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Thelma & Louise
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by MGM (Video & DVD)
Sales Rank: 8105
Price: $4.94
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<i>Thelma & Louise</i> is a feminist manifesto writ large on the big screen, a smart and funny gender reversal of the standard Hollywood buddy formula, a road movie extraordinaire, with characters who became instant cultural icons. No matter how you define it, Ridley Scott's 1991 box-office hit pinched a nerve and made the cover of national news magazines for tweaking gender politics like no movie before or since. Callie Khouri's screenplay overhauls the buddy formula with its story about two best friends (Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis) who embark on a liberating adventure that turns into an interstate police chase after a traumatic incident makes both women into fugitives; they are en route to a destiny they could never have imagined. The perfect casting of Sarandon and Davis makes <i>Thelma & Louise</i> a movie for the ages, and Brad Pitt became an overnight star after his appearance as the con-artist cowboy who gives Davis a memorable (but costly) night in a roadside motel. <i>--Jeff Shannon</i>
Viewer Reviews
To describe this movie as feminist is ridiculous. The female leads don't use their heads, operate on pure and unchecked emotion (mostly fear-based), seem to feel alive only when they're exhibiting the same level of violence that the cartoon-character-evil-men they cross paths with have exhibited towards them, and finally "triumph" by committing suicide, albeit in a "romantic" fashion by driving their convertible, top-down, over a cliff at the Grand Canyon while they clasp hands in hysterical "sisterhood."
Give me a f^%$#&^g break here, people. Feminisim is about responsibility every bit as much as it's about freedom. I don't know about your world, but in mine it's necessary to have a functioning brain, to be capable of rational thought and right action, to know when to ask for help and when to give it, and to be able to exercise some impulse control and deal effectively with unfair and sometimes even abusive treatment. Because it's not a perfect world. Not for men, and not for women. Deal.
OK, the movie seems to posit that these two - especially the Geena Davis character - are so incapacitated due to the abuse they've suffered that they're not capable of any of that. Gee, sounds like the excuse often given by male murderers and rapists for the horrible things they do. And it just doesn't wash.
Feminism does not equal intellectual vacuity and man-hating - although to accuse this film of man hating seems laughable. There are hardly any "men" in it, just stereotypes of men who exist merely to give the female leads an excuse to dig themselves an ever-deeper hole of violence and idiocy leading to suicide.
Yes, suicide. Death. That's triumph? That's a feminist statement? Not in my book.
This movie isn't man-hating because there aren't any men in it, only cartoon characters. But it IS woman-hating because it never even entertains the possibility that women who've been treated with violence and gross unfairness, women who've had their humanity stifled, might still truly triumph by undertaking the mostly interior, unglamorous fight for their own humanity and might truly win by living out life - yes, LIVING it out - on their own terms: creatively, lovingly, intelligenty, compassionately, productively, with self-awareness, as adults, in this imperfect world. That's real strength, and that's real feminism. The two-hour-long temper-tantrum the female leads in this movie engage in is not.
This movie panders to spoiled, gutless American women who enjoy their "victim" role and who refuse to do the work of taking responsibility for their own lives, as adults, in one of the richest countries on earth. I suggest these women go to a place like Somalia and see what the women there have to deal with daily, and then come back and see if they still see a self-indulgent, self-pitying, mindless movie like this one in quite the same way.
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Thelma & Louise
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