Private Benjamin

I really don't want to play to the stereoptype of girls liking girl-power movies but I really, really love Private Benjamin so much!
I watched it again recently with my dad, who seems like an ulikely suspect to watch this kind of movie with but he's the best feminist I know.
I really don't like Goldie Hawn, she seems to play the same character in every single movie, which is always dictated by her never-changing hair colour.
In this movie she is perfect. She has perfect comic timing, and her acting is spot-on.
In a way she is type cast. Hawn plays Judy Benjamin, a spoilt debutante who is constantly seeking her father's approval. Her greatest ambition in life is to have a huge mansion and a professional husband but when things don't go quite as planned she decides to do something drastic and joins the US army.
Along the way she proves to everyone that she's not just pretty face, she rises in the ranks of the army and becomes ambitious and powerful. Eventually she is again faced with the decision of marriage and security versus her need to succeed as a woman.

I think that it's a completely relevant movie, it was made during the eightees but it makes you think...
have things really changed all that much?
Women are still struggling with decisions like this everyday. As much as we're now brought up to want careers theres still a niggling feeling, in the back of your mind that maybe you do need to be a domestic goddess after all. It's like you have two choices either you work towards your career and everything else takes a backseat or you get married young and have three kids and a dog by the time you're 25. There is no middle ground!

At the end of the movie, when Goldie Hawn walks down a wet, muddy path in full wedding regalia to the sound a military drum roll its powerful and emotional. It's ranked as one of the funniest movies of all time but it also hits you hard in a dramatic way. The best comedies are the ones that also reach you on a dramatic level.