Hollywood Divas, Indie Queens, and TV Heroines: Contemporary Screen Images of Women / Edition 1

by Susanne Kord, Elisabeth Krimmer

Overview

Hollywood Divas, Indie Queens, and TV Heroines offers an entertaining and critical look at the representation of women in recent movies. Written in a refreshingly accessible style, the book analyzes over thirty box-office hits. The authors explore the screen personae of top stars such as Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Meg Ryan, and Renée Zellweger, as well as independent movie queens like Parker Posey and TV heroines like Sarah Michelle Gellar of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A must-read book for all film buffs who are tired of the mixed gender messages of mainstream culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780742537095
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	12/10/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.94(h) x 0.43(d)

About the Author

Susanne Kord is professor at University College London. Elisabeth Krimmer is assistant professor at the University of California, Davis.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Part I Hollywood Chapter 2 1 Introduction Chapter 3 2 The New-Born Identity: Julia Roberts Chapter 4 3 Running Woman: Sandra Bullock Chapter 5 4 Sleeping with the Enemy: Meg Ryan Chapter 6 5 The Real World is Not Enough: Renée Zellweger Part 7 Part II Some Alternatives Chapter 8 6 Highlights and Low Points: Affairs of State and Kung-Fu Bunnies Chapter 9 7 Hidden Alternatives: Judi Dench, Kathy Bates, Parker Posey, Whoopi Goldberg, and Frances McDormand Chapter 10 8 Vamp(ire)s and Those Who Kill Them: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dana Scully Chapter 11 9 Is This As Good As It Gets? Chapter 12 Notes Chapter 13 Works Cited

Editorial Reviews

Susanne Kord and Elisabeth Krimmer… have plunged into the pool of films from the 1900s and the first decade of this century to uncover the secrets of the modern representation of women on screen. The result is illuminating…and in the hands of these two talented writers, often very funny. It is rare to find an academic book that is prepared to make such unashamed value judgments.

Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Kord and Krimmer's exploration of the treatment of women in the Hollywood cinema of the last fifteen years is an accessible and engaging read. The analyses of key female stars of the 1990s and 2000s, and of the roles—some challenging, some all too familiar—they have played, are both passionate and political. This book should serve as an effective introduction to feminist cultural criticism for a wide readership.

Yvonne Tasker

With analysis both scholarly and a bit snarky, Hollywood Divas looks behind the popular images of women—from Julia to Buffy—to study messages about politics, society, and gender hidden in plain sight on the screen. Movie grosses supply ironic footnotes tracing the dollar value of each film to American image consumers. This book brings to the attention of scholars and buffs the range of images available to film and television audiences in the 1990s and, through tape and DVD, far into the new millennium. The very self-contradictory messages within the same actress's work, even within a single performance, provide the basis for Susanne Kord and Elisabeth Krimmer's significant contribution to screen scholarship.

Mary Alice Money

One of Hollywood Divas' key strengths is its attention to ambiguity and contradiction in women's representations. Kord and Krimmer examine how Hollywood films straddle progressive possibilities and traditional presumptions about women's roles. The authors are timely in their attention to the blurring of industry lines between Hollywood and Indie film production, and, even more importantly, they call on the audience to recognize the political underbelly and ideological power of all filmic representations.

Adrienne McCormick

Susanne Kord and Elisabeth Krimmer… have plunged into the pool of films from the 1900s and the first decade of this century to uncover the secrets of the modern representation of women on screen. The result is illuminating…and in the hands of these two talented writers, often very funny. It is rare to find an academic book that is prepared to make such unashamed value judgments.

Spring 2010 Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal

To examine "the representation of women in film from 1990 to 2003," Kord and Krimmer discuss the work of four actors-Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Meg Ryan and Renee Zellweger-who starred in blockbuster movies during this period. They connect each actor with a theme: Roberts is woman in search of herself, Bullock is "running after... or running away" from something, Ryan is angling for "reconciliation with patriarchal structures" and Zellweger is an ordinary woman trying to escape into the extraordinary. If these actors ever took roles defying those generalizations, they aren't mentioned here. The analyses Kord and Krimmer (professors at University College London and University of California, Davis, respectively) do make reveal more about their own politics than about women in film (for example, they find rampant "implied sex" scenes, such as one in Speed: "the subway train shoots through the billboard like a penis through a hymen"). While the authors go on to discuss women as violent action heroes and female roles in independent films and TV, their visible politics make their evaluations quite predictable (beware movies like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, for example, where "patriarchal containment of female power" masquerades as "female empowerment"). The authors' habit of ignoring any films that might undercut their perspective and their reluctance to discuss directors or scriptwriters make this book rather shallow. (Feb.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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