I'm not flying off the handle... Yet...

(Via) From Newsarama:

According to LA Weekly’s Nikki Finke, Warners isn’t interested in making films with female leads. Her source? Warner Bros president of production Jeff Robinov who Finke quotes (through three sources) as saying: "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead." Finke said that Robinov's sentiment/statement was confirmed by three producers

Original source here. Finke doesn't name the producers, just says there are three people verifying it.

Okay, maybe I'm flying off the handle just a bit. Kalinara is trying to talk me out of titling this post "Fuck you, Warner Bros."

A quick search on GoogleNews brings this article to light, which still pisses me off to no avail. Assuming the producer in question really is this much of a moron:

On a purely business level, though, if Robinov's declaration is more along the lines of "We are no longer doing action movies with women in the lead"... I'm afraid he's entirely justified. This isn't because a woman can't carry an action movie, but a acknowledgment of the deeply shitty reality that there isn't a single filmmaker or producer in town who knows how to develop an femme-led action movie that plays to the male quadrant (television is a completely different ballgame).

And it's a failure of imagination, really. In a way, I'd much rather see Jessica Biel as a former Navy SEAL assigned to track down terrorists threatening to blow up the Anheuser-Busch brewery. But no studio would ever greenlight Biel in a role developed for, say, Mark Wahlberg because they'd first call up the respectable grosses Underworld, Kill Bill and the Resident Evil movies, and, then, contrast those numbers with the not-so-good returns for Elektra, Aeon Flux, Domino, Catwoman, Ultraviolet, Point of No Return and, for the hell of it, V.I. Warshawski. And then they'd conclude that the risk is too high for the modest-at-best reward.

It sounds like they're using the logic that since Catwoman fucked up they don't want a female action lead because they assume all female pictures will suck. To which I'd suggest that maybe if they put more effort into making a female-lead movie work, like say a decent script, some dedication to the source material, and a good director rather than just assuming that big boobs will work box office magic they might find that female-led pictures would make more money.

Interestingly enough, CHUD above suggests that they know this, but might not willing to dedicate the necessary resources to a female-led movie because its a female led movie -- the logic of which pisses me off as much as the original unverified quote.

Family Approved?

Soyo snooped around and found more irritating stuff on the people who adapted The Dark is Rising into (*shudder*) The Seeker. It seems that the movie has been "family approved:

Of course, "Judeo/Christian values" and "positive family values" are buzzwords enough to chase me away, but I decided to look at exactly how they were reviewing films. Perhaps the most telling thing I found was a section labeled "content" that detailed anything objectionable that might be in the movie. In a way, they functioned rather like fanfiction warnings. Some of it was pretty laughable, putting "kissing" under the sex category, and counting the instances of bad language without writing out the actual words themselves. So you had "D" instead of "damn", and the like.

Other things were predictable, but still on the disturbing side. For instance, warning for "mentions of evolution" in an informative IMAX movie about dinosaurs. (Granted, as the daughter of two biology-types, I think people who "don't believe in evolution", should get the fuck over it.) Another thing that really bugged me was the constant chatter about fathers in the movie reviews, but very little mention of mothers. Look, I get that there's a big problem with dads being portrayed as immature and incompetent in the media. I agree that that's a problem, and I want people to fix it. But moms are important too. And it's ALSO quite annoying that the media assumes women automatically know how to parent, and LIKE to parent, and that any woman behaving otherwise is some immature freak.

Okay, whatever, crazy fundie website "approving" movies. They're out there, and most of them are even scarier. But for this one, producers submit the movies to be reviewed. So Walden must have submitted what once was The Dark is Rising up for review.

Now, this is old news that the company is a Christian movie company wanting to make Christian movies (but for some reason they bought the rights to a Pagan book series). But this is just one more layer on that that drives the point home that it wasn't just plain audience pandering, it was an actual attempt to edit out vital elements from the series because they weren't "wholesome" in their opinion.

