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.

Battle Royale vs. The Hunger Games: A Mostly Positive Discussion

In my secret identity, I'm a reporter for a small weekly newspaper. It was on assignment at a library when I learned about The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. Trying to entice a preteen to give me a candid quote, I asked her what her favorite book was.

"The Hunger Games," she said.

"Oh, what's that book about?" I asked, both trying to get her to open up more.

"It's about a bunch of kids who are put in an arena and have to fight each other to the death until only one is left."

"Huh ..." I said. "I thought I already read that book ..."

Of course I hadn't only read that book. I'd seen the movie and read the 12 volume manga series as well. I was first exposed to the story of Battle Royale, a story about teenagers who are put in an arena and forced to fight each other to the death until only one is left, when I bought the first movie on VHS tape at a comics convention and loved it. Then I read the novel by Koshun Takami upon which it was based and loved that a lot better. Then I read the manga by Masayuki Taguchi and that was ... um, interesting ... I won't say I like it, but I appreciate how it at least didn't change as much of the story as the movie did.

So I was a little skeptical of this newcomer on the block with largely the same premise. Yet my best friend really liked it, so I decided to give it a try. Friends and strangers, if you have loved Battle Royale and have been avoiding The Hunger Games because of that, don't. It's a great story, and there's enough differences to make both stand on their own.

Actually, for me. If you wanted me to sum up the novel Battle Royale vs. the first book of The Hunger Games I would say this:

Battle Royale is a better exploration of the premise. The Hunger Games has better central characters.

There are a couple of superficial differences so let me get them out of the way through the use of a chart ...

	Battle Royale	The Hunger Games
The setting is ...	In an alternate present Japan where the country won WWII and is run by a dictatorship that keeps the populace in a state of perpetual fear	In a future North America that has been ravaged by natural disaster and is run by a capitol that keeps its surrounding 13 12 districts in a state of perpetual fear
The government runs the contest to ...	Terrorize the country and keep the populace from revolting	Terrorize the country and keep the populace from revolting AGAIN
Contestants are chosen ...	By picking one high school class at random, gassing them and surreptitiously moving them to an arena	By holding a lottery of all children from the ages of 12 to 18 and picking two from each district - one boy and one girl - to fight in the arena
Contestants enter the arena	Staggered one by one, each getting a few minutes head start	All at once
How they distribute weapons/supplies	Each contestant gets a backpack at the beginning with supplies and one weapon or special item, which can range from good to a piece of crap (although they fight in their school uniforms)	Contestants fight over them in a free-for-all battle at the beginning, or get them through "sponsors" watching the show who choose to send them items (although the gamemakers give them appropriate clothing at the beginning)
The gamemakers keep track/control of the characters ...	Through collars around the contestants' necks	Through unseen cameras
They keep the players moving throughout the arena ...	By rigging certain areas after a period of time so if contestants walk into them, their collars will explode and kill them	By flooding an area with dangers such as fire, floods, lightning or mutant animal attacks
The novel centers around the struggles of ...	Shuya Nanahara and Noriko Nakagawa, whom he likes	Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, who likes her
The "veteran" player is ...	Shogo Kawada, who won a previous Battle Royale and acts as mentor to Shuya and Noriko in the arena	Haymitch Abernathy, who won a previous Hunger Games, and mentors Katniss and Peeta before the games begin
Speaking of which, the names ...	Are normal for the country where the novel takes place	Are stupid

In many ways, the story plays out largely the same, with teenagers killing other teenagers but more people surviving than they should. Yet both novels are different in their focus, which causes strengths and detriments in both works.

Battle Royale is more concerned with the contest itself, and the effect it has on the players, whereas The Hunger Games is more interested in the main characters and the world itself. This isn't a bad thing for The Hunger Games, especially as the trilogy goes on, and we end up learning a lot about the world of Panem whereas the dictatorship government in Battle Royale is very vague.

Yet it does mean Battle Royale comes off as the more realistic of the two, and not just because in The Hunger Games the arena will occasionally get flooded with mutant werewolves. With a larger cast of characters and an omniscient viewpoint that jumps from student to student, the novel plays out as a series of episodes of mini-tragedies, from the couple that would rather kill themselves than play to the alliance of girls that ends up self-destructing in a hail of suspicion and bullets after some poisoned food is delivered to the wrong person. Not all of the pieces work. There's a stereotypical gay character that angered me so much I considered giving up the book after his chapter, and the main villains' origins aren't great, but I feel like these stories are the heart of the book. These stories are mostly absent in The Hunger Games, too, which sticks mostly to Katniss' point of view and draws most of the rest of its characters (except for Rue and Thresh) in broad, flat strokes.

