This is a compelling premise for a biopic of The Runaways, especially one that derives its primary narrative by contrasting Currie’s experience with that of Joan Jett (Kristin Stewart), who forged a who-the-hell-cares rocker identity grounded largely in butch sexuality.  But despite its potential, the film never quite adds up to the level of sharp insight or critique.

The film is based on Cherie Currie’s tell-all memoir, Neon Angel, but Joan Jett executive produced it.  The two – along with all of the members of the The Runaways – have long had a contentious relationship.  One can only guess that the screenplay is an act of epic compromise, designed to produce a version of real-left events that everyone involved could live with seeing on the big screen.  As a result, the narrative is kind of a hot mess: the timeline of the band is never clear, real events come across as patently unrealistic, and the whole trajectory of the band gets glossed as a cautionary behind-the-music drug tale.  Fanning, in particular, gets saddled with a narrative that’s intended to be deeply sympathetic and moving, but there’s just not that much for her to do.  Too many depressive, swacked-out close-ups of Currie later, we still don’t know a thing about her internal life (or, for that matter, her breakdown) and we wind up blaming Fanning for a bad performance that’s probably not entirely her fault.

The Runaways isn’t a great film, but it does deliver on many fronts.  Kristen Stewart virtually disappears into the character of Joan Jett.  It’s a doozy of a performance.  She even gives Michael Shannon a run for his money, which is saying  something.  As producer/exploiter/legendary super creep Kim Fowley, Shannon turns in a crazy and charismatic performance that pretty much steals the movie away from its female actresses whenever he shares the screen with them.  (I can’t help but feel that it inadvertently rings true to the real-life dynamic being depicted, too.)  One of the key strengths of The Runaways is that it does an excellent job of making you realize that Currie and Jett – along with Sandy West, Lita Ford, and the other band members – were so very young when The Runaways started.  It really was an all-girl band.  In a scene featuring one of the band’s practice sessions, Shannon’s Fowley exclaims, “This is not about women’s lib… this is about women’s libido!”  It’s a statement that underscores the power of what Sigismondi does when she’s at her directorial best: letting The Runaways really rock.  There are several joyful and amazing moments that capture the elation and excitement of the musicians at work/play, and you can’t help but feel that they have actually liberated themselves from all the pressures of the music world to experience their burgeoning adolescent girl libido.  These moments celebrate The Runaways in all of their bad ass-ness; it’s just too bad the film falls flat at telling a good story about the band and exploring the complications and costs of the band’s success.

Unfortunately, the emphasis on Jett and Currie also renders the rest of the band members nearly invisible and, seemingly, dispensable.  This seems particularly criminal in the case of Sandy West, a pioneering female rock drummer who co-founded The Runaways with Joan Jett.  I would love for someone to tell her story – it’s a heartbreaking and moving one. For the time being, I would have settled for The Runaways to pay a decent tribute to her.  Sadly, that tribute never materialized.

Still, here’s the thing: The Runaways is pretty exuberant – even inspiring, at times. Sigismondi, a seasoned music video director, demonstrates a fair bit of awesomeness in her craft.  I hope she lands more work (perhaps next time with someone else’s script).  I also hope that the film emboldens more young women who dream of rocking out.  That would surely be a nice grace note to The Runaway’s important legacy.

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!

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.

In 2008 I found out that she had made The Hurt Locker, and I was thrilled. I couldn’t wait to see her take on a war picture.  But I also knew that the film was sitting on a shelf, waiting for distribution.  Waiting and waiting and waiting.  And then it was FINALLY released on a handful of screens in the middle of 2009.  And it was stunning.  I couldn’t believe how gripping, how disciplined, how thoughtful, and how exhausting the film was.  And I worried that despite critical acclaim, Kathryn Bigelow (and The Hurt Locker) would disappear again, invisible to everyone except action junkies and feminist film fans.

And here we are now, at the beginning of 2010, and Bigelow has won the Directors Guild of America award.  The first woman to ever do so.  And she has become only the FOURTH woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar.  [Count 'em:  Lina Wertmüller  (1976), Jane Campion (1993) and Sofia Coppola (2003).]  And she’s cleaned up in critics’ circles.

This matters.  This matters so much!  And, of course, it’s totally complicated: Bigelow makes movies that dudes love, while so many other women directors are resigned to chick flicks, especially romantic comedies.  Other talented women directors, indie and major studio alike  - Kelly Reichardt, Lisa Cholodenko, Darnell Martin (who became the first African-American woman to direct a film for a major studio in 1994), Kasi Lemmons, and many more – haven’t been able to gain Bigelow’s credibility or audience draw (see my point above: they don’t make action movies) and often end up on very few screens.  (And then there’s Jane Campion, who makes films that just freak the shit out of men.) And, yes, Bigelow was married to one of Hollywood’s most powerful producer/directors, and is now contending with him for the Best Director Oscar.

But still: HOORAY.  In fact, a big hooray!

