#4. Any Underdog Sports Film Is Way Better With Female Athletes
My all-time-favorite sports movie has to be Slap Shot, the 1977 Paul Newman film about a podunk hockey team trying to earn fan attention by beating the God out of everyone they encounter. It's a great, all-American underdog film filled with leather pants and uncomfortable gay slurs that was later followed up with Slap Shot 2: Is That Stephen Baldwin? and Slap Shot 3: We Made Slap Shot 3.
I'm not bummed they made two shitty follow-ups to King Cool's swank masterpiece; I'm bummed they made two shitty follow-ups and never took it to the logical next step.
Imagine an unappreciated women's hockey team trying to make a name for themselves by resorting to ultra violence. It would be not only a fun twist but one that amplifies the original film's moral question of using violence over skill. This is actually the plot to a Futurama episode where Leela becomes a baseball novelty instead of a female role model. It's a great story about women's often-mocked role in sports and makes me wonder why every underdog sports movie isn't about women … especially in a world where the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team is performing far better but making five times less than their male counterparts.
Why isn't Ronda Rousey already in a Rocky remake? How have we not made a Sandlot about little girls aspiring to be athletes? Fuck it, where's my goddamn lady Seabiscuit beating the statistical odds? Because female sports movies don't make enough money? Tell that to the highest-grossing baseball movie ever. (picture of A League Of Their Own)
There's no excuse when every female-led sports film like Million Dollar Baby and Bend It Like Beckham goes on to make $216 million and $76 million on meager indie budgets. And yet studios continually go back to the male-dominated underdog genre like it's the safest bet in town.
But this is by far not the most male-dominated genre in need of some dangerous estrogen …
#3. Non-Fictional War Stories Never Involve Women (And They Fucking Should)
Science fiction has long invoked lady war heroes like Private First Class Vasquez and Lieutenant Ripley in the '80s, the cast of Starship Troopers in the '90s, and Agent Carter and Edge Of Tomorrow's Rita Vrataski more recently. We're totally good at it, and even include military women in our comedies and dramas like Stripes and A Few Good Men. Every genre is covered! Except for any war film based on a true story.
Of course, women were traditionally kept out of combat – so perhaps there's just no good lady war stories to tell. At least none compared to Chris Kyle making 160 sniper kills, right?
Turns out there's like 300 dead Germans who would seriously disagree …
Guys, meet Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Not only is her name as awesomely complicated as Vasquez or Vrataski, but Lyudmila also happens to be a Soviet WWII sniper with 309 confirmed kills. That's more people than Rambo killed in the entire Rambo series, according to this one publication.
Along with the badassery we've previously pointed out (like winning a three-day standoff with another sniper), Lyudmila also had to battle the inevitable sexism that came with her occupation – having been constantly pressured to become a field nurse before finally being accepted into the 25th Rifle Division. When the war wound down, she became the first Soviet citizen to travel to the U.S., where reporters flooded her with bullshit questions about wearing makeup to battle instead of highlighting that she murdered more Germans than eight fucking Hindenburgs.
My point here is that this is basically A League Of Their Own with violence. And it took until 2015 for Russia to make a low-budget movie about her. Meanwhile, no such films have been made for Eileen Nearne, a British spy who was tortured and interrogated (to no avail) before escaping the Germans; Nancy Wake, who organized a French resistance and fucking karate-chopped a man to death; or Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, who killed at least three close-range combatants when her squad was ambushed for 25 minutes during the recent Iraq war. She even got her own fucking action figure, already giving her a leg up over most female characters.
At the behest of Kylo Ren, probably.
So why not make a movie about it? Well, it might have to do with the fact that women killing men in movies is never seen as heroic; rather, it's seen as an act of vengeance or just plain hilarious …