So much so that in all of the incarnations of the story I find the main characters Shuya and Noriko dull by comparison. Even if you set aside their terrible manga versions, whom reach their nadir when Shuya cries to the corpose of the psychopath teenager who had been stalking them for three days that they could have escaped the island together, I never remember them as well, despite their prominent pagetime.

Still, one could say - as my best friend did - the advantage they have over The Hunger Games heroine Katniss is that they are mostly normal people, whereas Katniss' history of hunting and trapping makes her more powerful and self-sufficient than the average teenager. (Although, as another friend of mine pointed out, the scene where they and the more-experienced Shogo [SPOILER ALERT] take out a ship of armed guards after three days of trauma is rather superhero-like. [/SPOILER ALERT])

Yet at the end of the day I do feel more of an affinity for Katniss than for Shuya or Peeta than for Noriko. Part of this is probably personal preference. I'd rather see a story where the female character is the active fighter while the male character needs to be protected but can camouflage really well, than a story where the two main male characters fight while the female character makes encouraging speeches and loads the magazines.

On the other hand, for all of her skills, Katniss is one of those rare beasts in genre stories: a heroine who takes damage but keeps going. Katniss being a 16-year-old who can shoot squirrels with a bow and arrow may be a little unrealistic, but the explosion that knocks out the hearing in one of her ears brings her back to earth again. She may have some advantages in the fight, but the road is never easy. This isn't to say that Shuya and Noriko never get hurt -- they do, and badly. Yet I can't help but be taken in by a heroine who remains active even through her struggles because it is so rare. In an age where most superheroines in movies have to be beautiful rather than hurt, it's very refreshing.

I also like Katniss and Peeta better, I suppose, because their story continues. They have more time to grow before and after the games, and more time is focused on their romance (and, yes, the notorious love triangle with Gale). Of course this is due to the story structures. [SPOILER ALERT] The destiny of Shuya and Noriko is to run off into the sunset forever under the eyes of the government, whereas Katniss and Peeta will both have a role in changing it. [/SPOILER ALERT]

Once again, this is because the stories have different goals. That one doesn't do what the other does doesn't mean either story is bad. I'd encourage people who haven't read one to read the other, and vice versa. It's impossible to not compare, and undoubtedly what will attract a person to one story may be a repellent for another. Yet just because one exists doesn't mean the other can't, and they're, in the end, both worthy of consideration.

This Comic-Book Related List from a Mainstream Magazine Surprisingly Does Not Suck

Yesterday, Darren Franich of EW.com published an article titled 10 Comic Book Heroines We Want to See in Movies! and I have to tell you: it's really great. The choices are excellent -- from the obvious "Why didn't we get this five years ago?" Wonder Woman movie to the obscure-but-no-less-amazing Fantomah movie starring Lady Gaga! (Can she act? Does anyone care?) -- and the list is clearly written by someone who knows and loves comics.

I'm surprised at how good this article is because in my experience mainstream articles on comic books, even if they're not the obvious "Bam! Pow! Comics Aren't for Kids Anymore!" type, are usually written by people without a knowledge of the genre. Thus we get articles where Mark Millar can say he sets his comic books in the real world and the journalist will just write it down and Maxim can declare Robin the lamest superhero ever. Yet when you read the article you can tell it's by someone who has a knowledge of the original stories and who is thinking about these female characters as characters and franchise starters, not as a way to get a sexy actress into a skintight suit.

I also find this article significant because it's by a mainstream source and it naturally assumes that audiences want to see good movies about superheroines. Since Warner Brothers apparently can't, this is also something remarkable.

Some years back, I was interviewed by a Canadian newspaper about superheroine movies, and why they didn't do well. Is the public not interested? the reporter asked. Is it sexism? I told the reporter the reason why most superheroine movies don't do well is that they are bad. It's not that nobody wanted to see Catwoman, Elektra and Supergirl fighting bad guys, but Catwoman, Elektra and Supergirl were not good movies, so nobody went. Unfortunately, that's never the message studio executives get.

