http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=947547
When watching films I will look for Propps Theory of narrative
The website above applies it to Star Wars, and is useful as it refreshes my memory of the theory
Sunday 28 September 2008
Wednesday 24 September 2008
While searching...
Whilst searching for females in james bond films, i came across these websites which could help me with my work. So over the weekend i will pick and choose what i need =D
A random blog I found on James Bond- http://writerunboxed.com/2006/12/12/movie-analysis-casino-royale/
A website dedicated to Bond women:
http://www.little-black-heart.net/bond-girls/bond.daniel.php
Representation of women in James Bond films: forum:
http://www.britmovie.co.uk/forums/media-studies/2831-representation-women-james-bond-films.html
The Male Gaze, Homosexualization, and James Bond Films
http://www.angelfire.com/film/articles/bond.htm
A random blog I found on James Bond- http://writerunboxed.com/2006/12/12/movie-analysis-casino-royale/
A website dedicated to Bond women:
http://www.little-black-heart.net/bond-girls/bond.daniel.php
Representation of women in James Bond films: forum:
http://www.britmovie.co.uk/forums/media-studies/2831-representation-women-james-bond-films.html
The Male Gaze, Homosexualization, and James Bond Films
http://www.angelfire.com/film/articles/bond.htm
JAMES BOND- CASINO ROYALE
Media Representations Who is being represented?
Women
In what way?
As the victim, sexual object and the one with the knowledge
By whom?
The other characters in the film- e.g. James Bond
The trailer opens in black and white, with Bond and a friend; there is also a male voice over. The way they are dressed suggests they are from a high status, as they are wearing suits. When Bond shoots he seems like the villain of the film, but is actually not.
There are many long shots of the scene with a female voice begging to appear. There is then a fade to a female (Judy dench), who is talking to Bond. She is seen as a smart professional, business women, because she is also wearing a suit. The way Bond is listening to her suggests she is in charge and has the power and control. Here the female is represented as strong and independent.
The sound heard now, makes the scene dramatic- it is parallel, with a male appearing- he is now seen as the villain and Bond as the hero. The shots here are fast paced, to show the casino and who has what. The female voice continues, she says Bond “is the best player in the service”- QUESTION TO BE ASKED: WHY IS THE MALE THE BEST??
Another female is shown; she is seen as attractive and beautiful. She is seen as knowledgeable as she is informing Bond. The close up on Bond looking at her, seems as he finds her attractive. The next scene shows her in revealing evening gown, straight after this is a shot of Bond in his swimming trunks coming out of the water. This is seen as a role reversal, as it is usually the female who is semi nude. He is represented as a sexual object for the female audience.(there is also a scene where Bond is naked- targeted towards females). She then comments on his “perfectly formed ass.”
There are many long and close fast paced shots of Bond beating someone up, after a close up of the villain is shown.
Women
In what way?
As the victim, sexual object and the one with the knowledge
By whom?
The other characters in the film- e.g. James Bond
The trailer opens in black and white, with Bond and a friend; there is also a male voice over. The way they are dressed suggests they are from a high status, as they are wearing suits. When Bond shoots he seems like the villain of the film, but is actually not.
There are many long shots of the scene with a female voice begging to appear. There is then a fade to a female (Judy dench), who is talking to Bond. She is seen as a smart professional, business women, because she is also wearing a suit. The way Bond is listening to her suggests she is in charge and has the power and control. Here the female is represented as strong and independent.
The sound heard now, makes the scene dramatic- it is parallel, with a male appearing- he is now seen as the villain and Bond as the hero. The shots here are fast paced, to show the casino and who has what. The female voice continues, she says Bond “is the best player in the service”- QUESTION TO BE ASKED: WHY IS THE MALE THE BEST??
Another female is shown; she is seen as attractive and beautiful. She is seen as knowledgeable as she is informing Bond. The close up on Bond looking at her, seems as he finds her attractive. The next scene shows her in revealing evening gown, straight after this is a shot of Bond in his swimming trunks coming out of the water. This is seen as a role reversal, as it is usually the female who is semi nude. He is represented as a sexual object for the female audience.(there is also a scene where Bond is naked- targeted towards females). She then comments on his “perfectly formed ass.”
There are many long and close fast paced shots of Bond beating someone up, after a close up of the villain is shown.
Now the female is seen as a sexual desire, as the male comments whether or not she has melted into Bonds heart. The next close up is now of Bond and the female showing their affection to one another by kissing. The villain is over looking this, in a jealous yet angry way. Bond now instructs to a male to “get the girl out” seeing her as vulnerable. They kiss again and are seen running away.
Now a car getting away is seen with the scream of the female in trouble.
She is under water, in a cage in trouble; Bond has come to save her.
Bond is seen getting into a car, driving really fast,
There is a montage of different scenes from the film.
Bond is about to hurt the female, who is tied up in the middle of the road, but he steers the other way, saving her.
Media Institutions
What is the institutional source of the text?
MGM AND Columbia
In what ways has the text been influenced or shaped by the institution which produced it?
The company is well known, there are numerous James Bond films out before this.
How has the text been distributed?
Through advertisements, billboards, and newspapers adverts
Media Values and Ideology
What are the major values, ideologies and assumptions underpinning the text or naturalised within it?
Those females are seen as attractive, vulnerable women. However, it is the female who is helping Bond with his mission, instead of a male sidekick.
Media Audiences
To whom is the text addressed? What is the target audience?
