Category: collections

More of my favorite kick-ass women movies

Here is list two of the long-anticipated project on which I’ve finally embarked: to catalog (review, rate, rank and otherwise write about) movies and TV shows that prominently feature kick-ass women.

The following movies are (again) listed in order of appearance (i.e. chronologically) and are not intended to reflect a ranking of my favorites. (Though I would say that my first list contains more of my overall favorites than this list.)

9 more of Alejna’s favorite kick-ass women movies

  1. Silence of the Lambs (1991)
    Everybody knows this one. Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) kicks ass by keeping her wits about her.
  2. Terminator 2 (1991)
    I particularly like the transformation of Linda Hamilton’s character from the first movie. Sadly, I can barely stomach watching this now due to my loathing of Arnold. (I’m partial to definition 3 on that link, if you decide to follow it.)
  3. Wing Chun/Yong Chun (1994)
    Michelle Yeoh serves up bean curd and ass-kicking in this historic costume drama.
  4. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)
    Calling Michelle Yeoh a Bond Girl doesn’t do her justice. She could so kick Pierce Brosnan’s skinny ass. (I don’t buy her need of rescuing at the end.)
  5. Mulan (1998)
    Not Disney’s typical I-need-a-man (to borrow a term from a friend) animated fare.
  6. Run Lola Run/Lola Rennt (1998)
    Franka Potente runs to the rescue, and runs and runs.
  7. The Matrix (1999)
    Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) kicks ass through most of the movie, but I have issues with the way she turns into a puddle of goo over Keanu.
  8. Mystery Men (1999)
    Janeane Garofalo doesn’t have as big of role as I’d like, but she kicks ass in so many ways, I had to have her on a list soon. Plus, the movie is just so much fun.
  9. Charlie’s Angels (2000)
    Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, Lucy Liu get extra points for having done intensive martial arts training for this movie, and doing their own stunts. Plus I appreciate the tongue-in-cheek tone.

token of my affection

My blog title is inspired in part by these fabulous lyrics by the late, great Kirsty MacColl:

“I’ve been the token woman all my life
The token daughter and the token wife
Now I collected tokens one by one
‘Til I’ve saved enough to buy a gun”
From the song Bad, off Kirsty MacColl’s 1994 album, Titanic Days.

Kirsty MacColl died in late 2000 in a bizarre accident where she was hit by a speedboat. The world lost an amazing voice and a talented songwriter.

While I don’t consider myself to have been a token woman (I actually come from a family and background where women predominate), the lyrics of the song resonate with me in a number of ways. I have felt the urge to rebel against my own identity and to besmirch the squeaky-clean behavior record I grew up with. Plus the lyrics are clever. And dark.

The thematic content of “Bad” also bears a striking resemblance to Eartha Kitt’s classic “I want to be evil.” These two songs are members in my collection of “songs about women who seek to break out of their restrictive goody-goody roles and discover the joys of naughtiness.” Actually, so far, this collection (which could perhaps use renaming) has only these two items.

As yet, 2 is the smallest quantity of members in a collection. Although perhaps I will decide at some point that 1 may be a sufficiently large set to merit being called a collection. Especially if I never expect to have additional members in that set. Hmm. “I would like to show you my extensive collection of nose.”

from the collections

I’ve realized that my life involves a lot of collecting. I’m not a collector of collectibles in the limited edition, hand-painted, as-seen-on-a-home-shopping-channel figurine sense of collectibles. And it’s not just things, though I certainly have a lot of stuff. (Way, way too much stuff.) I have a collection of collections.

Books are a big collection. And movies. And music. And with the media, it’s not just that I like to collect the physical objects (though I have a weakness for a first-edition or beautifully-bound book), but I like to collect their contents and other attributes. I like to categorize my media: Hong Kong martial arts movies, superhero movies, TV shows with a kick-ass heroine, Booker Prize-winning novels, signed first editions, songs with a color in their title, rock songs that are waltzes, signed first editions of Booker-prize winning novels featuring Hong Kong martial artist women superheroes whose theme songs are rock waltzes featuring color terms…

Over the course of my life I have started, inherited or accidentally accumulated collections (of varying sizes) of such items as boxes, rocks, socks, scarves, china, post cards, stamps, mobiles, yo-yos, beads, items with a lizard motif, vintage dresses, pens, inks, bottles and half-used jars of jam. I once even had a collection of dimes, and they were really just dimes. (This was when I was 9.)

I also seem to have a collection of hobbies. Hobbies that I am quite serious about, if often serially. I have at times been very involved in painting, jewelry-making, martial arts and music. I’ve devoted varying amounts of time to reading, book discussions, writing, cooking, travelling and photography as well as attempting to learn to knit, juggle, do yo-yo tricks and garden.

I tend to collect facts, too. Sometimes it’s intentional, such as those emails that people send out with lists of funny word definitions. And it’s often inadvertant, such as retaining useless trivia that I read off a cereal box in 1979 or remembering what someone else at my dinner table ordered at a restaurant 3 years ago.

In a way I collect people, too. (Don’t worry, not in the sense of bodies buried in my basement.) I like having friends and acquaintances from a variety of backgrounds, professions, walks of life. And I’ve realized that I will sometimes co-index them in my mind with some commonality like “enjoys bluegrass music,” or “once had a Weimeraner.”

And recently I’ve come to realize that my chosen profession (linguistics) is based on collecting and categorizing, which may be one of the things that has drawn me in that direction all these years. I get to collect patterns and constructions, examples, counter-examples and all sorts of other data and metadata.

So I intend this blog to be, at least in part, a way for me to manage my collections. I hope to sort through the clutter in my mind, and file things away in their various (cross-referenced) places.

By the way, I almost started my blog on blogger, which appealed to me largely because the name reminds me of frogger. But as it turns out, they don’t have a built-in “categories” feature. Since my joy in (and salvation from) collecting comes from classifying and categorizing, this was a deal-breaker for me.