Film 2012
< See last year’s list (kinda incomplete)
Films I saw for the first time this year. I will inevitably forget about this every so often and miss things off.
JANUARY
The Iron Lady
J. Edgar
Haywire
The Artist
FEBRUARY
Carnage
The Woman In Black
MARCH
[cannae remember]
APRIL
The Hunger Games
Wrath of the Titans
The Man Who Knew Too Much
The Cabin In The Woods
Tiny Furniture
Marvel’s Avengers Assemble
MAY
21 Jump Street (2012)
Young Adult
IDEAS
Prometheus, Mozart’s Sister, Damsel’s In Distress, 2 Days In New York, Moonrise Kingdom, Coriolanus, A Dangerous Method, Natural Selection, Martha Marcy…, Shame, On The Road, A Separation, Margaret, Resistance, The Deep Blue Sea, Take Shelter, Mozart’s Sister, If Not Us Who?, Into The Abyss,
Slavoj Zizek in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
But the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course, the matrix is a machine for fictions, but these are fictions which already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself.
I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake, fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself.
If something gets too traumatic, too violent, even too filled with enjoyment, it shatters the coordinates of our reality. We have to fictionalise it.
~ Are Hanna and her violent sisters doing it for themselves? Do kick-ass young heroines empower women or are they just sustaining a masculine idea of what feminism is?s
Worth asking the question. A conclusion might be that violent females in fiction serve a psychological and social function akin to that of an anti-capitalist chucking paint at a bank - it’s a small act of defiance, reclaiming space when fearful.
Just yesterday I had to challenge someone who had the notion that being honest about emotion was weak and being weak was “feminine”, i.e. the three are all interchangeable. These presuppositions are things that harm all people, regardless of gender, given that the converse is, as some above have pointed out, hardness = strength = male. That’s both damaging to the world in which it’s enacted and to males as individuals.
In addition:
1) I’m sorry, but “pitiless poppets” and “brutish babes”? Oh dear.
2) “A perhaps surprising feature of the bloodthirsty heroics of characters such as Hanna and Mindy is that they’re often wholly directed by some kind of patriarch.”
- I’ve noticed this too and agree that it’s a problem with the fiction in question.
