Gird Your Overrated Loins — Vanessa Tottle, Creative Director

by Vanessa Tottle

How do you introduce a writer? Gabe wants us all to write something about ourselves, and I told him that was stupid. You get to know your writers by what they write, not by who they’ve been. I don’t choose any book by its author description. I wouldn’t choose a critic by her bio. If you’ve been following here, you know I’m getting my PhD in vertebrate paleontology with a special focus in geochemistry. What does that tell you about my ability to review movies, aside from I’m really annoying to watch Jurassic Park with?

I put a lot of myself into what I write. I think we all do. It’s what this site demands. It’s the one thing that sets us apart from every other film site I have read. We want criticism based on empathy, not judgment. And empathy is not always the easiest thing for me.

I can’t empathize with bullies because I lived in fear for my life in my own house. I can’t empathize with the poor because I never wanted for anything material. I can’t empathize with the wealthy because my family treated us like boxes on an estate checklist, things to forget when not presenting us glimmering at parties between the art and name-dropping the private chef. I can’t empathize with the strong because of their power and I can’t empathize with the weak because they’re so powerless. I’m 25, the child left alive because the one lesson I learned early in life is to remain.

I’m a funny person to take over as creative director, yet I wasn’t asked. I created the job until it was there for me to take. That’s how I know the world. I’m not often a nice person. I try very hard to be, but there’s an inescapable foundation built inside of me – I will always value hardness and isolation as my greatest strengths.

Why do I write about feminism? Because I want it to be OK to be full of edges, to have “unwomanly” traits, to possess instead of need, to be a woman who can be cold and arrogant and difficult like a man because – who cares why? Because I have the right to be.

As I’ve gotten to know the writers here, there appears to be a common thread. We are people who have each bounced off the world in our own way. We keep on coming back because we don’t look at this as a fault in ourselves. We look at this as a fault in the world.

One of the things I take the most pride in is my Portuguese heritage, even though I was exposed to none of it as a child. Perhaps because I was exposed to none of it as a child. I cosplay because it allows me to live out the only cultural heritage I really do know – video games, movies, books. I don’t do cosplay as often as I used to because I’ve found other outlets – climbing, krav maga, belly dancing – but that media heritage was the only resource I had from which to draw strength, and I needed strength because the one lesson I learned early in life is to remain.

I’ve been accused of having an agenda because I write about women on film and I want to see MORE women on film, but what’s an agenda? I’m the only one in class who can turn new cladistics in my head faster than the computer models them, but I’m still asked out by the professor. I can be the best Aerith at the con and my dedication and artistry gets me groped that much faster. I can detour up a V, 5.8 and the most strenuous task is informing male climbers, “No, I don’t need any help,” as I pass them. I don’t go to krav maga to be asked out on dates but because I want to learn, and I don’t belly dance for you to stuff a dollar bill in my clothes.

If I’m to write something about myself, it is this: I was raised in a physically abusive family, from which I was thankfully taken away by a kinder relative. My brother was not removed, in part because he had learned to dole out abuse. Taking him would have put me at risk again. He did not get the psychiatric assistance he needed and he later killed himself. The few things I do in life to cope with this, to try to be human, to do anything other than just remain, are often treated by others as opportunities to sleep with me. Yet by saying no and slapping hands away and informing deans, I’m the one who’s rude. I’m the one “with an agenda.”

Saying there’s a problem with representation in film, or video games, or music, isn’t having an agenda. It’s loving something enough to be honest about it. It’s looking at the things that made me strong and saying, “I can return the favor. I can make them stronger.” Having high expectations of art isn’t hating something. It’s not a fault in me, or Anita Sarkeesian, or Laurie Penny. It’s giving back to the art that shaped us, that gave each of us strength to remain in big, dramatic ways and small, everyday ways.

I’ll repeat that: It’s not an agenda. It’s giving back.

It’s also doing our jobs. For those who can’t handle a few women doing their jobs and having an opinion, then gird your overrated loins because the world’s changing, and I’m just one of many more women looking forward to doing her job.

I created this position – creative director – not to have an agenda, but because this is one of the few places where I feel free of needing one; not because I’m very good at empathy, but because the writers I work with here have no limit of it; not because I always believe the world can be changed, but because these five people relentlessly do:

Staff Writer S.L. Fevre
Editor Eden O’Nuallain
Staff Writer Cleopatra Parnell
Research Lead Amanda Smith
Lead Writer Gabriel Valdez

(And because they’re all hopeless at organizing themselves.)

