Culture Representation: Taking place primarily in Las Vegas, the dramatic film “Prisoner’s Daughter” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans, Asians and Latinos) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: An elderly man, who’s been in prison for violent crimes, is released early after he is diagnosed with cancer, and he goes to live with his estranged daughter and her son, while she has problems with her ex-husband, who’s a drug addict.
Culture Audience: “Prisoner’s Daughter” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching formulaic dramas about estranged family members reuniting.
Kate Beckinsale and Tyson Ritter in “Prisoner’s Daughter” (Photo courtesy of Vertical)
“Prisoner’s Daughter” holds viewers hostage with its relentlessly maudlin and predictable story. Brian Cox and Kate Beckinsale go through some very drab motions in this trite drama about a terminally ill criminal living with his estranged daughter. The movie is supposed to be emotionally intense, but the tone often veers into hokey melodrama, with much of it not believable at all. The movie’s dialogue is pedestrian at best. “Prisoner’s Daughter” had its world premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival.
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke and written by Mark Bacci, “Prisoner’s Daughter” (which takes place in Las Vegas) becomes more about the “prisoner” and less about the “daughter” as the movie lumbers along until its very sappy conclusion. Cox is the “prisoner”: a gruff cynic named Max “Buddy” MacLeary, who has been in and out of prison for violent crimes for most of his adult life. Max’s most recent stint in prison has been his longest: 12 years.
The story’s “daughter” is Max’s daughter Maxine, nicknamed Maxi (played by Beckinsale), who is an embittered, divorced mother who has cut off contact with Max for years because he’s been an irresponsible, mostly absentee father for most of her life. Maxine’s mother is deceased. Maxine, who works as a food server at a casual restaurant, is financially struggling and living in a modest house with her son Ezra (played by Christopher Convery), who’s about 13 or 14 years old. Maxine’s ex-husband/Ezra’s father is a drug-addicted musician named Tyler (played by Tyson Ritter), who’s a drummer in a rock band that’s going nowhere.
Near the beginning of the movie, it’s shown that Max has been diagnosed with cancer, so he is granted an early release from prison, but he’s still supposed to be under house arrest. In other words, the prison system didn’t want to pay for his cancer treatment, so prison officials let him go, but still want to have some control over him. Max is required to wear an ankle bracelet to keep track of his whereabouts. Jon Huertas has a small supporting role as the prison’s warden, whose name is Joseph.
Now that Max knows that he has a terminal illness, he wants to make amends with Maxine. As soon as Max is released, he pays an unannounced visit to Maxine, who is very unhappy to see him. Max expresses remorse for not being a good father. Max tells Maxine that he’s in the final stage of cancer, and he asks to live with her and Ezra. Maxine dislikes the idea, but agrees only if Max pays her rent.
Max, who used to be a semi-pro boxer in his youth, gets the money by going to his old boxing friend Hank (played by Ernie Hudson) and asking Hank to repay the money that Max lent to Hank years ago, so that Hank could open his own boxing gym. The gym is still operating. Hank is the chief trainer at the gym.
Maxine has been having conflicts with Tyler, who wants to spend more time with Ezra, but she thinks Tyler is too dangerous and too flaky to get more visitation rights. Expect to see several scenes of Tyler being aggressive and unstable while he’s high on whatever drugs he’s been taking. One of the few things that Maxine and Max agree on is that they both despise Tyler.
Meanwhile, Ezra happens to be living with epilepsy. He is a bright and sensitive child who is bullied at school. What’s an ex-boxer with a violent criminal record to do when his best friend trains boxers and his grandson is being bullied? You know where this is going, of course. Max is vague with Ezra about all the crimes that Max committed, but Max does admit to Ezra that he used to make money by beating up people for mobsters. Max also doesn’t deny it when Ezra asks if Max ever killed anyone.
The rest of “Prisoner’s Daughter” is a back-and-forth slog showing arguments of Max versus Maxine; Max versus Tyler; Maxine versus Tyler; and Tyler versus Max and Maxine. Ezra is often caught in the middle, while the adults often forget that Ezra’s needs, not their egos, should come first, although Maxine does make the best efforts out of the three adults to be a good parent. And you just know that big epileptic scene is coming, long before it happens.
