Actors! Movies! A Bunch of Film Reviews and thoughts about slash (duh)

Will wonders never cease.

No, this isn't the Eames of Inception meta I've been threatening, alas, that will probably be on hold until I have my own copy of the movie so that I can analyse every scene he's in - because dude, it's all about the clothes, mannerisms and his turn of phrase and... yeah.

Any way, ever since I saw Inception I've been going over other movies I've missed due to having awful Hollywood taste and skipping a bunch of indie flicks that had Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ellen Page in them.

The films I'll be mentioning are: "500 Days of Summer", "Mysterious Skin", "Shadowboxer", "Smart People", "Whip It", "RockNRolla" and "Bronson".
This post may contain spoilers regarding some characters, but I'll be doing my best to keep plot out of it.

Don't say I didn't tell you!

( In which I go on about Joseph Gordon-Levitt )

By the way, Joseph Gordon-Levitt covers songs by women and listening to him singing "Express Yourself", "Bad Romance" and "Natural Woman" is just fucking grand.
The man is scarily talented.

Watching all those movies made me appreciate him a whole lot more - There's barely an audience here for Indie Cinema and the Cinemateques are not very close by to me and I generally miss screenings and had no idea these movies even existed until I see a mainstream movie, go to IMDB and find out that whoa! These people are prolific!

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is awesome y'all!

Ellen Page is lovely. She really is. Obviously I'd seen Juno, because everyone had seen Juno and I saw her as Kitty Pride in the third X-Men movie and she was very sweet there as well.
I've yet to see Hard Candy and yes, I know, it's a huge cavern in my film viewing arsenal, but I saw other movies instead!
( Now Ellen Page! )

Tom Hardy is a curious case. As it happens, except Bronson (which I will get to), I'd actually seen most of the feature films he'd been in! (he's acted in a few British mini-series and drama shows, which I've yet to see). Like Layer Cake - I've seen that a few times, because of Daniel Craig and Burn Gorman! And there he is on IMDB, Mr. Eames!
Not to mention Star Trek: Nemesis, which really, let's not mention it.

And Rock N Rolla the underrated (and also not as good as previous) Ritchie film. The first Guy Ritchie film (correct me if I'm wrong) with a canon gay character! ( Tom Hardy, I knew thee before I knew of thee! )

Getting back to Rock N Rolla for a mo'.
When I saw it all those many moons ago I expected to go online and find a whole slew of fanfiction! A canon gay character! A canon gay character with a crush! A canon gay character in the same 'verse as Jason Statham! (*wink-wink nudge-nudge*)
And 'lo, there was none. Or more to the point, barely any.
What with Tom Hardy's sudden popularity, the movie is getting rewatched and there were at least ten new fics I've found since I'd seen Inception back in August.

I find that interesting. I'm not really all that sure what to make of it. Especially considering that Eames, as a character, most definitely put ambiguous vibes sexuality and gender wise, there's nothing in the actual text to suggest that he's queer in any way - he's just got excellent chemistry with everyone.

Handsome Bob (Ritchie, you love your Statham^*, don't you?) played by Tom Hardy is very much not ambiguous, seeing as he comes out to the audience and protagonist early on and would appear to have been out to everyone else since before the events of the movie!

I'm wondering if it's because of this lack of ambiguity and the very real reaction that came from the character to whom Handsome Bob came out that there were barely any takers. I have a few fic ideas, but it takes me forever to write and I'm not very prolific, so don't expect anything from any time soon.
The more I think about, it really could be the fact that there was a reaction to the fact that here's a masculine bloke who likes the romantic and erotic company of other blokes, and the other blokes in the movie make it clear that being gay isn't as good as being straight in various and sundry ways - most of them are ambiguous in their malice, as in, clearly the actions were homophobic but it's unclear how much of it came from actual hatred of gay men and how much of it a part of macho gangster life.

That kind of ambiguity is rare. So often, you see a polarised split in reaction, not to mention the gay characters themselves are usually so stereotyped it's hard to watch... but in this film, the performances felt... friendly... a dangerously awkward moment in which I feared there would be yet-another-dead-queer-on-screen... but ended up being sweet and touching, throughout the film.

