Betsey and I watched "The International" last night. The movie spawned a couple of interesting conversations.
The first was about something we had both heard on NPR a little while ago, which is actually primarily about the ascendance of female characters in pop-franchises.
First, a little beef about the piece. In it, the author gives a pretty good description of the "conservative fantasy of romance". By pretty good, I mean, it would be easy to take the given description and derive a liberal fantasy of romance. The author also throws out the phrase "liberal fantasy of perfect justice". I'm a little lost here because I can't really derive, from the descriptions given in the editorial, what makes a fantasy of perfect justice liberal or conservative. I can think of many things that could differentiate liberal and conservative justice, including sentencing, but it seems the author would like to associate vigilantism with liberal, which irks me, because vigilantism may in fact be a "dark side of [...] righteousness", but I think it can affect both sides equally.
What the editorial was good for was reopening my eyes to the concept of perfect justice as a theme in media, and vigilantism as a method of achieving it. "The International" subscribes to this method, and Betsey and I had the opportunity to discuss our thoughts on the matter. Thanks pause button!
At the end of the movie, I also started thinking about another topic of interest to me: The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies. Maybe having a daughter has brought this back to the forefront of my mind, but I couldn't stop considering it at a particular point in the movie. I'd have to watch the movie again to be sure, but I think "The International" fails the test.
So, after instantly streaming the movie via Netflix, I decided to rate it. The movie was entertaining, and I could probably watch it again sometime, but the ending was less than satisfying since they left it wide open for a potential sequel, and I had these nagging thoughts about glorifying vigilantism and the Bechdel Test going through my head. "The International" received my first lower than 3 star rating - 2 stars (I didn't like it). Is that fair? I don't know. It was entertaining, I'd watch it again, some of my favorite movies have some of the same flaws, but the ending was so dissatisfying that I'm going to let that rating stick.
1 comment:
That Bechdel Test is interesting. I'm sad to say that the first X-Files movie fails utterly. The second one might pass, barely. I'd have to re-watch to see if, indeed, Scully and Agent Whitney talk about something other than Mulder, or Father Joe, or the unnamed (male) killer. They might have a brief conversation about one of the (female) victims.
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