Wonder Woman (2017)

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CosmicMonkey
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Wonder Woman (2017)

Post by CosmicMonkey »

Me: Do you want watch Dunkirk with me sometime next week?

Friend: I'm getting sick of war films but it is Nolan so I'm curious.

Me: And like honestly, I don't feel like you can really go wrong with a Nolan film.

Friend: Well he's not God. but they're always pretty good.

Me: You should be careful who you say that around, though. even implying that Nolan isn't some sort of Omnipotent supernatural being is enough to get you jumped in some circles.

Friend: I dunno, he got a lot of flack for Interstellar

Me: Yeah, but it's also like #35 in the IMDb top 250.

Friend: True. As long as no one in the film explains the theme in one line I'll be happy.

Me: Haha, I literally just finished watching Wonder Woman and that's exactly what happens in the last scene of the film.

Friend: What's the line?

Me: I don't remember the exact wording but basically it's along the lines of "Humans can be really terrible, but also wonderful and because of that they deserve love." ... It's definitely not the most thematically complex superhero movie I've ever seen.

Friend: Haha. Any good, though?

Me: Not gonna lie though, no exaggeration, there were tears of joy streaming down my face seeing so many amazing , strong, bad-ass women on screen. It was something I didn't know I needed to see until I actually saw it. And I'm not even a woman.

Friend: Nice.

Me: I can't even imagine how affirming it would be for an actual woman to see... So that's definitely the strong point of the film. Probably worth watching for that, but the rest is meh.

Friend: Fair enough.

Me: Also there's some really bad CG at times, especially considering that the film had a $200 Million dollar Budget. Plus, the first 15 minutes were full of obvious expo drops, all the major plot points were predictable, while the villain's motivations were very clear, his evil master-plot didn't really make any sense and there was a romance subplot that was either completely unnecessary or totally underdeveloped I can't decide which.... So yeah, Meh.

Friend: Ah, well.

paulofilmo
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Re: Wonder Woman (2017)

Post by paulofilmo »

honestly, american flyers gave me similar affirmation as a man. seeing those brave men ride so hard, beating the hench russians, guided by the spirit of kevin costner's ailing moustache. and the woman who bares her breasts for the riders.

it's very moving

CosmicMonkey
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Re: Wonder Woman (2017)

Post by CosmicMonkey »

I can't tell whether you're being facetious or not, but I think that's that kind of the point. Male Power Fantasies aren't anything new in cinema, and one can point literally dozens of examples of films with multiple strong powerful men on screen. 300, Braveheart, The Expendables, pretty much any Marvel film or 80s action film. Whereas the opposite just doesn't exist with women. If there are strong bad-ass women there's only ever one(e.g. Furiosa), standing alone in a group of men(e.g Black Widow), or facing of alone against an adversary (e.g. Ripley, the Bride). Never multiple, never together, and never standing together in solidarity. Or even if there are more than one, strong women are almost always fetishized and sexualized and seen and portrayed through the Straight Male Gaze (eg. Sucker Punch, Buffy, Suicide Squad, literally hundreds of others). Wonder Woman is the first film I've seen that's actually portrayed women (plural) on an equal footing to how men are portrayed in action films as non-sexualized, strong, confident and utterly capable bad-asses and the fact that's it's taken over 100 years of cinema to get this point is actually really important.

P.S. I realize that Wonder Woman may not the very first film to the this sort of thing, but it's the first I've seen, and it still remains that this sort of portrayal of women is still very rare, whereas the equivalent for men is not common-place but expected of.

paulofilmo
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Re: Wonder Woman (2017)

Post by paulofilmo »

oh, aye. docus about the YPJ are similarly bristling for me. (tho sort of sad to need fatigues with pink hello kitty socks to unbenumb the poignancy of war)




and yet

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