But it doesn’t mean that Kathryn Bigelow has made it.  The Hurt Locker is not a commercial success.  Bigelow may not get any major work after this.  And her success doesn’t mean that women have made it in Hollywood.  In fact, things are B-A-D for women in Hollywood, in front of and behind the cameras.  The movie biz is a numbers game, and we need lots and lots more numbers: more women directors, more box office dollars for their movies. There are still precious few women writing and helming films that get any major support – and if their films don’t make a lot of money or if they have a reputation for being irrational and weird, they disappear.  And all the while Joe McHack director gets the next action franchise sequel.  We need more women hacks.

So I’m celebrating, but – seriously – we have a long way to go.  And the only way to get there is to buy more tickets for women’s films.  So, friends, let’s make it a point to get out and support women filmmakers.  It’s the only vote we get in Hollywood.  Let’s make it count!

And, you know, Lee Daniels is only the SECOND African-American director to receive an Oscar nomination.  Spike Lee and John Singleton have both been nominated for screenwriting awards, but only John Singleton has received a directing nomination.  So while I can get excited about Bigelow, I would do a big disservice by glossing over the issue of race in Hollywood here.  I reiterate: I’m celebrating, but we have a long way to go.

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!

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…

I expected Anvil! The Story of Anvil to be entertaining, but I didn’t expect it to be quite so affecting.  This documentary about  Canadian-heavy-metal-lifers-who-should-have-been-rock-stars could have easily been the next American Movie (read: wretchedly exploitative) were it not for the deeply affectionate desire on the part of the filmmakers to see Anvil as more than the real life Spinal Tap.  In fact, Anvil! is almost painful to watch precisely because we want these rockers to succeed: the thought they might not ever achieve their dreams is nearly unbearable.  But what really interests me about Anvil! is that the heart of the documentary is really about the relationship between founders Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner – as well as their relationships with their families and friends.  In that way, Anvil! is very similar to Some Kind of Monster (2004), the documentary about Metallica that approaches something like a heavy metal group therapy session.  It occurs to me, then, that both of these documentaries are really about a peculiar kind of rock ‘n roll brotherhood – and that metal, in particular, is kind of a fantasy warrior brotherhood.  I would love to see this idea of masculinity, brotherhood and ‘making the band’ explored more.  In the meantime, I’m just relieved that Anvil finally got to live the dream and open for AC/DC this past summer.

Fantastic Mr. Fox – what a joy!  I’m not sure there’s much I can say about this film that hasn’t already been said: it’s super clever, delightfully animated and very funny.  I say, with some amount of snark, that it’s a relief to see Wes Anderson (as well as his co-writer Noah Baumbach) freed from the pretense of having to make films about real human characters, to see him being able to indulge his love  for bringing to life strange little dioramas without having to drag us through snoozy, half-completed real-people storylines.  And, in the end, Fantastic Mr. Fox delivers on a more emotionally compelling level than his last several films.  It’s wonderful!  And it’s even wonderful as a comic story about a man struggling with his wild animal instincts and his domestic responsibilities, as a story about fathers and sons, and as a story about living with your regrets (Meryl Street’s Mrs. Fox has a scene in which she confronts Mr. Fox that’s a real stunner).  Predictably enough, the film reinscribes  the natural world as an inherently gendered place (guess who’s sneaking out to hunt chickens and who’s at home cooking them?) but it’s done with a hefty serving of tongue-in-cheek good grace that tends to offset all the ’stand by your Mr. Fox’ action that takes place.  Also, I have to admit, I’m powerless in the face of an animated fox in underpants.  It may have impaired my critical judgment.

Critical judgment is not impaired by the technical accomplishment of Where the Wild Things Are, however.  Compared to the magical energy of Fantastic Mr. Fox, Where The Wild Things Are comes off as a fairly dull but Very Important Statement About the Wonder of Childhood.  (It’s actually not fair at all to make such a comparison, but I can’t help it after seeing the films on consecutive nights.)  My friend Dan has written just about the most eloquent review I’ve seen of this film in which he does a great job of exploring its merits – as difficult as they are – and it reminds me that the film is goodish.  But it’s not great.  The scenes with the wild things are overburdened with meaning, the framing narrative gets short shrift, the soundtrack is called upon too often to tell us how we should feel, and the ending is so subtle as to feel meaningless.  There’s some potent stuff eluded to here about the relationships between mothers and sons (or sons and their absent fathers) but not much at all gets explored.  (One of my friends feels that the film is about why you should never get too close to anyone, while another thinks the film is pretty much asserting that mothers should always unconditionally love their children no matter what, ever.) I left the theater scratching my head. What about this boy Max, in the end?  What do we know of him and how he has changed after his time with the wild things?  I guess we sorta know that something has happened, but what?  As a contemplation of childhood, the film is interesting and successful; as a film about a boy, it doesn’t quite perform.  That puts it somewhere in the goodish category, I guess?

No doubts here, though.  The crown jewel of all the films I saw this past weekend is Goodbye Solo.  Wow.  It’s amazing.  A sincere, beautifully directed, dual character study of a Senegalese cabbie and the old man who hires him as a driver, Goodbye Solo quietly explores how each of these men contend with their relationships, their roles, and their responsibilities.  And it manages to be both contemplative and lively, while completely avoiding all the indie film cliches to which it easily could have fallen victim.  Stop whatever you’re doing and put Goodbye Solo in your Netflix queue.  It’s easily one of the best films I’ve seen all year.