe everyone else finds these characters as irritating as Meyer intends them to be and I'm the equivalent of those creepy Harry Potter fans who see the Death Eaters as a noble race of aristocrats who have been unfairly maligned by the bullying Gryffindors and not as a rather-obvious metaphor for Nazism. Yet I can't help but look at these characters who've had a harder time than the main characters, and aren't happy about it, and can't help but sympathize as they rage against their clearly unsympathetic creator who set them on that path.

I enjoyed the ladies of Thor

I'm a little late to the party on this film, which came out in the U.S. last week. Yet last week was also the week that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ended its first season, and I decided I'd rather be timely on something that was over than something that would be in theaters for quite awhile. The perils of forcing/limiting myself to one post a week, I suppose. I wish I could do more. (I finished the first Portal video game this week and would love to talk about that too. Maybe at a later point.)

Anyway, given that I'm surely not the only person to wait to see a film until its second weekend in the theaters, I'll report back saying I genuinely enjoyed the new Marvel Comics movie Thor. Now, I've read quite a few comics with Marvel's version of the character but very, very few comics where he's the star, something I hope to remedy when I feel comfortable buying new books and comic book trades again (I have about 150 books to read and need to pay penance. No, that's not an exaggeration). So I knew the basics of Marvel Thor's powers and comic-book mythology surrounding him but very little about the specifics, and while I consider myself a comic fan I came to it as an outside observer, I suppose. (I also don't know much about the original Norse tales, for the record, but that may be for someone else to analyze.)

What I'm trying to say is, with few preconceived expectations, the movie is really fun. I know some people had trouble with the first thirty minutes, which largely takes place in Asgard. I don't quite understand this. The CGI renderings of Asgard alone are really impressive (I watched the movie in 2-D), and if they don't replicate Jack Kirby's drawings exactly they have enough of the feel. Plus, I like sparkly rainbow bridges, battles with Frost Giants and Anthony Hopkins' acting as the All-Father. Kenneth Branagh's directing makes these scenes shine.

I also like the beginning because it's a setup for Thor's (Chris Hemsworth) transformation from an arrogant man (or is it god?) into one who is genuinely good. I know some people are turned off by Tony Stark's arrogance in the Iron Man movies, which doesn't go away even after his transformation into a superhero. I think those who had an issue with Tony Stark will find Thor a lot more palatable. He comes off as genuinely interested in people and kind, especially when he smiles.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Critics seem to have had better things to say about the rest of the movie, where Thor is banished to earth and spends a lot of time fighting hospital staff and acting like what everyone else in the movie thinks is a "crazy homeless person." There is a lot that's awesome about this part. People can debate over whether or not Natalie Portman makes a convincing astrophysicist, but I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised at the movie 1.) creating a scientific team of two women (Portman and Kat Dennings) and one older man (Stellan Skarsgard) and 2.) not having that older man be in charge.

This may be the time to say what I've been trying to say for at least five paragraphs: I really liked the female characters in this movie. I won't say it was so great it completely blew me away or anything like that, but in terms of that it was a solid movie. Portman's Jane Foster may not be my favorite superhero girlfriend, but she's up there. She's charming and funny and clearly feels deeply for Thor even though the movie itself is low on angst. She doesn't fight, but she doesn't have to be rescued, either, which is actually really refreshing. Her assistant Darcy, who also doesn't need to be rescued, provides a lot comic moments in the film, too.

And if you want women battling, there's Lady Sif (Jamie Alexander). Sif doesn't have a lot of fighting scenes, but she has just as many as the Warriors Three, Asgardian male warriors. In fact, while I'm not sure if it's this way in the comics, the movie goes out of its way to make Sif an equal to the Warriors Three, both in her fighting and her attitude.

An aside, one of the Warriors Three (Tadanobu Asano as Hogun) is Asian, and Heimdall (Idris Elba) is black. I have no idea why a bunch of jerks got upset about one and not the other. I have a few theories but it doesn't really matter. Someone always takes the opportunity to act like a complete and total jerk in this situation, whether it's Michael Clarke Duncan as the Kingpin, Jessica Alba as the Invisible Woman or Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (even if that has a reasoning in the comics), and they should knock it off. I mean, it's just unconscionable, especially because few of the same people who are upset about this were upset about Jubilee being played by a white girl in the Generation X movie (yet they'll always call upon that false equivalency, of course). Asano and Elba are both really good in their small roles and it would be better if the background characters were more diverse, anyway.

I guess if I have any complaint about the movie is that I don't have a whole lot to say about Loki. The plotline of the movie is good, but Tom Hiddleston and the character don't leave a strong impression. That's not to say I hated the character, but he seems rather small scale for a God and pales compared to other Marvel supervillains.

