Wonder Women

I've been thinking about this Wonder Woman movie. Over on my blog, Electronic Cerebrectomy, I've talked on and off about it, lamenting the weak presence of women among America's directors. America isn’t very strong on the female point of view in cinema. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of years, since Joel Silver announced that he wanted Joss Whedon to write the Wonder Woman movie because “he knows how to write women.” My own negative feelings about Whedon’s work aside, my first thought was that, just maybe, women also knew how to write women. Is it such a strange, foreign idea to think that maybe a woman should handle the Wonder Woman movie?

Someone in my comments section challenged me: come up with someone to direct this Wonder Woman since you hate Joss Whedon so much. Then he suggested that Sam Raimi, Bryan Singer, and Mark Steven Johnson are directors who really have superhero experience. I suggested that sort of thinking is why the Wonder Woman movie is never going to be anything more than fantasy material for thirteen year-old boys. Why not try to make it a movie about a character instead of yet another superhero movie?

I want to see other viewpoints in film, and the woman's point of view is especially interesting to me because, well, I'm not a woman and I'm interested in how they think about things. And not in that commercial, obvious, cutesy Nora Ephron/Penny Marshall/Nancy Myers way. And not in that way that Penelope Spheeris or Amy Heckerling are co-opted to make comedies for kids and stupid people. Yes, Amy Heckerling still had Clueless, and Penelope Spheeris made The Decline of Western Civilization, but it's hard to argue credentials when someone finds themselves directing a movie starring Kadeem Hardison as a basketball-playing ghost.

It keeps happening to more recent talents, too. Angela Robinson, Maggie Greenwald, Francine McDougall, Sara Sugarman--all filmmakers with interesting sensibilities, all consigned of late to directing Disney movies. Gurinder Chadha, the director of Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice, is now being touted as the director of either I Dream of Jeannie or Dallas. Talk about getting marginalized. Where are the female equivalents of Spielberg, Scorsese, and (Francis Ford) Coppola? Too many movies about women are made by men, who seem to have their own fairly conventional and stereotypical ideas about how women grow up and deal with the world.

Why should a man make a Wonder Woman movie? Because stuff might have to blow up?

Here are a couple of directors I'd like to see more of:
Asia Argento (director of Scarlet Diva and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things)
Coralie Trinh Thi (director of Baise-Moi)
Jamie Babbit (director of But I'm a Cheerleader)
Kimberly Pierce (director of Boys Don't Cry)
Sofia Coppola (director of The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and Marie Antoinette)
Patricia Cardoso (director of Real Women Have Curves)
Niki Caro (director of Whale Rider)
Patty Jenkins (director of Monster)
Jane Anderson (director of Normal and The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio)
Isabel Coixet (director of the underrated My Life Without Me)
Nicole Kassel (director of The Woodsman)
Barbara Kopple (director of Havoc and Shut Up and Sing)
Mary Harron (director of I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho, and The Notorious Bettie Page)
Laurie Collyer (director of Sherrybaby)

These are all women I'd like to see get more opportunities to direct. I'd pay to see a film directed by any of them a lot sooner than I would to see another Michael Bay travesty. Is it so against the Hollywood grain to think that the scope of American film should be widened to let women in?

If so, that's probably a good thing.

Tell me what you think: women directors? Wonder Woman?