This hit the screens a couple of weeks ago in Britain, and I understand it just has just come out in the US. It has the distinction of being the first James Bond film I was actually excited to see (I was interested in seeing Casino Royale because I knew it was a reboot and they planned several changes in tone; but it wasn’t until after, when I knew what they had done with it that real excitement could kick in). So what did I think?

The Good:

Daniel Craig and his body look much as he did in Casino Royale; I presume most readers will consider that good news :). The film is a direct sequel to CR and it looks like the next will be a direct sequel to this (not a feminist issue, but I like that the organisation presented in CR is taking several films to deal with).

M: Judy Dench is as good as ever. M is smart, seeing through some bullshit from the CIA purely on the basis of who told it to her, and what it implies that they’re the one who did. She sees through Bond’s morass of emotions surrounding Vesper’s betrayal and death (and he admits that she was right), but nonetheless can tell the difference between his bad conclusions and his good ones. You can see why she’s the boss. She does get one terribly rattled moment, but it’s in the wake of something that would rattle anyone. In short, there’s nothing she says or does that I wouldn’t find credible if a man was saying or doing it.

Vesper: Vesper has a big presence in the film; much of Bond’s internal journey is through the turmoil of grief, betrayal, hatred, and guilt he feels. The boyfriend mentioned in Casino Royale come up here as well - and it’s worth noting that “endangered loved one of a similar age” is rarely employed as a motive for a woman to commit a betrayal (it’s usually kids) - there’s more to this at the end of the post, but it’s a spoiler. Anyway Vesper is neither shallow not disposable.

Camille: Camille is on a similar grief/vengeance kick to Bond; they are quite similar people in a lot of ways. They also have similar capabilities, though she’s put into a distinctly secondary tier compared to Bond (which might deserve to go in the Ominous category). But they get parallel fights at the end, each against the adversary who means more to them. And they don’t shag, which is cool. They do share one intense kiss, which neither seems to want to push any further (possibly because it would have meant something).

The Bad:

The guy that Camille wants to kill is a mass murderer. They also make him a mass rapist, for no particular reason but to underscore what a bad man he is. But what it also does is add a sexualised quality to his climactic fight with Camille, which I would have preferred to be a straight combat.

The Ominous:

The opening credits have the abstractly rendered women creeping in again, which I could stand to do without. They centred on long images of Bond though, and the women formed out of sandscapes, giving it a kind of navigational look - which certainly fit Bond’s inner journey at the time. So maybe it’s a one off. Hope so.

There’s an MI6 woman called Fields who Bond ends up sleeping with. On the plus side, it’s not given much screen time, and it seems as much a decision on her part as his - she ends up dead, possibly to get to him, and also possibly found as a result of his wanting to stay somewhere higher profile than she did - M does call him on his casual charm having lasting consequences for the women he uses it on, and he does seem to feel some guilt. The reason I find it ominous is that apparently her first name is Strawberry (though I don’t remember hearing it used in the film; she introduces herself as Fields). But weirdly and innuendily-named women are something I could certainly do without seeing come back.

In conclusion, then, it carried on most of the positive changes from Casino Royale (including the ones that have nothing to do with gender), but with some warning signs that they might start listening to people who say it’s not real Bond without the shallow women and misogyny. I hope they don’t. A Bond who pursues shallow interactions - not because he looks down on women, but because he avoids any emotional depth, for both good and bad reasons - is much more interesting than the philanderer of early incarnations. And women with their own goals and personalities - and duties and attachments - are certainly more interesting.

*****SPOILER WARNING : Vesper’s boyfriend turns out to be a bad guy who seduces women with access to sensitive information, and is then “held hostage” in order to extort it from them. A seducer is a common enough trope (though it’s seen differently depending on which side of the equation the woman is, and thus how she needs to be disdained - either as manipulator or emotionally led). But in this case, the boyfriend is definitely painted as the bad guy, and Bond isn’t hypocritical enough to harp on Vesper’s emotions when his have been so turbulent. And I have to say, pretending to be endangered for the purpose of extortion is a very female stereotype, and it’s interesting to see a man do it. *****

Posted in *Action, *Drama, Men, Mini-Reviews
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Hello, fellow readers of the internets! If you haven’t perused it already, the 22nd Feminist SF Carnival is live at SpaceWesterns.com. It’s a three-parter this time around, with new content in the first part, highlighted previous carnival entries in the third part and a whole lot of links to articles here at Hathor in the second. Which is really flattering, and also reminds me that I need to get off my butt and do some more in the series I started way back when on the women of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Anyway! Go read ye some carnival. And then volunteer to host one. You know you want to.