Still, I'd recommend it. Kenneth Branagh did a very good job. The sets are awesome, the main character is likable and the female characters are solid. See it at one point, even if you missed this weekend or the first it will still be just as fun.

Thank the Nerd Dieties for "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic"

When Michael Bay's Transformers film came out in 2007, I was one of the only people I knew at the time who had no interest in seeing it. This was before the franchise and Megan Fox developed their toxic reputations, but I'd heard negative things about the portrayal of Jazz (the "black" Transformer), and that a female Transformer had been cut out of the film, so I stayed away. When my younger brother called me pigheaded for this, I said something along the lines of, "Well, they would never give a girl's show from the 1980s a remake treatment! When are we going to get a 'My Little Pony' movie?"

Even at the time I knew my argument was a little silly. I didn't actually want a live action film of multicolored ponies and, to be honest, never really watched the '80s show as a kid. I liked the toys, and to a certain extent I liked the fandom that had sprung up around it when the "generation three" ponies came out, especially the part of fandom that liked to repaint the toys and make them look like Batman or whatever. Still the direct-to-DVD animations for that were dreadful and I can't imagine anyone who wasn't a child liked them in a non-ironic way.

So it was strange when people began talking about My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, especially before I figured out they weren't talking about those aforementioned direct-to-DVD things. Learning that the first episode was a dramatic fantasy battle and the rest of the series was about the ponies having slumber parties and relay races, much like the 80s show that had unimpressed me, left me skeptical. Seeing the new show was different and the animation style had drastically changed didn't rid me of my skepticism. Also, while I'm getting more used to it, I don't like the remade opening theme song. I worked in a children's clothing store between 2009 and 2010 and the aggressive-yet-muzzled guitar work reminded me of a lot of the tunes I had to suffer through on the job.

Still, when I heard Lauren Faust, wife of Craig McCracken, was the creator of this show, I decided to lighten up. And I'm glad I did. I might have not really meant my wish for a remade, better My Little Pony, but I got it, and I couldn't be happier. I've loved watching every episode. I've loved recommending it to my friends. And I've really, really loved recommending it to my younger girl cousins. Especially that moment when they watched the opening song on their iPod and said things like, "We can't wait to get home and watch this!" and "Rainbow Dash is a BEAST!"



What drew me so hard to this show where its predecessors failed is that this show is clever, much in the same vein of McCracken's Powerpuff Girls or Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. There's a lot of Buttercup in Rainbow Dash, and Pinkie Pie is a little bit like Cheese. Also, like both of those shows, you can learn a lot about the characters' personalities from their character designs and their gestures. In former MLPs, the ponies all blended together. Not so much with this one, where changing the color scheme can't erase who they essentially are. Since female characters are often painted with the same brush, this is a cool thing.:


(Found picture on Tumblr. Tell me if this is yours.)

Hyperactive Pinkie Pie and tomboyish Rainbow Dash I fell for at first, but I eventually grew to love almost everybody, even bookish Twilight Sparkle and her dragon Spike, who, by taking a cocky but sweet little brother route, seems to be the best version of this character, which has appeared in all the MLP shows. As you can guess, the show puts the characters into general "types" but mostly ignores negative stereotypes. Apple Jack is a farm pony but that doesn't make her stupid. And while I do think the writers slipped with her a few times, Rarity's love of glamor and fashion doesn't exclude her from having a generous heart. Along the same lines, the writing is very good. It's smart and funny, and while it's not afraid to poke fun at itself, it also doesn't turn into something cynical like the Shrek movies.

Also, this may seem sentimental, but there's one moment in particular that makes me love the show. I grew up a very shy kid with low self-esteem. And when you grow up that way, you tend to get a lot of messages that the responsibility is on you to be different. There's one episode where Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash decide to play pranks on all the ponies. Rainbow Dash sets up a prank to play on Fluttershy, but Pinkie Pie stops her, saying Fluttershy is too sensitive to handle even the mildest prank. What surprised me so much about this is the show 1.) gave what could have a very ditzy character who could potentially run over anyone else the intelligence to recognize another character's boundaries 2.) had a character that could have been a bully step back and say "Hey, you're right." It's a wonderful bit, and something that would have made me feel a lot better as a kid, and I hope it works on the kids out there now.

