I was reading David Sexton's film review for Lucy. It starts by calling Luc Besson the action-frog. Hardly an inspiring start to a review. But it was his description of Scarlett Johansson's lead character Lucy that was even more shocking.
"... she plays a dopey, gullible American student in Taipei, tricked by her boyfriend of just a week into becoming a drugs mule 'for ruthless Korean gangsters'. ... But when one of the thugs gives her a kicking, the bag bursts inside her and instantly makes her amazingly intelligent, fast and deadly..."
"Lucy, who up to this point has not been the sharpest knife in the drawer, wakes up superbright, impervious to pain and a lot more focussed, ..."
Nothing too objectional yet, except there is a tangential association with being dumb and being a female student, but surely if you are a student you have passed exams and might not be quite so stupid, naive perhaps. There is also the implication that she is easy with her boyfriend of one week. Every partner is of one week sometime, then it becomes two weeks etc. Then comes the last three sentences of the review.
"She becomes a sort of supreme internet, a popular conceit for obvious reasons, but not my idea of a dreamy outcome for the belle of the ball. Personally, I preferred Scarlett as she was on 20 per cent brain power. Or even a slutty 10."
Stop there, so he is saying a normal woman using 10% of her brain is slutty? Is he implying she is slutty because of the 1 week boyfriend? Or because she is blonde and female? Whatever way this is casual, everyday sexism. You might think that she was more fun to be with when she had the normal brain power than the souped up genius, but why does this mean she is a slut? If you can throw the word slut around so casually what does it mean about you opinion of women? It is this sort of misogynistic comment that feminist campaigners still have to fight. It is embedded in a lot of society and male culture, although there are some modest improvements. But for me this was unacceptable and I prefer to read Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in the Standard's sister paper the Metro, even with Daniel Craig's urgent penis .
