Caliban

I watched the 2010 Julie Taymor screen adaption of The Tempest recently. I hadn’t seen TheTempest in a fair while – not since I saw my high school’s Year 12 drama production of the play[1] – and was keen to watch it again. In this adaption, Prospero has been changed to Prospera, giving Helen Mirren a chance to take the role. I was pretty excited to see a woman play one of Shakespeare’s leading characters, and as the movie began, I wasn’t disappointed. Helen Mirren brings an aura of power and harshness to Prospera’s character, and her screen chemistry with Felicity Jones gave some delightful mother-daughter scenes. I also enjoyed seeing Ben Whishaw’s delightfully naked Ariel. Things were going well. Until, that is, I got to meet Djimon Hansou’s Caliban, whose portrayal I found to be problematic, to say the least.

Dating Othello

I’ve dated Othello in the past. Twice. Let’s call them Othello #1 and Othello #2, with the Othello of the play being just plain Othello. Well, ok, neither of the Othellos I dated were black (though Othello #2 was Asian, which gives a nice parallel with the racial issues), but they were jealous, and rather than confront their own jealousy, both of them decided to take it out on me instead. I don’t feel like talking much about my time with Othello #1 right now (though I quite possibly will at a later date), but seeing as Othello #2 was a particularly recent event, I would like to discuss instead how watching Othello has helped me to understand what I went through with him.

Thor is Definitely a Movie for Girls

Growing up, I never read comics, because I always had this idea that they were written for boys. While I never had anything against “boy” stuff – after all, I was all for footy and cricket and movies with lots of explosions in them – but fort some reason or other, superhero comics always struck me as something that was not only for boys, but also the kind of boys stuff that was of no interest to me. Even my high school addiction to the X-Men and Spider-Man cartoon series, and the fact that I enjoyed most every superhero movie that I saw did nothing to change my mind about the fundamental truth that I had internalized – that comics are for boys, and thus not for me.

Let Us Talk About Thor for a Moment

Crossposted from my other blog, Free Durian.

Of all the superhero films to be released in the last decade, Thor, to me, stands head and shoulders above the others in terms of its feminist interpretation. It might seem strange that I consider a superhero movie about a Norse god to be one of the most feminist films I have ever seen, but I have sound evidence for this claim: namely, every scene in which Thor appears with a woman (and indeed many scenes with women, but no Thor). Thor is a movie that passes the Bechdel Test within the first minute, and then continues to pass on many more occasions. Even without that, what Thor presents is a way in which a man can be a strong feminist, while still remaining Manly enough to be played by shirtless Chris Hemsworth*.

Fantastic Four and Grief

The 2005 Fantastic Four movie is actually quite a decent film. Similar to Thor, it is much better if you view it as a character movie rather than an action movie – which often causes people to underrate its quality. Throughout the movie, the conflict between the Fantastic Four and Doctor Doom largely took a back seat to the conflict between the Four themselves, and their adjustment to their new powers. The Four (plus Doom) all have different reactions to the changes in their lives, with each character representing one of the five stages of grief:

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