WOMEN underrepresented even in crowd scenes

Anything but a fan of Freeman (I'd usually approach her writing with the appetite I'd have for a Marmite cake...), the 80s movie headline drew me into this, an excerpt from what appears to be her autobiography (correction: turns out to be a book on 80s movies).

It turns out to be a very interesting piece, discussing:
Female, teen and tween viewership (yes, uses and gratifications ahoy...), not least of sexual scenes or storylines
How contemporary films appear to punish female teen characters for sexual activity
Studios customary cutting of any counter-hegemonic messages (including, in these examples, abortion)
The role that sponsorship or tie-ins or product placement can have in ensuring conservative messages prevail (ie, reinforcing the studios' conservative instincts, the point above)
A study, and research institute, launched by an iconic actress who began to worry about the messages subliminally sent to her own young children, especially noting how women were given less space and visibility on screen

Hadley Freeman: why I owe it all to 1980s movies, ().

UK films in thrall to upper classes? Kingsman eg

In a colourful review, replete with some strong language, the central theme is:

The film gives international audiences what they expect from Britain – a nice bit of posh – while also titillating natives with convincing oik detail. 

(League of gentlemen: Kingsman and Britain’s posh-boy spies)

The film is summed up thus:

In Kingsman: The Secret Service, out next month, a tasty little herbert called Eggsy from a London sink estate is recruited by the impeccably soigné, lah-di-dah spook Harry Hart, played by Colin Firth. Hart detects that Eggsy has the right stuff, the true Brit if you will, to transcend his oikish upbringing and become One Of Us. Now if Eggsy, played by Taron Egerton, can survive the training course in which he is pitted against a bunch of stuckup, over-entitled Oxbridge ponces (plus the token bit of hottie posh whose snobby froideur melts at our hero’s bit-of-rough charms), then he can become a Kingsman.

Sounds rather like the M.O. of Working Title ... but is primarily a 20CFox produced and distributed film (with TSG and Marv).

WHY do film-makers keep insisting on this narrow, ultra-clichéd stereotypical representation of 'Britain'? Simple really: because it is so familiar, it is easier to market. Furthermore, whilst often used within US-set films as characteristics of a villain, the posh Southern English chap/dame is at the same time an aspirational (cf. the 'uses and gratifications theory', explained in this post; the aspirational point could be applied to the 'personal identity' category) figure for many ... not least many in the US audience who might condemn a class system in the USA but simultaneously perceive the same thing in a 'British' context as glamorous and appealing.

The major brands who have paid $100m+ for product placements in the most recent Bond movies clearly perceive this to be true! (See Telegraph gallery, Guardian analysis, etc!)