The state-funded Swedish Film Institute supports the initiative, which is starting to catch on. Scandinavian cable TV channel Viasat Film says it will start using the ratings in its film reviews and has scheduled an A-rated “Super Sunday” on 17 November, when it will show only films that pass the test, such as The Hunger Games, The Iron Lady and Savages.
A movie passes the Bechdel test if it satisfies the following requirements:
It has to have at least two women in it,
who talk to each other,
about something besides a man.
Guess we won’t be seeing Gravity unless George Clooney is replaced by the ninja-gal from Pacific Rim. Unless you consider deep space a woman.
Gravity is so much better than The Hunger Games, Iron Lady, and Savages, for starters. I think it’s a good thing to consider in the aggregate, and as the article points out, pretty eye-opening, but a terrible way to decide what movie I would like to watch this afternoon.
I think WALL-E would fail this one too, at least technically.
I appreciate what they are trying to do, but it does mean that an awful lot of good movies that are NOT misogynistic (e.g., Saving Private Ryan, Deliverance) would get binned in with more deserving targets (Transformers). If there was a male-centric version of this, The Descent would fail.
This will work until they decide that men haven’t had enough of a presence. Then they’ll schedule “Balls to the Wall Weekend” that consists of nothing but Stallone, Seagal and Schwartzenegger films. It’s a pendulum…a pendulum fueled alternately by testosterone and estrogen.
If the balls are against the wall, they won’t make a very good pendulum.
Anyway, the point of the Bechdel test isn’t that it says anything about the quality of a movie, or that it means much when applied to any individual movie. The point is to look at the aggregate output of Hollywood and note what a small percentage of movies feature female characters that are self-defined, rather than an accessory to the male characters.
While the Bechdel Test is cool, I like the proposed Mako Mori Test.
The Mako Mori test is passed if the movie has: a) at least one female character; b) who gets her own narrative arc; c) that is not about supporting a man’s story. I think this is about as indicative of “feminism” (that is, minimally indicative, a pretty low bar) as the Bechdel test. It is a pretty basic test for the representation of women, as is the Bechdel test. It does not make a movie automatically feminist.
Infinitely complex and full of strange rules and laws that take men decades of studying through trial and error to even begin to comprehend? A vast calm strewn randomly with clusters of seething fury set to go off like a bomb at any moment, laying waste to all those nearby?
Sadly, only 28%. There were five other characters, only one of which was female (the shuttle captain). Besides her, there was the third astronaut on EVA, mission control, the guy on the ham radio, and the Russian space station captain (though I’m not sure where he was…I’m only getting that from the IMDB page).
Also discovered on IMDB, apparently the ham radio guy was not Chinese, as I thought from the sound of the language, but Inuit. There’s apparently a short showing his side of the conversation, which I would like to see.
