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Non-Review Review: Bridesmaids

It’s kinda interesting. Bridesmaids opens over here a month or so after it does in the States, so I’ve had the opportunity to pick up quite a significant amount of chatter on the film, as a good film tends to attract on the information super highway. Most of the discussion around the film has been centred around the movie’s gross-out humour, with reviews branding it as The Hangover in heels”or some such, and a great deal of discussion focusing on the fact that it demonstrates women can do that sort of disgusting and crass physical comedy. Such a discussion seems to be just a little bit over-the-top, as the movie really only features three absurdly crass set pieces (one of which admittedly opens the film, another competes with anything else in a comedy this year, and the third is tucked away in the credits) – so much so I doubt anyone would bat their eye if the same level of juvenile conduct were contained in a film about a bunch of dudes. It’s a damn shame that this seems to monopolise the conversation on Bridesmaids, because it’s actually just a really good film.

Maids of honour?

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It’s a Wonder They Stay On: Thoughts on Wonder Woman’s Wardrobe…

Well, the first pictures of David E. Kelley’s upcoming Wonder Woman adaptation have hit the web. Lynda Carter loves it and everyone else seems to hate it. Me, I really couldn’t care too much about the costume – I’m just worried about the very idea of a Wonder Woman television show from the creator of Ally McBeal. That’s not a putdown – well, it kinda is – but it’s a more fundamental problem than the outfit she wears (which will likely get retooled repeatedly over the course of the show – assuming the show has a course). Anyway, the outfit gives me an opportunity to wonder about Wonder Woman’s outfit. Is there something wrong with her traditional Lynda Carter look, and is this update an improvement?

Is it any wonder?

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Non-Review Review: Wonder Woman

This post is part of the DCAU fortnight, a series of articles looking at the Warner Brothers animations featuring DC’s iconic selection of characters. I’ll be looking at movies and episodes and even some of the related comic books. This is one of the animated feature films involving the characters from the creators of the original animated shows.

Did you… did you stop Ares?

No. I didn’t. I couldn’t.

What? Why not?

I had to save you.

(slap!)

Ow!

– Diana clarifies to Steve that she isn’t a damsel in distress

I have to confess, I’ve never been grabbed by Wonder Woman as a concept. Is she a feminist? A socially conscious superhero? A female superman? A superhero who is willing to take a life if it’s necessary? A diplomat? She’s been all these things and many more, which is perhaps why it’s hard to get a handle on her – which is perhaps why it’s difficult to care for her. Her origins cannot be summed up in a single sentence like Batman (an orphaned “rich kid with issues… lots of issues”) or Superman (who Grant Morrison managed to sum up in eight words) – her origin will likely eat up at least a paragraph of this review. As such, you can understand my surprise that Wonder Woman is perhaps the best DC comics animated adaptation they have produced to date.

Taking a swing at the character...

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Non-Review Review: The Bourne Supremacy

I have to admit that The Bourne Supremacy is the strongest of the Bourne films for me, even though fans of the series tend to forget it, snuggled as it is between The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Ultimatum. The middle part of the trilogy is undoubtedly the most straight-forward, but that isn’t a weakness – it contains a well-motivated character arc for the character of Bourne while handling the themes of the series remarkably well, and still paying homage to all the plot devices that one associates with the espionage thriller. It isn’t preoccupied with setting anything in motion, nor in wrapping anything up, but that gives the movie much more freedom than the two that surround it.

Nobody said it would be a walk in the car park...

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The Walking Dead, Vol. 2 (Hardcover)

Welcome to the m0vie blog’s zombie week! It’s a week of zombie-related movie discussions and reviews as we come up to Halloween, to celebrate the launch of Frank Darbont’s The Walking Dead on AMC on Halloween night. So be sure to check back all week, as we’ll be running posts on the living dead.

