Voynaristic By Kim VoynarVoynar@moviecitynews.com
Real Dads of Hollywood
Over Father’s Day weekend as my kids and I were plotting and planning how to make their dad’s day a special one, I thought about writing a column this week on great movies about dads and fatherhood. Unfortunately, I realized in trying to come up with a list of films I would include in such…
Read the full article »The Relativity of Relationships
There’s a certain irony in a film festival held in Las Vegas — a town where the size, not the quality, of your chip stash matters and fliers offering beautiful girls sent to your hotel room are handed out on the streets — programming some interesting films that focused on emotional connections. Based on an…
Read the full article »The Greatest Adventure of All
I celebrated my 41st birthday on Monday and, as many of us do when the clock makes another tick toward the inevitability of our own demise, I’ve been thinking about growing older, and things undone that I wanted to do (or thought I wanted to do) by now. When I was younger, I imagined many…
Read the full article »I’m Talkin’ About a Revolution
How long can Hollywood sustain the luxurious lifestyle to which it’s grown accustomed? Our economy is bad and not likely to get substantially better for a while — or at least, we’re told, it’s likely to get worse before it gets better again. The mortgage bubble that persuaded people on average incomes they could afford…
Read the full article »More than Skin Deep: Girls, Women and Career Choices
What will it take for women to compete on a level playing field with men in the world of film? And is it just the fault of Hollywood — or the film world in general — that men still largely dominate the industry when it comes to directing and the production side of the business,…
Read the full article »Sex, Morality and The Girlfriend Experience
“No woman gets an orgasm from shining the kitchen floor.” — Betty Friedan You might expect Steven Soderbergh‘s The Girlfriend Experience to be sexy — or, at least, sexual — given that it’s about a high-end call girl played by Sasha Grey, an adult film actress known for going to extremes. It’s not sexy at all, though it…
Read the full article »Girls of Summer
There are plenty of action-packed films with muscle-bound male heroes running around shooting bad guys and blowing things up, but where are the tough girls, the brainy, independent girls this summer? They must all be hanging out in science labs and old bookstores, because they’re few and far between in the films most folks are…
Read the full article »Of Monologues and Dialogues: Does Any Artist Really Work in a Vacuum?
“Is it somehow beneficial for me to exempt myself from events featuring the likes of Coppola and Hara? If I socialize with critics and cinephiles, who swarm to such events and whose company I crave, do I complicate the matter of my identity? And if I socialize with “fellow” filmmakers by attending a half-dozen festivals,…
Read the full article »Roger and Me
When I was a little girl growing up in Oklahoma City, I was a little geek who read books voraciously and wrote incessantly. I told stories to myself while walking to school to pass the time. I scribbled stories during class, hiding a notebook inside my textbook so my teachers wouldn’t know what I was…
Read the full article »Yellow-facing and White-washing: The Racial Issues Raised by the Casting of The Last Airbender
I’ve been loosely following the whole kerfuffle surrounding the casting of M. Night Shyamalan‘s live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender (renamed The Last Airbender, presumably to avoid confusion with James Cameron‘s Avatar project), wherein the lead characters of the Asian-influenced animated television series have magically become white people in the live-action version. Avatar is one of my own kids’…
Read the full article »Drunken Sex or Date Rape? A Look at the Issues Raised by Observe and Report
There’s been a bit of a brouhaha stirring over opening weekend about the alleged “date rape” scene in Observe and Report. When the film played at SXSW I didn’t hear a single person even mention this scene as being at all controversial. Now, as the film is seen – or not seen – by a larger…
Read the full article »What’s the Truth About Objectivity in Documentaries?
The idea of a documentary film tends to evoke a certain perception that what we’re seeing on-screen is purely non-fiction, a “document of the truth.” But is it possible to say that any documentary encapsulates some objective idea of “truth,” as opposed to the story the filmmaker seeks to tell, albeit through footage taken from…
Read the full article »Gentle Pressure, Relentlessly Applied: Women’s Voices in a Man’s World
Hip-hop music is a male-dominated field, although there have long been female voices fighting for a place above the testosterone-heavy fray. When the predominant voice of a culture, artistically, politically, and socially, belongs to one gender, how does the other perspective get heard — and, when it is heard, taken seriously? This weighed heavily on…
Read the full article »In Which We Discuss the Need for Nicolas Cage to Stop Making Bad Movies
I like Nicolas Cage, but he needs a new agent. Whatever happened to the Cage who started out making films like Racing with the Moon, Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona and Moonstruck? Or the later Cage, who intrigued with potent, evocative performances in Wild at Heart and Leaving Las Vegas? Or even the Cage who carried solid, action-packed films like The Rock…
Read the full article »SXSW’s Janet Pierson on Stepping Up to the Plate and Out of the Shadows
Photo Credit: Jason Whyte This is Janet Pierson‘s “Hillary Moment,” and she’s loving every minute of it. For Pierson, taking over the reins of the South by Southwest is something that’s been decades in the making. Pierson started college at 16, where she quickly determined that film was going to be a part of her future. …
Read the full article »The Big Blue Elephant in the Corner of the Room
Who’s afraid of the big blue cock, indeed? Watchmen finally opened this weekend, and all around the internet film journalists are endlessly analyzing the film’s opening weekend box office take, and whether the film will make back its bank, and how many DVDs it will have to sell to break even, and whether a Blu-ray Watchmen…
Read the full article »What Will Women Watch(men)?
I’m looking forward to seeing Watchmen tonight. I know what’s coming, having read the graphic novel and hearing from early reviews that the film is as true to the source material as it is to the costumes. So as a woman who’s not terribly enamored of violence in films, how will I react to watching that…
Read the full article »Mr. Hollywood and the Women
When it comes to the movies, we all know sex sells … but to what extent does Hollywood perpetuate gender stereotypes and the objectification of women? A couple of disparate things cropped up the other day that got me pondering the role the media in general and movies in particular play in perpetuating stereotypes about…
Read the full article »Oscars Versus Spirits: My Likely Winners
Published under Oscar Outsider. For the past several years, I’ve enlisted my children’s help when it came time to make a guess as to who would win what Oscars, on the theory that a pack of children playing a random game with the names of nominees worked in would result in predictions more-or-less as accurate…
Read the full article »Craftsmanship Versus Art in Filmmaking: Why Can’t We Have Both?
Are today’s filmmakers so caught up in trying to craft “artistic” films that they’ve lost the soul and spirit of what makes art “art” in the process? And how exactly do you define art versus craftsmanship? A good starting point for this discussion started up last week over on the blog Bright Lights After Dark. In…
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