Thank you and enjoy,

Vanessa Tottle
Creative Director

Gabe here: As Creative Director, Vanessa Tottle will be shaping the regular features and overall direction of this site. She will also write Silent All These Years – a feature about women in film – every other Thursday, as well as contribute standalone articles about movies and music videos. In addition to collaborative articles, she has previously written the following on this site.

Silent All These Years – Why Scarlett Johansson Needs to Play Hannibal Lecter

E3 Reactions – Vanessa Tottle’s Top 3

Their Desperate Arsenal: Isla Vista and the War at Hand

Ranking Every Superhero Movie Since 2000

Wednesday Collective – All About Games

Happy Birthday, Kristen Stewart, But You Still Can’t Work Here

Bits & Pieces – Production Design, Curse of the Golden Flower

A More Bechdel Blog — How and Why We’re Doing It

One of my most recent friends is a woman in her early 20s, whose hair hangs over one side of her face because of a scar that runs from the corner of her mouth halfway to her ear. We avoided the topic when we first met, but you could recognize two people under there.

We’ve since discussed that scar, the result of an angry ex-boyfriend who hooked a knife behind her cheek and pulled. His reasoning, as best she came to terms with it, is that if he couldn’t have her, he’d ruin her so no one else would ever want to. Every man from then on would know he’d taken a piece of her that day, had left a territorial marker.

Even after they’d broken up, her future was his to decide. Easy as that. A hand on the head, a knife in the mouth, a flex of the elbow.

She knows her hair doesn’t hide the scar, but it at least communicates to people that she doesn’t want it to be a focal point. Uncover it and we stare, cover it back up and we get the message.

Uncover it, though, and everything’s tilted. Every smile and frown and word only takes place on the side of her face she’s habituated to using. The other side stays still, frozen, trained over the years never to draw attention to itself.

In that way, he did claim a part of her that day. It’s a terrifying idea, to go through life with whole sections of your body and psyche taken away.

When I asked her if I could write this, she asked me why.

Because one of my friends last month wrote that she was given a temporary set of densures, to replace the teeth broken out of her mouth. She said she wept when she looked in the mirror and saw herself with teeth again.

Both these women are strong. Both these women are intelligent. Both these women are extraordinarily kind, despite what’s happened to them. They aren’t victims, they’re damn role models.

I can fill pages with the stories I haven’t asked permission for yet, but they’re not mine to tell. They speak of women who live daily with the evidence that men left a mark they thought they had the right to make.

The truth is, as a man, it’s difficult to figure out the right way to speak out. We’re not brought up – no one’s brought up – to view domestic violence as a regular part of our cultural heritage. It’s the exception. Even those who suffer it view it as an exception. It’s not to be talked about because it’s not normal: that’s the myth.

Several days before my friend had her teeth kicked in, jaw broken, hands stabbed, in addition to dozens of other injuries she sustained, I wrote down this phrase: “Be angry. But don’t just be angry.”

I have no idea what prompted me to write that down or what it pertained to in my head. But now it seems to hold special significance to me, as if the universe just knew I’d need that phrase a few days later. Because I am angry, and I’ve been livid since that day. But I’ve been angry before, and I know it’s greedy and self-serving. It’s a way for me to deal with feeling like I wasn’t there to protect someone I care about. It’s not a way to support and help.

I’m glad we have a voice here. At the beginning of the year, this site might have reached a few dozen people. Now, it reaches thousands. In the big scheme of things, we’re still a very modest blog, but I don’t want to have the biggest film site. I want to have the biggest film site that does things right, that has a social conscience, and that looks at its job as primarily one of creating art, not of tearing it down.

We can’t change something systemic just by being angry. We have to embody the change we want to see, and hope our own example changes the example others set.

With that in mind, we are making some changes to the site.

The Creative Director

First and foremost, Vanessa Tottle will be our first Creative Director. She’s essentially been moving toward that position for several weeks already while we’ve tested new features. I have final edit, but the idea is that Vanessa will control the direction of the content itself. We’ll still be movie-focused, but articles will be more varied, and features more regular. She’s still getting her PhD and travels abroad regularly, but we’re all so terrified of incurring her wrath, I’m confident we’ll stay on task when she’s away.

