We already knew that Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas was going to be a mess. The original teaser trailer wasn’t much of a teaser but rather a full blown, spoiler-filled revelation that the film was a vehicle for modern-day feminist propaganda. Well, the director recently confirmed that it’s literally a film about feminist propaganda.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Sophia Takal told them…
“I didn’t just want to make a movie about a bunch of women getting slaughtered. It just gave me a pit in my stomach. This is not to say that a man might want to see that. I just think I felt very much a responsibility not to perpetuate this idea of disposable female characters, because of how it makes me feel when I watch that. I call this movie a fiercely feminist film, so I don’t mind being asked about that at all.”
Bounding Into Comics picked up a few other choice quotes from the EW interview, where Takal explains how she wanted to portray the film in her vision for [current year]…
““The original Black Christmas feels so contemporary and modern for the time. Since then I feel like there have been so many movies about sorority sisters where the women have been portrayed as dumb, bimbo-y idiots. What I love was this was a group of women who, even though there was some conflict and strife — you know, Margot Kidder was a real spitfire [laughs] — they were all very much three-dimensional, strong female characters. I wanted to make something that reflected our time right now, drawing more from what the original evoked for me rather than great plot points. For me, it was about what does it feel like to be a woman in 2019?”
What does it feel like to be a woman in 2019? In current media is that butch lesbians that hate men and look like a mix of cocoa powder and pomegranate mixed together in a broken jadeite bowl from Mosser?
But it gets worse!
Takal then decided to take aim at the mythical boogeyman that haunts every third-wave feminists’ dreams… “The Patriarchy”.
She told Entertainment Weekly…
“It’s more inspired by the feeling that Black Christmas made me feel watching it, this idea of misogyny always being out there and never totally eradicable. So that was the jumping-off point for how I came up with this plot. I’d compare it more to how Luca Guadagnino remade Suspiria than to a straight-ahead remake. […]
“[…] [At] the beginning of the #MeToo Movement, it seemed like there was a really big reckoning, particularly in the film industry, but in lots of industries, where powerful men were being called out for their predatory behavior. And then, in early 2019, I sort of felt, and I know a lot of women who I know felt, the creeping back of these predatory men into positions of power and this feeling of like, “Oh, even when you’ve won the battle you still have to battle this patriarchal structure.” It seemed like everyone, the men and the women involved in the movie, on screen and off, were all really committed to exploring that feeling and were really interested in making a movie about that.”
Sorry… I had to take a moment to recover from a gag reflex.
Truth be told, the whole thing reeks of epic fail.
The trailer looks bad; they spoiled the villains; the heroines are annoying; and having a “diverse” cast of multicultural females kicking the butts of straight, white (evil) men is such a insipid, played-out, unoriginal cliché in [current year] that it should shock absolutely no one if this crappy third-try remake of a cult classic happens to take its wokeness on a one-way trip to the Get Woke, Go Broke Master List.
We won’t have to wait long to find out exactly how well Takal’s “fiercely feminist” film fares on the open market when it hits theaters on December 13th.
(Thanks for the news tip KotakuInAction 2)