Sure, I've heard the rumor that they've dropped The Dark is Rising from the subtitle is dropped, but that doesn't change the fact that the rights to the movies are owned by these people who want to suck the joy and wonder out of everything they touch in the name of "positive family values." (Because, of course, the only families are conservative Christian families and the rest of us don't count, and so our family-friendly books need to be turned into conservative Christian movies to really be family-friendly.)

The worst part of the whole thing is not that we're getting a sucky movie that's not meant for the fans of the books. Its that we'll never get a good movie after this. They own the rights.

Speaking of Blogwars

(I almost missed Friday Night Fights while I was writing another post.)

I should link these here more often

Because I've been keeping out of the blogwars too much lately.

You know...

That Wonder Woman Annual seemed very good. I imagine it would have been very good if I could remember what the fuck happened in Wonder Woman #1-4, or even find the issues to check (its been too damned long).

I say DC owes us a real Wonder Woman Annual.

I can't believe I read the whole thing.

So I read Chronicles of the Lensmen, Volume 1.

I know what some of you are thinking. "Ragnell, why did you go and do that? You know the reputation. You know its going to piss you off."

And for a long time, I put off reading these books. I knew they would be sexist. I knew the reputation. But seriously, its the fucking template for fucking space opera. Its arguably the mother of the Jedi Knights and the Green Lantern Corps. There was no fucking way I couldn't read this stuff, and the truth of the matter is there was guaranteed to be stuff I would love.

Fortunately, a big plus to having a blog and being in the feminist fan community is that I can read this stuff, enjoy what I enjoy, get pissed off at the sexism that keeps it from being as awesome as it could be (this writer had the ability to craft a kickass character, he just chose not to use that ability when it came to women and instead gendered strength and heroism) and complain about it to people who understand why I'm pissed off. Even with that in mind, this series is bad enough that I feel an intense need to justify that I kept reading the damned thing even though aside from the constant shitting on my gender the damned series feels like it was custom-written with me in mind.

In all honesty, I thought it wouldn't be so bad. I've read extremely sexist and misogynistic stuff from the King Arthur stuff written centuries ago and haven't gotten pissed off. I read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories and the Victorian attitude about women never pissed me off. It was part of the atmosphere, an anachronism. I figured I could just rationalize it away as "the attitude from the times" but I neglected two facts about this series: 1) A medieval setting where women are only princesses and barmaids is vastly less annoying than a future setting where women are only nurses and secretaries, and 2) It is a work that overtly worships masculinity and in the narrative (not the dialogue, or a first-person narrator, but the omniscient third-person narrator) goes out of its way to drop generalizations about women and uses the word "man" as a synonym for "hero".

In the first book, Triplanetary, I wanted to smack Clio. I swear, what a stupid worthless character and every stupid worthless part of her stupid worthless personality was attributed to her being a stupid worthless woman while everything that made her boyfriend a really awesome hero was attributed to his really awesome manliness.

I would've stopped there, it was pissing me off, but it was full of energy and adventure and detailed alien fish-people so I couldn't put it down. I consoled myself with the idea that I could find the author's grave and energetically voice my objections towards his rotting corpse when it was all over, and kept reading.

In the second book, First Lensmen, I was happy early on. Action-adventure set in outerspace, a couple of fun heroes and Clio was nowhere to be found. The only girl was mildly likable. I managed to forget for a moment that I was reading the Chronicles of the Lensmen, until Jill came back from Arisia with the explanation why women couldn't have a lens. The whole explanation just sounded mean-spirited and unnecessary. A "sex-based incompatibility." (I'm sorry, the color yellow has nothing on that one for idiocy.) It doesn't fit, and she goes on to say that the men she's with all have forceful, driven minds with tremendous scope ("pure killers") and a woman could not have that sort of mind. (This rules out any chance of a nice mean female villain. Which is a shame, because usually we can at least look forward an evil witch with a heart of iron that'll be turned into the misunderstood protagonist of an homage book.) She says there'll be one female lensman (I haven't gotten to that book, but I'm certain I'll be pissed off by it) in the future, and one of the guys suggests the female lensman will be some sort of freak thank you very much you bastard writer.

