Are documentaries a pathway through the glass ceiling for female directors in the fictional narrative arena?

Consider this a slightly interesting bit of news that hopefully will be a sign of things to come.  I generally don't post every press release I receive, mostly because there are other places you can go for that kind of thing.  But the press release regarding what was basically a casting announcement for Dakota Fanning caught my eye.  The film is called Every Secret Thing and it's also starring Diane Lane,  Danielle Macdonald, and Elizabeth Banks.  It concerns "two 11-year-old girls who are convicted of murdering a baby and are incarcerated until they turn 18.  Upon their release, children start to go missing; as the police turn their attention to the duo, the mystery surrounding the original murder comes back to light." The film's director is one Amy Berg.  Okay, so you have  female-driven film starring several major female talents and directed by a female director.  Always good news, but so what?  Well, Ms. Berg is making her feature film debut on the project, having previous cut her teeth in the realm of documentary film-making.

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'.

Review: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part II (2012) finishes the franchise on a relative high note.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part 2
2012
110 minutes
rated PG-13

by Scott Mendelson

As a would-be series finale, the biggest problem with Breaking Dawn part 2 is that  it really doesn't feel like the end of anything, nor does it feel like a natural stopping point.  This is not a finale in the vein of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II, where the series-long conflict is brought to a definitive end and the characters end in places from which they can not go back.  Nor is it akin to Back to the Future III, which attempts to bring its narrative full-circle and finish the specific story that it has been telling while leaving the door open for more adventures down the line.  The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part 2 basically plays like just another chapter in the lives of its main characters, one that qualifies as the end purely because the author of the original novels, Stephenie Myer, decided to stop.  The story does continue the adventures of Bella, Jacob, and the Cullen vampire clan, offering a completely new conflict at the end of its first act purely to actually have a conflict at all.  Obviously this is a source material problem, but don't expect the 'this is the end!' goosebumps that you got during the opening reels of Return of the King.  As merely a Twilight film, it's not half-bad.  If only by default, it's the best Twilight sequel and comes the closest to the irreverent shaggy dog charm of Catherine Hardwicke's original installment.

Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part II gets a trailer.

I've been whining a lot about sledgehammer-style advertising campaigns, so I must give kudos to this brief and concise trailer.  It's about 75-seconds long and does little more than set up the story and offer a few alleged money shots.  What I do find amusing is that this trailer isn't even trying to sell the idea that this series finale has anything approaching the scope and pathos of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II.  Yes there is a final battle of sorts, but it's clear that it's about on the scale of the action finale from The Golden Compass, which was basically a street fight as far as fantasy battle scenes are concerned.  Maybe the next trailer will sell the emotional highs, but of course I'd argue that there doesn't need to be a 'next trailer'.  I can't imagine anyone who isn't already a Twi-Hard not seeing this in theaters, while the whole 'series finale' enticement will only rope in so many casual fans. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part II opens on November 16th, 2012, or the 11th-anniversary of the opening of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, for whatever that's worth.  It's opening unapposed, as its Skyfall the previous weekend, but considering there are five (!) movies opening over Thanksgiving, I imagine something will end up opening alongside one of the two films (Ang Lee's Life of Pi perhaps?) As always, we'll see.  

Scott Mendelson