Month: October 2015

  • Review: Unexpected

    Review: Unexpected

    I just caught Unexpected on Netflix. This film is about a teacher obsessed with her work who can’t deal with the fact that she is pregnant. Spoilers ahead. The film stars Cobie Smulders, Anders Holm, and Gail Bean. Smulders is Samantha (Sam) Abbott, a white woman teaching science in a majority black high school. She’s…

  • Watch This: Trailer for Our Brand is Crisis

    Watch This: Trailer for Our Brand is Crisis

    You’ve probably seen the trailer for Our Brand is Crisis 15 times on your TV already, because it’s heavily promoted there. I wanted to mention it and include the trailer here because it looks interesting. It’s interesting because it stars Sandra Bullock in a role written for a man. A great move by the film’s…

  • Watch This: Westerns with Women – Trailers for Jane Got a Gun and The Keeping Room

    Watch This: Westerns with Women – Trailers for Jane Got a Gun and The Keeping Room

    When I was a kid I went to the movies every week. So many of those movies were Westerns. That was in the days of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. Men on horses with six shooters. As soon as I discovered there were options that went beyond the Western, I…

  • Dark New Trailer for Jessica Jones

    Dark New Trailer for Jessica Jones

    The new trailer for Marvel’s Jessica Jones is dark enough to give me goosebumps. Less than a month until it begins on Netflix. I will be watching. Will you?

  • Watch This: Trailer for Joy

    Watch This: Trailer for Joy

    Joy stars Jennifer Lawrence, with Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Edgar Ramirez, Isabella Rossellini, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen, Elisabeth Röhm and Dascha Polanco. We’ve seen the names Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro together in films before and it has meant Oscar nominations for Jennifer Lawrence when we do. This film is her…

  • Is the Badass Female Only the Female with a Gun?

    Is the Badass Female Only the Female with a Gun?

    I love the badass characters. I enjoy the badass female leads in Quantico and Blindspot, to name a couple of examples from this fall’s TV season. But I wish the badass qualities I love didn’t have to involve guns and violence. Is the standard audition practice these days to ask a woman to draw a…

  • Feminist Frequency: The Straw Feminist

    Feminist Frequency: The Straw Feminist

    This is an old video from Feminist Frequency, but I just discovered it. It talks about ‘the straw feminist,’ a character in media that is actually meant to demonize and confuse real feminism. It’s about 10 minutes long and worth the time. Here’s the description of the video: The Straw Feminist trope is a deliberately…

  • Review: Dear White People

    Review: Dear White People

    Dear White People is a film about 4 black students at a mythical Ivy League university that takes aim directly at white people with all their ignorance, bias, privilege and insensitivity. The film uses smart dialog, hilarious one-liners, and real people with real issues to deliver its message. Spoilers ahead.

  • Review: Hit & Miss

    Review: Hit & Miss

    I confess when I first heard about Hit & Miss, a British series about a transgender woman who works as a contract killer starring Chloë Sevigny, I thought it sounded awful. Really, every horrible idea you can imagine. A cis female playing transgender – and she’s a killer. And that title: too cutesy. But a…

  • Watch This: Trailer for Janis: Little Girl Blue

    Watch This: Trailer for Janis: Little Girl Blue

    Janis: Little Girl Blue is Janis Joplin’s story. The documentary, written and directed by Amy Berg, looks at the years of Joplin’s life when she took the world by storm as a rock and roll singer. The film includes archival footage of Joplin singing and laughing and talking. There are interviews with her friends and…