And when they do, they are depicted as the villain of the piece. Mind you, Jody Foster has done a couple of films recently which I haven’t seem but appear to be about a woman who saves the day by out-thinking other people – Panic Room and Flight Plan. But what other movies have you seen in which women are depicted as heroic using her intelligence? As for murdering people, perhaps with the aid of psychological manipulation or sexual temptation, these are actually considered negative things that women are unfairly depicted as doing as a way to assert even more male power. By, you know, feminists and stuff.
Just like everybody of any sex who wields any degree of real power IRL. Ass-kicking toughs, OTOH, tend to be the suckers who get used up and discarded by the powerful.
In space, no one can hear you scream…except for Chuck Norris…he hears everything…
Well, as a guy I certainly enjoy watching these films, but sometimes I think they take it too far. In the movies the little martial arts guy, or the martial arts woman always take down an opponent much larger than them, but IRL, it just doesn’t happen like that. There is a reason the tournaments all have weight classes. Even a guy- which is much more muscular on average than a woman, can be outclassed by a guy with less skill merely because of the opponents mass.
And there is overflow into other movies. For example, in X-men, Mystique was getting the upperhand on Wolverine, something I find to be a bit hard to swallow. That is a mild example to be sure, but I have only just now started to watch it get worse in movies. It is almost unPC if the female evil character isn’t a bigger bad ass than the protagonist. That, I think is unfortunate.
Violence as mindless entertainment or a realistic look at the part violence plays in the human experience?
Because for years we’ve had male heroes as walking billboards for physical courage, and now so we have female billboards as well.
However, filmmakers/playwrights like Sam Pekinpah, Sam Shepard and Martin Scorsese showed violence as this chaotic force of nature that seems to explode out of nowhere, but actually results from the pent-up rages of bitter, frustrated men.
In this same deep-end of the dramatic pool there is room for examination of the violent nature of women’s rage. Yes, there is Monster, but between the riot grll shoot-em-ups and the odd Lifetime Network “I got postpartum depression and slapped my baby” melodrama, this is one unexplored genre.
This entire thread could be translated as:
Where’s Paul Verhoeven when you need him?
I’m a huge fan of that sub-subgenre I call “tough broad” films; from Joan of Arc to *Tank Girl *to *Showgirls *to Kill Bill. We DEFINITELY need more of them.
“They” have been making ass-kicking chick flicks since at least 1965, if you want to start with Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, or start later with the Blaxploitation trend with Coffy or Cleopatra Jones in 1973.
I’m probably missing some chick flicks from before the '60s, maybe some girl gang/delinquent movies but offhand I can’t think of any that are particularly violent.
Still, they’ve been going on for no less than 40 years now, only now this style of movie has huge budgets and A-list actors, so I see no reason for anyone to stop making them.
Dude, Sam Fuller’s 1964 tough broad/ass kicking chick flic k*The Naked Kiss * has STILL not hardly ever been outdone, let ALONE by Russ Meyer. The opening scene was practically lifted whole by Verhoeven for the ass-kicking scene neear the end of Showgirls, except for the whole bald-headed-whore thing.
According to Box Office Mojo, Resident Evil took in $102,441,078 worldwide and had a budget of $33 million. Resident Evil: Apocalypse took in $129,394,835 worldwide and only had a budget of $45 million. Marketing costs cut into that, but both made a huge amount of money.
I thought the chicks in Bound did a pretty good job of usin’ their smarts. Of course there’s murder, but really…he was such a prick…he simply couldn’t get out alive.
Right. But it wasn’t until recently that ass-kicking women became really popular. They always appeared to be smarter by being above it. Not so much these days.
Try High School Hellcats (1958) – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051725/.
nevermind the “looks like” part, she could without even breaking a sweat. one of the reasons Miss Yeoh is in my top 5 hottest Actresses of all time list. shes Beautiful, very talented and very skilled in various martial arts. example in the scene in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon where Zhang Xiyi is kneeling expecting to get her head chopped off you see Michelle swing and stop the sword just short of target, in normal filming they do that shot by starting the blade near the neck and quickly withdrawing it then run the film backwards for safety…CTHD they had Michelle really swing that sword and filmed it.
