‘The Good Time Girls’: Laura Dern Is a Badass Feminist Gunslinger in Courtney Hoffman’s Bloody Western — Watch
You don’t want to mess with Laura Dern, and you especially don’t want to mess with Laura Dern when she’s a rifle-wielding crack shot hellbent on revenge. In Courtney Hoffman’s directorial debut, the blood-soaked Western short “The Good Time Girls,” a badass Dern and her cadre of just-as-wild-gal-pals go to war against a pack of men who have done them wrong at every turn. Let’s just say it doesn’t work out so well for the dudes.
Earlier this year, Hoffman explained to The Hollywood Reporter how her work as a costume designer helped push her towards directing. “It wasn’t always something I knew I wanted to do,” she told the outlet. “What I was giving to them as a costume designer was more — they trusted me with how I affected their performances. It was that kind of relationship and comfort that I realized I could give to people as a director.”
Her work on Western films, including Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” and “The Hateful Eight,” helped craft her vision for her debut film.
“The first film I ever designed was also a Western, so I just started asking myself a lot of questions about the women,” she told THR. “Who were the women that actually lived through this history, and are there any examples of women that break that? I think, specifically, Westerns are America’s Greek mythology, and it has created the white male hero in cinema and storytelling. To me, breaking down those boundaries with gender felt really exciting.”
The new short stars Dern, Alia Shawkat, and Annalise Beso as the eponymous Good Time Girls, as they embark on a journey to take down the infamous Rufus Black Gang.
You can check out Hoffman’s brand new (and definitely NSFW) short below, and be prepared for some seriously badass behavior and the arrival of a thrilling new filmmaking voice.
You can find out more about Refinery29’s award-winning Shatterbox Anthology, a short film series dedicated to spotlighting the voices of female filmmakers, including Kristen Stewart, Chloe Sevigny, and Gabourey Sidibe, over at its official site.
Sign Up Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
