Tag: movies

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The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies (SPOILERS)

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Warning: spoilers present in post and welcome in comments!

I understand critical response is muted/mixed, but I found it an emotionally satisfying end to the trilogy of films in a “the films are what they are” kind of way. Dwarves are silly. Physics is entirely optional, as are military tactics. Bilbo/Thorin is not very subtextual.

SADNESS: NO GOLLUM, PRECIOUS.

Wondered about/worried at!

  • The Battle of Five Armies is a skirmish of five armies. There’s no encampments, no supply lines, no reinforcements, no expectation that the battle might last more than an hour or two. Dain marched his people from the Iron Hills for this? (My fellow movie viewers noted to me that Thranduil is expecting to win bloodlessly by overwhelming display of force, but, confidential to Thranduil, you’re laying a siege. Bring some food and tents and maybe siege engines.) The Paintball of Five Armies.
  • Only the Orcs get some credit for tactics/preparedness. They have a command centre with good lines of sight, agreed signalling, and a general who doesn’t lead from the front. (Heroic to lead from the front, yes, sensible, no.)
  • Everyone else in is the tactics doghouse. I’m giving the Men of Laketown a pass: they lack tactics and preparedness because they are a desperate, starving, group of refugees. OK. The Wood Elves, on the other hand, have no such excuse.
  • How are there so many Wood Elves, anyway? Is this not the dawn of the Age of Men? I realise they’re mostly Silvan elves, but still, there are thousands and thousands of them and they’re highly disciplined warriors. Why are they not taking over the world? The Age of Elves, we could make this happen.
  • The Orc-ish forces are hugely overpowered compared to The Lord of the Rings movies: the earth-eating worms and the monsters that can head-butt their way into fortresses really seem like they should have been useful at Helm’s Deep (in The Two Towers). Saruman seems like the type who would have used them too. (And why did he bother breeding a more battle-hardy breed of Orc anyway? The Angmar version seem pretty decent.)
  • The Orcs start to lose some credit with the Thorin-Fili-Kili death sequence though. Why were the Orcs trying to trap Thorin (or, I guess, Dain, who seems as Gandalf says, more hot-headed) into single combat with their general, exactly? Of what possible tactical use could it be? Surely such a well-organised outfit has good enough intelligence to know that Thorin is on decidedly shaky ground as the King Under the Mountain (remember how he was under siege by another army?) and morale may not suffer as expected when you kill him?
  • In book canon, I believe the attack on Dol Guldur has Sauron merely pretend to fall before the White Council, as he is in fact ready to re-occupy Mordor but doesn’t want it to immediately be attacked. That would make more sense here too, but if so, we don’t see it. And Galadriel is evidently grievously wounded, but… this has no implications for anything in the future whatsoever?

One thing did sting my heart a bit: Bilbo seems to be setting off either before Thorin’s funeral, or just after it and before his wake. This seems to be a reversion to his self at the beginning of the trilogy. By this stage, it would be nice if Bilbo knew how to party or was willing to try. At least at highly personally and culturally significant moments like that one. (If nothing else, The Lord of the Rings kicks off with Bilbo throwing the party to end all parties, he has to have acquired the taste for it somewhere.)

There’s also a lot of loose-ish threads. Movie!Legolas is, it seems, off to play the role of Elrond’s sons Elladan and Elrohir (who do actually also exist in the movie canon, but not to any great effect): essentially Elvish Dunedain, and likewise motivated by an Orc-ish injury to their mother. Movie!Legolas, it seems, doesn’t even have a resolution to his mother’s story. All the more reason to go Orc-hunting! But how is that going to work out for him? If I recall the Council of Elrond in the movies right, Legolas and Aragorn don’t behave like comrades-in-arms who have seen each other recently.

Meanwhile, Tauriel is last seen grieving Kili with her status as an exile unresolved, likewise Legolas’s unreturned feelings for her.

