The good news/bad news regarding the decidedly un-feminist female characters in Oz: The Great and Powerful.

Full-on spoiler warning...

Unfortunately pretty much everything I feared about Oz: The Great and Powerful, right from the second trailer, turned out to be true, at least from a gender perspective.  It is indeed about three seemingly powerful women sitting around and waiting for a random man who fell out of the sky to not only attempt to save Oz but, more importantly, shape all three of their respective destinies.  The film also equates beauty with virtue in a rather explicit fashion, with somewhat laughable scenes of Rachel Weisz's Evanora complaining of jealousy over Michelle Williams 'pretty face' seemingly oblivious to the fact that said evil witch is played by *Rachel Weisz* (spoiler: Rachel Weisz is insanely hot). It's not just that Mila Kunis and Michelle Williams play seemingly strong female characters who constantly yap about needing some prophesied male wizard to swoop down and save their asses. The biggest problem in the film is that it allows its feeble and somewhat selfish male hero to basically define them and their actions.

Better roles for child actresses than adult actresses? Jennifer Lawrence graduates to 'adult' roles by playing the token girlfriend/manic pixie dream girl.

Yes, this started as deleted material from my Silver Linings Playbook essay from Saturday. I don't want to get into another 'roles for women' rant, but it's interesting that Jennifer Lawrence may win an Oscar for arguably the first role of her career where she exists purely to support the male lead's arc (even her token girlfriend role in The Beaver had a character arc for *her*). She has not a single scene in this film where she exists as a character outside of her role as Bradley Cooper's girlfriend/spiritual healer. She is basically a glorified manic pixie fuck toy who exists purely to support the male lead's emotional journey, not fit for even a single scene disconnected from Cooper's story. This parallels the career trajectory of the likes of Shailene Woodley and Blake Lively, solid actresses who did film and/or television work as leads who only earned real acclaim after they took supporting roles in more automatically prestigious 'manly dramas'. Blake Lively was a lead in films like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and the television show Gossip Girl.  But she was written off as a kid-friendly television star before she played a strung-out junkie with romantic feelings for Ben Affleck's oh-so-conflicted bank robber in The Town. Shailene Woodley was a lead actress in ABC Family's The Secret Life of the American Teenager, but critics only started taking her seriously once she played supporting fiddle to George Clooney in The Descendants. It's a great film and Woodley is terrific in it, but would critics have even noticed the picture had it been told from her point of view? I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of this as the newer crop of child actresses 'come of age'.

Guest Essay: Dana Shaffer on how Brave fails at feminism.

Friend and colleague Dana Shaffer wrote this terrific piece back when Brave first arrived in theaters.  Since I had already had my say on the film, I thought it best to wait until the film arrived on DVD/Blu Ray, which it does today.  Long-story short, this whole piece elaborates on ideas that I merely acknowledged in my review.  So do enjoy.

Does Brave give us the Disney princess we’ve all been waiting for? 

The film recycles a familiar tale, with a few misguided twists

By Dana Shaffer

Brave is the story of Merida, a bow-and-arrow wielding princess, with attitude, gobs of personality and more interest in pursuing her own ambitions than marriage. It sounds like a dream come true for many who have longed for a princess story with more of a plot arc than meeting a man and falling in love.

But let me give you a quick synopsis of the film (complete with spoilers, be warned):

It is the story of a vibrant and sassy redheaded teenage princess who doesn't quite fit in. She has an unusual hobby that her particularly strict parent does not approve of. During a nasty fight one day, the very strict parent destroys the daughter’s most beloved possession in a fit of rage. The parent instantly feels regret, but the damage is done. The rebellious redhead runs away. The girl seeks help from a witch, who gives her a spell that will change her destiny. But unless she fulfills a mission within a few days, the spell will turn very, very bad. After a series of inconsequential “fish out of water” scenes, the daughter must face the consequences of the spell, and her parent’s life is put in danger. The princess is rescued from peril, and in the end, the parent decides to let the daughter win the initial argument and have her way.

So that’s a bare bones plot synopsis of Brave. But perhaps it sounded familiar to you. Read it again, but this time think a little less moors of Scotland and a little more “Under the Sea.” Yep. Brave, whether it knows it or not, borrows heavily from the structure of The Little Mermaid. Of course there are some vast differences between the narratives. And perhaps in a world that recycles fairy tales and fables over and over, it’s not a big deal. But it lends some interesting ways to compare the two princesses.

Why the box office failure of Fun Size is actually good news.

