The Unofficial Female Film Canon

Interesting list at the House of Mirth and Movies of a 100 films focused on women. I've only seen 28 of these, but the selections seem very good to me. The blogger, who is only identified as mrsemmapeel, writes:

I’m still not sure what I qualify an “essential” film about women, I hope my list presents a huge cross-section of different kinds of women and experiences, but at the very least I’m looking for films that have at least one female protagonist, which rules out a lot of films that may have interesting or strong female supporting characters and roles unfortunately. I’m also not attempting to paint only a positive portrait of womanhood, I think many of these film reveal many imperfect, even downright cruel women… but that is part of a reality.

This list got me thinking about the Bechdel Test again, although it doesn't seem to be any part of the equation here.

Partisanship and polarization

Paleocon blogger Daniel Larison interprets the recent Pew poll on political polarization the same way I do. It's amazing to me how many commenters on the poll focus on the self-identified Democrats and Republicans and ignore the Independents (which is how most disaffected Republicans seem to identify themselves now). The people who complain that Obama hasn't achieved bipartisan nirvana are either naive as to his intentions or are pretending to be.

Larison goes on to assess the future of the GOP:

No one outside the Beltway cares whether the post-partisan utopia has been realized, and many of us outside the Beltway understand that Washington does some of its greatest damage when the parties collaborate to give us the worst of both worlds. In the GOP’s worst-case scenario, Obama will become even more unpopular among Republican rank-and-file while the rest of the country remains favorably inclined, which means that Obama will technically become a more “polarizing” figure by Pew’s odd measurements, but this will only widen the considerable gap between how the GOP sees the political landscape and how everyone else sees it. The real danger for the GOP is that the Democrats are in the process of turning the idea of positive polarization around on them, and they might then be able to divide the country and come away with the much larger portion on a more permanent basis.