We don’t intend to change the pre-existing flavor of anything we do, but we do want to add detail and better realize opportunities for talking about issues like domestic and sexual violence, more open communication, and feminism as a whole. These have a role in art and the media that are drastically underplayed at the moment. If we’re not critics of that, what are we critics of?

We now have a rotating, very-part time staff of six writers including Vanessa and myself who volunteer their time and effort. They are writers S.L. Fevre, Cleopatra Parnell, editor Eden O’Nuallain, and researcher Amanda Smith. This is in addition to more than 20 writers from whom we’ve featured exclusive content. More on our wonderful, newish staff in a later article, because I want to move onto the biggest format change:

More Bechdel

From now on, every new review posted on this site will have a critique based on the Bechdel Test added at the end. The Bechdel Test rates three simple fundamentals of a movie.

1. It has to have at least two women in it.

2. They have to talk to each other.

3. And that discussion has to be about something other than a man.

Those are fairly basic standards, and some films that pass the Bechdel Test still don’t present women in a good light. Sucker Punch, for instance. Similarly, some films that fail every step of the Bechdel Test feature superb female heroes. Just look at Gravity. The Bechdel Test is not an absolute; it is a tool of measure…so it won’t just be a straight yes/no to each of these questions. We’ll get into why and how each film does what it does.

We realize most people won’t make their viewing decisions based on the Bechdel Test, I often address the portrayal of women in my reviews without it, and there are already good resources for finding out if movies pass the test. It is our hope that visibly including the Bechdel Test at the end of every new review will serve as a reminder for how much work Hollywood still has to do. We also encounter that many still think of the Bechdel Test as a distasteful topic, as if somehow film is too much a creative act to be subject to reasonable social representation. We hope its inclusion will help to normalize the idea in people’s heads – not as some abstract talking point but rather as a useful and informative tool in how we assess film.

We won’t make a big deal of it after this – we don’t want to risk turning it into a gimmick. The review itself will still be the review. It’ll just have additional information for readers to consider.

Realizing Opportunities for Change

We are also taking smaller steps, but hopefully these are no less impactful. For example:

When discussing music videos, we typically link the video and list its title, artist, and director. We’ve been frustrated that when choosing our top videos of the year, half-year, or month, most are directed by men.

This doesn’t mean they do a better job – our top video of 2013, Arcade Fire’s “Afterlife,” was directed by the phenomenally talented Emily Kai Bock, who notched three music videos on the countdown. Our top video for the first half of 2014, Sia’s “Chandelier” was co-directed (with Daniel Askill) by Sia herself.

Rather, it means that the industry – like filmmaking – is dominated by male directors. Vanessa and I made separate comments that inspired Amanda toward a bit of research. Lo and behold, she found that while the music videos we’ve sifted through (we watched more than 70 for August alone) are nearly all directed by men, the majority of producers are women.

For that reason, when we list a music video now, we will not only list the director, but also the producers. It makes sense – producers have the most important role after the artist and director. Most readers aren’t interested in who produces a music video – we realize that – but we hope highlighting the number of women involved in producing will help readers recognize the power and creativity women can and do wield in filmmaking of all kinds.

We were disappointed when we realized 90% of music video directors are men. We were overjoyed to find that about 60% of music video producers are women. While we realize there’s still a problem to be addressed in that disparity, we hope that readers, viewers, aspiring artists – men and women alike – will also notice that and feel that same joy. Perhaps, it will persuade someone down the road to buck the trend and hire a woman to direct.

This site’s been about melding criticism with social consciousness from Day One. These are the sorts of changes that don’t refocus what we do, but that let us better realize our goal of delivering a new brand of criticism, one that still tells you the basic “is this movie good or not,” but also seeks to make artistic and social statements of its own.

If there’s anything you notice we can do differently, or better, tell us. Thank you for reading.

The women in the photos throughout this article are directors who have each shown why we’d have a better entertainment industry if women had equal opportunity to direct. In order, they are: Ida Lupino, Nora Ephron, Julie Taymor, and Kathryn Bigelow.

Ranking Every Superhero Movie Since 2000

by Vanessa Tottle

I want to rank every live-action superhero movie made since 2000 through this year. The movie has to have had a theatrical release to qualify. It’s an ambitious goal, so I broke things down into categories to make it easier.

