Women and Men in Movies

Alright, let's start with the fact that I know I'm probably going to make a lot of people upset by something in this post, for different people it will be something different, but I'm sure I'll make you upset by the end by something.  Let's also point out that this is going to be somewhat stream of conscience and not an argument over one thing, such as whether there should be women-only cast spinoffs of movies.... though I'm relatively confident that will come up given that I just watched a youtube show with a group of people arguing about it.  I also recognize that this isn't going to be some of my best writing, in part because it's just a rant, and probably not a very good one at that.

First aspect of women and men in movies, though, is going to be "I'm going to see that movie because so-and-so is hot".  For the love of movies, if you're going to see a movie to see a guy or a girl, you should just stay home and rent a porn with a lookalike or get a video with them in it and watch that over and over again instead of spending the $8-12 on a one-off viewing.  To me, movies are exercises in story-telling, first and foremost.  They are not opportunities to watch hot people be hot, they're opportunities to watch hot people perform in a story... I mean... they're opportunities to watch people perform in a story... ok, it helps when you cook with better ingredients and certainly part of visual story-telling is the scenery and, though it sounds shallow, beautiful people make for better scenery most of the time.  That said, I don't go see any movie because of a hot chick (or hot dude for that matter)... I go see it because I think it'll be fun or I think it'll have a good story.  I'm happy that women are going to see Marvel movies, but it saddens me whenever I hear that they're going because the men are hotties.  I know that men do the same thing and that creates 2 problems for me: 1) I'm ashamed for my gender and 2) it takes a lot out of my being annoyed by women who see Thor because Chris Hemsworth is hot topless.

All-women-lead casts.  Alright, the discussion online centered around what franchise should have an all-women-lead spinoff (other than Ghostbusters).  One person picked Mission Impossible, another picked Bridesmaids.  The person that picked Bridesmaids made the argument that she didn't want to see women playing male roles but instead wanted to see women being women and talking about things women talk about.  I'm sorry, there are already movies geared toward women, just as there are movies geared toward men.  There's nothing ground breaking about movies geared toward women with leading women, and it doesn't further the discussion, or the fact that there shouldn't need to be a discussion, of women playing different roles in movies.  There's also no way you can suggest that men in Mission Impossible are playing me, they're playing spies and heroes.  Men in Mission Impossible don't talk about normal man things.  Sure, a comedy movie about women would further the goal a little, but it has to be a movie for men or for both men and women.... not a movie that women bring their husbands/boyfriends to because their husbands/boyfriends brought them to X-Men and it's payback time.  Women in, let's say action movies, can also play different roles within those movies.  They can play stereotypical women roles, they can play stereotypical guy roles, they can play ... whatever.... point is, women and men have a wider range of characters than have historically been portrayed.  We're just starting to see geeky characters in action movies not be insanely wimpish and also not being super-awesome... expand it all and you're breaking barriers and proving that we don't need one-dimensional characters (Ethan Hunt), we need multi-dimensional characters (Loki, Magneto) and we need more of them to be women so that we can get past the whole discussion, then we can let it flow naturally to the point where we don't see the token woman or the token man but instead see true ensemble casts.

In conclusion, we should go to movies for the stories, not how sexy the people in them are and while we shouldn't need to think about whether we should cast strong women characters or whether we have enough women characters, we do for the time being until it becomes natural that there are strong women characters as often as there are strong men characters and the same with supporting roles.

Wako Comparisons

I've seen several posts comparing Wako's gang shootout to riots in Baltimore.... I'm not so sure that a gang shootout is really something you can compare to a riot so easily.

• One comparison suggested that there weren't mass arrests in Wako, but 170 gang members were arrested.
• One comparison suggested that since tear gas wasn't used, the police weren't as intense..... police were firing their guns at the gang members, that's not as intense as tear gas?
• One comparison suggested that since the National Guard wasn't called in, it wasn't being taken as seriously.... this comparison was made 1 day after the shoot out, the National Guard has been typically pulled into scenes much later than the first riot in the area... And by the time the comparison was made, the ATF and FBI were on the scene, the area was cordoned off, not really sure what the National Guard would have done
• I've seen a photo and the suggestion that the police were being super-relaxed in their handling of the gang members... Maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but I certainly can't tell from one photo and I most definitely don't know enough about the scene to know if they really could have behaved any differently (when you're entirely overwhelmed numerically you often react differently than if you have a ton of cops in riot gear)
• And now I've seen something asking why the media is calling it a gang shootout instead of a riot.... that's because IT WAS A GANG SHOOTOUT... if the riots in Baltimore were gangs shooting each other rather than gangs and others tearing apart some businesses, the story there would have been a gang shoot out as well.

Not everything is equivalent.
Not everything is a prime example of the difference in how police treat blacks vs whites.

Here's one more comparison: The location of the gun fight has been closed down as a franchise and will not re-open.  CVS re-opened one of the sites of the riot in Baltimore and has pledged to support the community.  Please tell me which community is being treated as dangerous and problematic to invite into a business.

I'm not saying there isn't white privilege, there absolutely is.  I'm not saying police behavior isn't part of that white privilege, it absolutely is.  I'm not saying that the riots weren't poorly reported, they absolutely were.  But just because gang members are being called gang members instead of thugs doesn't mean that the reporting isn't appropriate.

I leave you with one last comment: with all these comparisons, none of them are pointing out that 9 people are dead and 18 injured.