Holy shit, Chad Stahelski worked second unit for this. No wonder I liked the action so much.
I haven’t seen any theater write out the whole title anyway.
How long until we have the first movie that patches and renames itself in the same release?
LOL they tried that with Edge of Tomorrow for digital release, changing it to Live. Die. Repeat. Apparently lots of people chalk the poor box office performance of Shawshank Redemption to its name as well.
It was certainly a big improvement over its original title, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Andy Dufresne)”.
I don’t understand what feminism has to do with fighting in tight pants, that’s not my brand of feminism and to me grasping. Reproductive rights, maternity leave, not having to cover one’s face, not being treated like property, being able to own property, being able to vote, equal pay, not being a constant victim of drunken assholes (thus the temperance movement)… that’s feminism. Anyone who hails abnormally beautiful hollywood starlets fighting as feminism has a completely different view than me. But the movie is good or not. I’ll probably wait until it hits streaming, I hated the tone of Suicide Squad.
I assume it is the “Harley breaks away from Joker and becomes her own woman” is the narrative they are looking for.
They keep saying it’s somehow a movie geared towards a women audience, but I believe the tilt is actually with more men seeing it. I have no idea why they think that movie is feminism power either. I have heard though that Harley is fairly popular with young girls, or at least young girls who also like comics I guess.
Evidence indicates she’s also very popular with porn stars.
Most of these things don’t apply to movies; you’re generally not going to have Wonder Woman pointing out that she only earns 70% of what Superman makes.
But for female representation in media, you have other issues: women being allowed to be attractive without becoming eye-candy; avoiding the male gaze; the Bechdel Test; not pitting women against each other for male attention; men seeing other men as allies but women seeing other women as rivals; having abuse or assault not filmed gratuitously. There are so many problems with how women are portrayed in media without even touching on social issues.
Birds of Prey has a totally different creative team from Suicide Squad. Female writer, female director, and Margot Robbie is a producer for this one. And the tone is completely different.
Yeah it seems to have a very “Girl power!” vibe to it, and I guess something about a hair tie is getting big props.
I know a lot of girls that have seen it, and they all seem to adore it.
Harley is such an impossibly problematic character in the youth market. She’s popular, so DC features her in all their tween-marketed stuff like DC Super Hero girls, but her backstory and “adult” incarnations are inextricably tied to abuse and toxic relationships. There’s kind of no version of Harley Quinn that’s really appropriate for those readers. Best case scenario is it’s alienating, worst case is it’s teaching that those things are desirable.
This also kind of happened before with a generation that came to Starfire from the Teen Titans where she’s just sort of heroic and ditzy and charming, and they aged into the mainline comics where she’s just 100% sexualized.
I’d say a lot of comic book characters have… similar problems. If it’s the tweens they were after though… probably not make a rated R movie.
It’s entirely possible that the movie was made to address these specific issues.
Yeah, the movie is pretty much all about Harley moving past her toxic relationship, coming into her own, feeding abusive men to giant cats, partnering up with a bunch of badass ladies, and kicking the asses of a bunch of sexist goons.
The female-lead creative team, on-the-nose awareness and embracing of its semi-performative “wokeness,” and most of the pre-release marketing efforts on the parts of cast/production crew all kinda enable and emphasize these points.
It’s not, you know, a 200 page Critical Feminist Theory thesis or anything, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a movie about tearing down the male gaze, male oppression, and male power through bonds of strong, non-sexualized female friendship.
You can’t divorce it from all the baggage the character carries, and obviously, all that stuff is bubbling under the surface of a hyper-violent dark comedy filled with Deadpoolish one-liners and flippancy, but all things considered, it’s doing some real work on a AAA budget in ways that even, say, Wonder Woman didn’t try to approach it. It’s a bold shot, and I’m pretty saddened that it’s performing poorly. GF and I are probably gonna try to catch it this week.
There is nothing appealing about this movie to me, but hey I’ll be seeing Wonder Woman 2 as soon as it is out. Since it’s tilting male, apparently they… missed something. But it sure seems like a lot of guys think the women should love it based on the reviews and the discussions about the box office performance.
I mean, I’m primarily going off female reviewers (e.g. here and here) and the PR stuff from the cast and director/writer on it (e.g., Robbie’s delve into research to on destructive relationships and mental disorders). Which, admittedly, I did an unusual amount of reading on yesterday cuz a buddy of mine was sure it was definitely super misogynistic, which felt wrong to me since a bunch of incel sites and subreddits are protesting the movie, so I assumed it had to be doing something right to piss those dudes off.
It may have totally missed the mark or sailed by/bothered its intended audience, but at least in terms of what the director, writer, and Robbie herself were shooting for, it was definitely “fun and action packed female empowerment over the patriarchy.”
But for what it’s worth, I’m more excited about Wonder Woman. I’m a total sucker for 80s nostalgia shit.
I’m not sure how it’s “tilting male”, but that could be caused by a million other factors besides the creators of the movie “missing something” about female empowerment. And it’s not like the guys recommending it are operating in a vacuum, especially based on tweets like this:
https://twitter.com/kateleth/status/1225884914278531072?s=20
https://twitter.com/kateleth/status/1225886540737331200?s=20
Heh, yeah – thanks for elaborating better than I think I am managing. I was gonna link to a friend of mine, Metricula, who runs a discord named “Social Justice Bards” losing her mind over how good BoP was, but even though she’s basically a public figure through her streaming/performances, it felt weird doing so. Love that comic, though :)
Aka, more men are seeing it than women, as in percentage of audience.