If you observed Jennifer Lawrence and tried really hard to put her fairly on an intelligence tier list she would be safely in the middle. Overanalyzing what she says in any context is an utter waste of time.
Aliens has her beat by a few decades.
Yeah, and Aliens is actually GOOD.
Came here to say this. Why do people forget about Ellen Ripley?!?
They’re transphobes
Huh?
What about Underworld ?
Fuck guys, I forgot about this. I’m going to write a strongly worded tweet to Jennifer because I bet she forgot she was wrong too!
Be sure to include some kind of passive-aggressive “joke” about how everyone in Hollywood who’s left of Harvey Weinstein is stupid.
How quickly we forget Foxy Brown.
This feels more like she was obviously exaggerating for dramatic effect versus outright lying. In a conversation, I think most would understand that she meant not very much and she was talking about the young adult genre in general.
alien doesnt count?
Alien isn’t an action movie. It’s a horror. Aliens, however, is absolutely an action movie.
Dude, there are at least:
- Alien
- Doomsday
- Planet Terror
- Aeon Flux (edit: not Aron Flux)
- Catwoman
- all Charlie’s Angels movies
- and literally all Mills Jovovich movies
They are not all that well known, but the claim is still complete nonsense.
Edit:
- Ultraviolet
- Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
- Sucker Punch
- Salt
- Pans Labyrinth
- Lara Croft
- Kill Bill !!! (How the f did I forget Kill Bill?)
So I realise it’s a typo, but I’m also chuckling at the idea of a “non-dei” (heavily /s) version of Aeon Flux following the life and adventures of Aron Flux.
Ultraviolet is absolutely fucking terrible.
Don’t misunderstand this list as recommendations, Sucker Punch and Charlie’s Angels are also movies with mixed reviews.
Oh hell I need to watch at least Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon from that list. Possibly more. But a wuxia film starring Michelle Yeoh? Hell yeoh!
From the lesser known entries on this list I recommend Doomsday. But CTHD is a musst watch and even on a lot of “top X movies of all time” lists.
She was widely ridiculed for the quote with Alien as a notable example.
I think the rest of the quote was pretty accurate. She was speaking to gender bias in Hollywood and saying she was happy to be an exception, which I think was fine. But because she said something boneheadedly wrong to tee up the point, that’s all anyone really remembers about it.
You can be wrong but still hold a valid point broadly.
If you say “franchises” instead of movies and limit it to movies where the woman is the STAR and not part of a duo (Terminator and Terminator 2) and goes for 3 or more movies the only other example I can think of off the top of my head is Alien.
Theres a lot of female starred standalone movies, and a decent number of duos, sometimes with sequels. But once you start looking beyond that it gets REALLY skinny really fast.
Resident Evil has entered the chat…
We try to forget those movies exist at all.
You can’t deny the first one was great.
The first one was great, the third one was good. The 6th one was funny-bad and the final one was OK.
The first one was good, they descend quite quickly though.
True, I knew there would be other exceptions I just couldnt think of any off the top of my head.
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047771/mediaviewer/rm3607541505/
Underworld
Or Terminator 2?
Alien came out 12 years before terminator 2.
Yes, I was just giving another extremely well known example that predates Hunger Games by a few decades
T2 came out 34 years ago.
Id even say that arguably that doesnt count.
She was a lead role, but Michael Beihn and Arnie got top billing in the Terminator and Terminator 2 movies. Edward Furlong and Linda Hamilton had “starring” roles but they werent the lead.
Sure, but Sarah was really the protagonist. Regardless, Alien came much earlier
Terminator would be a better and earlier example.
Absolutely does. But they wanted to introduce us to one of their favorites. Which if I must say absolutely is an underrated awesome movie. Gina Davis is great in almost everything she’s ever been in. They didn’t imply it was the first.
As you said aliens definitely predates it and also counts. But the statements that it was the first big female led action movie was just so ridiculous because there are so many good ones that are easy to point out. Just how that blue origin launch with the all female crew was somehow this big step for females in space. Completely ignoring and down playing all the female astronauts throughout NASA’s history.
Fun fact about that: I think it was Mike Mullane who was on one of the first missions with a female astronaut. He found her, obviously, to be beyond qualified, and was just as furious as all the other astronauts of any gender at the dumb type of “how will you do your makeup in space” type of questions she would get from the press.
Anyway, partway through the mission her hair got caught by some kind of machinery, sucked in and tangled up in it, and it was a little bit of a pain in the ass to get things sorted out. She hunted down every single member of the crew and made them swear an oath under threat of terrible violence not to say a goddamned word about it, because it was intolerable that there be some actual negative issue with some reality that was connected with her gender in any way, that anyone could point to as a reason why male astronauts were better.
Then he put it in his book. Of course. Hopefully enough time had gone by at that point that we understood that astronauts can be qualified even if they have hoo-has. Or, well, we did until Jeff Bezos got involved.
Pam Grier would like a word
Dunno if that counts as an action movie, but she is wrong because there were a number of action movies with one or more women as leads in the 70s and 80s. They were B movies, but still movies!
aliens
The internet loves ridiculing women who slip up, or like Jennifer Lawrence in this case, are maliciously taken out of context for the purpose of ridiculing women
I think some of it is because we love our action women! Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton were fucking AWESOME action stars that were unique, smart and complex; and not just “woman who acts like a douche male” type that most modern poorly written female action stars are.
And IMO they were way better actresses and better written than whatever hunger games was.
Fun fact, the character of Ripley was written for a man, and only once the script was complete did they randomly decide to cast a woman for the part and see what happened.
And yes I completely agree with you. Implications about how Hollywood does things are left as an exercise for the reader.
Doesn’t the internet ridicule everyone who slips up though?
The Internet also takes every opportunity to elevate women, warranted or not. I suppose it balances out.
True. There’s certain asymmetry in how internet likes to shit on women. You would have to be blind to not notice
It is some kind of sport in every single community regardless of political spectrum. The difference is amount of slurs
I always get the death threats quite immediately when I mention being a land lady. There is asymmetric escalation
I’ve been downvoted for my feminist opinions being unforgiving towards men. I hate you for your job title, not your gender.
I wasn’t allowed to watch “violent” movies as a kid, so I missed a lot of action classics like RoboCop, Rambo, etc. But there were a few exceptions we had on tape so they got watched a lot. Long Kiss Goodnight, T2, Alien,… I rewatched this one again a couple of years ago and was shocked at how violent it actually is. It finally clicked that my single Mum was making an exception for iconic kick-arse women.
Mary Pickford “dude wut” Also Pearl White in the perils of Pauline 1914 there’s probably earlier but early film and fire etc
Great movie.
Kill Bill? or its inspiration, Lady Snowblood?
La Femme Nikita (original French), Alien, and Terminator 2 all had seriously kick-ass female leads.