The audience for this text is- males and females aged 15+
What assumptions about the audience’s characteristics are implicit within the text? They like watching action films
Theories:
Propp:
Bond= hero
Vesper Lynd= heroine
Le Chiffre= villain
M= The doner
Felix Leiter= the helper
-Mulvey can also be applied, as the female is presented for male gaze.
-Levi-Strauss: binary oppositions: good vs evil
“She is no run-of-the-mill Bond girl; with her Olympic-standard embonpoint and inverted triangle face, she has a sexy head-girl haughtiness, and the many close-ups of her tensely appalled expression by the card table make it look as if she has witnessed Bond dissecting a frog on the green baize.”
THE GUARDIAN
false- she is not seen as masculine, but as feminine, becasue of the way she is dressed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/nov/10/jamesbond.danielcraig
"For decades the Bond girls who accompany 007 on his missions have been dismissed as sexist eye candy and lampooned for their suggestive names."
THE TELEGRAPH
Tuesday 23 September 2008
MY PRESENTATION
WWW
I involved the audience,by asking questions
My powerpoint was good to look- it did not have alot of text
Well structured
Had Key concepts
I broke it up, by having a trailer
EBI
I asked questions about the trailer
have to comment on some of my blog posts
Targets
need to make more references to audience, uses/grats, and look at more genre theory.
research by using books
Genre Theory..
Look at other blogs...
I involved the audience,by asking questions
My powerpoint was good to look- it did not have alot of text
Well structured
Had Key concepts
I broke it up, by having a trailer
EBI
I asked questions about the trailer
have to comment on some of my blog posts
Targets
need to make more references to audience, uses/grats, and look at more genre theory.
research by using books
Genre Theory..
Look at other blogs...
Assessment objective
- AO2: Wider Context
I will read Media Guardian on a regular basis as well as reading newspapers, which I already do.
- AO3.2: Comparing and Accounting for similarities and differences
I will practice by comparing at least 2 texts a week, and will bring the rest of the assessment objectives in my answer. Then I can see what my targets would be.
-AO3.1: Issues/Debates/Theories
I will research over the internet different theories and theorists that I will need to use in the future. I will also look at blogs from last year and read a variety of books.
- AO5: Research Techniques
I will start to broaden my techniques my reading books
- AO1: Key Concepts
This objective is OK, as we used it last year, however i can improve by practicing on my independent study, to see what else I can add in.
Wednesday 17 September 2008
Friday 12 September 2008
Thursday 11 September 2008
Violent Femmes
This spring, while Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was breaking box-office records and feminists were arguing over the merits of the female action hero, no one noticed the dogs playing in theaters elsewhere. Exit Wounds, the latest Steven Seagal flick, opened with a paltry $19 million---his best in years, but a poor showing for an action film. While he's mercifully cut off the ponytail, Seagal is showing all of his 50 years, wearing a pastiche of orange pancake makeup and sporting heft not attributable to muscle mass.
In Exit Wounds, the martial-arts afficionado and star of macho classics Hard to Kill and Out for Justice employed Hong Kong kung-fu-movie wire tricks made famous in The Matrix and now standard fare in action-chick flicks. But where the wires only added to the grace and agility of lithesome Zhang Zi Yi in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, they seemed to strain just to get Seagal off the ground.
Meanwhile, Driven, the latest by Sylvester Stallone, the quintessential beefcake action hero, was dying from neglect. The car-racing movie went almost straight to video, and so far has grossed only $32 million, a far cry from the $47 million Tomb Raider made in its very first weekend. Driven's returns were actually an improvement over Stallone's last disaster, Get Carter, which in 2000 earned all of $15 million, barely what his 1981 classic, Nighthawks, grossed back when ticket-prices were a lot cheaper.
And then there's poor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Last fall, his cloning film, The Sixth Day, disappeared with similar returns---this from a guy behind one of the all-time box-office blowouts, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Schwarzenegger had better luck last year playing the voice of a bug in the animated film, Antz, which pulled in $90 million.
This year, the muscle-bound stars of action-film blockbusters of the '80s and '90s have found themselves ungraciously drop-kicked out of the genre by, of all things, a bunch of girls. Girl-power flicks like Charlie's Angels, Crouching Tiger, and Tomb Raider are topping the $100 million mark once dominated by men like Schwarzenegger. Charlie's Angels has brought in $125 million; Crouching Tiger is up to $179 million; and Tomb Raider, only open since mid-June, stands at $126 million. Even last year's cheerleading movie, Bring It On, trumped the traditional male stars, grossing $68 million.
Action chicks are taking over prime time television as well. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess and La Femme Nikita---all WB or UPN fodder---are about to be joined on a major network by Alias, a show about Sydney Bristow, a kung-fu-chopping female agent for a top-secret division of the CIA.
The enormous popularity of women as film enforcers has stirred much debate over what these films say about women, feminism, Hollywood, and violence, and whether it's progress or exploitation. But no one has answered a more interesting question: What does this say about men? After all, none of the big female hits could have achieved its staggering popularity without nabbing a significant male audience, those same guys who were once the primary consumers of Die Hard, First Blood, and Commando. If men once lived vicariously through the escapades of John Rambo and Col. Matrix---in movies where women were mainly crime victims or in need of rescue---what does it mean when they love watching Lara Croft kick some bad-boy ass? It's a pretty sharp turn from misogyny to masochism.