Am I right in thinking that in this cut, the Arkenstone vanished into Bard’s coat never to be seen again? If there’s one thing that stands out to me from the book, it’s Thorin’s burial with it on his chest.

And above it all, movie!Angmar is by no means defeated. Is Jackson setting up a third trilogy without a book source (other than the Appendices) to cover the time between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings? Or is that all video game canon?

I feel like the extended edition is going to be called on to do a lot of world-building work here that the cinematic edition sacrificed for pacing. Honestly, I think a lot of this will still be loose: there just won’t be screen time in that cut either, assuming that even the original scripts answered my questions.

Ahem. So… what did you think?

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If it’s really good, men made it

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

I feel odd blogging about a movie I haven’t seen, I want to get that out of the way. But a lot of women I trust are telling me that the movie The Social Network (a dramatisation of the founding of Facebook, script by Aaron Sorkin and direction by David Fincher) is infuriatingly sexist. Men made Facebook entirely, apparently, and women granted them sexual favours for it. As is the natural order! (See the Melissa Silverstein and Laurie Penny links in our last spam for this.)

(If you want to discuss The Social Network in particular, rather than the rest of this post, which is about geek women’s invisibility in general, I’ve set up a discussion thread for the movie.)

The erasure of women geeks from geek history is going to continue and snowball, most likely, because here are some of the factors that play into it:

  1. what geeks do is hard! you can tell, because women don’t do it!
  2. you might have heard geeks are not that high up the masculine status chart! you are wrong! because there’s no women doing it and that makes it Man Stuff! which is hard, see 1! (also wot Restructure! said)
  3. s things become important in retrospect, they become men’s work.

On that last point, there was a related discussion in Australia last year about the recent history of rock music. Triple J, a youth music radio station which is part of the government funded ABC network, ran a “Hottest 100 of All Time” poll for songs its listeners like best. Triple J’s airplay is generally “alternative” and in the late 1990s (when I listened most) featured women artists such as PJ Harvey, Courtney Love of Hole, Shirley Manson of Garbage, Liz Phair and Veruca Salt.

There was some leadup criticism about the voting website:

Divided into decades, starting with the 1960s, each page shows between 9 and 15 album covers, with an accompanying note about musicians or bands that influenced the direction of rock and pop. The section on the 60s mentions the Supremes as one of the groups on the Stax/Motown label, and Janis Joplin as appearing at the Monterey Pop Festival. Then the 2000s section mentions the White Stripes. NO other female artists or groups that include women are mentioned.

And although the website was merely a memory jogger and did not restrict listener voting, it turned out it was a harbringer of what the listeners voted for. The top 100 songs contained two female vocalists, both appearing in one-offs as vocalists with Massive Attack (with songwriting credits). There were also five bands with female members. This became a big deal: Triple J was quick to defend itself by noting that it was a listener poll. One of the most interesting pieces of commentary went to air on Triple J’s own coverage, from Catherine Strong, whose PhD research was into changing memories of music (thanks to Lauredhel for this transcript):

Catherine Strong: “What happened with grunge – it’s very interesting, that in the early 1990s, grunge was seen as being a very female-friendly type of music. There were lots of women involved in the grunge. So you had bands like Hole, and L7, and Babes in Toyland. There was also the associated riot grrl movement that was happening at the same time, so bands like Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy. At the time, these bands were quite successful: commercially successful, and they were critically acclaimed, they were talked about as being fantastic. There was a lot of celebration in the press of “Women in Rock”, “Isn’t it fantastic to see women in rock?” But then if you look at the media coverage over time, when people talk about grunge over time, the women don’t get talked about anymore. So on the tenth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death for instance, there were lots of magazines that came out talking about “Let’s look back at grunge”, “what was important about grunge”, “why was grunge such a great thing?”, and the women are hardly mentioned at all. So again you can see the public record leaves the women out – they just disappear, they fall out over time, as people write about it, and think about it looking back.

