That's certainly what I hoped was the answer.

I have discovered that The Expendables was at least partially filmed in New Orleans, so go The Expendables.

I liked the Flick Filosopher's question of the day for yesterday: Who would you cast in an all-female ‘Expendables’/‘A-Team’/‘Losers’ action film?

I love good plotting. I can forgive a whole lot if a movie gives me that.

Yeah, his movies are so well constructed. I can kind of see what he means with regards to the plot not servicing character (his criticism of The Prestige is interesting, for instance, and his proposed version would be cool, but, personally, I love that the movie is constructed as a goddamn magic trick). It reminds me of something someone said about Whedon vs. Abrams, which was that Whedon will sacrifice plot for character and Abrams will sacrifice character for plot. And it's true that with Abrams, I am generally in it for the plot. I like plot. I like stories. I like things to happen. And explode.

Still on the topic of fridging, it's not a movie but what about Deadwood in turning the tables? Alma Garrett's husband is killed in the first episode, if I remember correctly, not only to force her through grief and change, but to set in motion a lot of the plot events for the series.

Alias kind of turned the tables as well in the pilot, though admittedly also not a movie.

So, I saw The Losers a couple nights ago, and I thought it was lots of fun.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan: ZOMG, yum. And I never bought Saldana as an action heroine, but I thought she played it well.

I quite liked it.

Interesting. Several of our recent conversations in this thread seemed to have revealed that TV trends almost polar opposite to movies when it comes to subconscious bias tests like Bechdel and fridging. Apparently TV is feminist in a number of ways that film doesn't achieve on any kind of a regular basis.

I'm not sure I'd go that far. I can think of several TV shows where the protagonist has a dead wife and/or child.

I'd say it warrants further examination, but the trends do seem to be there to some degree.

I'd say there's at least enough there to conclude that, if you seek a story that passes Bechdel *and* reverses the fridging roles, you're far likelier to find such stories on TV than at the cinema.

Still, we're only generally talking about the shows we watch, and it's all very anecdotal. But it's still a tendency worth noting, I'd say.

I kind of gave up on that Nolan analysis after the woman who never existed in Memento somehow counted toward the total number of dead women. The term "confirmation bias" sprang to mind.

I have noted that love means lifelong guilt in Nolan's movies. I think that's funny, but I don't consider it a problem he needs to correct. It is true that women are not well-served in Hollywood in general, but I think it is a mistake to turn that kind of lens on an individual artist. Among other things, you create the situation you're complaining about -- if every individual female character is going to be tallied up as being a victim/bitch/saint without any context, the simplest way to avoid that criticism is to not have any female characters at all. (I am thinking of some of the criticism leveled at The Shield over Julian's character arc, because he wasn't, I dunno, a positive role model? Nobody else on that show was; why should he be spared?)

I do wish that Nolan would pick a better actresses to play the ingeniue, but I suspect that name recognition and studios play at least a small role in casting, so I'm not sure how much of his fault that is.

I dunno; the books & DVDs I own don't feature many happy, well-adjusted women, heroic women. But they don't feature many men like that either. People like that don't usually make for stories I, personally, want to see.

Unless, of course, they're pirates.