I unfortunately can't see that mentality changing any time soon. Even when women turn out to be the big spenders for a franchise, like the unavoidable Twilight series, Hollywood tends to be tone deaf. Still, it's nice to have an acknowledgement that yes, the audience for superheroine movies is out there, and from such a major source as Entertainment Weekly as well.

Also, I don't know about Franich but I want a She-Hulk movie. Preferably a meta-one where our heroine teases Edward Norton about Fight Club and breaks the fourth wall. Hey, I can dream, can't I?

The Kick-Ass Movie is Not Feminist (and Neither is Hit-Girl)

(In-depth spoilers for the movie follow.)

I do realize I'm late in discussing this, and the reason is because for a long while I didn't want to see this movie. I'm not a fan of Mark Millar. His Marvel Knights Spider-Man was okay but he never seemed to get the character's voice completely right and I really hated Wanted (although, to be fair, more of that has to do with the art than his writing) . I haven't read the Kick-Ass comic, either.

Yet I eventually changed my mind after I read essays and exclamations proclaiming Hit-Girl as a feminist character. This did not sound convincing to me: a young girl who is superheroing because her "Big Daddy"has groomed her to be a killer is inherently a character without agency and thus not feminist. Still, I decided to see the movie for myself and found my opinion changed from "That's not feminist" to "No, really, that's not feminist."

I can see why people would want to think it is, and why people would like Hit-Girl. She beats up a bunch of bad dudes, does it better than most of the male superheroes in the story, makes semi-clever quips while doing it and does it (ostensibly) wearing clothes that don't sexualize her. I can see where that appeals to the id brain of most female superheroine fans, and I will admit I'm not totally immune.

But as I said in my last post, sometimes the way to tell if a work is feminist is not how the story treats its heroine, but how it treats the other women in the story. So we're going to talk about them before we even get to Hit-Girl.

The movie begins on a bad note for women. It starts with our hero, Dave Lizewski (played by Aaron Johnson), describing his life as a comic book-reading loser who can't get girls and who masturbates all the time. Dave gets explicit about the latter point, describing how he fantasizes about his teacher: an older, buxom white woman. The film then shows Dave's fantasy wherein the teacher urges Dave to touch her breasts, and then takes off her shirt and unhooks her bra. The film cuts away before she can take reveal her breasts, but has no compunctions about cutting to a photo of two topless African tribal women on Dave's computer. In his voiceover narration, Dave explains his interest in the black women by saying, essentially, that he'll masturbate to anything -- with the clear implication that for anyone to find such women sexy is unthinkable. Essentially it's anti-feminist on two levels -- for one, it upholds the offensive double-standard that "white women's breasts are pornography, black women's breasts are anthropology" and also specifically codes an interest in black women as less desirable than an interest in white women.

Then there are the girlfriends in the story, Dave's girlfriend Katie and her Asian-American friend, who becomes a girlfriend for one of Dave's friends. Neither of these girls are real people, but are a male geek-specific fantasy of how some male geeks hope girls will act when they start dating them.

Katie is a beautiful blank slate of a girl, the type imagined by the myriad and maligned "How to Get Your Girlfriend Into Comics" essays. Her one unique interest (if you don't count "lattes") -- working at a methadone clinic, only serves to code her as "kind" and to connect her to the main plot of Dave fighting the mafia. Other than that, her role is to breathlessly state how amazing it is now that Dave is introducing her to the amazing world of comics. "I love Scott Pilgrim," she says breathlessly, "but I'm not into that superhero stuff." Although it's okay, after she's read what are considered the "girlfriend bait" comics, there's a scene later where she tells Dave "I really enjoyed those Ditko-era Spider-Man comics you gave me" as he rubs self-tanning oil onto her nearly-naked body.

An aside: There's a subplot too complicated and offensive to explain right now about how Dave is able to hang out with Katie because Katie thinks he's gay. Yet no intelligent straight woman who has respect for her gay male friend would ask him to rub tanning oil onto her body. Most gay men will see it as a cheap, titillating ploy for a girl to get an attractive guy's hands on her but make it "okay," and will ditch her for a woman who sees him as a real person and not as a handbag or a living slash fanfic fantasy posthaste.

