Wherenextcolumbus
Well-Known Member
Has anyone else seen the live version of Mulan? I loved it!
-
Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:- Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
- Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
- Access to private conversations with other members.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
Best feminist films and games
- Thread starter MysticSang'ha
- Start date
Oh yeah. Daughter hates Twilight. Seriously. She makes gagging noises whenever any of her friends mention Team Edward or Team Jacob. She thinks the character of Bella in the films and the books is an idiot. She read the first book and swore off the rest of the series, and makes fun of me because I read the whole series myself. LOL
I totally recommend The Hunger Games books. The film was pretty good (mostly because I love love love Jennifer Lawrence). But the books are raw and gritty in comparison. If they would have been truer to the violence in the books in the film adaptation, they could never have pulled off the PG-13 rating. But that was the demographic the producers were trying to reach.
Wherenextcolumbus
Well-Known Member
Ok I'm up for the books. Jennifer Lawrence was really good, and she is so pretty in my opinion.
MissAlice
Well-Known Member
I hate most chick flicks but most of the movies I love were stolen by you guys. 
Anyway here goes: Fried Green tomatoes, The Color Purples (love that movie!), Albert Knobbs, Muriel's Wedding and movies with female characters that I can strongly relate to on some level or another.
Games: American Mcgee's Alice, Nancy Drew, Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite (love all the bioshock games) and then I just imagine Mario as a girl in a mustache which explains her small stature.
Anyway here goes: Fried Green tomatoes, The Color Purples (love that movie!), Albert Knobbs, Muriel's Wedding and movies with female characters that I can strongly relate to on some level or another.
Games: American Mcgee's Alice, Nancy Drew, Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite (love all the bioshock games) and then I just imagine Mario as a girl in a mustache which explains her small stature.
Here are some movies, games, or shows I can think of off the top of my head that have good female characters. It seems that when so many movies even fail the Bechdel Test, just having a good balance of decently complex and strong women along with similarly complex men stands out to me. So, most of these have a female lead, while others have at least a fair balance of strong women and men in my view.
Shows and Movies:
Hunger Games (Katniss)
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (I only saw the Swedish versions)
Battlestar Galactica (casting Starbuck as a female was controversial and she was awesome)
Serenity and Firefly (good mix of both female and male dynamic characters)
Pixar's Brave (Merida)
Fargo had a realistic, down to earth lead character
Disney movies have gotten better for women (I like Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, and Tangled. Nala from Lion King was cool.)
Dogma the movie is funny. I like the lead actress Linda Fiorentino. God is a woman in the movie.
Kill Bill (I wasn't a fan of the movies personally, but the main character is cool)
Alien & Aliens (Ripley)
Prometheus (mediocre movie imo, the lead character is a woman, the same lead actress as the one from the Swedish version of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)
Juno (I love this one, I'm surprised nobody mentioned it yet. I mean she's a high schooler but it's still awesome.)
Alice in Wonderland (2010, Tim Burton) was okay I guess.
A few superheros (Wonder Woman being the most famous example, but my favorite is Hawk Girl from the Justice League tv show.) I've always been a fan of DC comics but that industry has always been notoriously dominated by male creators.
The Legend of Korra. (This was the sequel series to Avatar, the Last Airbender. The avatar aka the world-spirit can reincarnate as a woman or man, so in the previous one she was Aang, a man, but in this one, she is Korra, a woman. Aang was passive, calm, and nice, Korra is assertive, proud, and fierce. Actually the Last Airbender tv show had good female and male characters in it too. The Last Airbender movie was terrible, though, because the real creators of the series weren't involved and M Night Shyamlan messed it up.)
The Devil Wears Prada (I like Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep in this, and everyone else too. I'm not into fashion at all but I thought it was really well-written; it mostly portrays the fashion industry in a negative way but also kind of respects and acknowledges it in other ways. I thought it was a fun drama.)
Movies by Hayao Miyazaki tend to star women or otherwise have strong leading women or girls (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke; I think Spirited Away might still be the highest-grossing movie in Japan)
The Giant Mechanical Man is an indie comedy romance movie that came out last year and I liked it a lot. Both the leading woman and man are highly flawed, regular, dynamic people and I think it's really cute. The story is told rather equally from the two perspectives; neither one of them is the singular main character. It stars Jenna Fischer from the U.S. version of the Office, which led me to see it.