When you’re done with that, take a look at this post by Betty about strong women in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Though she has a penchant for wearing inexplicable belts in promotional images, Betty thinks the title character comes off as really strong, not just physically so:

Sarah Connor, on the other hand, is the decision maker on the show. John, her son, doesn’t like the fact that her word is law, and occasionally challenges her authority, but he’s not stupid enough that he can’t recognize her experience is vaster than his own. You might critique the fact that her primary purpose is to bring John Connor, humanity’s messiah into the world, but you have to acknowledge she hasn’t faded into the background after the womb-work was done. It’s her name on the opening title, and her story.

The difference is, obviously, agency.

I haven’t watched Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I’m thinking maybe I should. I do love me some strong women.

More on the topic of physical strength, E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman wrote a really interesting piece this month for Strange Horizons called “Wii Fitness: Rocking the Hula Hoops (and the Weight Issues).” Cabell talks about how much she hates Boardy, which is something I’d definitely thought of on my own (she and I compared notes briefly but neither of us know how to murder the little monster), but she also goes into the skeezy issues with weight and fitness that Wii Fit buys into:

…this is the crux of the matter: the only goal you can set is a weight change—a loss, of course; Boardy encourages you to think about how, with a BMI of 22 (right in the middle of normal and least likely to die, according to the somewhat dubious stats that Boardy himself reports), you’re okay, but you could be better!

I have the console and the game, and I enjoy playing with it, but it is definitely frustrating and dispiriting to have sanctimonious Boardy constantly chiding me about my weight. I’m heavier than is healthy for me right now, but even at my most athletic I’ve never had a BMI near 22. I’m too muscular. And it’s pretty absurd to assume that that means I’m unhealthy.

Over at Fantasy Magazine, Silvia Moreno-Garcia wrote an article about “Pre-Columbian Cultures in Film” that I found really thought-provoking. Moreno-Garcia talks about the ways in which several pre-Columbian cultures are smushed together and then super-simplified to create the interchangeable “loin-clothed savage” that we see in film. This ignores the rich and varied history of actual pre-Columbian cultures:

The pre-Columbian people that inhabit movies are far removed from reality. Two-dimensional, without a real culture or language, their accomplishments in art, astronomy or mathematics are ignored. Instead, they wander the screen clad in clichés.

When they are good, they are presented as child-like, primitive but harmless people like the chief from Road to el Dorado. A visit from a kind conquistador is all it takes to rectify their ways. But sometimes they are naughty and they decide to bring a stone jaguar to life (like that movie’s evil sorcerer). When that happens they’re appropriately punished.

I noticed some pretty obviously Mexica-derivative cultures in a couple of sci-fantasy books that I read lately, and though individual characters from them were reasonably three-dimensional, the cultures as a whole were all evil and savage-y. I was pretty perturbed to see that going on in depictions of groups that were so clearly based on a real culture. I mentioned it to a couple of friends, and they observed, as Moreno-Garcia does, that there aren’t really any “autochthonous leading voice[s]” in fantasy, whether it’s cinema or novels. But Moreno-Garcia also points out that:

…there’s also no ancient Romans or Greeks making movies and they generally get better portrayals than the average indigenous culture. One can only hope that one day movie makers will decide it is more interesting to explore rich, complex worlds than have a dozen men in chicken feathers and body paint worshiping a white dude who just landed in the area.

For an interesting exploration of some of the same ideas, check out Liz Henry’s post (and the resulting robust comments section) at Feminist SF – The Blog! about Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. I haven’t read the book yet, but I’m putting it on my list.

You should also read Liz’s post about a blogging party that she’ll be hosting which will have a virtual component related to it for those of us who can’t hang out together in meatspace.

And closing with humor, as I like to do, I recommend to you MightyGodKing’s “MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits” series: parts one, two, and three. I laughed so hard I choked, for serious.

Happy reading, internets! I’ll see you next time.

