(no subject)
Jan. 24th, 2004 10:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cleolindaI would just like to take a moment to say, God bless female fansite webmasters. The funny thing is, they're almost all I run into these days. Guys are the ones who run movie fansites--Batman, Superman, Hulk, etc.--but it's the girls who run the actor fansites for the most part, male and female actors alike. Of course there are exceptions, but this has generally been my experience over the last two years. And you know what? God bless 'em. They just get it--a lot quicker than the guys, too. The guys always sit there and ask, No, really, that's all you want? What exactly do you get out of this?
Maybe it's something embedded deep in our social genetics, but women just seem to grasp the concept--and how it benefits both of us--a lot more quickly. And they're always excited to join up and what else can they do and let's keep in touch. Guys? Well, I rarely ever hear from them again. (I have to break in here to say that the guys at Keira Knightley Wavefront are absolute dolls.) Which is fine. But considering that guys are usually so concerned about how many hits a day they get--one webmaster was having a completely normal IM conversation with me, and then he suddenly blurted out, "I get 250,000 hits a day!" Uh, put your ePenis away, dear--you would think that they would see that helping people usually results in 1) tons of goodwill and 2) links back to your own site.
You know what the saddest thing is? If the major movie news sites--CHUD, Coming Soon, IGN, Dark Horizons, AICN, etc.--are all male. If there are female editors, I don't know about it. Well, Empire Online, I think. But that's the official website of a film magazine. None of the built-from-the-ground-up sites are run by women. Which is why you see all this coverage devoted to horror/action/scifi/comic books--many of which do appeal to women, not that they realize it--and a movie like Pirates of the Caribbean sneaks up and stuns everyone with its popularity.
That's what always cracks me up--people are astonished when this or that movie is unexpectedly huge, when it's a no-brainer from a female perspective. Lord of the Rings? I can't tell you how many articles were written about how it wouldn't appeal to women, never mind that there are 65 flavors of hot in the cast. X2? Ditto. The Hulk? Well... a movie that pushes shirtless Eric Bana out of the way in favor of the Angry Green Giant, well, it's not gonna do too well. Duh.
Anyway. I don't know why I've gone on such a ramble today. But that's always the perspective I've tried to run my site with--what do I find interesting, and what do my friends find interesting? And the answers surprise me sometimes (if you'd told me I'd end up looking forward to Hellboy, I wouldn't have believed you). But what I consistently find is that male-run sites miss a lot of things that women are interested in. Here's hoping we fix that. :)
Maybe it's something embedded deep in our social genetics, but women just seem to grasp the concept--and how it benefits both of us--a lot more quickly. And they're always excited to join up and what else can they do and let's keep in touch. Guys? Well, I rarely ever hear from them again. (I have to break in here to say that the guys at Keira Knightley Wavefront are absolute dolls.) Which is fine. But considering that guys are usually so concerned about how many hits a day they get--one webmaster was having a completely normal IM conversation with me, and then he suddenly blurted out, "I get 250,000 hits a day!" Uh, put your ePenis away, dear--you would think that they would see that helping people usually results in 1) tons of goodwill and 2) links back to your own site.
You know what the saddest thing is? If the major movie news sites--CHUD, Coming Soon, IGN, Dark Horizons, AICN, etc.--are all male. If there are female editors, I don't know about it. Well, Empire Online, I think. But that's the official website of a film magazine. None of the built-from-the-ground-up sites are run by women. Which is why you see all this coverage devoted to horror/action/scifi/comic books--many of which do appeal to women, not that they realize it--and a movie like Pirates of the Caribbean sneaks up and stuns everyone with its popularity.
That's what always cracks me up--people are astonished when this or that movie is unexpectedly huge, when it's a no-brainer from a female perspective. Lord of the Rings? I can't tell you how many articles were written about how it wouldn't appeal to women, never mind that there are 65 flavors of hot in the cast. X2? Ditto. The Hulk? Well... a movie that pushes shirtless Eric Bana out of the way in favor of the Angry Green Giant, well, it's not gonna do too well. Duh.
