Category: movies

Barbieheimer: The Sequel

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I took myself to see Barbie this week. When I first heard about the movie, I figured it was one I’d never see. There were many reasons for that:

  • I never had a Barbie doll. (I was too old for dolls by the time Barbie became a big thing.)
  • I hate pink.
  • Mattel is corporate America personified and they supported the movie.
  • I came of age with second wave feminism. We rejected Barbie along with Miss America.

There was only one argument for seeing it: Greta Gerwig.

I have to admit that was a pretty strong argument in favor, but I remained skeptical.

Then I saw Oppenheimer, which was so relentlessly about men that it flunked the Bechdel test.

Plus I read some reviews and essays that made me think Gerwig really had managed to do something good with the movie despite having Mattel’s approval.

So I went. I did not wear pink.

It was a fantastic movie. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

And yes, it was feminist as all hell.

From the moment Barbie appeared onscreen amidst a group of girls playing with baby dolls, her appearance accompanied by the rousing fanfare of “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” I knew I was in good hands.

Continue reading “Barbieheimer: The Sequel”…

Reflections on Oppenheimer

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I grew up with the House Unamerican Activities Committee hearings, the Cold War, and the Doomsday Clock ticking toward midnight because of the bomb, which is why I decided I should see Oppenheimer.

I don’t always see movies based on recent history that I know well, because reviews and other information often give me a clue that the history is wildly inaccurate. For example, I have never seen Mississippi Burning, because I am damned sure that no FBI agent was ever a hero of the Civil Rights Movement.

While there was a lot of history related to the story that Oppenheimer left out, the stories it did tell were generally accurate, as far as my knowledge goes. And it certainly worked well as a movie; I was caught up in it from the beginning. I suspect a lot of its success is rooted in the acting of Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer.

I am glad I saw it, but my thoughts about it have more to do with how it reflected both the current times and the times of the story. Note that there are probably spoilers in here; I see no reason to avoid spoilers in the case of stories where everyone knows, or should know, what happened. There are no twists in this movie.

Oppenheimer is a movie about men. I would argue that the bomb, and even the Manhattan Project itself, is, for purposes of the movie, a McGuffin. It’s not what the men in this movie are doing that matters; it’s how they deal with each other.

On Facebook, I said this movie didn’t even come close to passing the Bechdel Test, which generated a lively discussion. While at least one person speculated the problem was a dearth of women working on the Manhattan Project, a Washington Post article this week points out that 11 percent of the staff were women, and many of those women were scientists. (free link.)

And I am sure that during Oppenheimer’s years in Berkeley he ran in circles that included more women than the ones he slept with.

It would have been possible to make a movie that included more women in significant roles, women who did in fact talk to each other, if the filmmakers had wanted to.

One of my Facebook friends opined that director Christopher Nolan is concerned with “Masculinity” (definitely with the capital M), which I think explains this movie very well. It may also explain why I found it very watchable even as I noted the absence of women and, for that matter, the absence of men who were not essentially European in heritage.

(Some of the men were Jewish, including Oppenheimer, and that is of course very relevant to a story from that particular point in history.)

That is, I looked at it as an analysis of how men in a patriarchal society behave toward other men. That aspect of masculinity did not come off particularly well.

I don’t know if that’s the movie Nolan intended to make, but that’s the one I saw. Continue reading “Reflections on Oppenheimer“…

Watching Old Movies and Asking Questions

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I watched The Sting the other night, not for the first time, but for the first time in a long time.

It’s a 50-year-old movie set in 1936, but given the power of the myths and stories that it’s built on, it doesn’t feel particularly dated, unlike a number of other movies that I enjoyed in the 1970s but find unwatchable now.

I always did like Paul Newman/Robert Redford movies, though I tried to watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid awhile back and found I couldn’t get into it. I’m not sure why The Sting still works for me and Butch Cassidy doesn’t, since they’re similar stories based on Anglo American mythology. Might just be that I can handle gangster stories better than westerns.

There are some reasonable criticisms of it. Robert Earl Jones (James Earl Jones’s father) plays a magical Negro role — the mentor to Redford’s young white grifter. He is, of course, murdered early on, setting up the reason for the revenge sting.

