THAT WAS WAY HARSH, TAI: The AV Club's new Fifty Best Films of the 90s List is appropriately canon-respecting, fun-respecting (Out of Sight and Toy Story 2 both in the top ten) and all, and each of us may have some personal gripes (where's South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, The Insider, Malcolm X, or Three Kings?), but then you look at the whole and there's a troubling trend: no Silence of the Lambs. The Piano? in storage. Indeed, zero films by female directors, and not a whole lot of films which come close to passing the Bechdel Test (Heavenly Creatures is the first exception I can find, plus Election and Boogie Nights) or center around the telling of women's stories. My goodness, where's Thelma and Louise?
Some of this, to be sure, is the fault of Hollywood itself, and the films it chooses to make and the directors it chooses to champion. Some of it can be explained by the process by which the list was assembled (through voting, not curating). But between Amy Heckerling, Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow, Allison Anders and (HT: to Watts) Nicole Holofcener, surely more films by and about women could've been slotted into the top 50 without seeming like tokenism -- because they're good films.