The show hasn't always been perfect. I'm not sure if Zecora the African Zebra and the Native American buffalo make sense, especially since their episodes deal with racism/colonialism on a metaphorical level and it would be offensive to have racism/colonialism themes centered around a bunch of fantasy characters who nobody has prejudices toward (i.e. James Cameron's Avatar), or are stereotypes that have the unfortunate implication of implying all the regular ponies are coded "white." (Although the fanart of the main character ponies as humans that makes some of them into people of color helps a little bit, I suppose. On a similar note, I have no urge to get into the subject of that gray pony with the silly eyes right now.) And I'm never quite sure if I find the Cutie Mark Crusaders, baby ponies on a quest to get the pictures on their butt which imply they have found their purpose, annoying or endearing. Still, the pleasures of the show are great and often outweigh the occasional discomfort.

Faust has left the show, which leaves me wondering if the second season will be as good as the first. I have high hopes, yet even if it doesn't, the first season has been a wonderful gift on its own. I may not have meant it when I asked for it, but I'm glad I got it anyway.

She Did Not Kill Things but Sanctioned It: A Review of "A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman"

Webcomic artist Kate Beaton has made a career out of riffing on history, but when comics mixes with history it isn't always for jokes. In collecting comics outside the superhero mainstream, I've found a couple of good titles that combine comic books and biography, like the anthology Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists, the Harvey Pekar-headed anthology The Beats: A Graphic History and Action Philosophers by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey. Okay, well, maybe the latter was about jokes as much as education, but I expected something similar to the former titles when I purchased A Dangerous Woman: The Graphic Biography of Emma Goldman by Sharon Rudahl.

I hadn't known very much about the anarchist leader before reading the comic besides the section in Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation on the killing of William McKinley. In this book about the assassinations of three U.S. Presidents, Vowell describes Goldman's philosophy, and her kind-of-sanctioning-but-kind-of-not of Leon Czolgosz's killing of President William McKinley. Vowell ends up finding Goldman interesting if not likable, and after reading the graphic biography I feel the same way.



The graphic novel, of course, covers far more than just the assassination, following Goldman from her birth to a dysfunctional Jewish family in Russia to her days as an anarchist writer and orator in America to her return and disillusionment in Russia and finally ends with her death in Canada. It gives a great overview of her life and some of her philosophy, often using quotes from her writings. The art can have static expressions, but is also pleasant to look at and serves the stories. Also, there's some sex if you like that sort of thing. Maybe you don't.

But the main point of the book is to highlight the accomplishments and progressive viewpoints Goldman held. They're numerous, and yet ... it's clear Rudhal has a very positive view of Goldman, and maintains that positive and heroic viewpoint throughout. This is a stance that seems incongruous and occasionally even shocking when Ruhal describes Goldman's feelings on Czolgosz or how Goldman plotted with her lover Alexander Berkman to kill American industrialist Henry Clay Frick. Or even when she says first-wave feminists were wasting their time trying to get women the vote.

However, I have to admit that even if the book has a sometimes overly-positive view, it gave me enough of a knowledge base to the point where I came around to the same place as Vowell. It even made me interested in Goldman's autobiography. So if you think you're interested in this book, pick it up. You may like it.

Things I read on Twitter ...

So, there were a few things tearing up the Twitter stream lately that I'd like to break down.

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First up, TokyoPop is closing its US operations. This news has been greeted with a mix of disappointment and unsurprise, no less than by me. Of course, the American "otaku" community's relationship with American translators of manga has always been one of love mixed with hate, so it's no surprise that the ambivalence that's been there since the beginning should be there at its end.

I've been a manga and anime fan on and off for years, and remember the excitement of being able to buy Sailor Moon manga in the store coupled closely with the knowledge that the translations weren't very good. I remember being excited seeing manga bloom on the shelves of comic book stores and bookstores and then being upset at how much they cost. I was glad TokyoPop had done so well and made a degree of concessions to manga fans and then the reports came out about the really poor way it has treated its creators of original work (which I won't even pretend to be conversant in). Like I said, mixed feelings. Very mixed.

Still, reading over the press release about the company's end, I can't help but be drawn to this:

Starting with just four titles -- Parasyte, Ice Blade, Magic Knight Rayearth, and, of course, Sailor Moon -- we launched MixxZine, aspiring to introduce comics to girls. These four series laid down the cornerstone for what would eventually become TOKYOPOP and the Manga Revolution.

My best friend tweeted about the ludicrousness of a decision to pair up a violent manga like Parasyte with titles like Magic Knight Rayearth and Sailor Moon. Even so, I can't help but be heartened by the phrase "aspiring to introduce comics to girls." Despite all their odd decisions over the years, one has to admit they really did it. They built it. We came. And they're proud of it. Considering the alienation most women feel from comic book publishers and the geek industry itself, the fact that as this company is going out of the US it has said "We wanted you there, and we wanted you there from the beginning" is a very, very big deal.

Thanks for the memories, TokyoPop. (And I better get to buying more Fruits Basket if it goes out of print. Eeek!)

