A few years ago, I saw a documentary at the Normal Theater called Miss Representation. As I sat there, next to my then ten-year-old daughter, it occurred to me just how under and poorly represented women really are in the media. Women are pitted against each other, made unnecessarily into sexual objects, dumbed down and made minor characters mainly serving as love interests. There are few movies with a strong female lead that doesn't have giant breasts (I'm looking at you, Lara Croft) or just unnecessarily made weak by lusting after a man.
Going into it, I was nervous that this was going to be another love story gone wrong. Girl meets boy, boy breaks girl's heart, girl turns evil... you've seen it a million times, chewed up and spit out into the same tired configurations.
Man was I wrong.
I absolutely loved this movie and the newer trend of bucking the old stereotypical love stories with female leads. Although some parts of the movie were uncomfortable to me (did anyone else see the wing dismemberment as a pseudo date rape situation? It legitimately made me nauseated.), I loved that this movie focused on who Maleficient was (and who she thought she was) and her relationship with herself. Bad things happened, she followed the "human" path of wanting revenge and learned that it doesn't fix things, opened herself to alternative forms of love (besides the cliched romantic variety).
This movie, written by a woman, is an amazingly strong retelling of a fairy tale that we thought we knew with HUGE feminist undertones. We need more movies like this for our girls. You don't need to wait for your true love, you can have bad things happen to you and come back stronger and, ultimately, YOU are in charge of your own destiny.
We should all be so lucky to have a little Maleficient in us.
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