Films Based Around a Male Superhero
51. Jonah Hex
50. Zoom
49. The Crow: Wicked Prayer
48. Son of the Mask
47. Thor: The Dark World
46. Green Lantern
45. Man-Thing
44. The Green Hornet
43. The Incredible Hulk
42. Superman Returns
41. The Crow: Salvation
40. The Spirit
39. Ghost Rider
38. Kick-Ass 2
37. Daredevil
36. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
35. Iron Man 2
34. R.I.P.D.
33. Super
32. Spider-Man 3
31. Punisher: War Zone
30. The Legend of Zorro
29. Ghost Rider: The Spirit of Vengeance
28. The Punisher
27. Iron Man 3
26. Blade: Trinity
25. Wanted
24. Iron Man
23. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
22. Captain America: The First Avenger
21 .The Amazing Spider-Man
20. Kick-Ass
19. Jumper
18. Spider-Man
17. The Dark Knight
16. Blade 2
15. Spider-Man 2
14. The Wolverine
13. Thor
12. Man of Steel
11. Hulk
10. Hancock
9. Hellboy 2: The Golden Army
8. Batman Begins
7. Hellboy
6. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
5. V for Vendetta
4. Constantine
3. Dredd
2. Unbreakable
1. The Dark Knight Rises

Ensembles Dominated by Male Superheroes
12. Fantastic Four
11. X-Men: The Last Stand
10. Sky High
9. Push
8. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
7. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
6. X-Men
5. X-Men: First Class
4. The Avengers
3. Chronicle
2. X2: X-Men United
1. Watchmen

Ensembles Dominated by Female Superheroes
no entries yet

Films Based Around a Dog Superhero
2. Super Buddies
1. Underdog

Films Based Around a Female Superhero
2. Catwoman
1. Elektra

If Black Widow gets a solo movie, we’ll be one ahead of dogs, you guys!

Happy Birthday, Kristen Stewart, But You Still Can’t Work Here

by Vanessa Tottle

Three years ago, Kristen Stewart had an affair with Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders. Personally, I’d have chosen co-star Chris Hemsworth, but there’s no accounting for taste. Since then, Stewart has been blackballed, too risky to touch because she bruised actor Robert Pattinson’s feelings. He’s forgiven her, whatever, that’s TMZ’s business.

At the time, Stewart was 21. Sanders was 40. Stewart was in a relationship with Pattinson. Sanders was married to the shockingly beautiful model Liberty Ross, who played Stewart’s mum in the film and with whom Sanders has two children. You know, those squirmy things you’re supposed to take care of with your wife instead of banging 21 year olds.

Stewart has since been blacklisted from the industry. She’s too risky to touch.

Sanders got offered a $200 million film, the live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell.

Let me tell you a thing. Stewart holds a record for a 24 year old: Movies in which she’s starred have made $4.2 billion worldwide. Take away the Twilight series (please, someone take it away) and she’s still made $873 million. She launched two major franchises. She launched several horror movies at the beginning of her career.

Liberty Ross divorced Sanders, who (may I remind you) was twice Stewart’s age, married, and had two children. He’s a one-time director who got handed three bonafide movie stars in one film (Stewart, Hemsworth, and Charlize Theron) and managed to make it a moderate success.

Recap: Hollywood won’t touch her record-setting $4.2 billion career. Him? Come on in, the water’s fine, here’s a major summer release.

You may have noticed we post a lot about women on this blog. Women writers, women directors, women critics. We post about women because the problem of equal representation isn’t close to solved yet. Wednesday Collective‘s Article of the Week is a statistical analysis by FiveThirtyEight about movies’ profitability when women are more of a focus. It uses the Bechdel Test as its measurement, a test that only asks you if your film had two women who spoke to each other about something other than a man.

Don’t just look at that article and nod in agreement with its findings that films with women – surprise! – make money. Look at it and shake your head that 47% of the movies we’re making can’t even pass the most basic test of equal representation imaginable.

If that’s the measure we’re still trying to surpass, then something’s very wrong in the world of film. So we’re going to keep on writing about women. And music videos, and movies, and stuntwork, and dance choreography, and giant monster movies, and neat Chinese art direction.

But also women, because where there is unfairness, we are not telling stories that teach us how to move our culture forward. Where there is unfairness, we are telling stories about how to repeat our failures.

So happy birthday, Kristen Stewart. Over here, we’re all fans.

You can watch the downright scary trailer for Liberty Ross’s short film “The Spirit Game” here.

You can watch Kristen Stewart talk about her new independent film Camp X-Ray here.

You can watch Rupert Sanders somewhere else.