I'd have stopped reading in disgust, but I had nothing else to read so I went on. I was pleased by zero-gravity fight scenes later, but I got annoyed whenever Jill was mentioned. What made this worse was that the author very much wanted me to like her, and built her up in the dialogue and narration without coming through in the action.

They made a point of saying repeatedly that she didn't need a lens, her skills were fine without them. But oh wait, there's a scene where she figures out something fucking important with her skills but can't contact any of the others to help her (and can't do anything about it herself) because she doesn't have a fucking lens. She has to wait for someone to contact her mind before she can let them know (to the writer's credit, chivalry is put forth as a bad thing here, because no one wants to go near her mind without her express immediate consent but that doesn't change the fact that this all could have been averted if she had a fucking lens.)

Of course, after this scene (and after a later one where she gets captured and roughed up because she doesn't have a fucking lens) they all say that it was true she didn't need one, and that's she awesome, and that annoys me more than her being in a shitty position to begin with. It's the "strong woman" thing. The writers seem to figure if they say a character is cool and a "strong woman" enough, she is, despite the fact that she's purposefully written as less powerful than any of the male characters. And of course, the writer sits and congratulates himself on what an awesome "strong woman" character he's created, and how progressive he is and what a good person he is for throwing the poor woman readers who have so little an awesome chick they can look up to and emulate.

Anyway, this wouldn't piss me off half as much were it not still in practice today (See Winick, the Writings of Judd), and the plot still had me hooked and I liked the male characters when the writer was not going out of his was to point out how manly they were (please take note if you somehow stumble across this searching on your name, Geoff Johns, and consider your Hal Jordan characterization) so I continued reading, reminding myself this author was dead and probably reincarnated (for his writing sins) as a feminist comics blogger. (This has the upside of Stephanie getting her memorial case once the karmic debt from Lensmen runs out. It unfortunately has the downside of having launched a genre with this sexist shit that still needs to be cleared out so that's a pretty big debt.)

He wrapped the book up with some good old-fashioned (and I mean old-fashioned, this was from the days leading up to the Red Scare) dated political allegory.

I actually found Galactic Patrol to be the most enjoyable of the series, and the reason why will only really apply to me. The main character was named Kim Kinnison. My sister's nickname (for "Kimberly") is "Kim", so already I'm inclined to think "girl" when I see the name. The inclination was compounded because I knew a "Kinnison" in basic training.

Kinnison was about half my size, with shoulder-length blonde hair (always tucked behind her ears), very round dark eyes, and mildly chubby cheeks. She always seemed to have a bewildered expression on her face, because it was basic training and you had to stand there with a completely slack expression (or else you'd get yelled at and made to do laps or pushups or something exhausting) whenever anyone with stripes was around, and she had one of those jobs that had a lot of visibility with the military training instructors (we called them TIs in the Air Force, not Drill Sergeants). She was our "chowrunner" which is a job that involved entering the dining hall before the rest of the flight, standing in front of the TI table during the whole meal and directing her flight to where they needed to sit and eat. I'm not sure if Kinnison ate before or after us, or if she got to eat at all. I just remember her telling everyone how she'd stand there and one of the TIs would make funny faces at her, trying to get her to laugh so he could yell at her.

I tell you this much detail because this is the person I pictured whenever I pictured "Kim Kinnison." Smith didn't have much in the way of physical description for the characters, so even though I knew Kim was short of "Kimball" and I knew it was a male character, and even though Smith went out of his way to praise the character's masculinity, I still could not help but picture a short 18-year-old girl with shoulder-length blonde hair and a bewildered expression on her face throughout the entire book. It made the whole thing really interesting, I just wish I could draw you her face. Her eyes had the perfect roundness for an "Oh shit" reaction to anything!

Inadvertently, Kim Kinnison has become one of my favorite female characters.

That doesn't change the misogyny in the surrounding narrative (though it does makes it amusing to me).

