Flight Plan

Touchstone pictures (2005)
Robert Schmentke
Main actress - Jodie Foster

Plot - The husband of aviation engineer Kyle Pratt has just died in Berlin. Now she is flying back to New York with his coffin and their six-year-old daughter Julia. Three hours into the flight Kyle awakens to find that Julia is gone! It's a big double-decker plane, so very concerned mother has a lot of territory to cover in order to find her daughter. But as Kyle fights to discern the truth, she takes matters into her own hands.

Jodie Foster is represented as a smart, sophisticated women through the clothes she wears which are trousers and smart jacket or jumper. Also, she has a bag with her ID and these props are presenting her upper class job. Additionally, she knows what she is talking about e.g. aeroplanes and she has alot of knowledge on engineering.

Is this a post-feminism representation? How do you know?

Yes as their is no man with her and she is a independent. However, their is a binary opposition because other kids on the aeroplane are with their father and constantly they call his name 'dad' and he looks after them and on the other hand Jodie Foster loses her daughter and this shows that men are better then women in things that they are meant to be good at. Furthermore, she is seen to be careless because she loses her daughter twice and is then shown to lose control and forced nus to believe she is crazy because their is a shot where the camera spins around her to show she is losing her mind and is overwhelmed .

How are patriarchal ideologies represented in the film?

The captain takes control of the situation and he is a man because Jodie Foster has lost control. Their are many shots that are high angle to show she is inferior to the male characters in the movie and the audience believes she is a neurotic female and is always worrying because of how the plot changes our mind about what to believe. The at the end of the movie she is looked at as a heroic figure, a saviour, strong minded, powerful and smart because she proved everyone wrong and is looked in a way we usually look at men to be like.

Mean Girls

Cady Heron moves to a new home from the bush country of Africa. She goes to a new school where she meets Janis and Damian. Her new friends warn her to stay away from the Plastics: the A-list, popular, crude, and beautiful clique headed by Regina George with Gretchen and Karen. When Cady sees Aaron Samuels, she falls in love. When Regina discovers this, she seeks revenge by taking and dangling Aaron in front of Cady. Now Cady, Janis, and Damian plot to bring Regina's status down. However, as Cady continues to spend more time with the Plastics, she begins to become one of them.

Women in this movie are represented as being strong yet out of control because the women fight against one another to ruin each others lives in high school. However, they are strong because they control the whole school and cause havoc in the entire school and control men around them. Their is a shot of the main character Cady looking at a man she likes and Regina takes control and ruins Cady's chance with him and she takes him and he is under control and this shows how all the women in the movie are stereotyped in school but then again are not stereotyped because not all women in movies are in control.

Also, in the movie the men do take control in the end the headteacher stops all the girls from fighting but he doesnt stop the fights completly and then the other teacher is women and she takes charge and then everything stops and girls becomes friends and everyone is ok again. Like Flightplan the main character is a women and she is shown to be smart, sophisticated and powerful at the start of the movie then eventually shown to lose control and at the end of the film she is shown to be smart, sophisticated and powerful again.

Flight plan Review

Feature films invite us to defy reality, believe a fiction, suspend disbelief. The actor has to make the unreal, real.
Jodie Foster has done this in the past with notable success and often chooses stories that parallel our unwillingness to accept: a rape victim that no one believed, a paranoid in a locked room that had every reason to be afraid, a scientist that finds proof of aliens. In Flightplan, she goes one further - a mother who loses her daughter during a transatlantic flight and whom no one, including the audience, believes.
Aircraft engineer Kyle Pratt (Foster) is devastated by the sudden death of her husband. She flies his body back from Germany to New York on a state-of-the-art airliner, which she designed. Dozing off for a few minutes, she awakes to find her six-year-old daughter is missing. Frantic searches ensue, as mounting evidence suggests that the girl was never on board in the first place.
Flightplan combines a taut psychological thriller with a deepening mystery and tremendous emotional punch. But does the denouement justify the storyline, the switching positions we are forced to adopt about Kyle's sanity and the existence of her daughter? Or is it simply a story that cashes in on current passenger apprehension over hijacking and Foster's considerable acting talent?
She is at her best, as an outraged, highly intelligent woman with a mother's bottled up, barely contained grief providing simmering emotional power.
It is a remarkable testament to her talent that she can carry such an unlikely story, single-handed. She imbues the confined space of an aircraft with an energy that doesn't wilt for a moment, ensuring that our attention never flags. Ably assisted by Sean Bean, as the captain, wanting to give her every benefit of the doubt, but increasingly forced to accept the evidence of his own eyes, and Air Marshal Peter Sarsgaard, who plays an interesting yet inscrutable character, we are mesmerised by Kyle Pratt and our own difficulty in knowing whether to believe her.
As the pieces unravel, we are presented with a bewildering complexity of background information which, without Foster to carry it, or Hitchcockian logic to prove it, are tempted to dismiss as over ambitious. As an exercise in strong acting that stands up as a Saturday night thriller, Flightplan delivers in Club Class, but, as the sum of its parts, it is as convoluted and full of wishful thinking as someone trying to stretch out in Economy.

