We don’t need to reboot old classics – women have their own stories to tell
BACK in the bad old days, women in films were nothing more than pretty props – background furniture with no purpose bigger than whimpering away until they were saved by Clark Gable.
Slowly, surely, Hollywood film-makers began to wake up to the fact that female audiences might want to see the characters representing us doing something more than just whimper.
The 2016 ‘Ghostbusters’ was an all-girl team of Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones. This summer we are getting ‘Ocean’s 8’ with its lady criminals ready to carry out the caper of their lives.
Sandra Bullock stars as Debbie Ocean, Danny’s cooler sister, who puts together a team to pull off a heist at New York’s Met Gala. Like ‘Ghostbusters’, it will be a generational event for many women, and it will probably show that female-specific blockbusters can do every bit as well at the box office.
I think this trend for rebooting old classics with male roles rewritten for women is too much of an easy cop-out though. Yes, gender-bending films that originally featured men might seem progressive but it’s really just a distraction from the deep-rooted problems with sexism in Hollywood. Plus, it makes it seem like women’s films still need some sort of male blockbuster appeal to get made.
According to the Motion Picture Association of America, women made up 52pc of total cinema goers in 2013 and half of all tickets sold. But only 15pc of these films starred women. And how many of that
15pc were reliant on a male co-star to relate her story to his? It doesn’t take a Bechdel Test expert to realise we have a problem.
Last year there were a few very successful female-led films, including ‘Wonder Woman’ and ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’. But a study in the US conducted by the Centre For The Study Of Women In Television And Film in San Diego revealed that women only comprised 24pc of all lead roles in
2017.
It’s similar here in Ireland. This year’s Ifta nominations show that we still have too few women involved in Irish film. There were only three Irish actresses in leading roles nominated, as opposed to five male actors in the equivalent category. Isn’t it shocking that we couldn’t reach the very low bar of having a large enough pool of women in lead roles in films to be able to nominate five of them?
It was the same story in other categories. Five men and zero women were nominated in the Scriptwriter Film category and four men and, again, not a single woman were nominated in the Scriptwriter Drama category.
‘Ocean’s 8’ is one chance for audiences to support the idea that you don’t need a male movie star in the lead to have a hit but I’m far more excited by the news that MGM is going to make ‘Legally Blonde 3’.
In the original, Elle was the bubbly sorority girl whose boyfriend Warner breaks up with her before heading off to Harvard Law School, because he needs a serious girlfriend now. Elle decided to prove she can be the kind of girl Warner wants by getting into Harvard Law herself. Things didn’t go well at the start but in the end she found a better life purpose than getting her boyfriend back.
I wasn’t exactly a certified mini feminazi after watching but I definitely started thinking about the nasty things that come with being a woman – things I probably wouldn’t have come across in my own life for years. Elle refused to change or adapt herself in order to succeed – that was groundbreaking. And she taught a generation of noughties girls that we need to fight for the job we want. The film grossed $141.7m (€120m) worldwide.
But as Hollywood studios devote more and more of their budgets to the spectacle-laden blockbusters and the micro-budgeted films that essentially can’t lose no matter how much (or little) money they make, the mid-budget world has dried up – and that’s where female leads live.
Big films (and little films) still tend to be white male journeys from white male directors and actors, and they always will if we don’t start supporting other kinds of films with our time and money.
Heading out to see ‘Ocean’s 8’ and then proclaiming that you support female-led films isn’t going to cut it – supporting a more diverse film world requires a bit of work. Go out and see films directed by women.
We vote with our wallets for the films that get made, and if female-led films are successful, Hollywood will make more of them for us. They don’t need to be all-female movie remakes either. Women are telling their own stories too.