Edit for readability:
Lower ranking is better, as in "rank 1" would be the best movie rated by that group.
The top section shows movies highly ranked by women, but lower for men. The bottom section is the reverse.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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Just about all the movies in the women's list feature either a female protagonist or prominent female characters. Quite a few of the movies on the men's list have no major female characters.
There's also virtually zero overlap in genre. The men's list is full of war movies and westerns, the women's list is predominantly kid's / family / young adult stuff, with some historical drama. (Brokeback Mountain is about cowboys, but I don't think it would be considered a western in the traditional sense)
The women's list is almost all relatively modern, the men's list is mostly from the previous century.
The women's list is entirely American (I think) and exclusively in English. The men's list has a fair number of movies from other countries and in other languages.
A third of the women's list is Harry Potter. I feel like that's gotta skew the data a bit. The closest to that kind of trend we see in the men's list is that there are two Kurosawa movies and a remake of a Kurosawa movie.
The deltas are higher on the women's list than on the men's list. At a glance it looks like the women's list represents movies that are closer to number 1 than the men's list, but I'm not getting to deep into analyzing the numbers here.
The Harry Potter films are very much British, not American, so the women’s list isn’t entirely American.
Obviously they are very British in nature, but it was produced by Warner Bros. which would classify it as an American production.
Heyday Films, which also produced them, is British. And they were filmed in the UK with British producers and predominantly British actors and crew.
They’re definitely not 100% British but I‘d argue, they’re more British than American.
My point wasn't how American they are, just that they aren't the kind of thing that would get thrown into a foreign films section. The cultural barriers between these movies and American audiences are almost nonexistent. Basically no one who consumes movies coming out of Hollywood is going to turn their nose up at Harry Potter the way a lot would for something like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, or Taare Zameen Par.
Oh yea, absolutely. Not arguing with that. I‘m just being pedantic for the sake of it. (After all, you did add „I think“ after saying they’re all American)
Didn't they deny Robin Williams a role because he's not British? I vaguely recall reading that somewhere.
This is a solid observation and I think that the women's rankings favor movies where the main focus is on overcoming conflicts within close relationships (family/romantic) and mostly lean towards a happy ending to the resolution that will lead to further positive interactions and the men's ranking favor the main focus being on violent conflict against outside groups or opponents. The men's movies will have some camaraderie and some shallow romance too, but the main focus is on the conflict itself.
Brokeback doesn't stand out on the women's list to me because it is focused on a relationship, which seems to have more impact than female leads even though the latter is certainly a factor. The Harry Potter series main conflict is family based (loss of Harry's parents) and there are tons of interactions with friends of the family and the connections the family has.
I think it's fair to say that the women's list has a lot of focus on relationships, but I don’t think that difference in the nature of conflicts is quite as clear between the two lists.
Harry Potter has the loss of family as a part of his motivation, but the actual conflict in the series is with the external threat that he and his friends need to overcome, generally starting as a conflict between students and faculty and ending in a forceful struggle between our heroes and actual villains. That plus Wonder Woman and Hunger Games makes a fairly sizable portion of the list where the conflict is a more direct fight.
On the other side of the equation Rashomon is a murder investigation that's about conflicting stories rather than a direct conflict between characters. Seven Samurai is far more focused on the tension between the samurai and the villagers than the fight with the bandits. Rocky isn't about the conflict with his opponent, it's about struggling to follow a dream, finding self worth, and living up to your potential with a romantic relationship in there for good measure. Casino isn't about an external conflict, it's more of a "rise and fall of" story, where the authorities aren't really characters at all, just an inevitable consequence of the choices the main characters made, and the fallout from their relationships with each other crumbling. Lawrence of Arabia is set during a war but is about Lawrence and the relationship he forges with his Arab allies. The Great Escape has conflict that is all about avoiding violence, I don't think there is even a single instance of the heroes solving a problem through violence. And that's just the ones I know off the top of my head.
I'm not saying there's nothing to the observation, just that I don't think it's clear cut at all.
I think the lists are less what women and men like, it's more like what they don't like.
We aren't seeing the crossover of what both like, so this just demonstrates trends away from certain films by gender.