He and his family and one other guy are the only Black people in the movie, but they are portrayed well and treated with respect by the good guy white people (all grifters). It could have been worse.

Still, this is very much a movie about white men. There are a couple of women in key supporting roles, but this movie does not pass the Bechdel Test. That said, and in spite of the fact that one of those women is a madam as well as Newman’s lover, it doesn’t feel directly misogynist. Women are just mostly irrelevant in this world, even women who themselves are grifters.

I enjoyed myself, but since I wasn’t sitting on the edge of my seat — it’s a movie with a lot of twists and surprises, but I knew what they all were — I found myself thinking a lot about the underlying mythology and the various stories we’ve all been fed that purport to tell us our history.

To start with, this is a story about grifters with a heart of gold. After suffering through a grifter in the White House for four years, I’m not as inclined to believe good things about grifters as I used to be. Continue reading “Watching Old Movies and Asking Questions”…

Moral Dilemmas and Fight Scenes

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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There’s nothing quite like seeing a movie about women, starring women, made by women, with a cast of so very many women.

Powerful women. Women who care about each other. Women who act in the world.

There were some men on screen, too, but the movie wasn’t about them. Everything about this movie was about the women.

And oh, God, the fight scenes were magnificent.

If you’re hungry for a movie that doesn’t just pass the Bechdel Test, but blows it out of the water, I highly recommend The Woman King.

From the beginning, when you see Viola Davis as Nanisca lead her army of women into battle to all the moments when Lashana Lynch as Izogie is giving guidance to Thuso Mbedu as the young recruit Nawi and all the scenes where Nawi and the others are learning to be warriors, this movie focuses on women, on their abilities, their strengths, their friendships.

I don’t think I knew how hungry I was for a movie like this until I saw it.  Continue reading “Moral Dilemmas and Fight Scenes”…

CODA

personby Madeleine Robins
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When I to went Clarion, waaaaaay back in the day, Algis Budrys taught a lesson on the five beat plot (variously the seven beat plot, the well-made plot, and I’m sure there’s another dozen names for it somewhere). The five beat plot boils down to: 1) the heroine has a problem; 2) the heroine attempts a solution; 3) an obstacle thwarts the solution; 4) the heroine solves the problem; 5) validation. (There are many different names for the five segments, but that’s the essence of the thing.)

Think of stories you’ve read, stories you’ve perhaps loved. I have this dread ring of power, see. I must destroy it! We gather our team. I hit obstacles (boy, do I hit obstacles). Eventually, through toil, danger, and blood, I destroy the ring. But not only have I destroyed the ring, the quest etc. has changed me on a fundamental level. I get to vanish into the West with the elves (and does anyone but me wonder if Bilbo ever felt homesick or bored, there among the elves?). I bet you can think of a zillion works, from Austen to Zelazny, which employ this bare-bones outline.

No, the five beat plot isn’t the only way to tell a story, Continue reading “CODA”…

A Plea for Better Movies

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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In a December piece in The New York Times, Nikita Richardson ( a Times staffer) says that The Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies was for millennial women what Star Wars was for an earlier generation.  She cites the gentle scenes between characters — not just Aragorn and Arwen, but between Sam and Frodo as well as other male characters — and notes that she and her sister and her friends rewatched it countless times.

I gather  she means that both series were a touch point for those who were teenagers when they first saw them. Both series were compelling, so this makes sense.

I was older than that even for Star Wars, and in truth my love of the first three of those movies had a lot to do with them being well-made space opera with incredible special effects at a time when the movies didn’t do that.

My fondness for the Lord of the Rings movies had more to do with my love of the books, which dates back to my college years. (I re-read the entire trilogy every semester during law school finals. I am not exaggerating. It kept me sane.)

Plus I’m a fantasy and SF writer and reader and remember all too well when those things didn’t get noticed beyond the cons. So it makes me happy to see them shared far and wide.

But on the whole, her essay broke my heart, because if teenage girls fixated on Lord of the Rings — a story in which there are only three women of any note among a multitude of men — it is one more reminder of how utterly our popular culture has continued to fail women. Continue reading “A Plea for Better Movies”…