The Cool Girl: Women in Film 2014

I want you to watch something for me.

You've seen some of these movies before. You're all familiar with this plot beat. The woman, almost always a love interest, has been captured by the villain, and the hero has to brawl or bargain to save her. There's nothing inherently sexist about the situation, just as the use of such a plot device doesn't automatically make a movie sexist. But that's beside the point. This supercut puts a lot of unpleasant Hollywood trends in stark relief.

For starters, notice how in most of these clips the woman doesn't even speak. She's a prop. The only important dynamic in the scene is that between the (generally) male hero and the (generally) male villain. Their relationship is the important one, the real one, the dramatically resonant one. The men have all the dialogue, all the power, all the agency, all the charisma, all the audience's rooting interests--everything. Meanwhile, the women just have weakness and manufactured tears. They are little more than poker chips in these scenes, an observation driven home when the heroes start offering money to trade for her: "I'll give up the gold," "I gave you the money," "I'll open the safe." Then, as if it wasn't apparent enough, we have the litany of scenes that make the utter unimportance of the woman explicit: "This is between you and me," "She's not important," "She doesn't belong here."

If she's really so unimportant to the central conflict, why is she even in the movie? The answer is even sorrier than the question: She exists in these films as nothing more than a pawn, a plot device, and an eventual reward for the man to take home and mount on his mantle. Figuratively speaking.

TOP FIFTEEN 2014

Around this time last year, I was looking back at 2013 with abject despondency. I had seen so few movies, and the ones I had experienced were hardly worthy to fill a top ten list. What was I going to round it out with, Man of Steel? The thought repulses me.

Now 2015 has rolled around and I find myself in the polar opposite predicament. Instead of waiting until December of the following year to scrounge up enough films for a worthy top ten, it is February and I already have too many! Despite having only seen twenty-eight movies, I couldn't deny myself the indulgence--this year's list will be a top fifteen.

Even that was difficult to pare down! There are films in my Honorable Mentions that I will rave about for years to come. There are even films featured in my Untoward Awards that I quite liked (Sorry The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1). All told, 2014 may have been a bad year for culture in general, but it was an excellent year for film. I feel confident stating as much even having missed the following potential gems (in order from most to least interesting for me):

Under the Skin, Boyhood, Force Majeure, Locke, Only Lovers Left Alive, A Most Violent Year, The Guest, Jodorowsky's Dune, Neighbors, Rosewater, The Rover, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, Foxcatcher

There's too much to talk about. This is gonna be long. So let's get started.

Ace Enjoys SEX: HOW IT WORKS

Today I am proud to bring you a Post-Credit Coda first--a guest-written movie review! My old friend Ace McKnight will be your guide today, and he will be whisking you through the details of a delightful little documentary called Sex: How It Works. I've known this interesting guy for a long time now, and I really appreciate his adding content to my blog. I always encourage that sort of thing. If anyone else out there wants to contribute, let me know. I would be happy to curate!

Enough from me. You came here to hear Ace talk about Sex: How It Works, and he will not disappoint.

FRANK: Something Perishable

Director: Lenny Abrahamson
Writers: Jon Ronson, Peter Straughan
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Scoot McNairy, Francois Civil, Carla Azar
Runtime: 95 mins.
2014

You think you know Frank. Just as our protagonist makes the mistake of believe he understands Frank's potential, Frank's desires, and worst of all Frank himself, you begin watching this film with a sense of superiority--or at least a sense of superior perspective. As the film opens on a young man desperately seeking inspiration but only coming up with a few facile snippets of pop fancy, you understand exactly where this must be going. This story is a Kunstlerroman--the development to maturity of an artist--with zany indie trappings. When our protagonist Jon (Domnhall Gleeson) joins a strange band called the Soronprfbs that jars him out of his sense of normalcy, you predict that this band will be the key to unlocking his nascent potential.

You've made a mistake. You couldn't be more wrong.

SELMA: An Impressive Movement

Director: Ava DuVernay
Writer: Paul Webb
Cast: David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Wendell Pierce, Common, Tom Wilkinson, Oprah Winfrey, Tim Roth
Runtime: 128 mins.
2014

I saw Selma a few weeks ago and tried to start a write-up, but nothing materialized. Then the Oscar nominations happened. Among the many reasons to be annoyed, perhaps the most pressing is the absence of Selma from all but a very few categories. No nods to Bradford Young for cinematography, no nods to Ava DuVernay for direction, not even a nod to David Oyelowo for what is clearly one of the most chameleonic performances of the year. I won't take any time now to complain about the Academy. Instead, watch this video interview with DuVernay in which she perfectly characterizes the issue in a matter of minutes.

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/27/selma_director_ava_duvernay_on_hollywoods

In my reviews I typically like to dig into the minutiae of my positive and negative feelings toward a film, and connect that to a discussion of the quality, or at least the success of a film. Does the movie accomplish what it sets for itself to accomplish? Does it hinder itself, or trip over its own feet in any way? Criticism is a hard conversation for many reasons, foremost among them being the need to approach a work on its own merits, rather than what you as a subjective viewer want to see. Then there's the semantics of whether a film being good means it is important, or entertaining, or challenging, or airtight, or inspired, and so on. The simple and endlessly complex answer is: It just depends.

WE ARE THE BEST!: It's the Best

In which three young girls kick ass and take names--ideologically.

Director: Lukas Moodysson
Writer: Lukas Moodysson
Cast: Mira Barkhammar, Mira Grosin, Liv LeMoyne
Runtime: 102 mins.
2014

Normally going into these things I have a structure outlined in my head, and I work through the review beat by beat. I don't have that for We Are the Best! I think, in the spirit of punk, I'll bang this one out as I go along.

