Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged women in film

Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks, and Consumer Culture

In the past decade, America cinema has shown a change towards producing more women-centered movies, depicting independent unmarried women who seek out their own empowerment and gradually changing society’s view of single women. The women of Sex and the City, for instance, celebrate their singledom, showing it not to be the pitiable state it was once thought to be. While these women possess many feminist qualities, they also have attributes that separate them from the traditional ideals of feminism, a perspective which media studies scholar Hilary Radner labels neo-feminist in her current work, Neo-Feminist Cinema.

Modus Operandi

My younger sisters and I used to tune into Lifetime to laugh at the formulaic (read: bad) movies that were regularly broadcast on that network. While I was watching Modus Operandi, a “comical homage to low budget exploitation-style films of the 1970’s,” I kept wishing my sisters were there with me. We would have been rolling in the aisles. I found the plot to be difficult to follow so I going to quote directly from the synopsis that I received at the screening: “Two briefcases with mysterious contents are stolen from Presidential candidate Squire Parks (Michael Sottile)...

Video Slut: How I Shoved Madonna Off an Olympic High Dive, Got Prince into a Pair of Tiny Purple Woolen Underpants, Ran Away ...

Sharon Oreck has the career that any child of the ‘80s would envy. She has produced over 600 music videos, many of which defined the monolithic “MTV generation.” She has been nominated for Oscars, Grammys, Women in Film awards, and of course, MTV Music Awards (twenty total!). From 1984 to 2000, Oreck’s work was a model for the visual repertoire that shaped the collective imagination of teens around the globe.

Timer

I love a romantic comedy. Throw in some magic realism–even better. Jac Schaeffer's Timer ticks both of those boxes, but, unfortunately for a film that explores people’s fears about missed opportunities, this film missed a few opportunities itself, and lost me as a fan in the process. (It bills itself as sci-fi but I say magic realism–there is new technology, but it’s never fully explained. I call that magic.

Leading Ladies

It may seem quite an impossibility, but the film Leading Ladies is, simply put, a quietly revolutionary dance musical. While most dance musicals (think Dirty Dancing, Save the Last Dance) center on the boy-meets-girl heterosexual love match, Leading Ladies is a beautifully wrought girl-meets-girl story.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

It's always a relief when the author of a novel decides to take its film adaptation into her own hands, especially if the author also happens to be a fairly seasoned writer-director for the screen.

Shooting Women

Award-winning Director of Photography Joan Hutton says that when she was starting out in the film industry she received absolutely no help from anyone. Even after she’d built up a substantial résumé of work experience and won prestigious awards she continued to experience discrimination. A directing position that she’d interviewed for was once given to a lesser-experienced young male who’d only been out of film school for three years.

Frankly, My Dear: "Gone with the Wind" Revisited

When I was about ten years old, my mother sat me down one Saturday afternoon and said “Sara, today we’re going to watch Gone with the Wind.

A Wink and a Smile

Deirdre Timmons' documentary A Wink and a Smile is a love letter to Seattle's thriving burlesque scene. Our tour guide is Miss Indigo Blue, veteran performer and headmistress of the Academy of Burlesque, which offers classes including a six-week Burlesque 101 course culminating in a public performance. The film focuses partly on the ten women who took the Fall 2007 course.

La Corona

La Corona, which translates to "the crown," is a short documentary centering around a beauty pageant which takes place every year in the largest female prison in Colombia. One of the judges jokes early on that Colombia has a pageant for everything, except cocaine.
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