I’m Not There is a somewhat experimental bio-pic of Bob Dylan written and directed by Todd Haynes, and featuring six different actors (including Heath Ledger and a much-discussed and brilliant performance by Cate Blanchett) playing various elements of the Dylan persona. Since the film is about Bob Dylan, and since all of the main characters are Bob Dylan, it doesn’t leave a lot of time to focus on other characters, including the women in his life.

And yet, the film manages … READ MORE

Joss Whedon’s latest project, developed during the writers’ strike, was an internet-based musical starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day, aired in three acts over the past week. Spoilers for all three acts follow, if you haven’t seen it.

Movies featuring anthropomorphic non-human characters are nearly always rich with questions about “gender” roles, since the assignment of gender onto such characters – especially inanimate ones – is entirely based on the writers’ imaginations, and the features selected to gender something “male” or “female” often reflect assumptions, stereotypes, and conventional gender roles. Pixar’s latest, Wall-E, is a love story between two robots working in an environment following the evacuation and abandonment of Earth under piles and piles of trash, and … READ MORE

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the sitcom Samantha Who? First, I generally hate sitcoms, and the premise of the show – a woman rebuilding her life after an accident that causes complete amnesia of who she is and what she’s done – seems exceptionally cliché at first. The show quickly redeemed itself in my eyes because it uses the trope in order to explore the characters and to reveal emotions, rather than just as an attention-grabbing, soap opera-esque plot device. … READ MORE

The recent bout of feminist critique of Firefly has finally roused me from my prolonged inability to write anything at all about television, which will hopefully translate not only into some posts on that show that I’ve been mulling for a while, but also into some more regular content from me. Consider yourselves warned.

As is covered in the linked post, although Joss Whedon’s work is beloved by many feminists and is definitely leaps and bounds beyond the bulk of television, … READ MORE

The Buffy Season 8 comic series started off with a 4-issue arc that was just okay, then produced the best single-issue comic I have ever read in my life (”The Chain”), and then managed to sustain some serious quality through the second 4-issue arc, “No Future For You”.

I have always liked the character of Faith–I thought she had some complexity, some struggles, some ambiguity. And this arc is exactly where the character has needed to go. This is Faith’s transition-to-adulthood … READ MORE

I so rarely see movies in the theatre these days, it’s just that much more disappointing when I see one that has lots of potential, and then misses the mark so badly.

Based on the ads and reviews for Dan in Real Life, I expected a smart, life-based movie, centred around a relationship, sure, and funny, but not a rom-com, or at least, not the bad kind of rom-com. And frankly, I can’t help but think that the only thing that … READ MORE

This is a more difficult post to write than the first two, both because it’s tougher to put my finger on exactly why I liked the way the third untrusting female character was portrayed, and because this character’s experience is more based on generalized male privilege than it is on the much more salient and dramatic problems that come with recovering from acts of violence.

The woman is Lt. Esme Pasquale, and her story is that she’s worried that her fiancé … READ MORE

The second woman in this episode who exhibits a learned discomfort with trusting her male partner is Rita, Dexter’s girlfriend. Rita is interesting for a number of reasons—she’s in a romantic relationship with a sociopath, but one who is adept at hiding the fact that he spends his evenings murdering people, though he still struggles to pretend that he experiences actual emotional connection to others. She’s also relatively recently gotten out of an abusive first marriage with a drug addict … READ MORE

December 6th is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women here in Canada. Unfortunately, that site doesn’t have links to any of the planned activities in various cities around the country, but if you live in Canada, you can contact the nearest women’s centre, shelter for abused women, or sexual assault/rape crisis centre in order to find out the time and location of the vigils, information sessions or protests planned in your area.

For anyone outside Canada … READ MORE