The cynics say men will watch hot babes do just about anything, whether it's Jell-O wrestling or kickboxing men, and that the dominatrix has always been part of the male fantasy. Certainly, that must be part of it. But while simple sex appeal might explain why men like Lara Croft, it doesn't explain why they no longer love Schwarzenegger, to whom they'd been so loyal, suffering through everything from Predator to Junior. Nor does the hot-babe theory explain why no obvious successors have stepped in to replace Jean Claude Van Damme and the other aging beef boys.
More to the point, though, the pat male-fantasy explanation doesn't answer the question: Why now? Women have been playing action heroes for more than a decade, but they have never achieved Tomb Raiders level of success until just last year. In fact, earlier films where women played the lead roles as strong (and sexy) action heroines dropped like bombs.
Neither Demi Moore's 1997 G.I. Jane nor The Long Kiss Goodnight in 1996, starring Geena Davis as a highly trained government assassin, spawned any TV spin-offs or plans for sequels. And neither came anywhere near the $100 million box- office benchmark of Charlie's Angels or Crouching Tiger. The Long Kiss grossed only $33 million; G.I. Jane, despite Moore's star- power and new breasts, garnered only $48 million.
Part of the appeal of the new action genre, of course, is that the old beefcake films were getting tired and repetitive, and their stars Reagan-era relics. It's not just that their stars are getting old---most are in their 50s now---but for men on the silver screen these days, being buff just isn't what it used to be.
If you don't believe that studs on steroids have lost their Hollywood appeal, all you have to do is watch Copland, the 1997 indie film in which Stallone tried to revive his flagging career by going against character and starring as a fat guy. He wasn't bad either, playing Freddy Hefflin, the sensitive, half-deaf New Jersey sheriff who adores Sibelius violin concertos. Still, there was only so much the Italian Stallion could do; Schwarzenegger had already exhausted the cutesy roles for inarticulate lugs (remember Kindergarten Cop?).
The meathead movie really flourished at a time when men were desperately clinging to their traditional male roles in the world even as those roles were quickly disappearing. The action heroes like John Rambo or Commando's Col. Matrix represented an ideal, and also nostalgia for a time when men built bridges, defended helpless broads, and were worshipped for their physical conquests---sexual and otherwise. They thrived during the '80s, when military might made a comeback and Bruce Springsteen dedicated albums to steelworkers.
Technology and the sexual revolution, though, have combined to make the muscleman---and his movie---obsolete. Wires have allowed Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz to high- kick, jump, and fly better than Seagal ever could, and the girls didn't have to become body-builders in the process. The lithe titanium bodies of Angelina Jolie and Crouching Tiger's Zhang Zi Yi make men like Schwarzenegger look like lumps of heavy, slow-moving steel. Their kind of over-tanned, sweat-sheened, macho muscularity has all but disappeared from the screen. Who sweats in action films these days?
Even the backdrop for the action film has changed dramatically over the past decade. While today's drama is more likely to unfold in a parking garage or at the beach, the final scenes of the classic '80s and early '90s formula action film invariably ended up in some sort of industrial-age setting where various forms of menacing, manly machinery lurked behind the fistfights.
Terminator 2 ended with Arnold lowering himself down into a vat of molten steel to terminate himself. Little did Arnold know then that T2 really was the new prototype for the modern action movie. In that 1991 film, the new terminator, the T2, was played by Robert Patrick, better known today as Agent Dogget on The X-Files. Compared to the T1 (Schwarzenegger), Patrick was smaller, faster, and smarter---everything you want in your new laptop, and all the things that women so naturally bring to the screen.
Barbarella Bites Back
T2 also foreshadowed the emergence of the action babe, with tank-top-clad Linda Hamilton opening the film doing very manly chin-ups. It took a while before Hollywood got the formula right---G.I. Jane and The Long Kiss Goodnight were fledgling efforts to bring a woman to the center of the action, but those films were fatally flawed in terms of the mass-marketing success formula for an action film.
The key to any good action film is an inverse relationship between the amount of special effects and the amount of dialogue. Talk too much and the heroine loses her mystique and starts to remind men of their ex-wives. Tomb Raider certainly scores on that front. Angelina Jolie couldn't have more than five lines---all snappy ones, of course, which is also a prerequisite for a good action flick.
The other critical requirement for a successful action movie is for the audience to be able to suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the fantasy. Even with a minimum of dialogue, it's unlikely that male movie audiences 20 years ago would have been willing to accept the preposterous idea of Angelina Jolie engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a man---and winning. With the women's movement beginning to make men uncomfortable men probably weren't eager to see women back up their political threat (or even divorce threats) with good roundhouse kicks to the head.
Today, women everywhere seem to be kicking ass, and men don't seem to mind, within reason. You only have to look to the tennis court to see the change. Women's tennis has never been more powerful---or popular. Venus and Serena Williams are smashing 100-mile-an-hour serves that John McEnroe would have had a hard time returning in his heyday. Lindsey Davenport could eat Lara Croft for lunch.
Oddly enough, while women's sports have paved the way for Lara Croft to gross $100 million at the box office, they have also made Rambo and his expression of male physical power the more laughable movie scenario. Rambo's reliance on brute force, jungle warfare, and big pipes seems so passé, especially when dorks like Bill Gates run the world. Muscles on men have become somewhat irrelevant unless the men happen to be mopping the floors at Microsoft. (Perhaps one of the slyest commentaries on the state of the modern American male came a few years back in the film American Beauty, when Kevin Spacey decides to try getting in shape and has to ask the neighborhood gay guys for workout advice.)
The average straight American male today is the doughy white guy who sits in a suburban office park most of the day before driving his SUV home to the wife and kids and online stock reports. Shooting hoop and bench-pressing in the garage just don't figure into the equation. And why should they, when women are more interested in the size of men's portfolios than the size of their pecs anyway?
