Karina’s Capsule: Girls on Film

Last week, I went looking for mashups produced by and/or for women, and came up short. As Chuck Tryon summed it up in the comments to last week’s post, the issue doesn’t seem to be that women are not making funny videos, but that there’s a culture of parodic web video making, based on Situationist-style use of found footage and juxtaposition, that women don’t seem to be heavily involved in.

But of course, generalities made on blogs are destined to be proven false by blog readers, and so I’ve spent some time over the past week following links offered by NewTeeVee readers to funny videos made by girls. I still have not seen a single mashup-style video made by/for girls, but I’ve seen several cases where women are deconstructing culture in similar ways through performance.

Girls on Film is one example. It’s a weekly movie review video podcast hosted by Suzanne Keilly and Heather Stewart, and produced by Alex Albrecht of Diggnation fame (who also happens to be Stewart’s boyfriend). In each episode, Keilly and Stewart review two movies, often from a location inspired by one of the films (so, in the episode above, they go to a cheap motel to review killer motel flick Vacancy).

In recent episodes, the girls have started performing a scene spoofing one of the movies before the review it (so, a clip proceding the Grindhouse episode involves fake blood and faker film scratch effects). You can subscribe to the show through iTunes, or watch it at Revver.

Keilly and Stewart are funny and likable. They have the natural, playful chemistry of real friends, something which is sorely lacking from every current movie critic show I can think of. Their gimmicks (which include a crosswalk-inspired ratings system in addition to the intro skits and the topic-specific locations) are cute, if not exactly groundbreaking. It’s a nice little show.

But it isn’t really about film — it’s about watching two attractive, charismatic women drinking champagne and making jokes. In terms of how Girls on Film actually serves its audience, it’s in every way the logical spinoff of Diggnation, which itself isn’t really about insightful commentary as much as it’s about replicating the social experience of drinking beer with your buddies and talking about gadgets.

As a post-feminist film critic, I think this is sort of genius, at least on paper: film criticism is a dying art, so why not use cute, funny girls to help transform it into something cool and performative and “social”?

But I think the whole endeavor would strike me as more subversive (and thus more successful) if Keilly and Stewart took themselves just a little bit more seriously. I know how brutally uncool sincerity is on the internet, but when the girls do occasionally break into a serious debate about, say, stereotypical girlfriend roles, they prove that they’re more than capable of pulling it off.

The pre-review skits are already starting to show a level of commitment that sets Girls on Film apart from any number of shows where people just sit around talking about stuff. I just hope we’ll start to see more integration between the performance and the ideas; after all, there’s really no better vehicle for satire than two pretty girls who may or may not be drunk.

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