Lady M's Netflix List

The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

This is the first of the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and it is focused on the Captain Jack Sparrow, a mutinied pirate captain who wants to get his ship, the Black Pearl, back.  He and Will Turner, an intelligent blacksmith, team up to save Wlizabeth Swann, the Governor's daughter and Will's love when she is kidnapped by Captain Barbossa, the pirate who has control of Jack Sparrow's beloved ship.  Barbossa and his crew are cursed to be undead when they mutinied and marooned Sparrow on an island and used all of the cursed money that he had revealed the location of.  The crew goes to Isla de Muerta to take back the last of the cursed coins and break the curse with a blood sacrifice.  Only a relative of Bootstrap Bill, a dead pirate who sabotaged Barbossa, can make the blood sacrifice.  Elizabeth is rescued by Will, who is revealed to be the son of William "Bootstrap Bill" Turner.  He is taken by Barbossa to do the sacrifice and maroons Elizabeth and Jack on an island.  Elizabeth creates a bonfire out of the cache of rum on the island and is saved by the British navy who is looking for her.  Together they go to capture Barbossa's pirates.  This all ends with Jack Sparrow and Barbossa battling it out, Sparrow becoming immortal by using a cursed coin,the undead pirates ambushing the Navy ship, and Will breaking the curse.  The now mortal pirates surrender, Barbossa is shot by Sparrow, and Sparrow is taken back to the UK to be hanged.  Elizabeth ends up saving herself by implementing a parley at the beginning to make sure Barbossa cannot kill her, saves Jack and herself by creating a smoke signal on the island, saves Jack's crew who helped him find the Pearl and who were captured when they met Barbossa, by sneaking into The Black Pearl, and saves Will and Jack when Will tries to rescue Jack from being hanged.  She also kills two cursed pirates and ends up with the guy she wants: Will Turner.  Lady Macbeth would appreciate the cleverness of Elizabeth, her killing of guards just like Lady Macbeth, and her achieving her goal of getting together with Will.  Manipulation, murder, and power over who she has a relationship with all sound like Lady Macbeth's cup of tea.

Brave

This is a Disney movie that doesn't actually portray the usual prince-saves-princess cliché.  It is about  Scottish Princess Merida, a kick-butt, feisty girl who doesn't want to do anything but shoot arrows at targets and ride her horse.  She actually defies her own suitor competition when she wins the archery contest.  She makes a deal with a witch to change her fate (just like Lady Macbeth did when deciding to get Duncan killed) and make her mother change so that she does not have to become a proper, married woman.  Well, that spell turns her mother into a bear, so then it is up to Merida to break the spell, battling a demon bear and keeping her mother safe in the process.  The curse is undone when Merida realizes that she needs to fix the tapestry she ripped when she and her mother were fighting.  Everything ends happily, with Merida and her mother having a strong bond and Merida continuing with her unladylike ways.  Though Lady Macbeth might appreciate a more proper main character, she would certainly love the way Merida took everything in her own hands throughout the entire movie, defying gender roles and being strong and smart.  Merida echoes with Lady M's desire to be a man, trying to change her fate, and fixing the consequence (the one thing that Lady Macbeth did not do).

Scandal

This is a very popular show about a woman named Olivia Pope who works at her own crisis management firm, Olivia Pope and Associates.  She is having an affair with the President Fitzgerald Grant while fixing disasters before they take place.  The series flow from focusing on one case to the President's conspiratorial election and Pope and her father fixing the accusation that she is having an affair with the President to Olivia's evolving love life and political murders and cover-ups.  Lady Macbeth would be impressed by the poised main character who fixes everyone else' problems and struggles to fix hers, and  this shows what Lady Macbeth eventually becomes.  She tries to fix her and Macbeth's problems by telling him to kill Duncan, then attempts to stop Macbeth from killing others and create more problems.  While losing power in her relationship, Lady M can't fix her own issue of guilt for starting Macbeth's murderous desire.

Alien

This 1979 movie depicts Warren Officer Ripley, a female astronaut who, along with six others, is in space and discovers sinister alien eggs.  An egg attaches itself to one of the astronaut's faces, and, with Ripley the only one unwilling to let him in, an alien comes out of the man's stomach inside the spaceship, killing him and releasing the creature into the Nostromo.  The crew attempts to flush the alien out of the spaceship, but a traitor (an android, nonetheless) is ordered to keep the alien in the ship to kill off the other crew members.  Ripley is saved from being strangled by another crew member, then interrogates the traitor and incinerates him.  The remaining two crew members (not including Ripley) are killed while trying to get supplies to abort the ship and go on the shuttle.  Ripley is on her own, and, when discovering that the alien came with her on the shuttle, she opens the capsule and forces it out into space.  Talk about a resilient, intelligent female character!  Lady Macbeth would love this movie because everyone dies except for the female, showing that females are more important than men and can withstand more than men can, in her opinion. Her "Unsex me here" speech is not even needed because this movie shows that females are higher in capability than their male counterparts.