Anyway, eventually Dave tells Katie he's straight and he's Kick-Ass, and unlike in the comic they get together. In their first love scene, Dave and Katie share a kiss, and then, like a romantic, he goes straight for the tits. Because that's what geek romance is really about, right? The guy finally getting to touch the breasts that have eluded him for so long. You may think I'm being pedantic or a prude about this, but nothing else happens in the scene. Katie doesn't try to touch him -- she just basically smiles like she's doing him a favor. The scene is not about two people who love each other getting together. It's about how Dave gets to touch tits -- that's its entire point.

About Katie's friend, all I can say is she and Dave's friend get together, even though Dave's friend sniffs her hair like a creepazoid when she's not looking. Later, he says "I'm going to explain comics to you" and she sits next to him and listens with wide eyes as if she's a five-year-old. Later she's hanging off him.

So, really, that's how the Kick-Ass movie treats its adult women: as blank objects of desire to be filled by geek males with their own interests, or freaks.

And now (finally) Hit-Girl. As I mentioned earlier, she's capable and strong. I liked her. She and her father are the best parts of the movie, and Chloe Grace Moretz and Nicholas Cage put in really funny performances. If the tone of the movie didn't wildly vacillate between a humorous dark parody of superheroes and a "serious" exploration of what superheroes would be like in the real world, I might have liked them better. But the movie wants you to see Hit-Girl's story as one of a child who isn't allowed to be a child by her revenge-driven father who makes killing a game to her, but also be gleeful about a child brutally murdering mobsters. It wants to eat the cake and have it, too.

Some will say I don't get it, because they mistake this hypocricy of tone Millar employs as satire or a joke on the reader. No. It doesn't work. This movie doesn't work. You can't claim this is a realistic movie and then have the hero fly in to save Hit-Girl on a jetpack.

Defenders of the movie have also said critics of the movie are only offended because Hit-Girl is female, and they would be fine if a young boy was brainwashed by a parent or parental figure into being a superhero. For one, I would not be. For two, the problem for me does not lie so much in the concept but, as I mentioned before, how it's presented. One of my favorite DC characters is the Cassandra Cain Batgirl, who was raised by her father to be a killing machine from a young age, but that story had a consistent tone -- Cassandra's upbringing is explicitly exploitative in the text, and her father is considered a supervillain, not a superhero like Big-Daddy. Also, what makes Cassandra a superheroine is how she eventually struggles to be independent and have her own agency (consider that her father took away her power to speak and she has had to fight to win it back). Hit-Girl does not have this agency.

Now, I don't mean to suggest that Hit-Girl has to become traditionally heroic to be a good character. I also do not necessarily need every superhero to be a good person -- I love Watchmen's Rorschach. If Hit-Girl were just an exploited child with an incomplete set of morals and that was seen as a horrifying thing, I'd probably be fine. But, like I said, the movie thinks what happened to her wrong but also thinks she's the coolest, and that's just messed up.

I also want to address a common claim I've heard: Hit-Girl is feminist because she's a child and thus can't be sexualized. I've heard this a lot and it is ridiculous. How low are our standards for superheroines that "she doesn't show cleavage" is the dealbreaker? And how does having a character too young to have cleavage solve that problem? It's like slash fanfic writers who say what they write is feminist because they can have romance without women characters and thus without gender differences. It's not solving or fighting the problem, it's sweeping it under the rug.

And it's not even true. Society has certain expectations for what little girls are supposed to look like and how they are attractive to adults, and Hit-Girl meets those expectations. Her superhero outfit has a skirt. When not in costume, she wears her hair in pig-tails with bows. She's constantly smiling and speaks in the cheerful, adoring voice of a good little girl. At one point, she dresses up to fight bad guys wearing a Catholic schoolgirl uniform.

I am not saying that any of those things in of themselves are bad or that this movie is somehow obscene or pedophiliac for presenting Hit-Girl this way, but I would also argue that cleavage and women looking sexy in of themselves are not bad, obscene or pornographic. I'm just saying it's there, and it is what it is.

One could also say that Hit-Girl defies these expectations by being tough and using profanity, but while I like pretty, dress-wearing warrior princesses (Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland movie is underrated), you could argue that buxom women in spandex beating people up is also defying some expectations. Honestly, they're both rather ordinary at this point.

But for those unconvinced, I offer up a scene with Dave's before unmentioned second friend. At one point in the story he sees a video of Hit-Girl fighting and declares, "I want to marry her!" When Dave's first friend reminds the second friend that Hit-Girl is 11, the second friend says, "I'm going to save myself for her."

Think about that scene and tell me again Hit-Girl isn't sexualized.