We Are the Best! follows two thirteen year old girls in 1980's Sweden as they sort of fumble around from day to day, hating what they hate and loving what they love, until they happen into this idea that they should really just start their own punk band--despite having no previous musical experience. Once they recruit an unlikely third member--a young Christian girl who has years of experience on the guitar--the band starts becoming something and taking on a central importance in their lives. Meanwhile they deal with drama and trauma surrounding school, parents, and especially love interests.

More than all that, this movie is about the spirit of PUNK. And the spirit of GIRLS. And the spirit of GIRLS doing PUNK.

But more than THAT this movie is about those girls--as people.

I'm going to reiterate because that is the most important thing I can say about this movie, as it is 2014 and this sort of thing is still a revolutionary concept in cinema:

We Are the Best! treats children as though they are people. We Are the Best! treats girls as though they are people. These are two of the most egregiously uncommon achievements of contemporary film, and two reasons why We Are the Best! has to be considered one of the most incredible things to be released in 2014.

The Great BOJACK HORSEMAN Experiment

Disclaimer: I have since finished watching Bojack Horseman, and it is one of the best shows on television. I am leaving this post up as a monument to drunken hubris.

Long ago I watched the first episode of Bojack Horseman in an airport. I was so viscerally displeased that I immediately swore the show off and launched into a series of theories about the problems with Netflix's original content model.

A month or so later, a good friend of mine was texting me in the midst of his marathon session of watching the show. He agreed wholeheartedly that the show was very bad, but he found his experience of marathoning the show all at once inexplicably engaging, and he recommended that I do the same.

Now it is many more months later, and I finally have.

What follows is the live journal of my experience watching the entirety of Bojack Horseman, transposed from a notebook to the world wide web without any alterations. Just pretend you can see the handwriting degenerate as time passes.

This blog post is brought to you by Admiral Nelson's Spiced Rum.

WHIPLASH: Crack That Whip

In which the protagonist's task is more challenging than getting pictures of Spider-Man.

Director: Damien Chazelle
Writer: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Miles Teller, J. K. Simmons, Paul Reiser, Melissa Benoist
107 mins.
2014

When you're young, movies have a direct line into your soul. They're like a flu shot--sometimes shocking, sometimes painful, inserting themselves into your body and altering your nervous system. Whether a child enjoys a movie or hates it is not necessarily beholden to quality or craft. Sometimes the things that make or break viewing experiences for kids can be a familiar image, or a character who talks a certain way, or the fact that the main character has a cat. This is why children can so easily watch movies with a sense of wonder, or a sense of terror, or a sense of unlimited empathy. It's also why children sometimes attach themselves to complete dreck.

As we stuff more and more movies into our craw, that sense of wonder gets calloused. We grow harder to please. We recognize obvious sentiment as obvious sentiment; tropes and cliches finally register as we see them for the seventh or twentieth time. We acquire expectations. We watch movies with our third eye open and wary. We criticize.

I just now made up that opaque reference to a third eye so let me try to explain it. One eye open picks out colors and shapes. Two eyes open situate those shapes in three-dimensional space. It would make sense that having a third eye open would situate physical objects in a greater contextual fabric, a fourth dimension if you will. That which is seen becomes important within the tapestry of time--it becomes historical, cultural, social. That third eye is our critical awareness, our consciousness of meanings and implications.

All of this speculation is totally irrelevant to Whiplash, because all I want to say about it is this:

Self-therapy: 2014 in Review

Other Years in Review

Welcome to the cusp of 2015.

This was a banner year for me. I wrote my thesis, I graduated college, I worked a summer at Haverford, I spent a couple weeks in Minnesota, I slummed around, I got a job, I moved to Philadelphia. It's been one of those watershed years in which your life on December 31 looks nothing like it did on January 1.

Of course, 2014 was also the first year of Post-Credit Coda! One year ago today I was in a dire mood, so I made this blog and posted this post because I couldn't muster up the willpower to do anything else. That has grown into something of a hidden theme on this blog. I spent a decent portion of this year stressed, depressed, or suffering from severe writer's block. Oftentimes I would turn here as a sort of self-therapy; when there was nothing else in the world I could think to write about, I could always write about movies. It was my recourse, my outlet. MY SALVATION.

I may be giving the wrong impression. When a new Post-Credit Coda post pops up, you shouldn't be thinking, "Oh no! I do hope he's alright, the poor sweet dear." I come here just as often, if not more often, because I am excited about something. Sometimes movies electrify me in a way few things can, and I love sharing that energy with others.

MOCKINGJAY - PART 1: Rebels and Rubbles

In which it takes me two hours to figure out how to upload a sound file to Blogger.

Director: Francis Lawrence
Writers: Peter Craig, Danny Strong
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Elizabeth Banks, Julianne Moore, Sam Claflin, Natalie Dormer, Mahershala Ali, Jeffrey Wright, Stanley Tucci, Jena Malone
Runtime: 123 mins.
2014

For this winter's biggest cinematic event, the continuation of the massively successful Hunger Games franchise, Post-Credit Coda is releasing its first audio review! Click below to hear me discuss Mockingjay - Part 1 with my two esteemed guest stars, Brandon and Carson Rebel. (Hopefully it works; you might have trouble on mobile devices. I apologize for the sound quality, I did the best I could with zero microphones.)

WARNING: Spoilers are discussed for Mockingjay - Part 1, though if you ask me it doesn't matter that much for this movie. Nothing beyond the scope of Part 1 was discussed.

My reviews for movies mentioned in the discussion:

Top Ten 2013 (Catching Fire)
Edge of Tomorrow
Godzilla

2.5 / 5  BLOBS