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Roderick

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More Alien than Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles? Or more fun than either?

 

Dang, I've been meaning to watch Jeanne Dielman forever now and would love a film club to push me over that little hill.

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It's actually probably a great starting point for a discussion of feminist film if your going in chronological order, and are super hardcore into film already. What about Hedwig and the Angry Inch? I know some people have issues with it, but it's one of my all time favorites and one of the reasons I consider myself a feminist today.

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Okay, so far we have:

 

  • Hedwig and the Angry Inch
  • Alien
  • Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
  • A Girl Walks Home At Night (horror)
  • Babadook (horror)
  • Gremlins 2
  • We Are the Best!
  • Wetlands

 

People interested in movie club, any other suggestions? We can start watching stuff next weekend once we get more suggestions. I've got a couple of my own I'd want to put on the list as well but I have to have a good think about it. 

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I've heard a lot about A girl walks home alone at night, its about a female vampire's adventures in Iran's underground. Its been praised pretty heavily and from what I understand deals with a number of social justice issues.

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People interested in movie club, any other suggestions?

 

Gremlins 2

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Oh yes! I've been meaning to watch A girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and its just gone up on Netflix US.

Also We Are The Best! is fantastic and adorable. The Babadook is supposed to be good and spooky, and was directed by a woman. I'll also go to bat for Wetlands, but that movie will absolutely not be everyone's cup of tea and I'd hate to have a group of internet acquaintances watch it on my recommendation without knowing whether or not it would make them nauseous or offended.

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Oh yeah if someone has seen some of these movies and can give the group obvious content warnings like sexual violence, etc, that would also be super appreciated. 

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Okay, so far we have:

 

  • Hedwig and the Angry Inch
  • More Alien than Jeanne Dielman
  • 23
  • Quai du Commerce
  • 1080 Bruxelles
  • A Girl Walks Home At Night (horror)
  • Babadook (horror)
  • Gremlins 2
  • We Are the Best!
  • Wetlands

 

People interested in movie club, any other suggestions? We can start watching stuff next weekend once we get more suggestions. I've got a couple of my own I'd want to put on the list as well but I have to have a good think about it. 

I think they meant both Alien and the movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. I had to look that up because I thought they meant three obscure movies like you instead of one absurdly long title. :)

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I watched Gremlins 2 when I was like 10 and it was Korean censored version (like, they would censor out the eye poking scene in Terminator 2) so... was there anything really gross about it?

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I think they meant both Alien and the movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. I had to look that up because I thought they meant three obscure movies like you instead of one absurdly long title. :)

 

Actually, I think Mangela meant films more like Alien than Jeane Dielman..., ie easier to watch so the whole thing doesn't die on its arse again, so the latter film shouldn't be on the list at all!

 

Gremlins has some mild horror and some fun gloopy gore, nothing the average 16 year old shouldn't be able to handle (I couldn't get through it at age 12 though). Gremlins 2 has basically no horror elements at all, and is basically a live-action Looney Tunes. The only thing to watch out for is the dark story that Phoebe Cates' character tells which is ambiguous enough to be a trigger warning for

her as a child either being flashed or something worse.

It's a really weird moment in an otherwise very light film. But I'm pretty sure these films were suggested as a joke, as they don't really have much to discuss re. feminism.

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Yeah, Gremlins 2 was a joke suggestion based on the fact that the last time we did this it just turned into Gremlins 2 talk. It's an oddly brilliant film, but it has nothing to do with feminism.

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Oh, okay. Well maybe if we need a free week or something, we can still watch it anyways. :P

 

But I think Aliens would be a great first week film, so let's go with that.

 

So, for discussion starting May 11th, please watch Aliens. If you have any relevant critical work that can go along with it, link it in the thread. 

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AlienS, not Alien, right?

...yes, Aliens. I ALWAYS forget that movie has an s on the end of it. 

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Of the two, I think Alien-no-S is a much more feminist film, to be honest, but Alien is also a straight-up horror film where Aliens is not.

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Yeah, but the first film is a horror film where the monster is essentially a rape analogy, and how each character embodies a rigid patriarchal archetype that's completely ill-equipped to handle the existential threat the alien presents. The gung-ho he-man is the first to die; the stern iron-man leader, the deferential woman, the paternal robot (an actual device created by the Powers That Be) that uses rape as a tool of control... all of them are inadequate. Like, I can imagine that it's not all entirely deliberate, but the idea was definitely to make a horror film that communicated the horror and trauma of rape. I also like that its heroine is a survivor - and what made her a survivor is not her being attacked by an alien. She's not defined by the attack, and Alien does a good job of saying that she has more to offer than surviving an alien.

 

Vasquez doesn't really make up for it - like, yeah, bad-ass lady soldier, but it doesn't go down into the bones the way it does in the first one. Vasquez exists because the world created in the first one needs Vasquez to exist.

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