CATE BLANCHETT AND Sandra Bullock are leading a team of incredible women in their new movie Ocean’s 8. The movie is a spinoff of the incredibly popular noughties movies which of course started George Clooney and Brad Pitt amongst others.
The reviews so far haven’t been as good as people were hoping for with the Guardian saying it has ‘lifeless direction’ while the Hollywood Reporter said ‘this is a self-satisfied exercise that’s only occasionally as much fun as it thinks it is’.
Cate and Sandra have had something to say about these reviews particularly with the dominance of male movie critics. Speaking to the Press Assocation Cate was asked if Hollywood was improving at telling women’s stories.
It’s Hollywood but it’s also the media, because a studio can support a film and it’s the invisible faces on the internet, and often male reviewers, who can view it through a prism of misunderstanding, and so I think that is a really big part of the equation.
Sandra Bullock went in for the reviewers a bit more and added that they should keep in mind who the film is for when they’re reviewing it.
It would be nice if reviewers reflected who the film is for, like children should review children’s films, not a 60-year-old man. I guess his opinion would be kind of skewed.
This is not the first time Sandra Bullock has criticized the backlash against all female reboots of movies.
Speaking about the backlash particularly against Leslie Jones earlier this month Bullock said she found the whole thing pretty disgusting.
The women are here — we’re not going anywhere. But this isn’t about just women. We like sitting at the table with men. We just want to be invited to their table as well because we like them at our table.
She repeated this sentiment when talking about male film critics last night saying gender balance within the job wouldn’t be a bad thing and would help assess how bad the problem of gender disparity is within Hollywood.
Balancing out the pool of critics so that it reflects the world we are in, like we are trying to reflect the world that I live in and my friends live in.
If Ocean’s 8 is a bad movie, then it’s a bad movie but plenty of bad all-male movies have been made before and not faced as much criticism as both Ocean’s 8 and Ghostbusters did. If bad all male movies can exist then so can bad all female movies. We shouldn’t be discouraging all female reboots though, they’re giving us the representation that so many of us didn’t have growing up.
On air with this crew for Uruguay v Egypt shortly! @StephanieRoche9 @No1shaygiven @KevinDoyle1983 @RTEsoccer #WorldCupRussia2018 pic.twitter.com/nI5fAVGLGO
— Jacqui Hurley (@jacquihurley) June 15, 2018
Don’t ever say that representation isn’t important.
