Every Single Word Spoken By People of Color In Movies
This is a good description of what I literally mean when I say “white people movies”
“12 women are on screen, all with speaking roles, and none of them are talking about a man. It not only outpaces mediocre measurements like the Bechdel Test—which the vast majority of Hollywood films never attempt to pass—it reminds you how feeble they were as yardsticks to begin with.”
Mad Max: Fury Road is everything you’ve heard and so much more
Just as important is Hardy’s choice to play Max as a subtle, quietly feminist hero. Max never objectifies the women he’s with, or views them as props for his own agenda. He helps when he’s asked to help, and when he finally speaks for any length of time, it’s not to take charge of a group that’s floundering without his help—it’s to make a suggestion, stand back, and then let the group decide.
This view of what equality actually looks like in a film is rare enough; but it’s even rarer to see it in this kind of genre material. Fury Road is every inch the high-testosterone, manly action movie of your dreams. And even when they show weakness, its female characters are still fully in charge of their own destinies. [Read More]
(via dailydot)
“Before Jaws hit theaters in 1975, great white sharks weren’t the villains we now believe them to be. But when the movie–which was purely fiction–became a blockbuster, it directly caused humans to seek out and kill sharks, causing widespread population drops in shark species across the board. The influence of that piece of fiction (coincidentally also based on a novel) even coined its own name: The Jaws Effect. When Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published, it was perceived by the public to be an erotic novel, despite the fact that it told the story of child sexual abuse through the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator. The result? To this day, we refer to sexually precocious teen girls as “Lolitas,” despite the author’s intent. Yes, 50 Shades of Grey is fiction, but fiction isn’t created or consumed in a vacuum. It is influenced by our culture, and influences our culture, and 50 Shades of Grey isn’t an exception. Even though something is “just fiction,” it can still have detrimental effects on society or expose problems that already exist in our perceptions. So when someone says “50 Shades of Grey promotes abuse as romance,” they’re not saying, “50 Shades of Grey is a totally real thing that happened and is a cautionary tale.” They’re saying that this work of fiction is having, or has the potential to create, real world effects.”
Jenny Trout, “Get Over It!” How not to respond to critics of 50 Shades of Grey
(via 35mmuniverse)
Images from the #50DollarsNot50Shades campaign on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/50-Dollars-not-50-Shades/713262428793958
Hollywood doesn’t need your money; abused women do.
Sponsors of this campaign include:
Stop Porn Culture stoppornculture/London Abused Women’s Centre/National Center on Sexual Exploitation/PATHS of Saskatchewan/Antipornography.org/ oneangrygirl.net
DO NOT EVEN GO TO SEE THIS MOVIE AS A JOKE.
DO NOT GIVE THIS MOVIE ANY OF YOUR MONEY.
IMPORTANT.
I wrote a much more in-depth analysis of American Sniper in an article I recently published. You can read it and/or share it at the links below:
The fact that American Sniper shattered opening weekend box office records and we still have to fight to get people to acknowledge the artistic brilliance and political relevance of Selma just tells me so much about American society:
The stories of brown people will never, ever matter more than the stories of the white people who kill them.
Today in Foolishness (1/15/15): Twitter goin’ AWF on the release of this years lily-white Oscar nominations. Beyond embarassing snubs in the acting and directing categories, this years nominations lack diversity in even the technical nominations. Y’all thought I was clowning about the Golden Globes— you ain’t seen nothing yet! #staywoke #representationmatters