I want to like Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. I really do. I love zombies. I love it when writers use horror to explore socially relevent issues. I totally dig the black-and-white style which is clearly intended to evoke the vibe of George Romero horror films. I love that it’s a mainstream comic book property that has broken into popular culture despite not featuring muscle-bound guys and gals with impossible physiques in ridiculous spandex – proof to the masses that comic books can be about more than superheroes. However, as much as I may want to embrace and love The Walking Dead, I just can’t bring myself to.

Grimes and punishment...

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Non-Review Review: Baby Mama

Baby Mama is effectively a “buddy” chick flick. Indeed, considering that the bulk of buddy guy flicks – like Lethal Weapon or The Expendables – are about guys doing stereotypically “macho” stuff (grrr… explosions and guns and fights and stuff!!!), it’s perhaps appropriate that this movie pairs off its two leads doing something stereotypically “feminine” (awww…. babies and maternal instincts and things…). The premise and the message of the movie are difficult to get a hold of (it by turns mocks and reinforces a conventional liberal perspective, particularly in its portrayal of class conflicts), but works at its best when it lets its two tremendously talented leads time and room to work – there’s a reason that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are competing against each other for that Emmy this year. Despite its fairly heavy subject matter, the movie arguably finds its feet as a conventional “odd couple” comedy – which is a shame, as that’s only one of many things it’s juggling.

Guess which one's white trash...

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A Dream Play at the Peacock

A Dream Play is regarded as one of the defining moments of surrealism on stage. It’s not so much a play as wide variety of clashing ideas and scenarios, which overlap and bleed into each other as if reality itself is bleeding. The net effect quite wonderfully evokes the idea that the audience is somewhere very strange indeed – where characters and archetypes seem just on the verge of making sense before morphing and merging into something new and strange yet strangely familiar. The National Youth Theatre have staged a production at the Peacock Theatre, working off the version of the play “edited” by Caryl Churchill. I put “edited” in inverted commas because – despite not having an annotated version – I can offer a pretty confident guess as to which parts of the play came from her more modern (and vastly less subtle) perspective.

A "dream" cast...

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Alice: A Feminist In Wonderland?

Alice in Wonderland opens this weekend, and we were lucky enough to tag along to the Irish premiere. Since we came out of the cinema, we kinda suspected that this would be a polarising film – as the Rotten Tomatoes score seems to demonstrate. However, taking a moment to step back and appreciate the breadth and depth of the critical response, is it possible that we’ve all completely missed the point? Rather than being a fantastically realised gothic fantasy that strays just a little bit closer to The Lord of the Rings rather than its own source material, has Tim Burton produced a uniquely feminist fantasy film?

Should feminists be up in arms?

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Non-Review Review: Last House on the Left (2009)

Wes Craven is a very odd man. On one hand, you have the luminary who gave us the breathtakingly original slants on the horror movie which we saw in A Nightmare on Elm Street, New Nightmare and the Scream franchise, along with his talent as a straight-forward thriller director in Red Eye. On the other hand you have the king of schlock, the man behind pointless gore fests like the original Last House on the Left or The Hills Have Eyes or even Dracula 2000. And, on a third severed hand you’d probably find lying around his trailer somewhere, you have the Wes Craven who wholeheartedly approves and supports schlokier remakes of his schlokiest films. Like this, the remake of Last House on the Left.

lasthouse

The only thing to fear is the quality of the movie itself...

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The Bechdel Rule – Feminism in Movies

I discovered a really fascinating movie-related concept this week, from my better half, who in turn picked it up from the Irish Times magazine. Basically, it’s The Bechdel Rule. Basically it states that the eponymous author will only watch movies that meet three simple conditions:

It has to have at least two women in it…
… who talk to each other…
.. about something besides a man.

There’s also a suggested corollary (known as the Mo Movie Measure) that the two women must be named characters. I’m dubious about using the test as a measure of quality, but it is interesting to think about how many movies meet that criteria. And which movies don’t.

So, does talking about how crap their lives are because they are oppressed by men count?

So, does talking about how crap their lives are because they are oppressed by men count?

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