I think the fact that there was this reaction existed on screen, jostled the slash goggles a bit.

Your own thoughts on this?

Footnotes
* In case you weren't aware, Jason Statham played a character named "Handsome Rob" in the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, where he plays a fast driving British lady's man. Handsome Bob, is also the driver for the East End gang he's a member of - he's also referred to as a "lady killer" at a certain point... only, he's a gay man. Yeah.
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In Hatred of that Flow Chart

I hate this female character flow chart with a passion I try to keep within me for causes that matter.

Luckily, this is one of them.

I am not the first to be irritated by it, no god no.

My main problem with the flow chart is that it reduces all female characters into foils of the male characters.
All of them.
It is especially irksome when Yoko Ono is there as well, being an actual person and all.

Sarah Connor, a heroine which we are afraid to see in this day and age, reduced to "Mama Bear".
Miss Piggy, one of my personal heroes, a performer of the highest calibre and one of the few regular female presence on "The Muppet Show", reduced to her mood swings, rather the hilarious comedienne that she is.
Lieutenant Uhura is useless?! In what freakin' universe!?!? A woman who held her own on the bridge of a Star Ship. I just... Ah!

Look at the flow-chart and judge for yourselves.

But judging is all that ever goes on when it comes to female characters, huh. It's all about whether they fit a paradigm of looks, abilities and personae.

Do male characters not fit that flow chart. You bet they do, but will there ever be a flow chart so demeaning? No, of course not, that flow chart will be critical and thoughtful and be about the characters as Characters, not the characters as "men".

The chart also demonstrates the notion that archetypes and tropes are a bad thing. I beg to differ, archetypes and tropes are what make a story work. If we look at the shortest form of a story, a joke, the comedy (and tragedy) of the tale works because we understand the history of the character as an archetype and we understand the situation the character is in because it is a common trope.

A horse walks into a bar, the bartender says, "Hey, why the long face"

Despite that joke being as old as the hills, it demonstrates my point - the characters, of which there are two, are in a common setting (a bar) and the funny is in the way is treated (as a human) by the bartender.

The joke wouldn't work without the archetype of the bartender and the trope of being sad in a bar.

Is a "strong female character" someone who manages to overcome the archetypes and the tropes? No, a strong character, regardless of gender, orientation, race, nationality, ability and more, is a person who works those things beautifully.

It is of course worth mentioning, that gender, orientation, race, nationality and ability do matter, because of the white-supremacist masculine-centric hetero-normative society we live in, those characters who do not fit well into the social paradigm listen above are scrutinised, because they have been more often than not been stereotyped, instead of archetyped and as such their stories are, at best, written in order to appease the long laundry list of hierarchies listed above.

The thing is, when it's the feminists (hi there!) who create that chart and continue to critique female characters as though they cannot stand on their own, as though they really are simply gender foils to male characters - well then, what exactly is the point?

Other articles to read regarding our loving and/or loathing of female characters would be Harridans, Harlots and Heroines: women of the classical world, all of which would likely fit in that chart as either Fickle Woman, Lady of War, Shrew, Suffering Wife or an Ideal Woman.

And Connecting with Female Characters in Geek Television which goes in quite a bit about the truly irrational hatred of Gwen Cooper of Torchwood and River Song of Doctor Who - two women characters which have garnered a lot of fandom hatred to the point where it seems to be almost a fetish to write fic that simply bashes them.

I will admit that I didn't like Gwen (though not to the point of murdering her in fic for the sake of calling her a whore and getting rid of her from the lives of Jack and Ianto... yes, I've seen it! *shudders*) in the beginning, but fandom taught me to love her and River is someone I loved from the moment I saw her.

When feminists participate in this kind of misogyny, not to mention racism, check this article out from Den of Geek that came out in July... Martha Jones. Martha "I walked the Earth for a year in order to save the Universe and all I got was a boatload of female Doctor Who fans who hated me for it" Jones.

This is me, giving that article and that flow chart the two fingered salute, the birdie and the request to stop perpetuating sexist ideas about what female characters are supposed to be like in order to be "strong".

Sometimes, being a feminist fangrrl is just no fucking fun at all.