Salt (starring Angelina Jolie)
I was pretty ticked off with the first season of the show, Arrow, which I watched with my friends. It's about the male superhero Green Arrow (kind of like Batman, but with arrows), but Black Canary is in it too because they're generally in stuff together. As I was watching the series I kept hoping she would be a great character. She's supposed to be a ridiculously good martial artist; one of the best in the DC universe. But so far she's a good attorney character that is weak as heck, and she's not actually the Black Canary yet. They keep saying she'll become her eventually. I'm doubtful they'll do it right.
Gaming:
Samus Aran (especially the original Metroid game; the player fights as an armored person the whole time and then at the very end, you find out she's a woman)
Legend of Zelda (she does the damsel role sometimes but is always a strong character, especially in Ocarina of Time. I like Impa from Skyward Sword, too.)
Lightning (Claire) is the main character of the Final Fantasy 13 series. I had her as my forum avatar for like two years.
Sarah Kerrigan (hero, villain, and anti-hero of Starcraft and Starcraft 2; there are several main characters and she's one of the top two or three in the series)
.....
I read an article last year called Why Strong Female Characters are Bad for Women. She has a crazy flowchart too.
I clicked on it because I thought I would hate it based on the title, but it ended up being the opposite of what I thought it would be, and it is a good overview of my views on some of the problems with women as depicted in films and games, and how to make better female characters. Basically, the article talks about how female characters were generally damsels in distress until viewers started wanting more strong female characters, but then predominantly male writers partially misunderstood what that meant. So, we started getting movies and games with a secondary lead female character that was over-the-top awesome at everything, a super-genius kung-fu master that looks like a model, and one-dimensional. Basically, the she's the character the male viewer wants to bang, as the article describes it, rather than actually a strong, complex, interesting character that can carry a story in her own right. Because "strong" doesn't (or shouldn't) mean over-the-top awesome at everything, it means "well written". Strong, flawed, complex, and interesting.
Shows and Movies:
Hunger Games (Katniss)
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (I only saw the Swedish versions)
Battlestar Galactica (casting Starbuck as a female was controversial and she was awesome)
Serenity and Firefly (good mix of both female and male dynamic characters)
Pixar's Brave (Merida)
Fargo had a realistic, down to earth lead character
Disney movies have gotten better for women (I like Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, and Tangled. Nala from Lion King was cool.)
Dogma the movie is funny. I like the lead actress Linda Fiorentino. God is a woman in the movie.
Kill Bill (I wasn't a fan of the movies personally, but the main character is cool)
Alien & Aliens (Ripley)
Prometheus (mediocre movie imo, the lead character is a woman, the same lead actress as the one from the Swedish version of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)
Juno (I love this one, I'm surprised nobody mentioned it yet. I mean she's a high schooler but it's still awesome.)
Alice in Wonderland (2010, Tim Burton) was okay I guess.
A few superheros (Wonder Woman being the most famous example, but my favorite is Hawk Girl from the Justice League tv show.) I've always been a fan of DC comics but that industry has always been notoriously dominated by male creators.
The Legend of Korra. (This was the sequel series to Avatar, the Last Airbender. The avatar aka the world-spirit can reincarnate as a woman or man, so in the previous one she was Aang, a man, but in this one, she is Korra, a woman. Aang was passive, calm, and nice, Korra is assertive, proud, and fierce. Actually the Last Airbender tv show had good female and male characters in it too. The Last Airbender movie was terrible, though, because the real creators of the series weren't involved and M Night Shyamlan messed it up.)
The Devil Wears Prada (I like Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep in this, and everyone else too. I'm not into fashion at all but I thought it was really well-written; it mostly portrays the fashion industry in a negative way but also kind of respects and acknowledges it in other ways. I thought it was a fun drama.)
