Females MARVEL at the box office

Hollywood is an industry all about networking.

You hire who you know, who you’ve done business with before, who you owe a favor, and who’s blackmailing you.

Some say it’s just business and it’s not that men are deliberately excluding women but that it’s about the connections you have. Some industry executives say it doesn’t matter who they hire for the job, whether man or woman, just as long as the job gets done.

I disagree that that’s what’s actually happening. 

 Personally, I think some men are still uncomfortable with having a woman in a high-up position. They don’t want a woman bossing them around. (OH NO!! That would be embarrassing, emasculating. People will snicker, point and stare, talk about you behind your back, all because a woman was in charge.)

There are times however, when they’re dying to hire a woman.

Whenever there’s a rom-com or drama they go a knockin. 

Females have been pigeon-holed into making and writing these same genre films.

These films have the same story…

“Woman has a great career, but something is missing in her life. Woman meets man, they fall in love, her life is now fulfilled. The End. Cue: Etta James.”

If a studio decides to make an action, superhero, or war film they rarely will go to a female director.

Many believe that female directors don’t bring in as much revenue as male directors.

This might be so, but I’ll tell you why….

Like I said women are relegated to directing rom-coms and dramas, which have a lower production value than action and superhero films.

Films with lower production value, meaning they are not as expensive to make, generally don’t make as much money at the box-office.

So as you can see it’s a tangled web, where it’s a lose lose scenario for women.

Executives claim it’s just business and they want directors that will bring in the most money, but if they only let women direct rom-coms and dramas, which generally make less money than how can we prove that we can make successful box-office hits.

Frankly, it takes one person willing to give women the opportunity to do this.

It might be happening... as Marvel has hired Patty Jenkins to direct Thor 2, making her the first woman to direct a superhero flick.

She is my superhero. (I hope she wears a cape on set.)

This announcement came as a surprise to many (because she has two X chromosomes).

(I wonder how many comic book nerds cried at this announcement)

The discussions surrounding this decision are quite interesting, as many wonder whether she is qualified or not and whether they think a female can direct a superhero film.

"Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of...THOR!"

(I guess the other male directors couldn’t lift the hammer). Hazah!

(Frankly, I think it’s sad that in the year 2011 she is the first woman to direct a superhero film.)

She’s best known for directing, Monster which Charlize Theron won an Oscar for.

When someone claims that a female director is a poor choice for a specific genre, one needs to look no further than Kathryn Bigelow, who won an Oscar for the military thriller Hurt Locker. http://movies.yahoo.com/news/patty-jenkins-direct-thor-2-female-director-fit-183300290.html

Had Hurt Locker made a bigger splash at the box-office this movie might have paved the way for allowing women to direct various genres.

Many agree  

that it’s long been a problem in Hollywood: a lack of women who move on from film school to take the helm of major motion pictures. http://www.screened.com/news/could-thor-2-help-shift-hollywoods-attitude-towards-women-directors/3029/

Hopefully this will help change Hollywood’s attitudes toward female directors. Since Hollywood cares about box-office moolah more than anything else, then women-directed films hitting it big will only lead to more women getting the same opportunity.

Let’s make it happen!!

“For Odin For Asgard”

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice (Hold the Sugar and the Spice)

You’re a boy- you get blue!

You’re a girl- you get pink! 

(But what if I like green? TOO BAD)

From the day you’re born your identity has already been constructed by the society you live in.

Boys get cool toy cars and tool sets, while girls get easy bake ovens and dolls. (They’re already training us to be mothers and to be the chefs of our home.)

( I for one will not be the only one who cooks in my house when I get older, frankly because I hate the idea that because I’m a woman it’s assumed that that’s my job. It’s going to be an equal partnership. 50/50)

From a young age we’re already been assigned gender roles.

Just flipping through a children’s toy catalog you can see the radical differences of types of toys that children are marketed. (Basically boys get all the awesome toys).

Society constructs a world that creates a set of rules for what roles boys and girls should have.

 A main contributor to this worldview is the media. Ads, commercials, television, and films create standardized roles of women and men.

I’m going to take this even a step further by saying that the media perpetuates a world of sexism.

(Yeah you heard me correctly).

The media sexualizes, demeans, and objectifies women and children are extremely impressionable. They imitate what they see and the images they view in the media impacts how they think of themselves, their body image and their relation to boys.

