"Audiences are very sophisticated and they're very smart," says editor Terilyn Shropshire on her commentary track with Secret Life of Bees writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood. "They pick up things very quickly." And ho boy, there's no fooling me! I saw right away what they were trying to sneak past us moviegoers: This is a movie about women. And not about women who are prizes to the male hero, as women are supposed to be. It's a movie about women as people, as if there were as human as men or something. Shifty, underhanded Prince-Bythewood ... I see right through your game, girlie.

How dare you, Ms Prince-Bythewood? How dare you try to foist off on us a story about women incorporating grief and acceptance into their souls in order to make their lives richer, a story about not letting themselves wither over sorrow? This kind of tale rightly belongs in the hands of, oh, Martin Scorsese, and is rightly set among the lives of hard-bitten Boston cops or sensitive and philosophical Brooklyn gangsters. Bah! Who cares about what women in the 1960s South think about such things? And black women?

I mean, you might have gotten away with having either Queen Latifah or Alicia Keys or Sophie Okonedo or Jennifer Hudson in the movie, maybe as a maid or something appropriately menial. But all of them? As individuals as varied and diverse and smart and funny and wise and kind as white men? And turning in performances as marvelous and shrewd as this? The nerve! Everyone knows that movies about black people are supposed to look like Tyler Perry minstrel shows.

At least you had the decency to cast a white girl in the lead. Dakota Fanning is well on her way to a proper movie career as The Girlfriend, The Wife, The Mother, and/or The Victim, and if she has to pass through such nonsense as The Secret Life of Bees to get there, well, she's just biding time till she's of age to understand her subordinate role to men. It's clear from one of her statements on another commentary track that she already has an inkling. She says she enjoyed working on this movie because "I got to work with all predominantly women, which I had never really done before, and I was really excited about that." Good for her for having been properly inculcated as to the standard ratio of men to women in Hollywood movies.

Ms Prince-Bythewood, you do realize, don't you, that this young girl's excitement would have never come to pass if everyone made movies like yours? If all of Fanning's other movies had featured lots of women in their casts, her very special pleasure would never have occurred. Is that what you want for our young actresses? For shame.

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MaryAnn Johanson, not a frakkin' Cylon (email me)

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