March 29 movie: The Great Escape. Fuck you, Rose McGowan.
Apparently you cohost "The Essentials" on TCM now (from Molly Haskell to Carrie Fisher to you -- a downward trajectory to be sure). And in introducing The Great Escape last night, you announced that the film is remarkable for being "a war movie that women enjoy too!" which you followed by tittering, "I don't want to be sexist, but!" Wow, you don't want to be sexist. Congratulations; not being sexist is a worthy goal. I don't want to be sexist either. Here's a tip: if you really don't want to be sexist, don't say sexist bullshit on national television.
I watch a lot of movies. Probably more than you do, considering the inanity of your segment last night. And I am sick to the teeth, fed up beyond belief, with being told that my gender dictates my taste in movies. That I should prefer the ones featuring true love, best girlfriends and kittens. That I'm supposed to love Steel Magnolias and be bored by Sahara. Where did this idea come from, that stories about universal values and struggles are the sole property of men? In your world do women not possess or care about courage and ingenuity? Do you enjoy living in a world where half the human experience is assumed to be beyond you? I wouldn't enjoy that world at all, and I refuse to live in it.
So fuck you, Rose McGowan, and fuck everyone who thinks that being female means I'm not supposed to like war movies. My boobies and I like them just fine, thank you very much, and we think The Great Escape is a particularly good one. Now that I've got that off my .. ah .. chest, I think I'll watch a movie. One with nary a kitten or a best girlfriend to be found.
4 Comments
You tell it!
Now me, I'm a macho, macho man with nerves of steel. I hardly cringed at all when I was getting a nasty hangnail on my right big toe cut last week. Really! And the last movie I watched -- or semi-watched, while running around the house procrastinating on several projects -- was Flower Drum Song. I stopped running around and sang along with "I Enjoy Being a Girl," and I also stopped several times and sort of smacked myself on the forehead, saying "So that's what that song is that's been going through my head since the mid-60s!"
Dang, come to think of it, I haven't ever seen The Great Escape. Some day, for sure.
Okay, ranting about gender stereotypes and movies aside, I loved Flower Drum Song. The one that always sticks in my head is "A hundred million miracles!"
You have got to see The Great Escape. It's so good!
I once checked out the Three Stooges at VisArt and the clerk was like "What?! A woman who likes the Three Stooges?!" I love my share of lesbians with hardships and period dramas (with emphasis on the "period") but war movies and bloody murder rate up there too.
This whole gender-dictated-movie preferences thing reminded me of something I just read in the Onion about "Urbane Tomboys" --
Onion: http://www.avclub.com/content/node/76215
Original article: http://www.observer.com/2008/urbane-tomboys?page=0%2C0
that's exactly what I'm talking about! "You have lady bits, how can you possibly like this thing that I like?" That "urbane tomboy" thing is hilarious.