Movies by Hayao Miyazaki tend to star women or otherwise have strong leading women or girls (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke; I think Spirited Away might still be the highest-grossing movie in Japan)
The Giant Mechanical Man is an indie comedy romance movie that came out last year and I liked it a lot. Both the leading woman and man are highly flawed, regular, dynamic people and I think it's really cute. The story is told rather equally from the two perspectives; neither one of them is the singular main character. It stars Jenna Fischer from the U.S. version of the Office, which led me to see it.
Salt (starring Angelina Jolie)
I was pretty ticked off with the first season of the show, Arrow, which I watched with my friends. It's about the male superhero Green Arrow (kind of like Batman, but with arrows), but Black Canary is in it too because they're generally in stuff together. As I was watching the series I kept hoping she would be a great character. She's supposed to be a ridiculously good martial artist; one of the best in the DC universe. But so far she's a good attorney character that is weak as heck, and she's not actually the Black Canary yet. They keep saying she'll become her eventually. I'm doubtful they'll do it right.
Gaming:
Samus Aran (especially the original Metroid game; the player fights as an armored person the whole time and then at the very end, you find out she's a woman)
Legend of Zelda (she does the damsel role sometimes but is always a strong character, especially in Ocarina of Time. I like Impa from Skyward Sword, too.)
Lightning (Claire) is the main character of the Final Fantasy 13 series. I had her as my forum avatar for like two years.
Sarah Kerrigan (hero, villain, and anti-hero of Starcraft and Starcraft 2; there are several main characters and she's one of the top two or three in the series)
.....
I read an article last year called Why Strong Female Characters are Bad for Women. She has a crazy flowchart too.
I clicked on it because I thought I would hate it based on the title, but it ended up being the opposite of what I thought it would be, and it is a good overview of my views on some of the problems with women as depicted in films and games, and how to make better female characters. Basically, the article talks about how female characters were generally damsels in distress until viewers started wanting more strong female characters, but then predominantly male writers partially misunderstood what that meant. So, we started getting movies and games with a secondary lead female character that was over-the-top awesome at everything, a super-genius kung-fu master that looks like a model, and one-dimensional. Basically, the she's the character the male viewer wants to bang, as the article describes it, rather than actually a strong, complex, interesting character that can carry a story in her own right. Because "strong" doesn't (or shouldn't) mean over-the-top awesome at everything, it means "well written". Strong, flawed, complex, and interesting.
Last edited:
Excellent post, Penumbra. Can't say I disagree with any of it. :yes:
Rakhel
Well-Known Member
Samantha Carter was my favorite from that show.
There was another after she left, but it was long after I lost interest.
Movies
Shirley Valentine
Tank Girl
Practical Magic
TV
Cagney and Lacey
Katherine Bell from JAG
Current ones I find on NCIS and NCIS LA
Abby, Ziva and Mackenzie
Alceste
Vagabond
I loved the books. I literally could not put them down. Read them start to finish and didn't sleep.
Alceste
Vagabond
Totally forgot about juno and all the miyazaki films. Awesome post. I'll have to check out the airbender sequel. I really liked that series.
Shadow Wolf
Certified People sTabber & Business Owner
I really like Sigourney Weaver, who has taken a strong leading female role as both an Xenomorph ***-kicker and even the head strong doctor from Avatar (I can't recall her character's name). I also loved Claudia from Interview with the Vampire.
As for games, I have always admired Princess Zelda, who often takes an active role in defeating the evil Ganondorf, and whom Link would be unable to complete his epic quest without. I also like Samus, who doesn't need anyone else to kick some Space Pirate butt.
As for games, I have always admired Princess Zelda, who often takes an active role in defeating the evil Ganondorf, and whom Link would be unable to complete his epic quest without. I also like Samus, who doesn't need anyone else to kick some Space Pirate butt.
Samantha Carter was my favorite from that show.
There was another after she left, but it was long after I lost interest.
Movies
Shirley Valentine
Tank Girl
Practical Magic
TV
Cagney and Lacey
Katherine Bell from JAG
Current ones I find on NCIS and NCIS LA
Abby, Ziva and Mackenzie
Tank Girl!!! :jam:
Interesting you mentioned Cagney and Lacey. Husband said it was one of his favorite shows back in the day, but I didn't watch a single episode. I think now I'll check it out.