Now, you'll notice this review is about gender-related issues. There's also race, sexuality, nationality, and religion to consider. Surprise surprise, everyone with a romantic subplot is straight. True, he doesn't really bother to mention race, but all of the names are European and some of the main characters are redheads and blondes. He has a Norwegian and a couple of Germans and everyone else is American. I didn't notice anything about religion, and I'm quite glad he didn't think to address the subject.

Overall, there is stuff I like better than the Green Lantern Corps and stuff I like less. I prefer the green energy to mind-control powers (though in the third book Kinnison gets really kickass really fast and my opinion on who has the better power set may change as I make my way through the last 3 books). I prefer the wristband to rings. The Galactic Patrol was set up much more intelligently than the GLC, with the lens falling apart once the owner was killed and killing anyone who tried it on but wasn't worthy. A smart idea, but offers less narrative flexibility. The Arisians being infallible (as of the third book) isn't as interesting as the Guardians being borderline psychotic at times, but that just demonstrates two different attitudes to government. The GLC and the Jedi both kick collective Lensmen ass by allowing women in the order (the next person who tells me the Silver Age Green Lantern is inherently anti-woman because it was based on the Lensmen novels gets a lecture about how E.E. Smith makes John Broome look like William Moulton Marston.)

It had some really kickass action in it and I did like the male characters despite the author's desperate, pathetic need to point out how manly they were. I also thought Clarrissa wasn't vomit-inducing, and Jill might not have been if not for the author's insistence that he wasn't being sexist with her plotline (I wanted Clio dead, though). I couldn't put the damned thing down once I started it, because while I'd not get pissed off by sexism I'd also not get to read zero-gravity fights and fishpeople and that bit with the cat in the barber's shop.

Ultimately, reading this series was like getting a lovely green leather briefcase as a gift and finding "To my favorite nephew" inscribed on the side. Its beautiful leather, holds everything I need, and green is my favorite color, but someone had to go and mark the damned thing for a boy. Every time I look at it I'm reminded that even though it suits me perfectly it wasn't really meant for me.

That sours any enjoyment I can get out of it.

The Rack

Ouch, poor Lydia!

Especially the last one, gross.

Discworld Filing

I've been trying to arrange my Discworld books on LibraryThing, and found that Wikipedia had different story sets than I did.

It seems they go by single protagonists (although I'm not sure how the History Monks get a grouping -- they strike me as guest-stars). I don't, though. See, I consider Tiffany Aching a direct continuation of the Witches books (her stuff certainly fits as well as Equal Rites does), and Rincewind's stories under the heading Wizards with the books that primarily feature Ridcully and Co. The Watch is definitely separate from the beaurocratic dreambooks that feature Moist, but I think The Truth with its politics in Ankh-Morpork setting attaches nicely as a prologue to the Moist storyarc.

Of course there's always going to be some overlap. It all depends on who seems to drive the story more and who is just there to be present. Death and the Wizards seem to share nicely, since the UU staff gets as much plot-importance as Death and Susan get in at least 2 of their books (Hogfather, Soul Music -- books about the nature of belief and magic fit both character groups). The Wizards and the Witches don't "share" -- the Witches get all of the major actions in Equal Rites and Lords and Ladies, and those are just Witch-style books. (Witch books seem to be about defying the expectations of the universe, Wizard books seem to be about discovering the nature of universe.)

I'm going by theme and mood, I expect. The protagonist sets the mood, yes. Some books are just Watch books. They have Watch-style plots and star those characters, and everyone learns a Watch-style lesson about humanity. They're set in the city. They usually end with Vetinari spouting philosophy. City books like The Truth and Going Postal have the same traits and characters, but they focus on someone other than Sam Vimes and therefore have a much more optimistic mood.

Susan books tend to have the same mood usually too. Tiffany and Granny have the same outlook, so naturally all the Witches books blend together. But Rincewind and the rest of the UU staff don't really have personalities that match, but the Wizard books have the same feel whether Rincewind is present or not. The story seems fresh and exploratory, I have to group them together. Moving Pictures just doesn't stand alone to me, its a Wizards book.

Am I the only one who arranges them this way?