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Switching over from an acknowledgment of geek women and girls to yet another sad dismissal, many on Twitter have also been epically pissed about this off-hand comment in Ginia Bellafante's New York Times review of the TV adaptation of George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series:

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness [the series sex and incest] has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

Well, Bellafante's got me there. I certainly wouldn't stand up at my book club and demand we read The Hobbit over Lorrie Moore, but that's only because Lorrie Moore is really good and in any book club I'd be a part of, the ladies would have all have read both The Hobbit AND The Lord of the Rings trilogy in high school, even if they never got through the appendixes (cough cough).

As for my own book club -- which isn't so much a club but my best friend and I looking at our more than 100 unread books each that we own and going to each other "Maybe something should be done about this ..." -- we're both reading Orlando right now. It's fantasy-tinged novel by Virginia Woolf about a nobleman who becomes a woman, which is awesome in itself but we're reading it too so we can get references in Alan Moore's (no relation to Lorrie) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics. So I would also suggest to Ms. Bellafante that perhaps she hasn't gone to the right book clubs.

But amid all the indignation the main point of this passage has gone curiously unremarked upon. Now, I haven't read Martin's work. I hear it's a fantasy version of The War of the Roses, and so long as he has a heroine half as cool as Queen Margaret of Anjou I'm pretty much down. Anyway, I have no authority myself on what would or wouldn't appeal to the average woman or average geek woman about Martin's work but I'm a little weirded out by the assumption that what the average woman wants is stories with lots of sex, preferably incestuous sex. That's not usually a stereotype that comes up, although I guess considering how often the Times writes trend pieces about how women are like Sex in the City maybe that's just the buzz around the office. Or maybe she/her friends read a lot of Flowers in the Attic in her youth and that's the "girl fiction" standard she's going for.

On the other hand, and because I don't want to be too mean, considering one of the few non-Tolkien doorstopper fantasy novels I've ever read is Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series, which is much higher on sex than it is on fantastical elements, she may have a point. Still, I'd probably tell my book club to read Tolkien over Carey. I guess we have to get through Silmarillion at one point.

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And speaking of novels that have developed a reputation in my mind as dense and long and maybe don't have a literary reputation comparative to their time/effort demand, Atlas Shrugged has a mainstream movie adaptation. The first part of it, anyway.

I haven't seen it yet. Other than professional critics I think nobody has seen it yet. I'm not sure I will see it. I have the book lying around somewhere and I'll get to that one day because I've read enough of Steve Ditko's Mr. A comics for it to be worth it and sometimes I like to track the depth of my anger levels. Yet even though I admit I don't have an informed opinion, there have been a couple of things I've been wondering in the amazement over the collective critical throw up.

1.) I wonder if it's fair to call Bella Swan fandom's choice of "Worst Female Character" ever when Dagny Taggart exists. From the little I saw/heard of her in the trailer and what I've read about her character in essays about the book she seems incredibly unpleasant. Of course, I've also wondered that when I read the Sookie Stackhouse series. And when I saw my roommate was reading a Shopaholic book and remember the blinding rage I felt watching 30 minutes of that movie.

2.) How much the people who are freaking out over the negative reviews in the form of comments don't really seem like fans. They seem like cheerleaders.

I saw this phenomenon a lot when the conservative comedy An American Carol was coming out. You'd see a lot of messages of support in response to the bad reviews but most of them weren't about how great the film was or how much they expected to enjoy it, but how glad they were that something on "their side" was coming out. I remember one comment in particular that gushed "I'm going to take 12 of my friends!" I had to laugh because 1.) I don't know anyone who has that many friends and 2.) it's hard to get my friends into anything I'm really, really excited about. How many viewings of Monty Python and the Holy Grail have been ruined by someone who knows all the lines and says them before they happen?

I also doubt their fannishness because fans tend to fret and freak out over whether a movie adaptation of their favored work will be good, and then when it turns out not to be curse the filmmakers and talk about how amazing the book was and how nobody could get the essence anyway. I try to be above that but I've succumbed to the hype/hate cycle. These cheerleaders, on the other hand, seem to bypass all that and go straight to "It's amazing!" Of course, people want these movies to fail, so some defensiveness can be expected and even human. It still seems like an alien concept to me. I won't pretend I don't prefer movies that reflect my worldview but since when did watching a movie become voting?

Oh well. Hopefully there'll be a potential Rifftrax. It'll rock! Or it'll suck! I need to post about this everywhere! And bring 12 of my friends! DOWN WITH ATLAS SHRUGGED! UP WITH RIFFTRAX! I HAVEN'T SEEN IT AND IT DOESN'T EXIST BUT I DECLARE VICTORY! TEAM MIKE NELSON! Wooooo!

