Eve Arden was always a favorite. Often overlooked because she wasn’t the star of the movie, she was usually the only woman on the staff or in the newsroom. Because the stories centered around the star, her parts weren’t written to prove anything. They just made part of the group who could wisecrack as well as anyone, often making her the most memorable character in most of her movies.
Sometimes the best thing to do is to step back and not try so hard; let it come naturally.
And, uh, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Mindy Kaling, cool-cool-cool.
Orphan Black isn’t produced in the USA… If you ask me, THAT is a factor in how Tatiana Maslany plays Sarah Manning.
Exhibit A: X-Files produced in Vancouver vs. in California.
Exhibit B: almost all 'Mercan coming of age films vs. Gregory’s Girl (a film loaded with strong females)
Y’all:
Don’t limit yourself to the boring, repetitive dreck that the Hollywood Distraction Machine (and its ilk) pumps out. Me, I’m at a point where I refuse to encourage them by giving any of my hard-earned money.
Other places/people/ethea do make movies, books, and art, dontchaknow?
France, England, India, Iran…even Canada. Maybe the trick is to patronize low budget movies? Become fluent in another language? Read a book? Refuse to be told how to think?
You can suppress your independent thinking by starting here, or here (I disagree with some/many of the selections, but they’re easy to get to…and it’s a start.).
Better still: Work on the paradox of “How can I be a Strong Female Character self-actualized human being if I need to reread someone else’s text every couple of weeks so as to remind me what or how to think about something?”
In that particular scene Arwen was a replacement for the male elf Glorfindel, who in the books was the one who rescued Frodo from the Ringwraiths and brought him to Rivendell.
I guess I have a “be the change you want to see in the world” mentality about this. If you want female characters a specific way, then go and create stories with these characters in them. Dont worry about the current state of media not being what you want it to be, write those stories and your audience will find you. Become undeniable and the industry will change because you made it change through creating, not through pointing out things you don’t like. If every person who donated to Anita Sarkesian (Im not against her, I’m using her as an example because of how much she made on kickstarter, which translates, for me, into how many people agree with her) instead learned how to program and made games they were proud of, the industry would no choice but to shift. Maybe I’m just being naive, but pointing out what you don’t like seems more negative than the positive action of creating things you do like.
In a show with graphic depictions of decapitation, dismemberment, disemboweling, torture and just about every other conceivable act of violence that people can perform on other people, is it really worth getting upset about some nudity?
It’s supposed to be a gritty, visceral depiction of how power works in a brutal world and sex (and violence) makes up a big part of the power plays within it. It also tends to be the people who wield sex as an instrument of power who tend to be more effective than the people who settle everything with swords and their sense of honour.
Sure, you can call it gratuitous and say it should just be hinted at, but isn’t that true of every brutal act of violence too? Why not remove all the sex and violence and fade to black every time something untoward happens? Shit; why not have the Lannisters and Starks settle their differences by having a dance-off with the winner going on to the Westeros championships to compete against Danny and the Dragons and stick it on the Disney channel?
If you’re looking to Indian movies to provide you male or female examples of complex characterization, I’m afraid you’re hoping for a real miracle. Sure, there are some, but largely, you’re going to be seeing cardboard cutouts in dance numbers…
“Upset” is the wrong word, and no one was talking simply about “nudity,” but it is important in the context of “strong female characters” to note that nudity and sexualized violence on TV carries gendered baggage along with it.
Why not paint every portrait with a broad brush? Why not critique art for overusing tropes? Why not play every tune in C major?
In a similar vein as the OP suggested there are things that just get flat and tired. Most of the tropes about gender are at the, “okay, I got it” stage.
I want her to be free to express herself
I want her to have meaningful, emotional relationships with other women
I want her to be weak sometimes
I want her to be strong in a way that isn’t about physical dominance or power
I want her to cry if she feels like crying
I want her to ask for help
When is the last time you saw a male character with any of those attributes in a non-drama blockbuster film? Meaningful emotional relationships with other men? Ha. Weakness? Only after being physically injured in some way that was unfair. Crying? Apparently, men lack tear ducts. Asking for help? Once in a great you get is the old “I can’t do this alone,” but you rarely see a character actually actually ask and be put in a vulnerable position where they could be told no.
The character development in the movies she references sucks. Replace the lead of Captain America or Iron Man movies with a woman and maybe you’d notice that they were extremely two dimensional characters in the movies. The only reason they get away with it is either people are familiar with the characters before and fill in the missing character development or the character’s personality is one you’ve seen so many times that you fill in the blanks (e.g. the egotistical alpha male).
Even Sherlock Holmes movies the OP puts forth suffer from this. The movie version with Robert Downey Jr. had an extremely hollow portrayal. It demonstrated very few of the attributes she gives to Sherlock Holmes: brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian, whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious, artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Those attributes are of the character developed over the last 130 years by books and countless portrayals by dozens of actors not the most recent movies.
I do agree there should be more women in films. I’m super tired of seeing movies with one woman and four men. I’m super tired of most scenes in the movie being populated by men except for some out of focus women in the background. It is annoying.
And how about more women who aren’t in their 20s-early30s? It’s disconcerting as I get older to see that it is mostly young women who have any presence.