Mean Girls review

2004, Paramount. Directed by Mark S. Waters. Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese, Jonathan Bennett, Lacey Chabert, Tina Fey.
Note: This review was written by a guest critic.
Review by Suzanne E. Greydanus
When 16-year-old Cady (Lindsay Lohan) first arrives at her new school after ten years of homeschooling, she is a kind, sweet girl. But don’t think that there’s any positive statement here about homeschooling. Cady herself goes out of her way to tell us that typical homeschoolers are either dysfunctional geek freaks or fundamentalist bigot nutcases. Thus begins Mean Girls’s lesson in tolerance and compassion.
At school, Cady is befriended by two social outcasts: an artsy girl named Janis (Lizzy Caplan) with an all-black goth look, and her sidekick Damian (Daniel Franzese), whom Janis describes as “almost too gay to function.” She is also befriended by the clique of popular girls (dubbed “the Plastics” by Janis), queened by Regina (Rachel McAdams), who think Cady pretty enough to be their friend despite her ignorance of proper social rules for high-school “success.”
Janis and Damian think it’s a scream that Cady is accepted into the inner circle of “the Plastics,” and tell her to pretend to be friends with them in order to spy on them, perhaps learning something which can be used against them. Cady, however, is genuinely nice to everyone, not having learned the nasty socialization of high school that she has been lacking in her education.
She doesn’t remain innocent for long. Cady is quickly swept into their world and begins to become one of them — dressing to their standards (i.e., like a slut), lying and back-stabbing, gossiping about and putting down the rest of the world. In the end, when this behavior has alienated her from absolutely everyone, even those from whom she learned this behavior, she decides that “calling someone fat doesn’t make you thinner, and calling someone dumb doesn’t make you smarter.” Now there’s some wisdom for you.
Mean Girls, written by “Saturday Night Live” alum Tina Fey (who also plays math teacher Ms. Norbury), was loosely inspired by a non-fiction self-help book by Rosalind Wiseman called Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence. I don’t know what lessons Wiseman’s book imparts, but as far as I can tell here are the lessons of Mean Girls:
High-school girls are basically back-stabbing, lying gossipers at heart.
Everyone who is not a total loser is having sex in high school.
Being mean to other people won’t ultimately make you happy. And, of course,
Homeschoolers are ordinarily loser freaks, unless they are really hot like Lidsay Lohan and become properly “socialized.”
In the end, no one has really learned their lesson (despite Regina’s unfortunate accident with a school bus), though everyone can get along now — ever since “the Plastics” broke up and each joined other cliques.
It’s nice to see some respectable authority figures. Cady’s parents are caring and smart (even if her father doesn’t know what “grounded” means). The principal knows how to take charge effectively, and doesn’t take sadistic glee in lording his authority over students like some movie principals. Ms. Norbury is a kind, tough teacher who tries to encourage Cady in a better direction. When she says “Cady, I’m disappointed in you,” you really feel the sting of her disapproval.
All of this goes some way towards balancing out the other adults — the buffoon of a coach. who harangues students in health class about not having sex while having sex with more than one of them himself; Regina’s mom, who declares herself a “cool mom” with “no rules” who would very much like to be kept young by being one of her popular daughter’s flunkies but isn’t worthy.
Though better written, better acted and with more wit and subtlety than your avarage teen flick, the atmosphere in Mean Girls with its promiscuous sex and well, meanness, make it almost as nasty to sit through as these girls are to each other.