I recently came across a great trailer for a documentary that addresses many of these issues.

The film, Miss Representation examines the gender discrimination that exists in society.

Its garnished great reviews by the press, universities, and elementary schools.

The Hollywood Reporter stated,

A relevant and important doc that deconstructs the insidious role of visual media in the widespread, unbalanced depiction of women and girls.

It shows how women are misrepresented in the media and in the political world. It brings up some great points about how the media pokes fun at powerful and important women in our country such as Hilary Clinton, Michelle Obama, and Sarah Palin and how if the media can’t even take the strongest women in our country seriously then what does that say about our society?

The film shows us some saddening statistics on women in the film industry and in politics.

• ·         Women only hold 3% of positions of influence in entertainment, publishing, advertising and telecommunications.

• ·         Of the top 250 grossing films, only 7% of directors and 13% of writers are women.

• ·         The US is 90th in terms of women in national legislatures in the world.

• ·         Women make up 51% of the population yet hold only 17% of the seats in the House of Representatives.

 It also shows us statistics on the influence that the media has on body image.

• ·         Cosmetic surgery performed on youth 18 and younger tripled in the ten years between 1997 and 2007. For the same period, liposuction nearly quadrupled and breast augmentations increased nearly six-fold.

• ·         65% of American women and girls have an eating disorder.

Hopefully the film will bring awareness to the depictions of women and can have a significant social impact on people.

(I mean media has a huge impact on people, but for some reason positive messages seem a lot harder to get across…strange right.)

I hope because of the praise this film has gotten that people will see it and recognize that a change needs to occur.

(I doubt all the executives at the major studios, ad agencies, and networks will gather around and watch this film together and decide that they will change the way they portray women)

….so you ask where does the change occur?

Perhaps the change can occur in the media viewers by making them aware of the messages the media feeds them and educating them on how this is not an accurate depiction of their role as women and men.

The creators of the film have begun an initiative that would bring media literacy education to children in schools.

This may not change the industry forever but I think it’s at least a step in the right direction.

“You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” ... (Don’t call me Baby)

“Bridesmaids reaches levels of hilarity and heart that movies like these haven’t reached in over a decade” is a quote on the Bridesmaids poster.

The recently successful film, Bridesmaids has garnered praise for pushing boundaries for women comedians.

 

"Bridesmaids" does seem to be giving writers more courage to push the boundaries, specifically when it comes to big comedic set pieces and raunchy talk that was previously reserved for the boys."

There’s a double standard that exists in comedy for men and women. 

Men can get away with doing outrageous things and making inappropriate jokes (often times, the raunchier the better.)

But for female comedians there’s almost a taboo that exists. Why?

(Because women aren’t supposed to be raunchy? Because they’re supposed to be well-behaved ladies relegated to the kitchen?)

It’s the 21^st century for goodness sake.

Society is still extremely uncomfortable with the woman's body and with womens bodily functions.  Male comedians doing fart/poop/puke jokes is the standard but almost unheard of for women.

To those that find such raunchy humor funny it should be funny no matter who performs the joke, whether a man or a woman.

The film did extremely well at the box-office earning a domestic total of $169,106,725. (Beat that Superbad).

These box-office numbers show that women can be funny (gee, who knew) and that there’s an audience for films about women. 

So now studios are trying to latch onto this idea because as we all know Hollywood isn’t about new and innovative ideas but rather copying a successful concept, and if a film about women sells then they’re going to jump on that bandwagon.

Previously studios thought that if they made films about women and that if they were marketed as “chick flicks” that men wouldn’t go see these films. 

But I think the box office numbers prove that an all female cast can be highly successful.

Why is there a stigma that men can’t see a movie with females in it? Even one of my own male friends asked me “Is it the kind of movie a guy can see?”

I could have answered numerous ways.

(“Yes, you have the viewing capability to see the movie on screen. The screen does not discriminate against sexes.”

“No, no boys are allowed. The ushers at movie theatres were informed to not allow any testosterone into the theatre.”)

What is it they fear? One of their male friends will spot them entering the theatre? They will be castrated inside the theatre? 

Or even worse, THEY MIGHT LIKE IT!!! (Gasp)

Previously studio execs would have passed on a film that contained an all female cast.

Usually the pass would have sounded something like: "It's hilarious; I was cracking up. But I can't get that made. No one wants to see women do that!”

(Think again boys!)

