The Bechdel Test, for those you who aren't familiar with it, asks three simple questions as a kind of test to see how well female characters are portrayed in movies & literature these days:
1. Are there at least two women in this movie?
2. Do these two women ever talk to each other?
3. About anything other than a man?
The Russo Test, similarly, asks if a movie meet the following criteria:
1. The film should have at least one LGBT character.
2. That character must not be defined as "the gay one." (IE they are made up of the same sort of unique character traits commonly used to differentiate straight characters from each other).
3. He/she must be tied significantly into the plot. (They're not there just to provide 'colorful commentary', or set-up a punchline; this character should matter).
It was established by GLAAD earlier this year as part of a project to see how well-represented the LGBT community has been portrayed in the mainstream media (big blockbuster type movies, etc.) last year.
Anyway, just thought I would post about it here since I happen to watch (& review) a lot of gay movies. I found out about it through an article that was linked on IMDB (Here's the article).
Of course, other than "God loves Uganda", I haven't really wanted to post any of the movies I've recently watched. Some of them have been bad (see below), and the rest have just been "okay".
(too lazy to link these; you can find them all on imdb or netflix instant)
- The Men next door
- Morgan
- Bad
- Ethan Mao (pretty bad)
- Clapham Junction
- Yossi & Jagger
- 29th & Gay (pretty bad)
- Gayby
None of these are 'big studio' movies, though.
Think of a couple of big-studio movies you've seen in the last year that had a gay character. Did they pass the Russo test?
No comments:
Post a Comment