Hanna: It's better, but not great ...

I've seen the premise of "young girl assassin" in quite a few different types of media now, but I have to admit the title character in the new movie Hanna, played by Saoirse Ronan, reminds me less of the characters from the anime Gunslinger Girl, Hit-Girl from the movie/comic book series Kick-Ass or the Cassandra Cain Batgirl and more of the character Eli from the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In. I think this is because I liked the character and the film for what it wasn't, in much the same way I wager most of the people who loved Let the Right One In did so less for its own merits and more because it wasn't like Twilight.

Don't get me wrong, Let the Right One In was a good film, and so is Hanna but most of the accolades for the former seemed to be some brand of "Wow, this movie does vampires right, not like those awful, wuss-ass sparklepires." In a similar sense I like this film better than Gunslinger Girl because Hanna as a character has more depth and character growth compared to the blank, albeit often tragic, slates that populate that story. And while I wouldn't call Hanna a girl power character, like Christy Lemire did, I preferred her story of escape and trying to become human through interactions with her peers and a mother figure better than Hit-Girl's journey, where she's mostly influenced by older men.

The film begins in snowy Finland, where Hanna is being brutally trained by her father, ex-CIA agent Erik Heller (Eric Bana) in combat, language and general knowledge but keeps her isolated and ignorant of some technology in the world. After training her to a certain point, Erik allows her to signal the CIA and begin the mission she has long been trained for, which is slowly revealed over the course of the movie. What we do know is that Hanna is constantly pursued by CIA agent Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett). Throughout her journeys, Hanna also meets up with a British family that gives her a taste of a normal life.

Before I watched this film I wondered if the film would be one of exploitation, like so many of these stories are. I didn't get that vibe, and I wondered if I should count that among the movie's flaws, but in the end I believe Erik's motives turn out to be far more altruistic than expected, which leaves a better taste in my mouth. It still doesn't make Hanna a feminist heroine, but that's okay. Assassins by their very definition really shouldn't be.

On that note, the film also does well at making Hanna scary but still sympathetic. I was a little facetious when I compared her to Eli earlier, but they are both essentially dangerous "children" trying to make their way in the ordinary world, and while Hanna's friend Sophie (Jessica Barden) doesn't have a major role the way Oskar does, their relationship has some parallels.

I also really liked Blanchett's character, who I think is one of the more effective villainesses I've seen in awhile. What I like so much about her is how she's a woman but she's still very much the standard military heavy, even down to the Southern accent that Blanchett uses to bark out orders to her subordinates. Even while the character's childlessness occasionally comes into play, it's a role that could have easily been played by a George C. Scott type, but just happens not to be.

On the same note, another refreshing piece of the story, and one that's not really emphasized in the trailers, is how often the conflict and the relationships comes from women: Marissa vs. Hanna, Marissa vs. Hanna's mother and grandmother, Hanna and Sophie, Hanna and Sophie's mother. The film passes the Bechdel's test and passes it often. Erik may have trained Hanna and she may meet up with nice men, but it still feels like in the end women are the driving players of a large part of the tension and character building.

The film's also exciting. I wasn't too fond of the last chase scene, but there are a lot of riveting sequences, especially the one where Hanna escapes from holding. I like the direction, too, especially Joe Wright's nature shots. The action is shot with less quick cuts than the average movie, allowing you to better see what's going on, and The Chemical Brothers' score does wonders for setting the mood. I hadn't been familiar with them before but I really loved their work in this film.

That being said, the film stumbles sometimes. The screenplay isn't sure how adept Hanna is at modern technology. One scene has her scared of an electric teapot and a TV but before the climax happens she's able to research her past on the Internet. The final sequence that compares Marissa quite literally to a big bad wolf after Grimm's fairytales have been used throughout the film in a not-quite-cogent metaphor also made me groan.

Still, it's a decent movie if not a great one. I wouldn't say it's a must see but it's worth checking out, at the very least for Blanchett. It was better than I expected, anyway, which is something I, like Lemire, am glad to say after Sucker Punch and Kick-Ass.

This IS a Sucker Punch review: Empowerment shouldn't be so depressing

Ever since I was a little girl my id has been something of a complete dipshit. When all the other girls were avoiding the proliferation of huge tits-tiny bikinis-big swords books that seemed to flood a quarter of the comic book shelves in the 90s as sexist garbage a small voice in the back of my head would always whisper, "But they're superheroines ... they can't be that bad, right?" This may go a long way toward explaining why I grew up to make a blog called "Chicks Who Kill Things" and not something like "Enlightened Discourses on How to Further the Role of Strong Genre Fiction Heroines in Urban Fantasy, Comic Books and the Culture at Large." While I can always fault this tendency -- it's true my first comic was a Jim Balent Catwoman -- it sometimes leads to good results -- I'm really glad I started reading comics. Yet it sometimes leads to bad results, like an urge to see this movie.