I don’t think it’s about “smarter.” I think they were still being limited by tradition. By misogynist tradition. The traditional school of feminism is to show the guy as a jerk, and show the woman as being more noble than the guy; to put her above it. This still insists on pretty rigid gender roles and limits the choices of all parties. The reason I think of Verhoeven’s movies as ultimately more truly feminist is that his characters–his asskicking female leads–make their own choices, and fight just as dirty as the men. Plus they usually win. This is why I consider Showgirls’ Nomi Malone to be a daughter of Joan of Arc, the original asskicking broad; the ultimate feminist. She totally rejected the limitations that society had set for her, and defined herself by what made sense to her. She didn’t “win” by playing within the rules set down for women; she made up her own rules.
Those are the best tough broad movies, in my opinion. THe ones that show the woman making her own choices, setting her own agenda, and completely ignoring the expectations set up for her by her male “opponent.”
This is why I like* I Spit on Your Grave* more than Aliens. In I Spit on Your Grave, an obvious influence on* Kill Bill*, the rape victim relies on her own strength and ingenuity to exact revenge upon her attackers. One by one she tracks them down, outsmarts them, and destroys them. In Aliens, Ripley doesn’t win until she pays tribute to traditional gender roles: she gains her physical strength from shielding herself with the mechanical exoskeleton and strapping on a giant phallus that shoots bullets instead of sperm (though only on a literal level), and her emotional strength through “motherhood”; she’s not fighting for herself, but for her adoptive child, Newt. She even emphasizes that she’s a gender traditionalist by calling her rival mother a “bitch” before she fights her.
PUtting a woman up on a pedestal–above the fray–even if you give her a gun and a haircut–is ultimately just as patriarchal as leaving her home to darn the socks while the man goes out to fight the bad guys. In the best tough broad movies, she gets just as down and dirty as the guys, only she usually wins.
I have always felt that these ass-kicking-sexy-chick movies have gotten tiresome. I’ll tell you my biggest complaint about them: the women are always too stereotypically “hot.”
I would like to see a movie with a chick who looks like a rugged bad-ass. Not too fucking pretty, as if she has time to do her hair and select the perfect skin-tight outfit. I just think female fighters are too over-sexualized, and I’d like to see a chick who’s just a powerhouse and isn’t too polished-looking.
When Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater came out, and I began playing it, I developed an immediate crush on the female villain known as “the boss.” (Before you mock me for having a crush on a video game character, just know that this game’s visuals are as close to perfect as any I have ever played - if you’ve seen the cinematics you’ll know what I mean.) Anyway, I thought The Boss was the sexiest female character I’d ever seen, because she was just so rugged and hard-looking. Here’s a picture of her - she’s on the right, obviously.
I’d like to see more female characters like her, and fewer in ridiculous sexualized skintight fetish outfits who look like S & M models.
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We might get something like that, if they every made a movie based on S.M. Stirling’s Domination of the Draka novels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination (In the Domination’s ruling caste, all citizens of both sexes are raised in military boarding schools and do military service.)
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I hope you’re right but I think the STORY doesn’t matter. What matters is the director, and action directors always seem to have an eye for the most cliched shit. And so the movie may be based on a great concept but it will come out looking how the director wants it to look.
Hell, that’s half the reason I love playing Splinter Cell. Mmm, Sam Fisher. 
I’d like to see more stories where an obviously tough chick tries to take on a not-quite-so-tough guy and gets her ass kicked. As it usually would happen IRL if he were just a lot bigger than she.
Of course, there’s already an established convention that any woman, however tough, can be immobilized if a man grabs her by the upper arm. http://www.galactanet.com/comic/381.htm
Well, the reality is that any movie ass-kicking chick, no matter how tough, is still about 110 lbs.