Posted in I Read The Internets
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Heartbreakers is the story of a mother-daughter conwoman team, Max and Page Connors (Sigourney Weaver and Jennifer Love-Hewitt respectively).It initially interested me because the idea of conwomen sounded interesting; it’s always the men who get to pull of elaborate schemes, a la Matchstick Men, The Italian Job and the Oceans series.

I was incredibly disappointed with it. Why? Because Max and Page’s conning is almost exclusively restricted to seduce-and-destroy tactics. In the opening scenario, Max has inveigled Dean (Ray Liotta) into marrying her by withholding sex. Then she continues to withhold sex after the wedding. Enter Page posing as his sexy, skimpily-attired secretary who maneuvers Dean into a compromising position. Instant divorce settlement. The rest of the move evolves around Max and Page trying for one last scores with a mega-millionaire while falling in actual love with men who conveniently happen to be very wealthy.

For sure, Max and Paige have a few petty scams which don’t rely on sex – pretending to slip on the floor of a posh hotel and then spilling water as leverage for a free room; sprinkling crushed glass into their meals to get comped. But for the most part, the tactics are sexual, from Page’s comically sexy outfits to Max distracting a guy at the petrol pump so Page can use his charge card.

The sad thing is, Max actually had potential because of the way she thinks on her feet – in one scene, posing as a Russian, her potential new husband William (Gene Hackman) takes her to a Russian club and she has to fake her way through the language. But this was an isolated scene and in the context of her playing a sexy Russian in distress because she is threatened with deportation and wouldn’t you know, if she marries an American, she gets to stay.

Oh, and then Max-as-the-sexy-Russian locks horns with William’s housekeeper, who has her eye on a cut of William’s inheritance and sees Max as a threat. Because female conwomen relying on seduce-and-destroy tactics isn’t tacky enough, no, we need a housekeeper waiting for her boss to cark it so she can inherit.

Why couldn’t we have a female conwomen movie with lots of cool gadgets a la Oceans, or a smooth-talking duo posing as postal workers or IRS agents a la Matchstick Men? Why did they have to be obviously sexy, and rely on sexual tactics? The closest I can think to one of the men in abovementioned movies using seduction tactics is Linus (Matt Damon) in Ocean’s Thirteen… and he still gets to spend most of the trilogy demonstrating his technical skills.

I wonder what Ripley would say if she were to meet Max.

Posted in Mini-Reviews Tags: Heartbreakers, Sigourney Weaver
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First, Fox couldn’t sing Palin’s praises hard enough. Then the election ended - and not well for the party Rupert Murdoch supports - and now Fox can’t tell us enough about the “foibles of Sarah Palin.” (They claim they were prevented from reporting this stuff during the election - by whom, I’d like to know.)  At the very same time, they defend McCain’s choice of her as a running mate:

It’s not McCain’s campaining that cost him the election. Nor was it his choice to echo the policies of an extremely unpopular president until he bought a clue and changed his tune midstream except not really. Nor was it his ham-handed attempt to woo Hillary Clinton voters with the substitution of another woman, as if they’re all interchangeable to us. No, it was, as always, The Woman who cost him the election.

Now, let’s be clear. Palin is underqualified to be president (so am I; so are most of us), and I believe McCain’s rationale in selecting her was all about demographics, and that shows a reckless disregard for the well-being of the US on McCain’s part. Attempting to hide Palin’s lack of qualification shows a reckless disregard on the part of whomever dictated that it not be reported.

But none of this is Palin’s fault. You can criticize her for her policies and her actions and things she says (and there’s plenty there to criticize), but it’s not her responsibility to turn down the offer of a lifetime. It’s McCain’s job to exercise some intelligence and discretion. But there’s nothing quite like using a woman, casting her aside, and then scapegoating her for your (or your party’s) failures, and that’s what everyone from McCain to the press is doing.

Choosing Palin probably did harm McCain’s chances. But it was the choice, not the woman. It was the man who made the choice, not the woman who played her part as asked.

Remember, girls and women: when they make you an offer that’s too good to be true, you may regret accepting. On the other hand, if you don’t accept, things will never change. On the other other hand, if you accept and then make a fool of yourself, you might set us all back twenty years. Oh, never mind. We’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t and damned when we point out what bullshit it all is.

Posted in *In the News
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