Sucker Punch has gotten terrible, terrible reviews. As I write this it's got a 20 percent fresh rating on Rottentomatoes.com. I can't imagine this review is the first of those you've read, but in case it is, the movie follows Baby Doll (Emily Browning), who has been framed for the murder of her younger sister and imprisoned by her stepfather in an insane asylum, where she's due to be lobotomized in five days. To deal with the pain, Baby Doll mentally escapes into an alternate reality where she's actually in a brothel and is due to be sold to "the high roller" in five days. In this reality the psychiatrist becomes her madam (Carla Gugino) and the head of the hospital the evil, slimy head of the brothel (Oscar Isaac). In the brothel she meets five other girls, Amber (Jamie Chung), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Rocket (Jena Malone) and her sister Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish). Baby Doll is also made to dance, and at the madam's urging when she dances she goes within herself to another fantasy, this one where she's a sailor suit-clad fighter in a world that crosses just about every genre well-loved by nerds. In this fantasy a wise man (Scott Glenn) tells her she and her friends can escape if they find five items: a map, fire, a knife, a key and an unknown item that will require a great sacrifice.

A lot of pixels have been spilled on how much this movie panders to a geek audience and a male geek audience in particular. Let me tell you right there that this is not why this movie is bad. This movie is bad because it has a girl and her friends cutting open samurai giants and steampunk zombie Nazis and a dragon in a castle and robots on a train set to blow up a futuristic city and yet it is totally, completely not fun. Okay, well, it's mostly not fun. When they found the fire and lit the fire in the nerd mashup fantasy world I was like, "Wow, that fire looks really pretty." That may have been the only time I had fun.

There are a couple of reasons the movie falls apart for me. The first is that director Zach Snyder seems to have spent way more time thinking up the story/visuals than the characters. Baby Doll doesn't speak for about 10 to 20 minutes of the movie and is mostly a passive presence, staring at everything with a wide-eyed, lips pursed expression of beaten down, beautiful fear. When she finally starts talking the movie is more concerned with moving the plot forward than the emotions of her or any of the other girls, who are called on to either be fighting badasses or to look scared and cry a lot. Snyder tries with the sister relationship between Rocket and Sweet Pea but that never feels like it gets to the emotional level it should. The action scenes just aren't very good, either. They're usually confused and muddled and shot through a brown filter that makes everything look the same despite the very different locales. Reviewers have compared the action scenes to video games, but that's not really fair. I felt more connection to Heather from Silent Hill 3 (which also has a plot where the character descends to an evil world and then a still eviller world, I guess) than I ever did to Baby Doll.

Even if they were great, though, they'd have an uphill battle in overcoming the nauseating "brothel" plot. Now, I will say this for Snyder, I do get the impression that however flawed the movie is, he and the actresses think it's empowering. Even though I rolled my eyes at shots like Baby Doll's high-heeled "battle" shoes and how every outfit was some sort of sexy black hell, I did feel like the film at least likes its female characters and feels sympathy with them, as opposed to something like Frank Miller's The Spirit movie which has tough female characters and doesn't seem to like them too much but thinks it can fall back on "But they can fight!" if anyone accuses it of sexism. Like the scene between the Comedian and the first Silk Spectre in Watchmen, all of the scenes of men threatening or killing helpless women are appropriately horrible. (Speaking of which, man, I hope Snyder took Gugino out to a lot of fancy but professional dinners where he said "thank you" a lot in between these two movies.) I appreciate that but I don't appreciate how much time we spend in the horrible scenes. Watching this movie I didn't feel empowered at seeing women fight monsters, I felt depressed at seeing women get killed and nearly raped by men.

Also, the even the mashup scenes of empowerment seem somewhat hollow since they're led by a man in all of it. I don't understand what Glenn's was supposed to represent or why he was there, other than to be the "good" man. I have to admit while watching the movie I made up a fake backstory where he's actually Baby Doll's real, dead father. Despite the ending, I still want to believe that bit of fanon.

This is a concept that really needed to either go campy or needed a Tarantino-like touch to work. It needed to either be big and ridiculous like a Russ Meyer or John Waters film so its uglier moments could go down easier, or the characters needed more time to talk and grow inner lives like they do in most Tarantino films -- admittedly I'm thinking more the Tarantino of Kill Bill than the Tarantino of Death Proof, where the talking goes nowhere, but that's another story. At any rate, though, the movie needed to be big and fun, the movie needed to be worthy of a name like Sucker Punch.