Conan the Librarian
It's easy to see how Stallone and company have lost their male audience. What's harder to understand is why men aren't more threatened by the arrival of powerful heroines. Of course, a closer viewing of these films suggests that, for all their killer moves and rippling muscles, the action babes still aren't really creating a new world order. If they were, moviemakers wouldn't have needed to create a curious new role for men: The Chad.
For those of you who haven't seen Charlie's Angels, The Chad is Drew Barrymore's erstwhile boyfriend, a scrawny boat owner who gets up early and cheerfully makes her pancakes for breakfast, only to have her dash away to meet up with the other angels for some daring mission. The Chad dotes on Barrymore, "my little starfish," only to watch helplessly as she plunges off the side of his boat in scuba gear to wage an amphibious assault on the bad guys.
The Chad, a descendant of Nancy Drew's Ned, the faithful boyfriend who dutifully arrives with the car at just the right moment, appears in other films as well. Usually, though, The Chad comes in the role of technogeek who worships the heroine (who will never in a million years have sex with him) and often needs to be rescued---or is, at least, of little help when the action heats up.
In Tomb Raider, The Chad is a fellow named Bryce who lives on Croft's estate and builds robots and other gadgets for her. When the evil warriors launch their attack on the Croft mansion, Bryce somehow gets locked in his RV and can only watch helplessly on the TV monitors as Croft vanquishes the black-hooded intruders.
Chad-like characters and their goddess-worship also regularly populate television, particularly episodes of The X-Files, where computer geeks frequently encounter Lara- Croft-type characters and are abused by them. Emasculated, these quivering high-tech weenies heighten the physical prowess and fearlessness of the heroines. Surrounded by submissive men, the women become powerful---but only in the geeks' realm. The weak men are necessary props for the audience to buy into the heroine's triumphs. But The Chad also reassures the regular guy that Drew Barrymore couldn't kick his ass.
And when the action babe does meet her male match, the fighting becomes more like foreplay than a duel to the death, as with Zhang Zi Yi and Chang Chen, wrestling across the sand dunes over a stolen comb in Crouching Tiger. More than just a good martial-arts scene, the fight is fraught with the excitement of sexual conquest that has all but disappeared with the sexual revolution.
No doubt our action heroines have come a long way since Wonder Woman, but the feminist critics are right: Women are still only allowed to be violent within certain parameters largely proscribed by what men are willing to tolerate. To be sure, what men will tolerate has certainly changed a good deal. But in the old action films, at the end, the male hero always walks away from a burning building looking dirty, bleeding sweaty yet vindicated (Remember Bruce Willis' bloody feet after walking through broken glass barefoot in Die Hard?).
None of today's action chicks come near that level of messiness. The violence is sterilized---it is, after all, PG-13, aimed mostly at 12-year-olds. They rarely mess up their hair, nor do they really fight---or perhaps gun down---significant bad guys like, say, Rutger Hauer or Wesley Snipes, which would seriously upset the balance of power. Often they end up sparring with other women. Their motives are always pure and they never use unnecessary violence the way Arnold and the boys get to. The body count in Commando topped 100; Charlie's Angels couldn't have had a single real corpse.
Women playing real action figures who menace real men still don't sell, as Geena Davis discovered in Long Kiss Goodnight. In the opening scene, Davis does something unbelievably unladylike: She kills Bambi, snapping a deer's neck with her bare hands. That scene alone probably sank her movie. Men may have accepted women as action figures, but only when those action figures are a cross between Gidget and Bruce Lee. To achieve box-office success, the new action babes have to celebrate women's power without being so threatening that men would be afraid to sleep with the leading lady.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0109.mencimer.html
In Exit Wounds, the martial-arts afficionado and star of macho classics Hard to Kill and Out for Justice employed Hong Kong kung-fu-movie wire tricks made famous in The Matrix and now standard fare in action-chick flicks. But where the wires only added to the grace and agility of lithesome Zhang Zi Yi in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, they seemed to strain just to get Seagal off the ground.
Meanwhile, Driven, the latest by Sylvester Stallone, the quintessential beefcake action hero, was dying from neglect. The car-racing movie went almost straight to video, and so far has grossed only $32 million, a far cry from the $47 million Tomb Raider made in its very first weekend. Driven's returns were actually an improvement over Stallone's last disaster, Get Carter, which in 2000 earned all of $15 million, barely what his 1981 classic, Nighthawks, grossed back when ticket-prices were a lot cheaper.
And then there's poor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Last fall, his cloning film, The Sixth Day, disappeared with similar returns---this from a guy behind one of the all-time box-office blowouts, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Schwarzenegger had better luck last year playing the voice of a bug in the animated film, Antz, which pulled in $90 million.
This year, the muscle-bound stars of action-film blockbusters of the '80s and '90s have found themselves ungraciously drop-kicked out of the genre by, of all things, a bunch of girls. Girl-power flicks like Charlie's Angels, Crouching Tiger, and Tomb Raider are topping the $100 million mark once dominated by men like Schwarzenegger. Charlie's Angels has brought in $125 million; Crouching Tiger is up to $179 million; and Tomb Raider, only open since mid-June, stands at $126 million. Even last year's cheerleading movie, Bring It On, trumped the traditional male stars, grossing $68 million.
Action chicks are taking over prime time television as well. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess and La Femme Nikita---all WB or UPN fodder---are about to be joined on a major network by Alias, a show about Sydney Bristow, a kung-fu-chopping female agent for a top-secret division of the CIA.