Cox is doing yet another “tough old man” role. Beckinsale, no matter how hard she tries, is just not entirely convincing as a down-on-her-luck, working-class mother. Her scenes with Cox look too much like forced acting instead of being naturalistic. In real life, Ritter is the lead singer of the rock band The All-American Rejects, so he didn’t have to do much acting in portraying a musician. All of the cast members are, in one way or another, depicting not-very-interesting stereotypes with their “Prisoner’s Daughter” characters. It doesn’t help that the cast members have to say a lot of idiotic lines from the low-quality screenplay.
“Prisoner’s Daughter” is not the worst movie you could ever see. It’s just so lazy and unimaginative in its dialogue and story. The direction of “Prisoner’s Daughter” also lacks creativity and makes “Prisoner’s Daughter” look like one of those movies that gets dumped on a streaming service or third-tier cable network and is quickly forgotten. There are absolutely no surprises in “Prisoner’s Daughter,” which lays the melodrama on thick toward the end, but didn’t bother to make everything look authentic.
Vertical released “Prisoner’s Daughter” in select U.S. cinemas on June 30, 2023. The movie was released on digital and VOD on July 18, 2023.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Italy and briefly in the Los Angeles area, the comedy/drama film “Mafia Mamma” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans) representing the working-class, middle-class, wealthy and criminal underground.
Culture Clash: An “empty nester” Italian American mother finds out that her recently deceased grandfather in Italy was a Mafia boss whose dying wish was for her to take over the family’s Mafia business in Italy.
Culture Audience: “Mafia Mamma” will appeal primarily to fans of stars Toni Collette and Monica Bellucci, as well as anyone to doesn’t mind watching idiotic movies about the Italian Mafia.
Toni Collette and Giulio Corso in “Mafia Mamma” (Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street)
“Mafia Mamma” is an irritating mix of crude comedy and cloying drama failing on every single level. The filmmakers want to fool viewers into thinking that Toni Collette’s shrill and mindless Kristin character is supposed to exemplify “female empowerment.” Collette can usually be counted on to give good performances in even her worst movies. However, Collette (who is one of the producers of “Mafia Mamma”) does nothing but embarrass herself in this moronic and schlocky mess. The rest of the “Mafia Mamma” cast members give equally atrocious or forgettable performances, made worse by the misguided direction and awful screenplay.
Directed by Catherine Hardwicke, “Mafia Mamma” was written by J. Michael Feldman and Debbie Jhoon, as if it were a stale and outdated movie from the 1980s. It’s the type of comedy/drama that Goldie Hawn might have made back then, when movie audiences were more receptive to seeing someone act like a ditzy blonde who’s thrown into uncomfortable situations while she shrieks, grimaces, and whines about how she doesn’t know how she ended up in these situations. To make things even worse, “Mafia Mamma” tries to pretend that it’s a “feminist” movie, when it’s actually the opposite of a feminist movie, because it makes the female characters in film look very shallow.
And let’s not get started on the utter stupidity of the concept that a powerful Mafia family in Italy would want a naïve and estranged relative, who doesn’t speak Italian, to suddenly take over the family’s Mafia empire in Italy. Even if viewers suspend their disbelief at this flimsy premise for “Mafia Mamma,” the cast members do a terrible job of selling this concept as entertaining. There’s a desperate tone to “Mafia Mamma” that’s very off-putting. It’s like being stuck in a room with people telling bad jokes that they know are bad, but they just ramp up the barrage of foolishness, because they want to convince you that being louder and sillier automatically means “funnier.”
“Mafia Mamma” begins with a scene showing the aftermath of a gun massacre somewhere on a street in Italy. A Mafia general named Bianca (played by Monica Bellucci), who has an ice-cold personality, walks among the dead bodies of men and snarls, “This means war.” She then spits on the ground. Viewers soon find out that Bianca works for the Balbano crime family. And one of the people killed in this massacre was family boss Giuseppe Balbano (Alessandro Bressanello), whose dying wish was for his American-raised granddaughter to take over the family’s Mafia activities, even though this granddaughter has no idea that her family in Italy is in the Mafia.
