Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Blog 2- Endless Love

I chose the movie Endless Love for this assignment, this movie scored a 9 or a B on The Representation Test. This movie is the typical love story about a boy and a girl who fall in love but the boy doesn’t meet the fathers standards so they have to fight against him to be together. One way that this movie is different from some others that put women down is that the girl in this movie is considered more successful than the boy. She is going to Brown to become a doctor eventually and he works on cars and will not be attending college. This is a different story than some where the male is more successful and the girl is just the housewife. That being said, this movie scored a 3 in the “women” section of the test. There were two protagonists in this film and one of them was a woman. This scored two points, the other point came from women being portrayed as more than “objects for the male gaze”. The male in this movie really loves the female and he admires her for many reasons other than just looking at her. He loves everything about her and although she is a pretty sight, it is very clear that he loves her deeply for other reasons besides being nice to look at.
            The “men” section of the test scored 3 points, there are violent men in the film but they are in no way glorified. When the men in this film get violent it is frowned upon and seen as a very bad quality so this film is not glorifying violence at all. This film also avoided perpetuating an extreme and unhealthy body ideal for men, it did not focus much on the looks of men. There were a couple of scenes where there were shirtless men but it was not focused on much and these men did not seem to have unrealistic body shapes like they do in some portrayals. This men also casted a man of color as one of the main characters, he plays the role of the main males best friend. This man is not portrayed as any racial stereotypes, he is just a normal member of the cast. This movie scored well in the men section so it does a relatively good job of portraying men.
            This film scored all points possible in the race, ethnicity, and culture section of the test. It has no stereotypes that I noticed, the cast of the film was mostly white but when there were people of different races it was not noticeable because they were treated the same and acted the same. Therefore, there were not noticeable stereotypes.
            In the LGBT people section and the people with disabilities section this film scored no points because it didn’t feature either of these things at all. All of the romances in the story were between a man and a woman, they weren’t perfect relationships and they showed that the relationships had problems but there weren’t any lesbian or gay couples. This film did a poor job of showing people who might be different because of their sexuality or their sexual orientation or even a disability. This film did score two bonus points because it was written and directed by a woman. There were multiple writers in the film but the same woman who directed the film was also a writer for it.
            The Representation Test does a relatively good job of grading this movie but it could be done better. Endless Love scored a B on the Representation Test although it left out a significant amount of society. In my opinion, this movie did not deserve a B because it left out lots of different races, LGBT people, people with disabilities and people of a variety of ages. To make this test better I would simply change the grading system so that movies that score a 9 like the movie that I graded will not be awarded such a high grade because I don’t think that’s accurate. Movies should represent so much more of society than they do and they should be held accountable for that and not just getting a good grade because they represented a couple of different aspects.

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