The enormous popularity of women as film enforcers has stirred much debate over what these films say about women, feminism, Hollywood, and violence, and whether it's progress or exploitation. But no one has answered a more interesting question: What does this say about men? After all, none of the big female hits could have achieved its staggering popularity without nabbing a significant male audience, those same guys who were once the primary consumers of Die Hard, First Blood, and Commando. If men once lived vicariously through the escapades of John Rambo and Col. Matrix---in movies where women were mainly crime victims or in need of rescue---what does it mean when they love watching Lara Croft kick some bad-boy ass? It's a pretty sharp turn from misogyny to masochism.
The cynics say men will watch hot babes do just about anything, whether it's Jell-O wrestling or kickboxing men, and that the dominatrix has always been part of the male fantasy. Certainly, that must be part of it. But while simple sex appeal might explain why men like Lara Croft, it doesn't explain why they no longer love Schwarzenegger, to whom they'd been so loyal, suffering through everything from Predator to Junior. Nor does the hot-babe theory explain why no obvious successors have stepped in to replace Jean Claude Van Damme and the other aging beef boys.
More to the point, though, the pat male-fantasy explanation doesn't answer the question: Why now? Women have been playing action heroes for more than a decade, but they have never achieved Tomb Raiders level of success until just last year. In fact, earlier films where women played the lead roles as strong (and sexy) action heroines dropped like bombs.
Neither Demi Moore's 1997 G.I. Jane nor The Long Kiss Goodnight in 1996, starring Geena Davis as a highly trained government assassin, spawned any TV spin-offs or plans for sequels. And neither came anywhere near the $100 million box- office benchmark of Charlie's Angels or Crouching Tiger. The Long Kiss grossed only $33 million; G.I. Jane, despite Moore's star- power and new breasts, garnered only $48 million.
Part of the appeal of the new action genre, of course, is that the old beefcake films were getting tired and repetitive, and their stars Reagan-era relics. It's not just that their stars are getting old---most are in their 50s now---but for men on the silver screen these days, being buff just isn't what it used to be.
If you don't believe that studs on steroids have lost their Hollywood appeal, all you have to do is watch Copland, the 1997 indie film in which Stallone tried to revive his flagging career by going against character and starring as a fat guy. He wasn't bad either, playing Freddy Hefflin, the sensitive, half-deaf New Jersey sheriff who adores Sibelius violin concertos. Still, there was only so much the Italian Stallion could do; Schwarzenegger had already exhausted the cutesy roles for inarticulate lugs (remember Kindergarten Cop?).
The meathead movie really flourished at a time when men were desperately clinging to their traditional male roles in the world even as those roles were quickly disappearing. The action heroes like John Rambo or Commando's Col. Matrix represented an ideal, and also nostalgia for a time when men built bridges, defended helpless broads, and were worshipped for their physical conquests---sexual and otherwise. They thrived during the '80s, when military might made a comeback and Bruce Springsteen dedicated albums to steelworkers.
Technology and the sexual revolution, though, have combined to make the muscleman---and his movie---obsolete. Wires have allowed Lucy Liu and Cameron Diaz to high- kick, jump, and fly better than Seagal ever could, and the girls didn't have to become body-builders in the process. The lithe titanium bodies of Angelina Jolie and Crouching Tiger's Zhang Zi Yi make men like Schwarzenegger look like lumps of heavy, slow-moving steel. Their kind of over-tanned, sweat-sheened, macho muscularity has all but disappeared from the screen. Who sweats in action films these days?
Even the backdrop for the action film has changed dramatically over the past decade. While today's drama is more likely to unfold in a parking garage or at the beach, the final scenes of the classic '80s and early '90s formula action film invariably ended up in some sort of industrial-age setting where various forms of menacing, manly machinery lurked behind the fistfights.
Terminator 2 ended with Arnold lowering himself down into a vat of molten steel to terminate himself. Little did Arnold know then that T2 really was the new prototype for the modern action movie. In that 1991 film, the new terminator, the T2, was played by Robert Patrick, better known today as Agent Dogget on The X-Files. Compared to the T1 (Schwarzenegger), Patrick was smaller, faster, and smarter---everything you want in your new laptop, and all the things that women so naturally bring to the screen.
Barbarella Bites Back
T2 also foreshadowed the emergence of the action babe, with tank-top-clad Linda Hamilton opening the film doing very manly chin-ups. It took a while before Hollywood got the formula right---G.I. Jane and The Long Kiss Goodnight were fledgling efforts to bring a woman to the center of the action, but those films were fatally flawed in terms of the mass-marketing success formula for an action film.
The key to any good action film is an inverse relationship between the amount of special effects and the amount of dialogue. Talk too much and the heroine loses her mystique and starts to remind men of their ex-wives. Tomb Raider certainly scores on that front. Angelina Jolie couldn't have more than five lines---all snappy ones, of course, which is also a prerequisite for a good action flick.
The other critical requirement for a successful action movie is for the audience to be able to suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the fantasy. Even with a minimum of dialogue, it's unlikely that male movie audiences 20 years ago would have been willing to accept the preposterous idea of Angelina Jolie engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a man---and winning. With the women's movement beginning to make men uncomfortable men probably weren't eager to see women back up their political threat (or even divorce threats) with good roundhouse kicks to the head.
