Little Boys Learn A Lot From Watching 'Star Wars,' And It Isn't All Good

[1monster]

Very interesting take on the effect of movies on boys and girls.

[arcane1]

1. Even as a kid, I found it odd how uninterested Luke was in his mother.

Indeed, she's never even mentioned.

Kicking to watch this later!

[RandySF]

2. Nice point.

But I'm not going to leave it to movies to teach values to my kid.

[1monster]

3. No. But kids pick up their values from everywhere and it is hard to counter that.

Had I picked up all my values from my mother and my father, I would be a person that, as I have turned out, I could not stand.

I'm pretty sure it can work both ways....

on edit: The video is more than 12 minutes long and you posted seven minutes after I did. You could not have watched it through.

[A Little Weird]

4. Thanks

I had never heard of the Bechdel test. That seems like such a low bar, it's shocking that so few popular movies meet the criteria.

[starroute]

5. There's been a lot of judging of Star Trek by the Bechdel Test

Here's a page of negative comments about Star Trek: Into Darkness:
http://bechdeltest.com/view/4127/star_trek_into_darkness/

Here's a brief Bechdel Test rundown of all the Trek movies:
http://trekkiefeminist.tumblr.com/post/52579715684/bechdel-testing-star-trek

And as a bonus, here's a recent article on "10 Famous Films That Surprisingly Fail The Bechdel Test "
http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/features/10-famous-films-that-surprisingly-fail-the-bechdel-test.php

[Egnever]

6. Interesting

Not sure I buy into it, but it does provide food for thought.

[txwhitedove]

7. Kick, to view later. Interesting subject.

[KurtNYC]

8. An interesting talk but I think he missed something big

More women than men are graduating college. Our increasingly interconnected society values the communication skill that women develop.

Men commit suicide at 3 times the rate women do. So perhaps in spite of the bias of films, men are internalizing more negative messages than women, or there are just plenty to go around and men are more internal about their struggle with them.

Movie are an artificial world where things get done, completely in 110 minutes or so. The movie that get funded do so because they closely resembled prior movies which made money. There is no grand plan to leave women out of quest movies -- it seems that simply men and little boys are much more stubborn about watching a "chic flick" than the other way around.

Aside: George Lucas was highly overrated as a screen writer. The Star Wars films are heavy on action and visual effects but Lucas lifted almost every other element from prior films -- The Hidden Fortress, 3 days of the Condor, Bridge Over the River Kwai, and the robots are from "Silent Running." Lucas made Yoda speak like the stereotype of an older Jewish man and gave him the hair of Albert Einstein. When Lucas creates his own characters they are embarrassingly racist, as if Lucas can't tell how ridiculously out of date and offensively simple Jar Jar Binks and that shop merchant are. So not only can Lucas not write convincing and 3 dimensional female characters, he can't write male characters either.

Now George Lucas has taken to re-writing films that everyone loved just as they were:

[ThomThom]

9. kicked

and saved