Call it reason 3,214 why movies aren't dead.  As you all know, the Nickelodeon comedy Fun Size debuted in theaters last weekend with nary a peep. With just $4 million to its name by Sunday night, it was the 64th-lowest opening weekend for a wide release in history.  Why does any of this matter?  Well, precisely because it doesn't matter.  The film starred Victoria Justice, Jane Levy, and Chelsea Handler and was sold as "The Hangover for kids".  It was also yet another example of a female-centric comedy.  It bombed.  But you know what didn't happen?  You didn't hear hand-wringing about how a female-centric comedy tanked at the box office. You didn't see speculative essays about what the film's failure meant for the future of female-driven comedy in mainstream cinema.  Heck, I did not see one single article discussing even the fact that the film was in fact a female-centric comedy.  I've always said progress comes when you don't have to talk about it.  Well Fun Size bombed last weekend and nobody really cared.  I'd argue that is progress.

A chance to shatter a glass ceiling: Fox should hire Jane Goldman to direct X-Men: Days of Future Past.

I'm going to make this as brief as I can.  As most of you know, the industry was somewhat stunned this afternoon when it was announced that Matthew Vaughn was stepping down from directing X-Men: Days of Future Past (IE - X-Men: First Class 2).  The film is set to roll in early 2013 which means Fox will be scrambling for a replacement director.  The rumor mill suggests that none other than Bryan Singer is being lured back to the director's chair for the franchise that he started twelve years ago.  Jack and the Giant Slayer feels like a dud and Superman Returns nearly killed an iconic franchise.  You know my thoughts on directors returning to franchises they walked away from long ago after a string of disappointments and you can know admit that I was right about Ridley Scott and Prometheus.  I have another idea for who should helm the sequel.  She is the co-writer of the last X-Men First Class and this upcoming sequel and she is a frequent collaborator with Mr. Vaughn having co-written nearly all of his projects since Stardust back in 2007 while also writing The Woman In Black just this year.  If you want someone who is comfortable in the world established by Bryan Singer while also arguably offering a fresh perspective to a now-12 year old series, she's an obvious bet.  That Jane Goldman is a "she" is a bonus.

Review: Brave (2012) is Pixar's most impersonal and least consequential film and a more troubling failure than Cars 2.

Brave

2012
93 minutes
rated PG

by Scott Mendelson

Beset by production troubles and changing schedules, Brave enters theaters as a fable without an author.  I don't know what happened behind-the-scenes with original director Brenda Chapman nor do I know what replacement director Mark Andrews added to and removed from the final product.  But Brave is an almost irrelevant entry in the Pixar library.  While it is visually scrumptious (in 2D, natch) and boasts a terrific lead vocal performance by Kelly MacDonald, the overall story is both painfully slight and lacking any deeper meaning beyond surface-level morals.  While it is technically a superior film to Cars 2, that film was arguably a 'one for me' project with Pixar founder John Lasseter indulging his love of the Cars universe and his love of old-school spy pictures.  Brave is an artistically superior picture that is still pales in comparison to both the better efforts from both Pixar itself and the various animation rivals (Blue Sky, Dreamworks, Illumination, etc.) nipping at its heels.

Without comment or emphasis: Why The Avengers may end up this summer's most progressively-feminist blockbuster.

I wasn't going to write about The Avengers again for awhile (other than box office) both because I didn't have much more to offer and because I didn't want this blog to turn into 'all Avengers all the time'.  But I would like to take a moment to single-out a specific element that the film does quite well.  There has been much hand-wringing this week about whether or not The Avengers (and specifically its two major female characters) qualifies as 'feminist'.  Pundits are understandably upset about the lack of more female lead characters, and the fact that the film fails the Bechdel Test.  Merely presenting a couple strong female characters doesn't automatically make your product feminist in nature nor does creating a sausage-fest with a token love interest make your film inherently misogynistic, although the latter does make me roll my eyes a bit more often than not.  But the way Joss Whedon and company present their female superheros merits acknowledgment primarily because of what they don't do. In short, they don't draw one damn bit of attention to it.

Review: Mirror Mirror (2012) is lifeless and drab, a poor-man's Ella Enchanted.

Mirror Mirror
2012
106 minutes
rated PG

by Scott Mendelson

The good news is that Tarsem Singh's Mirror Mirror is nowhere near as obnoxiously zany and aggressively annoying as the trailers seem to suggest.  Frankly, the most eye-rolling moments of the marketing campaign aren't even in the movie, and I'd be hard-pressed to name more than a few pop-culture references over modern-anachronisms.  And the film is surprisingly nonchalant about gender, presenting a heroine and  female villain whose respective strengths and flaws have little to do with their gender.  But the film is strangely immobile throughout, feeling less like a cinematic experience than an overlong stage-play with expensive costumes and occasionally well-constructed sets.  Every scene goes on too long and every performer seems too tired to give it their all.  When the first trailer dropped, I derisively compared its apparent tone to the live-action Cat in the Hat.  As horrible as that film is, Mirror Mirror could have used some of its boundless energy.