I will throw the movie a bone, though. I didn't hate the ending as much as some people did. HUGE SPOILERS BELOW.

At the end of the movie, which comes after all the non-blonde heroines are dead (sigh), Baby Doll realizes in the "brothel" layer of the plot that what she has to sacrifice is herself, and by doing so she'll allow Sweet Pea to live. Her decision has repercussions in the "insane asylum" layer of the plot, where she gets lobotomized. The lobotomy was supposed to be authorized by Gugino's character and when she discovers this she has Isaac's character, who forged her signature, arrested. So the implication isn't that Baby Doll gains freedom through a lobotomy, but that she's sacrificed herself so that not only Sweet Pea will live but that life in the asylum may get better for the inmates. It's not a story of self-empowerment (at one point Baby Doll explicitly says it's not her story), but the story of the empowerment of others. It also has a degree of symmetry, as Baby Doll failed to save her sister at the beginning of the story but manages to save another girl who's lost a sister, as well as many others.

Granted, I would have felt better about this if they'd given Baby Doll a stronger personality from the beginning though, maybe making her a sort of McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest to the other girls. So I can't help but feel depressed at how it all went. Very, very depressed.

This is not a Sucker Punch review but I talk about another Zack Snyder film

I meant to see Sucker Punch this weekend. No, really, I did. It was going to be great. Well, the movie probably was not going to be great but having just seen a sexploitation film like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! it would have been a nice lead-in to something like Sucker Punch. How do they compare? How do they contrast? Where does one go wrong and the other right? Do they both go right? How about those Alice in Wonderland stories that are very similar? Will I ever get around to finishing that video game?

Alas, I went home to see my mother this weekend, and while I planned to see the movie while my mother was working at my aunt and uncle's yogurt store (it's in Red Bank, N.J. so stop by when you're going on your Kevin Smith-related field trip!) business has been slow during the cold weather so she texted me to come visit her at work. So, alas, Sad and Lonely Mom trumps Probably Bad Movie. Maybe next weekend.



But I guess this is a good opportunity to think a little about Zack Snyder, and his last movie I saw, Watchmen. Now, I love Watchmen. Like, really, love Watchmen. I was on a whole podcast dedicated to Watchmen and have a poster of Rorschach. I'm first and foremost a lover of the comic and will defend Rorschach as an awesome character to those who dislike him because damn it some characters are fascinating if they're not models of how one should behave, but I know some people aren't fond of it. And some really aren't fond of the movie.

But I think there's a lot to like the movie. I don't think they could have found more perfect actors for Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson, who did great despite maybe being a bit too attractive for the part) or The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) but the movie's not very good for women. I disagree with those who say the near-rape scene was sexualized; I actually thought it was the right type of brutal and harrowing. I did think the death scene of Silhouette and her girlfriend was sexualized, though.

I'll be first to admit the movie has its problems, though, and I'm not too fond of what ended up in theaters OR the really badly-put-together "Ultimate Cut" which has The Black Freighter cartoon clips inserted haphazardly into it, breaking up the flow to a crazy degree. Still, the "Director's Cut" hits a certain sweet spot. It's not quite as rushed and explains a little more. Also, it has a few more scenes of Laurie, my favorite character. Albeit not enough to redeem the pathetic portrayal of the character in the movie for me.



Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre II. I'm not sure what went wrong here. Akerman's something of a blank, and considering that Carla Gugino, who played the first Silk Spectre, did a pretty good job even with unconvincing old age makeup, I don't think it's Snyder giving her bad directions. Yet ... I don't think it's totally her fault, either. I doubt she made the decision to cut out some of the character's more aggressive lines. I doubt she made the decision to turn the character's already impractical costume into something that was just as impractical but in a different way. And I really doubt she made the decision to make the character a nonsmoker, meaning the character ends up pushing a button on the Owlship with a giant fire sign because it's fun, rather than because the character was looking for a light.

Like I said, the Director's Cut restores at least some of the character's edge, having her beat up one of the military men who are keeping her locked up in the base after Dr. Manhattan goes to Mars and handcuff him in the bathroom but it's still something of a waste. Especially because in a lot of the pre-release interviews Malin Akerman seemed really excited about playing the role and about the film itself. So it's a bummer that it all didn't come out so well.

Actually, it seems like a sad trend that women in superheroine movies seem to either be good at their roles and yet dismissive of comics or comics culture as a whole (Gwenyth Paltrow, Kirsten Dunst to a certain extent) or excited about comic books or playing a superheroine and then and then not so good at acting (Jessica Alba). Which sucks. And, like I said, I'm not sure whose to blame here, if the movies are casting the wrong people or directing them the wrong way or both. And the sort of blank faces of the girls in Sucker Punch I'm seeing in the movie posters don't lend themselves to me thinking this one's going to be much better.