Today, women everywhere seem to be kicking ass, and men don't seem to mind, within reason. You only have to look to the tennis court to see the change. Women's tennis has never been more powerful---or popular. Venus and Serena Williams are smashing 100-mile-an-hour serves that John McEnroe would have had a hard time returning in his heyday. Lindsey Davenport could eat Lara Croft for lunch.
Oddly enough, while women's sports have paved the way for Lara Croft to gross $100 million at the box office, they have also made Rambo and his expression of male physical power the more laughable movie scenario. Rambo's reliance on brute force, jungle warfare, and big pipes seems so passé, especially when dorks like Bill Gates run the world. Muscles on men have become somewhat irrelevant unless the men happen to be mopping the floors at Microsoft. (Perhaps one of the slyest commentaries on the state of the modern American male came a few years back in the film American Beauty, when Kevin Spacey decides to try getting in shape and has to ask the neighborhood gay guys for workout advice.)
The average straight American male today is the doughy white guy who sits in a suburban office park most of the day before driving his SUV home to the wife and kids and online stock reports. Shooting hoop and bench-pressing in the garage just don't figure into the equation. And why should they, when women are more interested in the size of men's portfolios than the size of their pecs anyway?
Conan the Librarian
It's easy to see how Stallone and company have lost their male audience. What's harder to understand is why men aren't more threatened by the arrival of powerful heroines. Of course, a closer viewing of these films suggests that, for all their killer moves and rippling muscles, the action babes still aren't really creating a new world order. If they were, moviemakers wouldn't have needed to create a curious new role for men: The Chad.
For those of you who haven't seen Charlie's Angels, The Chad is Drew Barrymore's erstwhile boyfriend, a scrawny boat owner who gets up early and cheerfully makes her pancakes for breakfast, only to have her dash away to meet up with the other angels for some daring mission. The Chad dotes on Barrymore, "my little starfish," only to watch helplessly as she plunges off the side of his boat in scuba gear to wage an amphibious assault on the bad guys.
The Chad, a descendant of Nancy Drew's Ned, the faithful boyfriend who dutifully arrives with the car at just the right moment, appears in other films as well. Usually, though, The Chad comes in the role of technogeek who worships the heroine (who will never in a million years have sex with him) and often needs to be rescued---or is, at least, of little help when the action heats up.
In Tomb Raider, The Chad is a fellow named Bryce who lives on Croft's estate and builds robots and other gadgets for her. When the evil warriors launch their attack on the Croft mansion, Bryce somehow gets locked in his RV and can only watch helplessly on the TV monitors as Croft vanquishes the black-hooded intruders.
Chad-like characters and their goddess-worship also regularly populate television, particularly episodes of The X-Files, where computer geeks frequently encounter Lara- Croft-type characters and are abused by them. Emasculated, these quivering high-tech weenies heighten the physical prowess and fearlessness of the heroines. Surrounded by submissive men, the women become powerful---but only in the geeks' realm. The weak men are necessary props for the audience to buy into the heroine's triumphs. But The Chad also reassures the regular guy that Drew Barrymore couldn't kick his ass.
And when the action babe does meet her male match, the fighting becomes more like foreplay than a duel to the death, as with Zhang Zi Yi and Chang Chen, wrestling across the sand dunes over a stolen comb in Crouching Tiger. More than just a good martial-arts scene, the fight is fraught with the excitement of sexual conquest that has all but disappeared with the sexual revolution.
No doubt our action heroines have come a long way since Wonder Woman, but the feminist critics are right: Women are still only allowed to be violent within certain parameters largely proscribed by what men are willing to tolerate. To be sure, what men will tolerate has certainly changed a good deal. But in the old action films, at the end, the male hero always walks away from a burning building looking dirty, bleeding sweaty yet vindicated (Remember Bruce Willis' bloody feet after walking through broken glass barefoot in Die Hard?).
None of today's action chicks come near that level of messiness. The violence is sterilized---it is, after all, PG-13, aimed mostly at 12-year-olds. They rarely mess up their hair, nor do they really fight---or perhaps gun down---significant bad guys like, say, Rutger Hauer or Wesley Snipes, which would seriously upset the balance of power. Often they end up sparring with other women. Their motives are always pure and they never use unnecessary violence the way Arnold and the boys get to. The body count in Commando topped 100; Charlie's Angels couldn't have had a single real corpse.
Women playing real action figures who menace real men still don't sell, as Geena Davis discovered in Long Kiss Goodnight. In the opening scene, Davis does something unbelievably unladylike: She kills Bambi, snapping a deer's neck with her bare hands. That scene alone probably sank her movie. Men may have accepted women as action figures, but only when those action figures are a cross between Gidget and Bruce Lee. To achieve box-office success, the new action babes have to celebrate women's power without being so threatening that men would be afraid to sleep with the leading lady.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0109.mencimer.html
Genre- ACTION
http://www.filmsite.org/actionfilms.html
Women in action-films usually play the roles of accomplices or romantic interests of the hero, although modern action films have featured strong female...
Women in action-films usually play the roles of accomplices or romantic interests of the hero, although modern action films have featured strong female...
Feminine Masculinity: The Rise of Women in Action Films
Feminine Masculinity: The Rise of Women in Action Films
It has become a trend in cinema for female actresses to take on roles that used to be typically suited for men.
View more »
It has become a trend in cinema for female actresses to take on roles that used to be typically suited for men.
View more »
Tuesday 9 September 2008
When a Stranger Calls (2006)
Director- Simon West
Release Date- 12/05/06 (UK)
Distributed by- Screen Gems
Genre- Horror
Tagline: Evil Hits Home
During an otherwise routine babysitting gig, a high-school student is harassed by an increasingly threatening prank caller.
