Any woman would be to if the rolles were reversed.

Except that roles are rarely reversed, at least on film — perhaps never. (I certainly cannot think of a film in which a man is raped and murdered and his wife sets out to extract vengeance.)

It’s not that it’s not understandable that a man would be angry were the women he loves to become the victims of a violent crime: it’s that this is *such* an easy way to rile up an audience, and one used *so very often* by unthinking cinema — that is, suggesting that violent crimes against women *entitle* men to go vigilante — that makes it worth commenting on. As I said in a comment at FlickFilosopher.com, it’s all about:

the abuse of the trope. If this were the only movie ever to have used such a setup, I doubt we’d be complaining. It’s a cheat on the movie’s part and it insults the audience. It assumes — and perhaps rightly so — that a less emotionally wrought crime would be harder to get an audience riled up about. But that’s the whole point of our criminal justice system: it’s supposed to remove, as much as possible, the emotion and the subjectiveness from the process. A movie like this is so entirely antithetical to a civilized process of justice that it indicts itself… except that most people won’t ever think about it that way, and will only whoop and cheer and call it a good time at the movies.

If your point was that it could easily be, say, a wife and a little boy, or a husband and a little boy, then okay, but that’s not how your little blurb reads.

But that is NOT my point. It could NOT be this way and be even remotely like the same movie.

The difference is between what happens in real life, and what happens in the movies. The two are not always the same.

I also think it’s a shame that Thurman and Dieckmann are making those comments while promoting a movie that looks appallingly bad. It’s the same thing with a movie I reviewed last week called Creating Karma, which noted in the press materials that the two women who wrote and directed it were trying to create roles for funny women, but it was a serious competitor for the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

It’s also a shame that I can’t feel the same way about An Education. I saw it and thought it was overwhelmingly familiar. It seems like even Mary Ann should agree; how about a story about a young girl who makes smart decisions and does clever, funny things rather than gets swept up in the ritzy glamour of a sophisticated older guy who’s obviously bad for her?