This granddaughter is pharmaceutical marketing executive Kristin Dorner (played by Collette), who is living in the Los Angeles area with her musician husband Paul Dorner (played by Tim Daish), who is a wannabe rock star in an obscure band. It’s explained later in the movie that Kristin was born in Italy, but she and her widowed mother moved to the United States when Kristin was too young to remember her father, who was Giuseppe’s only child.
Kristin has no siblings. Her mother has been deceased for an untold number of years. Kristin is an overprotective mother to her only child: a son named Domenick, nicknamed Nicky (played by Tommy Rodger), who is seen saying goodbye to his parents as he drives off with two buddies for his first year in college in Portland, Oregon.
Kristin works at a company called ICO Pharma, which is always looking for new drugs to market to the public. She is the only woman in the small group meetings at her job, where the marketing executives have to pitch ideas for new campaigns. Kristin’s boss Hank (played by Jay Natelle) is misogynistic, even though he goes to great lengths to try to make it look he’s not.
Hank is dismissive of Kristin’s ideas and treats her as inferior to the male employees. He over-praises the unoriginal ideas of his male subordinates Randy (played by Yonv Joseph) and Wayne (played by Mitch Salm), which include re-using ad campaign ideas that portray women as sex objects. When Kristin pitches an idea for medication that will give hair growth to balding men, Hank suggests that Kristin work instead on a campaign for Restylane (anti-aging fillers) for women. Kristin’s job at ICO Pharma plays a big role in an awkward slapstick scene and in a nonsensical subplot shown later in the movie.
Kristin not only feels undervalued at work, but she’s also feeling lonely and unappreciated at home. In addition to having “empty nest syndrome,” Kristin has a non-existent sex life. She and Paul have not had sex with each other in three years.
Kristin is about to have a very bad day that will change her life. First, she gets a call from Bianca telling her that Kristin’s paternal grandfather Giuseppe has died in Italy. Even though Kristin never knew him, Kristin still feels a sense of loss that she never got to know this deceased family member.
And then, Kristin gets another bombshell: She walks in on Paul having sex in his music room with a younger woman named Tracy (played by Claire Palazzo), who was Domenick’s high school guidance counselor. Kristin is naturally shocked. It’s one of the few scenes where Kristin gets upset but doesn’t start screeching. An apologetic Paul uses the opportunity to tell Kristin that he wants them to have an open marriage.
Kristin is next seen taking out her anger and frustration in boxing exercises at a gym. Her gym partner is her loud and foul-mouthed best friend Jenny (played by Sophia Nomvete), who is an attorney for ICO Pharma. Jenny suggests that Kristin go to Italy for Giuseppe’s funeral and use the trip as a chance to reclaim her sexuality. Jenny crudely compares it to Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 self-discovery travel memoir “Eat Pray Love,” by saying Kristin’s trip to Italy can be like “Eat Pray Fuck” for Kristin.
“Mafia Mamma” is so poorly written, it isn’t mentioned what Kristin has decided to do about her marriage until after she arrives in Italy. It turns out that she and Paul are separated, but there’s no mention of her filing for divorce. At any rate, Kristin considers herself to be completely single and available. She wants to make one of her fantasies come true by having a romance (or at least passionate sex) with a handsome and attentive Italian man who treats her well.
As soon as Kristin arrives at the airport, and she’s outside in the arrivals/pickup area, she happens to meet an attractive 34-year-old stranger named Lorenzo (played by Giulio Corso), another traveler who’s standing nearby. Lorenzo’s aunt Esmerelda (played by Dora Romano) has arrived to give Lorenzo a car ride, and she’s in a hurry for him to get in the car. However, Lorenzo finds enough time to quickly introduce himself to Kristin, flirt with her, and exchange phone numbers with her. Of course, it won’t be the last time that Kristin sees Lorenzo.
Bianca is Kristin’s main guide in Italy, but two goons who work for the Balbano family are also at Kristin’s service: jittery Aldo (played by Francesco Mastroianni) and quiet Dante (played by Alfonso Perugini), who later become Kristin’s bodyguards. Dante’s body size becomes the butt of some unfunny “fat” jokes in the movie, which frequently makes Dante more concerned about gorging on fattening food than doing his job properly.
At first, Kristin thinks the Balbano side of her family has gotten wealthy from the Balbano winery. However, during Giuseppe’s funeral procession, there’s a shootout that leaves several people dead. Kristin and her entourage barely escape with their lives. A shocked Kristin demands to know what’s going on. And it’s how she finds out that the Balbano family is a Mafia family. The main Mafia enemy of the Balbano family is the Romano family.
Bianca also shows Kristin a video statement that Giuseppe made that he only wanted Kristin to see after he died. In the video, Giuseppe says that his dying wish is for Kristin to take over the family’s Mafia business. This announcement enrages Giuseppe’s great-nephew Fabrizio (played by Eduardo Scarpetta), a dimwitted, tattooed thug who was expecting to be named the leader of the family. It just leads to witless scenes of a rivalry that Fabrizio has with Kristin.
Throughout the movie, Kristin is a fast-talking, nervous chatterbox trying to make people like her, or she’s a screaming ninny trying to get out of a nasty situation. The movie has expected scenes of bloody murder, but there’s some gross-out comedy involving vomit and defecation that look really stupid and childish in a movie that needed a darker edge. The “fish out of water” scenarios for clueless Kristin get tiresome very quickly.
Even though Bellucci shares top billing with Collette, the Bianca character isn’t in the movie as much as she could have been, thereby squandering an opportunity to make the developing friendship between “opposite personalities” Kristin and Bianca into something hilarious. Instead, the movie lazily uses Bellucci’s image as a “sex symbol” to drop major hints that Bianca might be sexually attracted to Kristin, but Bianca doesn’t act on it. It comes across as being a tease just for the sake of being a tease and adds nothing to the story. Bianca is ultimately a hollow character who reveals nothing about herself in this junkpile film.
“Mafia Mamma” also mishandles what could have been the most suspenseful part of the movie: the rivalry between the Balbano family and the Romano family. The Romanos are too generic and uninteresting. Carlo Romano (played by Giuseppe Zeno) is the family boss at one point in the story, but he’s not in the movie for very long. A high-ranking family member named Mammone Romano (played by Vincenzo Pirrotta) is barely in the movie and doesn’t make much of an impact.
“Mafia Mamma” is also a bloated film that tries to cram in too many ideas, most of which have inexcusable plot holes and just make everyone involved look like morons. Nothing about the story and characters in “Mafia Mamma” looks believable. The movie becomes too long and drawn-out as more ludicrious plot twists emerge. There’s such an overload of bad acting and horrible comedy in “Mafia Mamma,” it truly is a crime against cinema.
Bleecker Street will release “Mafia Mamma” in U.S. cinemas on April 14, 2023. The movie will be released on digital and VOD on May 2, 2023.
Culture Representation: In the documentary film “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power,” American filmmaker Nina Menkes and a group of filmmakers and film/culture experts (predominantly white, with some African American, Asians and Latinas) discuss how the male-dominated film industry affects the way that women are depicted on-screen in movies.
Culture Clash: The documentary shows examples of how the “male gaze” of male directors and other male filmmakers often portray women as sex objects instead of fully formed human beings.
Culture Audience: “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in filmmaking and seeing how misogyny and sexism against women are ingrained in many movies.
Nina Menkes looks at a photo still of “The Lady From Shanghai” star Rita Hayworth in “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” (Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber)
“Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” will undoubtedly make some viewers uncomfortable in how it clearly demonstrates why misogyny and the objectification of women in movies are so pervasive. This documentary should be required viewing for anyone who cares about how manipulated images in movies can play a role in enabling sexism against women in society. Although some people might be in denial about it, the fact is that movies have a great deal of influence in how people behave, how they want to be perceived, and how they treat other people in real life.
Directed by Nina Menkes, a filmmaker who often makes speaking appearances about sexism in cinema, “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” has interviews with several film experts, but the movie is also partially formatted like a university lecture, which might be somewhat of a turnoff to some viewers of this documentary. The movie’s lecture scenes (from Menkes’ presentation “Sex and Power, the Visual Language of Cinema”) were filmed at Walt Disney Modular Theater at the California Institute of the Arts. Menkes speaks on stage and shows several movie clips on a video projection screen as examples of how the “male gaze” in filmmaking has resulted in sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious ways of how women are exploited and objectified on screen.
And the images of women often are far from empowering: Women on camera in movies are all too often being portrayed as subservient to men or existing mainly to please men. With some exceptions, when men and women co-star in a movie together and get equal billing, the men usually get more dialogue and screen time than the women. And in non-pornographic movies, women are expected to get fully naked on camera a lot more than men are expected to get fully naked. Menkes and the documentary do not put the blame only on male filmmakers for perpetuating this type of sexism in cinema, because it’s pointed out that some female filmmakers are just as guilty of the same sexism against women.
The fact remains though that men are the majority of directors, cinematographers and editors: the three types of filmmaking jobs that have the most influence in how performers look on screen. And that’s why the term “male gaze” came into existence. Early on in “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power,” the phrase “male gaze” is defined for viewers who don’t know what it means in cinematic terms. Film theorist Laura Mulvey, who is interviewed in the documentary, is credited with being the first to coin the term “male gaze” in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
The “male gaze” is considered to be a cinematic angle or viewpoint where women are presented as mainly existing to be pleasurable, passive or inferior to men. This is not the same thing as appreciating a woman’s inner or outer beauty. The “male gaze” point of view specifically shows in subtle and obvious ways that the men in the movie have the most control and power, while the women in the movie are never the men’s equals.
Mulvey says in the documentary that when she was in college, she watched a lot of movies. And it dawned on her: “Part of my pleasure in all of this filmgoing was that I was watching these movies [like] a male spectator.” She saw that the women on screen were often presented to be looked at, but not really seen as equal to the men. That feeling of “to be looked at-ness” (a phrase that Mulvey also coined) was also part of Mulvey’s awakening to the practice of female objectification in movies.
California State University at Long Beach faculty member Rhiannon Aarons comments, “Even though Mulvey’s foundational work was written in the ’70s, we still totally normalize the male gaze in cinema. I think the majority of people don’t ever question that form of looking. It’s so normal. It’s like asking if a fish is wet.” Filmmaker/TV producer Joey Soloway (who identifies as non-binary) comments on “male gaze” sexism: “To name it, to show it, is something that I think can change the world.”
Award-winning filmmaker Eliza Hittman (whose directorial credits include 2017’s “Beach Rats” and 2020’s “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”) offers this perspective: “It’s not just optical. It’s perceptual.” She cites actor/director Robert Montgomery’s 1947 film “Lady in the Lake” (which has a main character showing misogynistic distrust of women) as “an extreme example of what subjectivity is. It aligns with my ideas about a male point of view and a male gaze.”
Several clips from movies are used as examples of scenes that objectify females in a sexual way. The movies include 1947’s “The Lady from Shanghai ” (directed by Orson Welles); 1981’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (directed by Bob Rafelson); 1989’s “Do the Right Thing” (directed by Spike Lee); 1998’s “Buffalo 66” (directed by Vincent Gallo); 2003’s “Lost in Translation” (directed by Sofia Coppola); 2017’s “Blade Runner 2049” (directed by Denis Villeneuve); 2019’s “Bombshell” (directed by Jay Roach); 2020’s “Cuties” (directed by Maïmouna Doucouré); and 2020’s “365 Days” (directed by Barbara Bialowas and Tomasz Mandes). Although the documentary focuses primarily on how women are objectified in cinema, “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” includes a brief example of a man being sexually exploited on camera, by showing the scene in 1975’s “Mandingo” (directed by Richard Fleischer) where a white woman forces an enslaved African American man to have sex with her.
UCLA Film & Television Archive director May Hong HaDuong acknowledges: “I think sometimes, with films that are part of the canon, that are part of the ‘best’ films, there is a reticence to even question how they were made and the stories they tell. And I think it’s okay to to still love and see a film, and say it was great, but that it has some issues. And I think without questioning it, we’re doing a disservice to our own humanity.”
“Daughters of the Dust” director Julie Dash says, “As filmmakers, we have to be courageous and willing to be that force, and be willing to speak our minds, and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute. What’s wrong with this picture? What’s the visual rhetoric we’re looking at? It doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel correct. Let’s rethink this.'”
In the documentary, Menkes presents a theory that there’s a direct line between visual language of cinema, employment discrimination (against women in the film industry) and sexual abuse/assault. The employment discrimination is obvious when you consider how actresses over the age of 60 are rarely hired to be in movies as sexy, leading characters with an active love life. By contrast, male actors over the age of 60 can be cast as sexy leading characters with an active love life, and they usually have a female love interest in the movie who’s at least 15 to 20 years younger. The gender discrimination is even more prevalent when it comes to who gets cast as the headlining stars of action movies.
Rosanna Arquette, an actress who was 18 when her first movie (the 1977 TV-movie “Having Babies II”) was released, says that now she’s a middle-aged woman, she’s lost out on many jobs for what she thinks is age discrimination: “I got a great movie lately. It would’ve moved the needle. And they decided to go younger [casting a younger actress for the role] … That happens a lot. I have a lot of sadness even talking about it, because I love to work.”
The “male gaze” means that women in front of the camera are held to higher standards, in terms of pressure to look youthful and be of a certain body type, usually slender. Aarons says, “I think this visual language really contributes to female self-hatred and insecurity in a way that is not insignificant. What is normalized as beauty is seen specifically and dominantly through a male gaze.”
It’s hard to argue with this fact: Male actors can be considered “sex symbols” when they have gray hair and wrinkles, while actresses with gray hair and wrinkles are rarely considered “sex symbols.” Catherine Hardwicke (whose directorial credits include 2003’s “Thirteen” and 2008’s “Twilight”) comments, “I don’t worry if a guy has wrinkles because it just makes him look rugged as they get older, but you don’t want to think that for women.”
Who gets to decide what’s sexy? Who gets to influence people into thinking what’s sexy? In many cases, these influencers are the filmmakers who portray these actors and actresses as sex symbols, according to what the (usually male) filmmakers want. That type of influence has far-reaching effects on how people around the world perceive themselves. It’s probably no coincidence that women are the majority of people who get anti-aging plastic surgery.
Menkes sees five ways that the “male gaze” and sexism affect choices during the shot design, which is how a scene is filmed: (1) subject/object; (2) framing; (3) camera movement; (4) lighting; and (5) narrative positions of the characters, which are influenced by the previous four factors. For example, there are too many movies to name where the camera takes an ogling view of a woman: Her body is looked at up and down, sometimes in slow motion, while the men in the same movie don’t get the same camera treatment. Sometimes in these body-ogling scenes, the women’s face is not seen, as if her face doesn’t matter because she’s just an anonymous sex object to be stared at in a leering way.
Similarly, women are more likely than men to have their body parts singled out on camera for close-ups or camera angles that are meant to be sexually arousing. (We all know which body parts they are.) This type of filmmaking has become so common, many viewers don’t question it or don’t even think about it. “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” shows in no uncertain terms that this type of complacency is part of the sexism problem and why sexism continues to affect women and girls in a negative way.
Menkes and some other people who comment in the documentary come right out and say that “male gaze” sexism also plays a role in rape culture. Dartmouth College faculty member/filmmaker Iyabo Kwayana says, “I think we have to consider that it is through the formal visual language, we are effectively communicating meaning. It has to do with how [camera] shots are composed and framed, how they’re assembled, and ordered in a sequence of shots … If the camera is predatory, then the culture is predatory as well.”
The constant barrage of “male gaze”-directed images in movies that try to dictate what is “sexy” and “not sexy” in a woman can have real-world consequences on women’s self-esteem. As psychoanalyst Dr. Sachiko Taki-Reece says in the documentary about how a typical woman reacts to these movie images that are usually decided by men: “For women, because you are looking at those films, for instance, she would like to shape herself to be the object of the gaze. But she thinks, ‘Some part of me is not matching to that image.’ She feels empty. That’s the problem.”
Dr. Kathleen Tarr, who works with the Geena Davis Institute Task Force and Stanford University, comments on how sexist portrayals of women of movies can have consequences for women’s careers: “Absolutely, objectification of women impacts hiring practices … It becomes this way of dealing with women that is primarily around their sexual value. If they’re attractive to you, it absolutely has to do with how you’re treated on the job.”
