Here’s some shameless self-promotion and a shout-out to feminist media for your Thursday! I review There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond, edited by Corinn Columpar and Sophie Mayer, for the latest issue of Bitch magazine, which you can get here. This is a very worthy collection of academic essays, and it makes me excited about a whole ton of new directions in feminist film scholarship.
I confess that I haven’t done a great deal of publication writing lately. I’ve been awfully busy with client work. However, I’m always so pleased to be a part of a lot of very important feminist conversations!
I’ve been singing the praises of Kathryn Bigelow ever since I first saw Near Dark in the mid-1980s. As a horror fan, a cinema junkie, and an emerging feminist, I couldn’t help but love that film even more after I realized who directed it. I was so excited that a woman was making bloody awesome movies, and I was all sorts of anxious to see what other women film directors would do, as it really seemed as if Bigelow had started to blaze some trail.
And then… nothing happened. Bigelow continued to direct films and television – some exceptional and some engaging-but-kinda-meh – but no wave of women filmmakers followed in her wake. And whenever I found myself talking with someone about women directors (in high school, college, and graduate school) we could always name just a small handful, and then we’d say, “But Kathryn Bigelow – she’s made it!” In fact, Bigelow has never – EVER – made a major studio movie (yep, including Point Break). She has always had to pursue independent financing for her projects. And there have always been long periods of time when she disappeared. But still, I really wanted and needed to assert that she’d made it. Because, despite all of my optimism, women directors have continued to be a rare commodity.
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January is traditionally the cinematic dumpster, a time when studios are tossing out the films even they think are garbage. But it’s always been a good time for fans of genre film, who can inevitably find a few treasures in the junk pile. So I’m pleased to report that Daybreakers – yes, the Ethan Hawke vampire movie – officially earns a happy dance from me.
Daybreakers actually looks less like horror and more like very stylized sci-fi (the presence of Hawke makes it feel all the more like Gattaca) until the first of many buckets of gore are unleashed on the audience (frankly, I haven’t seen this much head exploding since Scanners) at which point you know that you’re in for some serious horror action. But the premise is smart enough: it’s 2019 and vampires run the show, but they’re about to run out of human blood. Our Hawke hero is a reluctant vampire scientist searching for a blood substitute, who also has a trigger (fang?) happy brother in the vampire army. Enter Willem Dafoe, a redneck former vampire who goes by the name Elvis, and a group of hunted humans, led by the very compelling Claudia Karvan. Rounding out everything is a perfectly cast Sam Neill as a (literal) corporate bloodsucker. There’s a bit of social commentary here – Hawke works for the equivalent of big pharma – but it’s never particularly heavy-handed. Instead, the film is a pretty solid blend of brains, blood and actors who do a good job of selling the script, which gets pretty thin at times. Add to that a solid dose of muscle cars, a lot of cheeky visuals, chimpanzee vampires (chimpires!) the most ludiciously fantastic bloodfeasting sequence – we’re talking SLOW MOTION BLOODFEASTING here, people – and a couple of very good jolts and you’ve got yourself quite a January horror gem. It’s good!
One other item of note about Daybreakers: being a vampire is seriously uncool in this film. These vampires are bad. What a refreshing return to form for a supernatural creature that seems confined to handwringing and canoodling with humans in pop culture these days. Hooray for the return of the bloodsucker!
I think I’ve seen more good, sophisticated films about men this year than any other year in recent memory. That’s probably a strange thing to say in light of the fact that I’m always agitating for more good films about women, but I feel strongly that we’re in serious need of smart films about real, complex female AND male characters. So it feels rather serendipitous that I ended up spending this past Thanksgiving weekend watching good – or at least ambitious – films dealing with men, boys, and their relationships.
What a quadruple feature: Anvil! The Story of Anvil, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Where the Wild Things Are, and Goodbye Solo. I was so moved that I decided to jot down some notes on them…
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Star Trek, which is being released on DVD and Blu-Ray today, was an official sponsor of Sunday Night Football this past weekend. E. was watching the game, and I was putzing around online, but when we heard that official endorsement, we both stopped and said, “Whoah!”
Star Trek sponsoring the NFL. It looks like J. J. Abrams’ re-branding of the science fiction franchise is complete. Star Trek has been remasculinized. It’s too bad that women lose out in the bargain.
(Minor spoilers ahead.)
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