Jon Stewart has made a name for himself not only as a comedian but also as a journalist and journalism critic. Here are several links and videos that illustrate just who Jon Stewart is:
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. always understood symbolism and that words and actions had to match each other. That’s why he marched and got arrested in Birmingham, Alabama on Good Friday, 1963. While he was jailed there over Holy Week, he wrote his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. How much more powerful is that as a message and a symbol than a “Letter from a Birmingham Hotel Room”?
There are lots of movies with great relationships between men. There are a number of movies with interesting roles for women. But how many movies out there feature multiple major female characters who interact with each other? That’s the question the Bechdel Test for Women in Film tries to answer. I stumbled across this amazingly simple tool for analyzing films in one of those “You might also like” boxes at the bottom of the Mediaite page.
Here’s the scoop, quoted from Rachel Sklar’s Mediaite article (which references a post from Boing, Boing):
The Bechdel test—named for the cartoonist Alison Bechdel who wrote a long-running comic strip called Dykes To Watch Out For and the critically acclaimed graphic novel Fun Home—is a test to assess whether women have a meaningful presence in a movie. It consists of three questions.
1. Are there two or more women in it that have names? 2. Do they talk to each other? 3. Do they talk to each other about something other than a man?
Once you start thinking about it, you’ll be surprised by how many films don’t pass this test. In fact, there are entire genres (action-adventure, for example) that seem to fail the Bechdel test, by and large.
Not surprisingly, male-centric movies such as Fight Club, or Lawrence of Arabia, or Das Boot don’t pass the test. But as Rachel Sklar points out, other notable non-passing movies include:
Shrek
Clerks
Big Lebowski
Home Alone
Slumdog Millionaire
The Truman Show
Lord of the Rings
Tomb Raider
and even…. Princess Bride
This test doesn’t judge the quality of the movie or whether it is misogynistic, only that it doesn’t portray the interaction of two women with names dealing with something other than a man.
Let me reiterate – the Bechdel test doesn’t say whether a movie is good or bad, or whether it has positive portrayals of women (Read the full week of the comic Dumbing of Age for a great discussion of this!). It only tells us how central the interactions of women with other women are to the plot of the movie.
Here are two videos that deal with the Bechdel test. The first introduces us to the test and the second looks at how the movies nominated for best picture Oscar in 2012 fared when facing the test.
So the movie of The Hunger Games is out, and it’s been an enormous success. Here are some questions the movie might raise:
That whole death lottery things seems familiar. Haven’t I read that kind of story before? Yes, in high school or freshman English. It’s a story by author Shirley Jackson called The Lottery. Hunger Games is in no way a “rip off” of The Lottery, but the premise of it does have some common thematic elements with the Jackson story.There was a short film made of The Lottery back in the 1960s. You can see it in twoparts here.
Did Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins just come out of nowhere to write her bestselling trilogy? Nope. She had a well-regarded children’s series she had written before, and she was a staff writer for Nickelodeon children’s television series. As a side note, the central premise of the series, according to Collins, is that it is about children and war. The deepest roots of the story go back to when her father came home from Vietnam.
Are there really racist tweets out there about the casting of the film?
Yes, but I don’t know that it really was that many people making them. Keep in mind, the movie had a huge opening. The fact that something about the movie would upset a few of them, and that they would post that displeasure to the Internet should not be surprising. The above link is to a Tumblr blog that deals with the issues of the tweets.
The top cable news channel is Fox News (by a lot).
The top cable commentary show (by a lot) is the O’Reilly Factor.
I don’t want to get into an argument about bias. You go looking for it, you’ll find it. Left or right. But don’t try to paint “The Media” as some monolithic institution. It’s a wide-ranging stew of content out there.