And the thing in rock that I think is particularly interesting, is that periodically, women are rediscovered. So every five years or so you’ll find that there’s something that will turn up in the media saying “Hey, it’s great! Women are making inroads into rock for the first time!”, when it’s not the first time. So every time those stories come up, I think we as a society, or people who like rock, feel as though progress is being made; but what’s actually happened is we’re just going round and round in circles. Women are being discovered, then they’re being forgotten, then they’re being discovered again, and they’re being forgotten again, and it’s just going round and round like that.”

And here it is, happening with geek history. To avoid one obvious strawman: no, I am not claiming that there was a woman who was more important to the story of Facebook than Mark Zuckerberg! I’m claiming that the movie is part of this pattern in geek history:

  1. when we look back on geek history, things women worked on, and women who were involved in men’s projects will slowly vanish from the story as part of a pattern of making what geeks do important and hard and real
  2. there will continue to be active resistance to women being visible as geeks because the presence of women takes away status points in the masculinity hierarchy and/or that geekdom is a men’s space for men who don’t want to be around women (I keep meaning to find the explicit comments I’ve seen on LWN to this effect, if the lazyweb helps I won’t object)
  3. perhaps most worryingly of all, every few years there will be a brief spotlight on women geeks, everyone will conclude “hooray they’re/we’re here, we’ve been seen, this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning of the battle, thank goodness for that” and then a few years later we’ll do it all again (see an example of “but women geeks are new” here).

What do you think? How many rounds of the geek women visibility battle have you been present for? (I’ve been around for at least two major ones, I think.)

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Geekspiration of the fictional kind

This article originally appeared on Geek Feminism.

Here’s an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers (questions still being taken):

Reading Rudy Simone’s Aspergirls prompted me to crystallise this question: where are the female role models for young geek women?

I’m thinking of characters who have genius-level IQs, coupled with a lack of social skills and, for whatever reason, an absence of Significant Other. There are plenty of characters like this: Sherlock Holmes, Rodney McKay, Greg House, Spock … but where are the women?

Where are the isolated geniuses who are married to their work? Where are the women whose ‘problem personalities’ are forgiven because of their talents / gifts / abilities / focus? Where are the women who are single and don’t give a damn because they have better things to do?

I’m probably missing some obvious examples: I’m not a big media consumer. Remind me, enlighten me! TV, movies, comics, novels all welcome.

A few possibilities, from a fellow consumer of not very much media:

  • Dr Susan Calvin, in various short stories by Isaac Asimov. She’s the leading research roboticist on fictional near-future Earth, and a key employee of US Robots.

    Unfortunately Calvin is one of those fictional characters who is a little better than her writer: Asimov lumps her with some unfortunate embarrassing romantic and maternal feelings occasionally, and the song and dance other characters make about their immense forbearance in forgiving her ‘problem personality’ gets a bit wearing. But nevertheless she’s a key fictional influence on the development of robotics, and the main character in any number of the stories.

    The character Dr Susan Calvin that appears in the 2004 film I, Robot is young, movie-pretty, sarcastic and really resembles Asimov’s character very little, but I quite like her also and still think she’s a fictional geek role model if you accept that she’s very loosely based on the Asimov character: she’s abrupt, literal-minded, a high ranking research scientist and, something I really liked, she’s not shown as having any sexual or romantic interest in the lead character at all. (Shame she isn’t the lead character.)

  • Dr Temperance ‘Bones’ Brennan in the Bones television series; if, crucially, you can ignore or don’t mind (or like!) the multi-season plot arc about her mutual attraction with Seeley Booth.

    Bones is a forensic anthropologist prone to social mistakes or at least idiosyncrasies, but key to criminal investigations due to her unparalleled anthropological skills. The writers apparently think of her as having Aspergers, but haven’t said it in the script because you can’t have Aspergers on Fox, or something like that.

    I’m actually not an enormous fan of this show for reasons that are irrelevant to this entry, so I’ll point you to Karen Healey’s guide, since she is an enormous fan and that’s only fair if you want to try it and see.

Who would you recommend?