Rakhel
Well-Known Member
I only remember bits and pieces of C & L , but it was one of my favorites, too.There weren't too many female cops in media.
I mean, there was always Charlie's Angels and One Million Dollar Woman, but there was something about those two women. I can't explain it.
I forgot someone, and I know some might laugh, but Xena, Warrior Princess, was a good one too. She was feminine with a side of kick-***. Plus Lucy Lawless is hot.
La Femme Nakita(not the current show. I don't know why, but it irks me to no end)
Matilda(Natalie Portman) from Leon: The professional. I like to think the movie was more about her than it was about him.
InformedIgnorance
Do you 'know' or believe?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oni_(video_game)
Loved it. She be kickass.
edit: apparently it tried to put the closing bracket outside of the url tags... dont know why
Loved it. She be kickass.
edit: apparently it tried to put the closing bracket outside of the url tags... dont know why
Last edited:
Wherenextcolumbus
Well-Known Member
Oh yeah, how about the film kickass
Alceste
Vagabond
Oh yeah, how about the film kickass
Awesome flick.
I read an article called,
Dear Hollywood:
Hiring women directors could rescue the superhero movie.
Love, half the human race.
It talks about some of the shortcomings of the current approach (like the role of women in them, in general), and specifically that there have been like 100+ superhero movies, but apparently only one real superhero movie has been directed by a woman. Women do make up a substantial chunk of the super hero movie-going audience, often over 35% or 40% or more, and the action audience in general.
The percentage of female directors of large movies has not increased since the 1990's, despite the fact that in terms of small films, women are very well represented and successful. Only one female director has ever won an academy award for directing (Kathryn Bigelow, for Hurt Locker, a gritty movie about the Iraq War). Women are statistically very under-represented behind the scenes in creating movies, from writing to producing and especially to directing.
After reading the article, I mentioned the statistic to some of my guy friends that love super hero movies, and they kind of 'politely' scoffed at the idea. The idea of a woman directing a superhero movie was an alien concept to them. Of course, two men have directed the first two Hunger Games movies so far (starring a woman, aimed towards a mixed audience with an emphasis on girls/women), and four out of five of the Twilight movies (starring a woman, aimed towards girls/teens) were directed by men, Juno (starring a woman) was directed by a man, Salt (starring a woman) was directed by a man, Devil Wears Prada (starring mostly women, probably aimed mostly towards women) was directed by a man, and there are a zillion other examples where gender is irrelevant to create a profitable and in some cases good movie.
Dear Hollywood:
Hiring women directors could rescue the superhero movie.
Love, half the human race.
It talks about some of the shortcomings of the current approach (like the role of women in them, in general), and specifically that there have been like 100+ superhero movies, but apparently only one real superhero movie has been directed by a woman. Women do make up a substantial chunk of the super hero movie-going audience, often over 35% or 40% or more, and the action audience in general.
The percentage of female directors of large movies has not increased since the 1990's, despite the fact that in terms of small films, women are very well represented and successful. Only one female director has ever won an academy award for directing (Kathryn Bigelow, for Hurt Locker, a gritty movie about the Iraq War). Women are statistically very under-represented behind the scenes in creating movies, from writing to producing and especially to directing.
After reading the article, I mentioned the statistic to some of my guy friends that love super hero movies, and they kind of 'politely' scoffed at the idea. The idea of a woman directing a superhero movie was an alien concept to them. Of course, two men have directed the first two Hunger Games movies so far (starring a woman, aimed towards a mixed audience with an emphasis on girls/women), and four out of five of the Twilight movies (starring a woman, aimed towards girls/teens) were directed by men, Juno (starring a woman) was directed by a man, Salt (starring a woman) was directed by a man, Devil Wears Prada (starring mostly women, probably aimed mostly towards women) was directed by a man, and there are a zillion other examples where gender is irrelevant to create a profitable and in some cases good movie.
Alceste
Vagabond
Ooh, Hurt Locker was one of the best war films I've ever seen. Didn't know that was directed by a woman.
Titanic
Well-Known Member
Hey, some girls like big breasted, scantily clad women too.
I know I do. Oh wait I am not a woman...