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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Saturday, November 20th, 2010 - Comments Off on Why You Should Go See Made in Dagenham
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Why You Should Go See Made in Dagenham

Dear readers,

I am taking time out from my honeymoon to bring you this important message:

If you live in a city where Made in Dagenham is getting released this weekend, I’d like to take a moment to encourage you to go see it. Yes, yes, by all means, go see Harry Potter 7.1 first. I know you’ve been dying to see that, I was too.

But then, make the time to get out to support this little Brit film. I reviewed it from Toronto (you can see my full review over here) and liked it a lot. It tells a great story about a little known strike by female factory workers in blue-collar England at the dawn of the feminist movement. It’s fun, it’s a nice femme-themed movie that DOESN’T center around women talking about nothing but men and sex and fashion, and it stars Sally Hawkins and Miranda Richardson in a couple of great performances. AND it has Bob Hoskins. Jeepers, what more do you want?

I’ve read a couple of luke-warmish reviews criticizing some of the characters for being one-dimensional representations, which I actually don’t completely disagree with when it comes to a couple of the supporting characters, but on the balance the performances by Hawkins and Richardson in particular more than made up for that for me. And further, I liked that while it’s a “strong women” film, it’s more about these women who’d always accepted their place as being beneath the men realizing that was wrong, and finding the courage to stand up for what they believed in, and the film conveys this without making all the men out to be complete assholes.

There are several men in the film (Hoskins among them) who are supportive of the women, and even though some of the husbands are shown as going through a period of growing weary of the effect of the women’s strike on their own jobs and their households, they are not uniformly painted as “look, aren’t all men jerks?” but rather as people with flaws, most of whom ultimately come to support the women’s cause in spite of it going against everything they were raised to believe.

So I urge you, give this little film a chance, go out and support it, take your teenage or pre-teen daughters or nieces or granddaughters (and their brothers, too!) to see it. Because we cannot and should not forget all the women who bravely paved the way for where we are now — nor should we forget that even now, the Republicans are fighting President Obama tooth and nail on the issue of equal pay.

So please, go see Made in Dagenham, and judge it for yourself. I promise you, I would not take time out from my brief honeymooon weekend to say this if I didn’t really believe in this little film. It needs your support. Thanks.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon