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[Movie] So I was right about Maleficent

Warning: talking about rape again.

Or rather, the way I interpreted the wing-removal scene in the movie. Angelina Jolie has confirmed that it was very deliberately indicative of rape.

Now Jolie has confirmed that the scene deliberately echoes the too-familiar beats of the date-rape narrative. “We were very conscious, the writer [Linda Woolverton] and I, that it was a metaphor for rape,” Jolie said during an interview with BBC Woman’s Hour.

There’s another quote right after this one in the article that’s worth emphasizing, I think.

Jolie had spoken forcefully at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, on Tuesday, demanding an end to rape as a tool of war. “It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict,” she said at the Summit. “There is nothing inevitable about it.”

I think the way the movie staged the scene is very in line with what Jolie said there. It’s very clear that Stephen’s decision to cut off Maleficent’s wings is a very, very deliberate one. He went out to meet her already prepared to do something terrible. He made a conscious decision to drug her. He made a conscious decision, when he couldn’t bring himself to kill her, to still do something that hurt her in a very fundamental way. Stephen chooses to do this because he wants power, and the crown. It in no way something that was destined to happen from the beginning of their relationship, or even because he threw in his lot with the humans.

And it’s sad that it feels very unusual for a movie to depict rape as something that isn’t just about the “heat of the moment” but rather a choice on the part of the attacker (either pre-meditated or a snap decision) to hurt someone. We’re still getting fed the bullshit rape fantasy where it somehow turns consensual partway through more often than I care to think about.

I have to take extreme exception to one thing the article says, as a throw-away:

Maleficent may have muddled messages—the fact that Maleficent’s entire motivation as a villain is rejection by a man is not a great feminist message—

Are you fucking serious? Did we not watch the same movie? Did you just forget the part where the entire previous paragraph of the article is about how Stephen cutting off Maleficent’s wings is a fucking rape scene? Now, if we want to gripe about her entire motivation for villainy being about what a man has done to her, okay then. That’s definitely a legitimate complaint. But raped by a man and rejected by a man are not even on the same plane of existence.

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feminism movie

[Movie] Maleficent

Going to start this one off with a disclaimer, which is this:

I am not an original dyed-in-the-wool Maleficent fangirl. I do not have a massive ladyboner for this Disney villain the way quite a few of my friends do. So I’m taking this movie as itself. It’s been well over a decade (man, probably closer to two) since I last watched Sleeping Beauty, so all I really can say about the original animated lady of menace is that she sure had some style. 

TL;DR: I have absolutely nothing to say about how this movie relates to the character as seen in Sleeping Beauty. So please don’t yell at me.

All right.

I really, really liked this movie. Even more than I expected to, and I was already looking forward to it.

Angelina Jolie? Fucking amazing. I am already so in love with that woman I could write odes to her (non-enhanced) cheekbones, so this did not surprise me. She made a stylish Maleficent, from menacing to downright intimidating even when she was being “good.” And man, those contacts she had. Holy crap, her eyes.

Other than Maleficent, Diaval (Sam Riley), and Stephen (Sharlto Copley), there wasn’t a lot to most of the characters. I found the three pixies particularly grating. There were some odd pacing issues, and the movie seems to kind of get lost and meander during the second act until it remembers where it’s going and launches into the third.

The movie was pretty enough, but could never quite decide if it wanted to look realistic or be overtly cartoonish. I think either style can work just fine (even cartoonish does all right mixed with live action if the movie just jumps in with both feet) but never being willing to commit to one or the other or draw lines between the two realities of the film didn’t serve it well visually. I found myself wishing there was less cgi. A lot less cgi. Particularly when they were in the fairy lands, pretty much everything was computer generated and some of it just…didn’t quite make it out of the uncanny valley, I think. (And missed a golden opportunity for some gorgeous puppets and practical effects.) Or maybe it just looked a little too fake. I found the miniaturized pixies disturbing. They just did not look right in some fundamental way that really bothered me. Score was all right but nothing to write home about.

So, not the best offering I could have hoped for. Honestly, Snow White and the Huntsman did a much better job visually, I think.

What really made me like Maleficent was the story itself, and I found several aspects of it very interesting:

Going to cut this now for major spoilers.