Michael Medved is the first person I've ever heard, ever, EVAR, expressing any degree of disbelief that she could not only take Brad Pitt down if she really wanted to, but reduce him to a featureless pulpy mass with one hand tied behind her back without breaking a sweat.

You didn't ask me. She was not buff in the movie. She was scrawny as hell. Not buff. I disagree with most of his points, but the weakest part (well, the whole no-plot thing was an issue too) of a movie I really enjoyed was how one of the equal physical protagonists looked like a lollipop with breasts. And Mrs. Smith wasn't as crazy as Jolie can seem, which is what I'd chalk up as Angelina's main equaliser.

Ehn. In the first picture, she still looks, to my eyes anyway, at any rate physically tougher than Reese or Julia Roberts or whoever else Medved mentioned approvingly in that article. If she actually looked in the film the way she did in the second picture, that'd be bad, but it looks so creepily perfect and airbrushed it's hard to tell. I totally defer to your far more informed who's-actually-buff judgment, though.

Doesn't make me like the article, or Medved's general Flandersness, any better, though.

He doesn't have to be wrong about every opinion to be an idiot.

As for Mrs. Smith, I was most struck in the chair balancing scene of how little muscle mass she was toting. I'm pissed to drop to 135 - I'd have to be at least ten (at least) pounds lighter again to have arms like her. And they call me skinny at the centre at 145.

Fighting up in weight classes is hard.

She's definately not as physically impressive/potentially intimidating as she is in the image I have of her in my head.

She's definately not as physically impressive/potentially intimidating as she is in the image I have of her in my head.

I'll have to agree with Debeyesse here.

And, speak of arms, my viewing of the movie Chicago was somewhat spoiled by the scrawny yet muscular arms of Renee Zellweger in flapper garb. It just looked non-period and WRONG to me. Either really thin, or with a bit of flab, but Roxie Hart wouldn't have those arms.

In the two Kill Bill movies, lithe, lovely Uma Thurman becomes a sadistic avenger who, in one much-heralded scene, uses Samurai swords to dismember more than 80 highly trained, male Ninja assassins.

Hereby proving that he can't do his job very well. If he had watched the second one, David Carradine actually SAYS that there weren't that many.

Despite political correctness, most of us continue to harbor a visceral preference for brawny male cops or firefighters to come to our rescue in emergencies.

This sounds to me like Michael Medved's personal preference. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

It just looked non-period and WRONG to me.

Angela Bassett's arms in What's Love Got to Do with It are so anachronistic that they nearly take me out of the movie every time I watch it. Tina Turner never had stompers that ate Tokyo in the 1960s, damnit!

I'm pretty sure the Ned Flanders character on The Simpsons is based on him, with some added humanizing touches.

OMG, I'd never thought of that, but it's SO true. Heh.

That article was head-spinny.

pop culture's odd determination to erase gender differences

Ha! Christina Aguilera's buttcheeks beg to differ.

Also this summer, Red Eye featured fragile, innocent Rachel McAdams (best known from The Notebook) inexplicably besting highly trained terrorist hit-man Cillian Murphy in deadly hand-to-hand combat.

To be fair, she did have the element of surprise, and weapons (um, unconventional ones), while he did not. Also, Cillilan Murphy is the size of my toothbrush. I think I could pick him up one-handed.

Also also, that was the whole point of the movie. The character was a professional doormat (a hotel manager), so it was all about her grasping power in an overt way, and telling somebody "no".

(For all it was a silly thriller, it was a neatly laid-out thriller, with a nice little arc and everything. At the end, the audience was cheering her.)

The public doesn't yearn for stylish chicks to replicate the sweaty brutality of male action stars, but prefers watching characters who display the distinctively feminine strengths associated with the natural superiority of women.

Don't you love how he tries to make it a compliment, at the end? Don't fight back against a beatdown, honey; use your wiles and shit. What, wiles don't work against a beatdown? Not my problem.

Typical of Medved, I'm afraid, and a terrible bit of rhetoric. If he handed that in as a freshman comp paper, I'd give him a D.

Anyone else wishing for Medved vs. ita, dark alley, barehanded? Just me?(It would be a really easy fight for ita, but the part where she suckerpunches him and says "Wile this, motherfucker," would be my favorite clip of anything ever.) Cool. And I thought I couldn't hate him more. I don't remember exactly which now, but he has dumped on a number of my favorite films, probably for feminism. And he can't be a Homicide fan.(Not with Kay acting "like a man.") Somebody needs to kick his ass. I did recall thinking in WLG...that it looked like it might be too easy for Angela-as-Tina to, you know, "take" Ike, but he was controlling her psychologically too, so for me, that didn't last long...it was a great performance.