Anyway. I don't know why I've gone on such a ramble today. But that's always the perspective I've tried to run my site with--what do I find interesting, and what do my friends find interesting? And the answers surprise me sometimes (if you'd told me I'd end up looking forward to Hellboy, I wouldn't have believed you). But what I consistently find is that male-run sites miss a lot of things that women are interested in. Here's hoping we fix that. :)
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-24 09:52 am (UTC)Whee! Best line I've read on LJ, ever. Heh heh.
Lord of the Rings? I can't tell you how many articles were written about how it wouldn't appeal to women, never mind that there are 65 flavors of hot in the cast.
Oh, so very true! Of course, the movies also had to be good. If they weren't, I don't think droves of women would have sat through all three of them (multiple times!), no matter how much pretteh was involved.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-24 12:34 pm (UTC)As is "the movies also had to be good." They do! I think we have a much lower tolerance for crap in some genres. I also think that's why POTC and X2 did so well--they were good
and had lots of delicious men. How could The Hulk hope to compete, with its angsty boringnessand only one delicious man?By this theory? If Troy is any good, it will make more money than God.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-24 02:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-24 02:36 pm (UTC)Silly boys.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-24 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-01-24 08:23 pm (UTC)And you have always been one of them. You have always been helpful and open and giving. I'm talking about the comic book guys who blow me off, the guys who treat me like I'm trying to scam them, the webmaster who now has his own CNN segment and won't give me the time of day, etc. You're not who I'm talking about, and you know it. Seriously, it's like, you, Garth Franklin, and Chris Faile. And God bless you all.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-29 12:48 am (UTC)I don't like using that "the movie has to be good" argument. yes, I've enjoyed both Lord of the Rings and X-Men movies, and both deserved their successes, but looking at a lot of box-office stats, they tend to be the exceptions.
By the way, how much appeal does a woman kicking ass in a movie appeal to ladies? Some people claim it's a selling point, but the action movies where ladies were top-billed were either serious dissapointments or not particuarly big fish. In fact, the higehst grossing "geek movie" besides the Star Wars films of course, is Spider-Man which doesn't feature a spunky or badass femme-fatale, but an annoying, shamelessly exploited gold-digging high-school homecoming despot.
Re:
Date: 2004-01-29 09:36 am (UTC)Fametracker? It's a site, fametracker.com, with message boards. In fact, FT is why I got a Livejournal, and FTers were my first LJ friends. I think there are FT communities on LJ, too. What list did you see?
I personally love to see women kicking ass. I wanted to see Jennifer Garner play Elektra... and then the movie got bad reviews, and I got busy, and I haven't seen it. I'll probably catch it on DVD or cable eventually, but solely for the purpose of watching Jennifer Garner kick ass. (It won't be for Colin Farrell's baldness, I promise you.) ;)
I never saw Spider-Man. I wouldn't run away screaming if someone with me wanted to rent it, but I felt like I'd already seen the movie, by the time all the hype was over, and there was nothing really compelling left over.
Now, Catwoman is going to come out. I am already hearing that it's a trainwreck. I really would have wanted to see that... but I'm not going to spend $10 going to see Halle Berry attempt to kick ass in that awful shredded catsuit (http://superherohype.com/cgi-bin/imageFolio.cgi?direct=Catwoman/The_Movie/Movie_Stills).
I don't know if "it has to be good" is really a fair generalization, but given what I've just said about Daredevil and Catwoman, and conversations I've had with other women about movies like these, you can see where I'm getting the idea from.
Re:
Date: 2004-01-30 01:51 am (UTC)Daredevil did reasonably well, and when it came out, was not the critical train wreck many refer to it as. The movie gets shit upon, perhaps more then it deserves, because it was released the same year as Gigli, and because there's a bit of a movies-based-on-comic book backlash. I don't think it's the best movie in the world, but outside of the "A-Class" franchises, it is probably one of the more bearable action movies of the year.
Re:
Date: 2004-01-30 06:34 am (UTC)I noticed that Daredevil was received pretty decently at the time, but when it came time for year-end roundups, everyone acted like it was a bomb of Eddie Murphy proportions. I still haven't quite figured that one out yet.