Word: perilousness
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PHILIPPINES Hostages in Peril Police said they arrested two senior members of the al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf rebel group accused of kidnapping, murder and connections to bomb blasts in the city of General Santos last month. Officals said Salih Abdullah was an intelligence officer for the group, while Satar Yacub had been based on Basilan Island, where rebels are holding two U.S. citizens hostage. Earlier in the week, the group threatened to kill the couple, saying negotiations were closed...
...psycho, and let us watch. If the woman has an ailing daughter for the baddies to terrorize, good. If the man she loves has a dark past and maybe a homicidal kink, better. If she must confront two mad-genius kids, best. Just put our heroine in dire peril before she emerges victorious. It's a lesson in female resiliency. Also, these days, big box office...
...talked, fought and loved as equals, and audiences flocked to see these battles of wits and wills. Often women dominated the most popular movies. Until 1965, Hollywood's top-grossing film was Gone With the Wind, which was succeeded by The Sound of Music--two films of women in peril (Yankees! Nazis!). Among today's heroines in jeopardy, there's no room for Vivien Leigh's classy spoiledness or Julie Andrews' sassy sweetness...
...problem with current women-in-peril films is they've got the peril but not the deep emotional resonance," observes Camille Paglia, the post-feminist author and agitator. "They're driven by gimmicky, high-concept plots. But the center of great women's pictures is the long close-up of a woman's soulful, suffering face as her eyes brim with tears. Today's actresses are too buff and brittle to take that kind of scrutiny...Too many know how to do everything but play real women. If the women-in-jeopardy motif can make filmmakers start to think...
...fact is, the women-in-peril films are like most other recent U.S. movies, from Pearl Harbor to In the Bedroom: they are revenge fantasies, playing on the understandable but infantile belief that every atrocity can be overcome by a righteously violent response. But life doesn't work that way, and neither did most of the best old movies. Casablanca and Gone With the Wind did not end happily for their heroines; the frustrations of duty and destiny intervened. In the end, the new women-in-peril films betray a simultaneous naivete (that the heroine will triumph) and cynicism (that...