"New Moon" Weekend

Just a quick post right now about the giant juggernaut that is the Twilight franchise releasing its latest film this weekend. I probably won't see it, as I have little interest in the story on its own, but I just wanted to comment because it is huge, and it's striking to me that it's the first film in recent memory that is aimed specifically at women that is pretty much guaranteed to be a mega-hit at the box office.

I'm sort of ambivalent about this. On the one hand, it's about time that women and female-centric films were seriously considered as viable in Hollywood again, because they haven't been for a long time. There's this sense that women just don't go to the movies the same way men do (gee, I wonder if it might be because most big films released aren't aimed at women or even female-friendly most of the time), and it's about time that that idea got a serious rattling. On the other hand, I have some serious ideological problems with the stories in this series, and find them to be deeply problematic in some ways, so their continuing success and validation are troubling for me. The fact that it is so widely popular might mean that if Hollywood does decide to put more stock in projects aimed at women, they're going to be following this formula. So it's a bit of a double-edged blade.

That was really all I had to say on the subject. I'll have more posts this weekend, I hope, since I have tons of ideas right now.