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John wick pencil montage1/12/2024 Indeed, its icy perfection becomes all terribly expected after a point, and going back over the film, looking at its shooting strategies, it feels less a work of rigor than one of remove. Under the Skin is perfect, in its way: it nails that brand of cool distance familiar from certain strands of art-world installation work, Björk music videos, Lexus commercials, and…almost any other arty indie sci-fi film. Most Mindlessly Monolithic: Under the Skin Instead of sharing in the lot of the disadvantaged, or even the privilege of men, it treats him, like so many movies, as someone outside the system, no more than a magical talisman. Though it shows how bad it is to be a woman in this world-constantly subjected to the predatory behavior of men, threatened with rape, etc.-it wrongly exempts the disfigured man from this misery. Unlike, say, the dwarf-tossing incident in The Wolf of Wall Street, where the depraved treatment of the disabled illustrates Jordan Belfort’s inhuman callousness, Under the Skin comes off as sanctimonious and inconsistent (and still sexist). Disability is not incidental or adjacent to feminism, but wholly shares in its anti-patriarchal critique. Because feminism is not about “women” so much as it is about toppling patriarchy, a system that says that some bodies matter more than others, whatever feminist statement this film is trying to make is almost entirely undone by this hackneyed trope. Of course the exceptional treatment of disabled characters is nothing new in film and television, but this is more than a regrettably clunky episode. Moreover his “specialness” triggers her curiosity about, and sympathy for, being human. But when this unfeeling alien encounters a man with a face disfigured by neurofibromatosis, instead of ingesting him like anyone else, she spares (i.e. This premise, which the first half of the film sets up, brims with feminist potential, as many critics have noted. Though she understands the seductive powers of feminine wiles, it’s all a ruse, a means to a different, gooier end than her male victims imagine. In Under the Skin, we get an alien wearing a woman-suit, but she (it?) is not necessarily concerned with being a “woman” at all. A sci-fi or fantasy film that suspends or hyperbolizes certain aspects of reality can play around even more. You can pass the Bechdel Test (though Under the Skin doesn’t) and portray the lives of women as they are actually experienced. You don’t have to address the sex lives of women, but if you do, they don’t have to be slut-shamed. What makes a film feminist? You can start by having a woman or group of women make the movie. Most Overappreciated “Feminist” Film: Under the Skin
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