At least I heard they cut out the sex scene, right? Not that I thought the sex scene between Laurie and Dan to "Hallelujah" was that bad but maybe "You're My Thrill" might have been better considering that was the song actually mentioned in the comic book and ...

Oh, hold on, let me go to this Sucker Punch-related interview ...

EMILY [Browning, star of the film]: I had a very tame and mild love scene with John Hamm... I think it's great for this young girl to actually take control of her own sexuality. Well, the MPAA doesn't like that. They don't think a girl should ever be in control of her own sexuality because they're from the Stone Age... So essentially, they got Zack to edit the scene and make it look less like she's into it. And Zack said he edited it down to the point where it looked like he was taking advantage of her. That's the only way he could get a PG-13 [rating] and he said, "I don't want to send that message." So they cut the scene!

Actually, never mind. I'm depressed forever.

Why I Liked "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

Image taken from Wikipedia

I was kind of bummed but not exactly surprised when some of the more prominent feminist sites didn't acknowledge the death of actress/cop/dental hygenist/exotic dancer/model Tura Satana last February. Bummed because Satana's history -- living in an internment camp, learning martial arts and tracking down her rapists, becoming the leader of a gang, modeling for Harold Lloyd and then working as an actress on his recommendation -- should be worthy of merit. Not surprised because feminism and sex work has an uneasy history, and I have to admit I'm not always sure who's right in this debate.

Ever since I was 11 I loved comic books because I loved the idea of superheroines. Yet I very early on told myself to accept that the heavy and unequal sexualization of female heroes - and yes, they are unequal no matter how much you like looking at Dick Grayson's butt - was part of the package. Is a woman kicking ass rendered moot if she does it in a low cut top? Can true empowerment really be reached if women remain sex objects first and foremost?

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is not a comic, but it shares many traits with comics, especially the comics of the Silver Age. Fight scenes abound in the story. Characters fight with judo chops and test their strength against racecars. Women are dressed in skintight clothing and have big breasts. The characters use slang and the same quippy style of talking that I remember from comics written by Stan Lee. Its director, Russ Meyer, also reminds me more than a little of comic books' preeminent showman, even if their intended audience is much different.



NSFW, some offensive language

It's this sort of high cartoonishness that, as Roger Ebert says in the above documentary, sort of mitigates any offensiveness one might take from the movie. Can one really take a movie seriously if it has lines like "The point is of no return, and you've reached it!" For those who haven't seen the film, the plot centers around three go-go dancers who like to race fast cars. A man joins their drag race and for reasons that aren't entirely clear, the main girl, Varla (Satana) kills him and kidnaps his girlfriend. Later the girls run into a misogynist old man and plan to steal his money, but it doesn't quite work out as they planned.

Is this movie tailor-made for the male gaze? Absolutely. Yet the movie doesn't have a great opinion of the men doing the gazing. Watch the opening scene below. After the hilarious spoken word intro (my absolute favorite part of the movie), the movie cuts to our three ... um, main characters ... dancing in glittery bikinis for men. Yet the women are filmed from below, a shot often used for powerful figures (see: Citizen Kane) while the men are filmed from above, visually cueing us to the fact that they are weaker despite the creepy shadows.



The men they meet later in the story don't get much better: the misogynist old man, the racecar driver and even the only male character in the story who could be a hero are unattractive and schlubby. The one attractive male in the movie is mentally slow, like a darker version of Rocky Horror from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Obvious abelist issues aside, it's clear who are the more powerful figures here. Laughing the way they do, Varla, Rosie (Haji) and Billie (Lori Williams) remind me more than a little of mythical witches, with their cars standing in for their brooms.

Yes, these women are villainesses. Did that schlub deserve to get killed? No. But since when do the teenagers in a slasher film deserve to get killed for having sex? As spectators, we enjoy these women the same way we enjoy Disney characters like Maleficent. They may be bad, but they're fun to watch as they're bad. And anyway, the old man, who has nefarious plans for their kidnap victim, is much worse.

[SPOILER] On a similar note, it also helps that for the most part it isn't the schlubby men who take the women down. "The Vegetable" takes down Rosie, but that death feels as senseless as he is, and not as a justified revenge you can cheer over. Varla kills Billie, and Varla herself is taken out not by the "hero" of the story but the female victim who spends most of the movie crying and whimpering in a bathing suit, proving that even at the end the weakest woman is still stronger than the strongest man.[SPOILER]

So, is Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! exploitative? I think so. Is it feminist? I think so, too. It's feminist enough to give props to Tura Satana, at least. Those are some nice, big judo chops.