ANALYSIS
In the first five minutes of the film a female is presented as weak.
This is shown after she answers her phone call, from a stranger, who asks her what her name is, she replies ‘I’m the babysitter.’ She is later seen being dragged down by someone (the stranger on the phone) screaming. This long shot of her portrays her as a victim. Her screaming is juxtaposed by children laughing at a fair nearby to the house at which she is babysitting.
The next scene is in Colorado, the film introduces us to Jill, a young female in high school, who has problems with her Boyfriend.
- She is shown to be independent, because she broke up with her Boyfriend, who kissed her best friend- Tiffany. The fact that she is shown running in a gym above males, suggests she is powerful and dominant, as she is higher than them. A high angle is used to show where she is and what she is doing. Also, she is shown not to be a stereotypical cheerleader, who craves the attention from her male peers.
- Tiffany is shown to be someone who does not care for anyone else’s feelings. Later on in the film she calls herself ‘a bitch’ which can sum up her character by herself.
Her story starts, when she has gone over her phone minutes, as a consequence she is not allowed her phone, her car, and is not allowed to go out anywhere. Her dad has given her a job as a babysitter for someone he knows.
- Here she is shown as female who look afters children, a question that can be raised here, is that why couldn’t a male be the babysitter instead? The female is stereotyped as a maternal figure, she has to care children.
The house she is babysitting at is isolated; it is set during the evening when it is dark. The house is surrounded by water- a lake, with woods nearby (trees all over)
- TYPICAL CONVENTION
30 minutes into the film:
The phone rings, and there is heavy breathing on the other side- to the audience it can suggest she is the next victim, as she is a babysitter, just like the first female, and the phone call is the same. There is a medium shot of her looking scared.
The door closes behind her; she hears footsteps and the lights go on automatically.
- TYPICAL CONVENTION
The phone rings again, this time she hears crackling, and the man asks her
‘Is everything OK?’
45 minutes into the film:
She is shown entering a room full of birds, which scare her. This is an intertextual reference to, The Birds (1963) a horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
After this scene her ex- best friend Tiffany come to the house, she is shown to be a stereotypical blonde. She is shown to be attracted to alcohol; this is a negative representation of females.
When she is leaving alone, she drops her keys; there are loud noises in the background of footsteps and branches. Then from the point of view from the stranger, we see Tiffany trying to move the gate. There then is a close up of her from the stranger’s point of view- suggesting to the audience he has attacked her.
We are now back to Jill- the phone rings, and she answers ‘what Tiffany’
A male voice says ‘This isn’t Tiffany’ there is all of sudden a loud wind sound. This sets the mood for the audience, as it is thrilling and mysterious, as they want to know who is behind it all.
Another female who is presented is – Rosa- the house keeper, she is shown to have disappeared- the audience can then figure out the stranger has got to her.
The phone rings again- there is a long shot of the eerie atmosphere.
The man say’s ‘Have you checked the children?’
She checks the children and they are fine.
Walking down the stairs, the phone rings, the stranger tells her he ‘is outside the house,’ and he can see her.
She pulls the curtains, because he is now scaring her.
Looking outside she sees a dark shadow in the guest house, a close up of Jill shown, shows her as frightened.
The phone rings- she asks him what he wants, and he replies
“Your blood all over me”
The water is heard running upstairs, then a close up of JILL.
1 hour 5 minutes into the film:
The police ring, because earlier she phoned them and reported the calls, they then traced the calls. They tell her the calls are coming from inside the house…
Jill goes upstairs and finds, Rosa on the floor dead K - that was obvious
Also the kids are missing.
20 minutes left of the film:
The kids are found hiding in their room; they tell JILL there is a man in the room. He jumps down from the top, wearing all black.
She and the children run away, where the birds and little river is. She is hiding in the water below, and sees a dead female- which is Tiffany. The children run outside into the living room, and Jill gets caught, but she manages to escape him.
He catches her again, but she hits him with something used for an electric fire- a metal rod.
She runs outside and bumps into the police.
She is seen sitting there alone, as the car with the stranger is inside, the audience can finally see his face which is a close up.
The TV news is shown saying, a man has been captured, who has killed 15 young females.
A final scene is her in an empty hospital alone, the phone rings and the stranger is behind her….She wakes up screaming in a busy hospital.
Jill is represnted as a vitcim, but strong, as she survived. However, even though she escapes him, she is still a victim, because she has gone mad.
Release Date- 12/05/06 (UK)
Distributed by- Screen Gems
Genre- Horror
Tagline: Evil Hits Home
During an otherwise routine babysitting gig, a high-school student is harassed by an increasingly threatening prank caller.
ANALYSIS
In the first five minutes of the film a female is presented as weak.
This is shown after she answers her phone call, from a stranger, who asks her what her name is, she replies ‘I’m the babysitter.’ She is later seen being dragged down by someone (the stranger on the phone) screaming. This long shot of her portrays her as a victim. Her screaming is juxtaposed by children laughing at a fair nearby to the house at which she is babysitting.
The next scene is in Colorado, the film introduces us to Jill, a young female in high school, who has problems with her Boyfriend.
- She is shown to be independent, because she broke up with her Boyfriend, who kissed her best friend- Tiffany. The fact that she is shown running in a gym above males, suggests she is powerful and dominant, as she is higher than them. A high angle is used to show where she is and what she is doing. Also, she is shown not to be a stereotypical cheerleader, who craves the attention from her male peers.