And now that studios are aware that women comedians are funny there is talk about “The Bridesmaids effect.” This film may have sparked an onslaught of other films that are about women.

ABOUT TIME!!

I think it’s great that female comedians will soon be given the same admiration and recognition as male comedians and that the number of female speaking characters will hopefully increase.

Researchers at USC did a gender analysis that looked at the 100 top-grossing theatrically released fictional films in 2008.

Across the 4,370 speaking characters coded with an identifiable gender, a total of 32.8 percent are girls or women.  So just over two boys/men appear on the silver screen to every one girl/woman. (Women comprise 50% of the population and should be represented so on-screen.)

So a film that contains six lead female characters is a rarity. 

The only thing I fear  about this increase in female based films is that numerous studios will try to repeat this women centered formula, but if it does not garner as much money they expected then that will be the end of that. 

They’ll defend their decisions by saying, “We tried, and it just didn’t work.”

One unsuccessful female film could set us back again. 

Another thing I fear is that studios will simply try to beat out the other by making their female center films even raunchier then the next. 

And as a result, the substance and depth of the female characters may diminish and then women are there only as props for the raunchy gags. 

One way to ensure the integrity of the characters remains intact is to have diverse voices create media images. (Another important reason there should be an increase in the number of women green lighting films about women.)

For now, we will be on the lookout for films that allow female comedians to break barriers. I guess we have Kristen Wiig to thank.

Kristen Wiig has made one small step for woman, one giant leap for Hollywood!! (hopefully)

I'm in love...

“Love is a battlefield” and I’ve been shot at too many times. 

Until….I met THE ONE.

You know the one you can’t stop thinking about, the one that gives you butterflies and makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, the one that you’ve been waiting for all your life, and the one that you can’t imagine life without. 

A soul-mate is hard to come by but once you’ve found that special person you have to try hard to hold onto them. I intend to hold onto my soul-mate for a long time. Good thing I’ve bookmarked her page so I can keep a close eye on my….social bookmarking soul-mate.

We’ve just met, but I instantaneously felt that connection. 

Kate Carlson is the one I’ve been looking for.

 We have sooo many things in common. For example, some of her top bookmarks are “recipes, HP, feminism, baking, and The Office: US.” I mean I don’t care much about baking, or Harry Potter, but I do care about feminism. (See, we’re made for each other)

She hasn’t bookmarked anything since 2010 but when she did she bookmarked pages quite often. (Hey, we all have a past.) She has bookmarked over 1300 pages. (You have to kiss a few frogs before you find the one.)

She has a wide range of topics that she’s bookmarked, but it is easy to navigate her page because she has done a good job in organizing her tags. It was fairly simple to find articles that related to my own interest of women in Hollywood. This extensive collection proves to be very helpful.

She has numerous tags and the one that served most helpful to me was the “feminism” tag, which 80 articles of hers fall under. I found two great articles that she tagged as “feminism” and “film.” She commented on both of these articles which shows that she thoroughly reads the articles as well as voices her opinion on the article and even starts discussions with others about the article.

In an article entitled, Single Feisty Females and the Bechdel-Wallace Test she was the first to bookmark this page and a few others bookmarked soon after. She found a hidden treasure of a blog and brought it to the attention of others.

Girls on Film: Ellen Page, Gender, and Cinematic Sexuality is another great article about how Ellen Page has been deemed “boy-like and asexual” because of the clothes that she wears and that the clothing in films helps characterize what is “sexy” or not. (Apparently not wearing short skirts and tops with cleavage makes you a boy.) (I wonder how they would have classified Eve and her plant ensemble.)
 

These are just two examples of articles that can help develop my own blog and that spark new ideas of topics that I should include.

Just by following this one person alone on Diigo I came across at least ten great articles that I hadn’t encountered before. Although many of the bookmarked pages were not academic articles it still provided me with great content to reference in my blog.  

By browsing Diigo profiles I can find people with similar interests and can filter out all other information not pertaining to my blog topic.

I’ve traveled the social bookmarking battlefield far and wide, and have learned that it really is a great resource to write a paper.

The internet and social bookmaking is like finding your soul-mate, there are so many choices and sometimes you don’t know where to begin but once you do find that one your search is over and life is a lot easier.

It may take time, tears may be shed, heartbreaks may occur, but in the end when you find what you’re looking for…IT”S SO WORTH IT!!