Go Ahead, Make Her Day

It used to be the heroine's job to get in trouble and the hero's job to get her out of it. How many films ended with the good guy and the bad guy battling it out while the sweet young thing shivered to one side, never thinking to pick up a plank and help out?

You've come a long way, baby. Flick on the TV, and see women--young women, almost always--kicking and thinking and winking at both the old notion of femininity and the aging precepts of feminism. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in her fifth season on the WB) saves her classmates from Evil, when she's not cracking a book or a joke. The Cartoon Network's Powerpuff Girls, "the most elite kindergarten crime-fighting force ever assembled," protect Townsville with their magical powers. Max, the bionic babe on Fox's Dark Angel, occasionally lets a mere man help her save the world, after which she suavely extracts herself from his adoration. "What's the plan?" asks her enraptured swain of the moment, who doesn't deserve to be in her car pool, let alone her gene pool. Max's blunt reply: "I'm the plan."

Fact is, TV has long been a woman's medium. Movies are guy space. So consider the release next month of Josie and the Pussycats, a live-action version of the comic book and '70s TV cartoon series, and this summer's Tomb Raider, with Angelina Jolie as supervixen Lara Croft. Consider, and savor, the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the all-time top-grossing foreign-language film that was set to hit the $100 million mark at the North American box office last weekend. Ang Lee's martial arts fantasy features two strong women, a 30ish warrior (Michelle Yeoh) and a willful teen (Zhang Ziyi) just discovering to what uses, good or ill, she may put her powers of physical levitation and female cunning.

"It's a mythic epic narrative which has as its center a female consciousness," says James Schamus, one of the film's writers and producers. "In all the great epics, from the Iliad on, the protagonists have been masculine, their destinies a masculine destiny. Now a real shift is taking place, in which some collective identities--those created for the whole culture regardless of gender--are female."

The women of the Charlie's Angels movie, which has earned $125 million since its November debut, might not seem to have kinship with Crouching Tiger's stately stunners. This colorful jape propels Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu through its empty-calorie plot with the force of a hurricane blow-dryer. The stars giggle, wear swank togs, toss their coiffures in luxurious slo-mo. Diaz shakes her booty a lot. And skeptics may laugh their booty off when told that the Angels are icons of empowerment.

Yet they do fly through the air, giving the bad guys foot-facials (Charlie's stunt maven, Yuen Cheung-yan, is the brother of Yuen Wo-ping, who choreographed Tiger). And to Barrymore, who produced it, Charlie's is a tribute to today's woman: able, independent and cute--not so much femi-nist as femi-nice. "We wanted the Angels to be strong, but not masculine," says scriptwriter John August. "They aren't afraid of their sexuality, but they don't use it as power. Drew and I agreed they should be recognizable 'girls.' And she doesn't mind the word girls."