Every time a new Twilight film comes out, my brother and I brave the madding crowds and ridiculously overpriced tickets to see it in theaters.  The overblown romance and cheesy dialogue of the saga is singularly entertaining and best captured on the big screen, where each one of Taylor Lautner’s constantly displayed abdominal muscles can be larger than the human head.  From the melodramatic opening sequence, we’re laughing.  But we’re far from the only ones.  In fact, amidst the endless discussion of Twilight‘s serious diehard fans, the ones who wish they could date Edward or Jacob themselves, it seems that a sizeable chunk of the films’ viewership is being ignored: the amused.

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Last night, my best friend and I went to see a new documentary, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.  An in-depth look at the past year of Rivers’s life, interspersed with footage from her decades-long career and interviews with family and friends, the film was enlightening in the way that intensive examinations of the day-to-day existence of celebrities generally are.

Being famous is often quite unpleasant; the entertainment business is incredibly damaging; celebs cry, too, and so on.  But what makes this movie particularly interesting is that it’s a familiar story told about an unfamiliar subject: an older woman.

Most people probably think that men and women are equally represented in film roles.  After all, most movies have a male lead and a female lead, and there are Best Actor and Best Actress categories in every awards show.  Plus, you know, women make up roughly half (actually slightly over half) of the world’s population, so it seems natural that they would have roughly half of the film roles.  As the Bechdel Test, an interesting/sad little thought exercise I recently discovered, shows us, this is hardly the case.

Last night, my mother and I rented Up in the Air.

I reviewed the movie for my school’s newspaper back in January, but my mom is constantly a little behind the times, and I had liked it enough to agree to watch it again.

What struck my mom the most about the film, and what I think left such an impression on me the first time, is the unconventional way in which the major romance, between George Clooney and Vera Farmiga, unfolds.  We are so accustomed to stories about love progressing in certain ways that it can be quite shocking when the plot takes a different turn. [Spoilers ahead!]

Over the weekend, I saw Iron Man 2.  Apparently I was far from the only woman to do so.  With a 60%/40% male/female audience breakdown for the film’s opening weekend, Iron Man 2 has surprised Paramount studios by attracting a huge number of female viewers.

One distribution exec even commented that these were the kinds of female numbers one might expect for a movie aimed specifically at that demographic, such as Sex and the City 2.  So why did such a theoretically male-targeted film draw so many women?  Or should the real question be: why is the studio so surprised?

I just saw Date Night, Tina Fey and Steve Carell’s new romantic comedy/thrilling caper. It was cute, the kind of film that is perfectly enjoyable but perhaps not especially memorable. But what it does contain, in place of unforgettable laugh riots, is one of the more refreshing depictions of a married couple to show up in mainstream culture for quite some time.

In a media dominated by images of oafish, layabout husbands and angry, overcritical wives, a film that presents familiar marital issues from both sides, without relying on lame “women are always like this; men are always like that” humor is something to get excited about.

The Twilight series gets a lot of criticism for giving teenage girls an unrealistic idea of what teenage boys are like. As the average seventeen-year-old neither lives off of animal blood or has a century’s worth of experience holding back all sexual urges, this is a pretty fair critique. Edward Cullen is a terrible representation of young male desire.

But what so many miss in their rejection of Edward is that Bella Swan, the Twilight heroine and narrator, is actually a pretty remarkable thing in pop culture: an openly and unashamedly desirous teenage girl.

Last night, Kathryn Bigelow won the Academy Award for Best Director for her Iraq war film, The Hurt Locker. The Hurt Locker also won Best Picture, beating out the newly crowned highest grossing film of all time, Avatar (whose director, interestingly enough, is James Cameron, Bigelow’s ex-husband).

By winning these awards, Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for directing and the first woman to direct a Best Picture. If you look at the media write-ups of the Oscars, these achievements appear to be a very big deal.

For film studio execs, the Holy Grail is the four-quadrant film.  Prospective audience members are divided into four groups (young men, young women, older men, older women), and every once in a while, a film like Avatar comes along to attract viewers from every demographic and therefore make obscene amounts of money.

But James Cameron films aside, it’s hard to make a movie that everyone in the world wants to see.  Because of this, there’s another piece of conventional film industry wisdom: if you want to make a blockbuster, aim for younger men.  The idea behind this is that young women are much more likely to tag along to whichever new action/superhero/explosion porn film their boyfriend or husband wants to see than young men are to sit through a movie specifically aimed at women.

If you look at the highest grossing films of the last decade, this seems to be true.  Superhero movies, like The Dark Knight and Spiderman 3, and other action franchises, like Transformers and Star Wars, are the ones setting the records.  And while there are certainly many women and girls who love these movies, comic book and action/adventure plots are the stuff of traditional masculine fantasies.  The really big movies are made for the boys.

The industry is surprised, then, when women and girls show off their purchasing power.  When Sex and the City debuted in 2008 and broke a few box office records of its own, critics were shocked, even though it was a very well-publicized film based on a hugely popular and culturally significant TV show.  The LA Times found the film’s $57 million opening “surprising.”  Entertainment Weekly called it “stunning.”  The New York Times labeled it “an unconventional hit” powered by “its legion of female fans.”  Apparently it could in no way have been predicted that large amounts of women would go to see a movie that was made for them.

But while Sex and the City set records for the highest grossing romantic comedy of …