Katy (Rifftrax Shorts)

Rifftrax Year:  2017
Riffers:  Bridget Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl

What?  Women delivering papers?  What's next?  Them wearing pants and voting and being seen in public?

Katy is a short film about a girl named Janet...oh wait, her name was Katy.  Sorry, but you can forgive the confusion.  Katy's brother is leaving town for a while and is unable to deliver his paper route so he enlists her to do it for him.  Upon entering the building to take the route over she is treated with scorn by her male peers, mocked by her boss, but she takes the papers and gets the job done.  This happens repeatedly until the day she asks for a route of her own and asks for jobs for her other female friends.  But hiring womenz is a no-can-do!

I think Mary Jo perfectly sums up this short in the opening ten seconds...

"Every generation a short film with a worthwhile message is poorly produced by a well-meaning graduate.  We have reason to believe this is one of those films"

Feminism and sexism in the 70's was a hot topic, and Katy clearly wants to be an eye-opening short on the subject.  I see the idea here, which portrays pre-teen girls discovering how hard it could be for them in the work force as they grow up.  The message comes off a bit underwhelming because of the haphazard production.  I feel for Katy's plight, but it's not because of the efforts of the short.  There doesn't seem to be any effort in giving any sort of depth to the situation other than "I'm a girl and they don't like me."  Certainly sexism can be meaningless like that, but in conveying a message there needs to be more than a bare bones portrayal of the subject.  Katy doesn't really convince me that the people who are playing these roles are real because they're so one-dimensional.  Katy exists to look sad, and men exist to make her feel sad, and the filmmakers' melodramatics fail to make it feel emotional at all.

When the short ends it's moral seems to be "strength in numbers."  Katy gathers her friends and they march down and demand their own paper routes.  This seems to be a call to arms of some sort, demanding women to march for equal rights.  I can see the echo of reality being reflected, though this short looks silly in doing it.  The symbolic "moneyshot" of the short is when Katy steals a basketball from a boy and makes a basket, symbolizing "Anything you can do, I can do," leaving the boy puzzled in her wake.  But as the symbolic gesture of the short it falls flat on its face because it really comes out of nowhere.

I can get behind Katy's message.  But as a short film it's ineffective.  Women's rights deserve's better than this hollow portrayal.

But I am a Caucasian male, so I am not allowed to judge films like these in any way, so take all of this with a grain of salt.  Bridget and Mary Jo however are women and they seem to have the same opinion of it that I do.  They laugh at how silly Katy's simplistic portrayal of sexism is, tear apart the artless direction of the piece, and play around with the low quality production values.  They get a lot of laughs from the drowned out soundtrack, of which it's hard to make out just what actors are saying half the time.  By the time the film ends they seem perplexed and frustrated by its ambiguous ending as well.

Katy is a short that wants to be important but lets itself down.  It almost feels terrible to pick on it, but it makes for a perfect Rifftrax.  Bridget and Mary Jo bring humor to the plight of women everywhere, and they are the perfect women for the job!  In essence they make a better argument for female equality for the short because they demonstrate once again that they're the best employees with the most consistent output in the Rifftrax company.

That's it, gals!  Break that glass ceiling!

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