An obvious and common question comes up in these types of discussions: “Why don’t more women just become movie directors?” The answer isn’t as simple as more women just need to go to film school, because there are sexist barriers to actually getting hired in the real world. The documentary cites a Los Angeles/San Diego State University study that found that about 50% of film school students in America are women, but women are less than 15% of the directors of the top-grossing movies in any given year.
Director/activist Maria Giese explains: “People are really happy for women to be attending film schools at parity with men, as long as they’re paying money into the system. But when we move into the professional playing field, and we’re asking the industry to pay [equal] money out to women, that’s where the door gets closed. Hollywood has been the worst violator of Title VII of any industry in the United States of America.”
Award-winning director Penelope Spheeris says when she was in school, including when she getting her master’s degree, “It never occurred to me to be a director.” That’s because in many people’s minds, the image of a movie director is that of being one specific demographic. As actress Charlyne Yi put its it: “Gender is a huge factor when you look around [movie] sets. Things haven’t changed that much. It’s mostly white men.”
“Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” (which had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival) certainly presents important visual evidence to bolster the premise of this documentary. However, the movie isn’t without some flaws. Perhaps the biggest flaw is in the last third of the film, which turns into Menkes going into a self-promotion tangent: She shows clips from her own movies as examples of a “female gaze” that empower women or have women on an equal level as men on camera. This part of the documentary just looks like ego posturing, Menkes patting herself on the back, and perhaps exaggerating the impact that her movies have had on the movie industry.
“Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” admirably gives some mention to female director pioneers, such as Alice Guy-Blaché and Dorothy Arzner. However, “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” should have given more credit to contemporary women filmmakers who are avoiding the “male gaze” sexism trap. The documentary would have been enriched if these female filmmakers gave analyses of certain scenes in their movies where they made choices to present women on camera in an empowering way. Instead, “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” kind of fizzles when the documentary veers off into what looks like Menkes doing an infomercial/sizzle reel of her own work. That’s not to say that Menkes shouldn’t have given analysis of her own work in this documentary but that she should’ve let more female filmmakers in the documentary have the chance to do the same.
The documentary also misses the mark by not including any perspectives of any male directors, particularly those who’ve used “male gaze” sexism, to get their side of the story of why they made these choices. (No men are interviewed in the documentary at all.) It’s very easy to dole out criticism of people in a documentary when those people don’t get a chance to respond in the documentary. It’s much harder to confront those people and give them a chance to explain their points of view in the documentary.
Other people interviewed in “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” include “Liberating Hollywood” author Maya Montañez Smukler, Global Media Center for Social Impact founder Sandra de Castro Buffington, cinematographer Nancy Schreiber, intimacy coordinator Ita O’Brien, artist/activist Laura Dale and culture transformation scholar Dr. Raja G. Bhattar. Dale shares a story that she says happened to her when she was an actress, she refused to do a sex scene that wasn’t in the script. She later got an ominous message from a female casting agent, who made this thinly veiled threat in an attempt to coerce Dale to do the sex scene: “We can fix this so won’t destroy your life.”
“Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” comes across as an echo chamber of interviewees who essentially agree with the arguments that Menkes has in her presentation. As valid as many of these issues are, this documentary cannot be considered truly well-balanced if it doesn’t present opposing points of view. It would have made for a higher-quality documentary if it included a healthy exchange of dialogue from people with conflicting opinions.
In “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power,” Menkes makes a statement that could be considered a response to any criticism she gets about these issues. In answer to anyone who thinks she’s just an uptight feminist, Menkes has this to say in the documentary: “If you are a heterosexual male, and you want to photograph some woman’s behind, I am certainly not the sex police. I’m not telling you, ‘Don’t do that.’ I’m just pointing out the fact that a whole lot of majorly acclaimed directors through time have done just that. There isn’t a whole lot of wiggle room for those of us seeing these things and are sick of the results of that kind of attack on our selfhood.”
Kino Lorber released “Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power” in select U.S. cinemas on October 21, 2022. The movie is set for release on digital and VOD on December 6, 2022.