- Tiffany is shown to be someone who does not care for anyone else’s feelings. Later on in the film she calls herself ‘a bitch’ which can sum up her character by herself.
Her story starts, when she has gone over her phone minutes, as a consequence she is not allowed her phone, her car, and is not allowed to go out anywhere. Her dad has given her a job as a babysitter for someone he knows.
- Here she is shown as female who look afters children, a question that can be raised here, is that why couldn’t a male be the babysitter instead? The female is stereotyped as a maternal figure, she has to care children.
The house she is babysitting at is isolated; it is set during the evening when it is dark. The house is surrounded by water- a lake, with woods nearby (trees all over)
- TYPICAL CONVENTION
30 minutes into the film:
The phone rings, and there is heavy breathing on the other side- to the audience it can suggest she is the next victim, as she is a babysitter, just like the first female, and the phone call is the same. There is a medium shot of her looking scared.
The door closes behind her; she hears footsteps and the lights go on automatically.
- TYPICAL CONVENTION
The phone rings again, this time she hears crackling, and the man asks her
‘Is everything OK?’
45 minutes into the film:
She is shown entering a room full of birds, which scare her. This is an intertextual reference to, The Birds (1963) a horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
After this scene her ex- best friend Tiffany come to the house, she is shown to be a stereotypical blonde. She is shown to be attracted to alcohol; this is a negative representation of females.
When she is leaving alone, she drops her keys; there are loud noises in the background of footsteps and branches. Then from the point of view from the stranger, we see Tiffany trying to move the gate. There then is a close up of her from the stranger’s point of view- suggesting to the audience he has attacked her.
We are now back to Jill- the phone rings, and she answers ‘what Tiffany’
A male voice says ‘This isn’t Tiffany’ there is all of sudden a loud wind sound. This sets the mood for the audience, as it is thrilling and mysterious, as they want to know who is behind it all.
Another female who is presented is – Rosa- the house keeper, she is shown to have disappeared- the audience can then figure out the stranger has got to her.
The phone rings again- there is a long shot of the eerie atmosphere.
The man say’s ‘Have you checked the children?’
She checks the children and they are fine.
Walking down the stairs, the phone rings, the stranger tells her he ‘is outside the house,’ and he can see her.
She pulls the curtains, because he is now scaring her.
Looking outside she sees a dark shadow in the guest house, a close up of Jill shown, shows her as frightened.
The phone rings- she asks him what he wants, and he replies
“Your blood all over me”
The water is heard running upstairs, then a close up of JILL.
1 hour 5 minutes into the film:
The police ring, because earlier she phoned them and reported the calls, they then traced the calls. They tell her the calls are coming from inside the house…
Jill goes upstairs and finds, Rosa on the floor dead K - that was obvious
Also the kids are missing.
20 minutes left of the film:
The kids are found hiding in their room; they tell JILL there is a man in the room. He jumps down from the top, wearing all black.
She and the children run away, where the birds and little river is. She is hiding in the water below, and sees a dead female- which is Tiffany. The children run outside into the living room, and Jill gets caught, but she manages to escape him.
He catches her again, but she hits him with something used for an electric fire- a metal rod.
She runs outside and bumps into the police.
She is seen sitting there alone, as the car with the stranger is inside, the audience can finally see his face which is a close up.
The TV news is shown saying, a man has been captured, who has killed 15 young females.
A final scene is her in an empty hospital alone, the phone rings and the stranger is behind her….She wakes up screaming in a busy hospital.
Jill is represnted as a vitcim, but strong, as she survived. However, even though she escapes him, she is still a victim, because she has gone mad.
Monday 1 September 2008
Information
Laura Mulvey:
http://www.answers.com/topic/laura-mulvey
Feminist film theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_film_theory
http://www.answers.com/topic/laura-mulvey
Feminist film theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_film_theory
Analysis of “What happens in Vegas” film
What Happens in Vegas
Release Date:9 May 2008 (UK)
Genre: Romance and Comedy
Tagline: Get Lucky.
Plot: Set in Sin City, story revolves around two people who discover they've gotten married following a night of debauchery
Release Date:9 May 2008 (UK)
Genre: Romance and Comedy
Tagline: Get Lucky.
Plot: Set in Sin City, story revolves around two people who discover they've gotten married following a night of debauchery
Media Representations
Who is being represented?
The females, with focus on Cameron Diaz
• In what way?
• Her representation changes throughout the film.
• Beginning: she is a loving and caring partner
• Middle: she goes to Vegas and parties, gets married in the ;heat of the moment’ and then tries to anger her new husband so he will ask for a divorce so she can have all the money.
• End: she falls in love with him
• Is the representation fair and accurate?
• She is shown in many ways: intelligent, funny, dopey at times, a bit crazy and caring
Needs to be continued….
Research
I will read the following blogs,over the next couple of days, which will help me with my work......
http://cbjuicyfruity.blogspot.com/
‘ I’m the deadliest women in the world – but right now, I’m scared shitless about my baby![1] With particular reference to “Kill Bill”, how and why have women’s roles in action films changed?
And i need to go to the libabry to get books which will help me.
-Title: Sexing Code: Subversion, Theory and Representation Author: Claudia Herbst
http://cbjuicyfruity.blogspot.com/
‘ I’m the deadliest women in the world – but right now, I’m scared shitless about my baby![1] With particular reference to “Kill Bill”, how and why have women’s roles in action films changed?
And i need to go to the libabry to get books which will help me.
-Title: Sexing Code: Subversion, Theory and Representation Author: Claudia Herbst
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