Rosario Dawson vs. Michelle Rodriguez
Battle of the Tough-Girl Sidekicks

In Hollywood, life isn't all peaches and cream for pretty white girls. Okay, fine -- they do get to be the protagonists of 97% of all movies produced by major studios. But getting to be the protagonist means that the pretty white girl has an antagonist: in other words, she has some kind of showy problem to overcome. And when the pretty white girl is in the middle of all her angst (in the moments when she isn't getting comforted by some dude or other, that is), she gets bucked up, ass-kicked, or defended by her feisty female friend. And if the pretty white girl's friend happens to be a sidekick of colour, so much the better to keep the NAACP's complaints about diversity in film at bay, right?

This summer, Rosario Dawson has been so busy acting as the designated love interest for two of Hollywood's African-American alpha males -- Will Smith, in Men in Black II, and Eddie Murphy, in the long-delayed Adventures of Pluto Nash -- that one might forget that she also has a lot of experience filling out a roomful of girls onscreen. Her first film role ever was playing Ruby in Kids, in which she exchanged bawdy talk with pretty white girl Chloë Sevigny. From there -- after a few gigs with the likes of Spike Lee and Freddie Prinze Jr. -- she embarked upon what was supposed to be a girl-power franchise, playing Valerie in Josie and the Pussycats. While Pussycats was a box-office disappointment its producers seemed to want to forget as quickly as possible, we think that in time, it will eventually be recognized as a cult classic too smart for its intended teen audience. (I mean, a cookie-cutter boy band called Du Jour? Clever! Plus, Seth Green!) In the thankless job of filling out a girl-group trio with two charisma vaccuums (a.k.a. Rachael Leigh Cook and Tara Reid), Dawson glows: she's smart, natural, witty, and sweet, and really makes you believe the impossible -- namely, that her friendship with her grating bandmates is the most important thing in her life.

Michelle Rodriguez has also made some recent inroads as a tough-girl sidekick. She told Jordana Brewster some hard truths in The Fast and the Furious. She backed up Milla Jovovich against skinless Dobermans and...uh...okay, that's all we could gather from the commercials for Resident Evil. But this summer, she has reached the pinnacle of her tough-girl sidekickery as Eden in Blue Crush. Her character seems to exist for no reason other than to goad pretty-white-girl-protagonist Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth) into maintaining her ambition of success as a pro surfer. Eden makes surfboards; that's all we know about her when she isn't pissed off at Anne Marie for goofing off with NFL love interest Matt (Matthew Davis). Eden not only doesn't have a love interest of her own; we don't even know if she likes boys. Given her obsession with Anne Marie, one has cause to wonder whether Eden's interest is strictly professional. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Rodriguez and Dawson are sidekicks only in mainstream films; in indies, where both got their starts, they have played roles with a bit more heft and have even, on occasion, carried movies on their own. Rodriguez, for instance, had only appeared as extras in a couple of films before she won the lead in Girlfight, playing a boxer trying to succeed in a male-dominated field. (And not only did she play the lead instead of the tough-girl sidekick -- she didn't even get a tough-girl sidekick; instead, she got a fellow boxer for a boyfriend, so she had to decide whether beating the crap out of him in the ring would put the kibosh on their relationship.) Dawson, for her part, was one-sixth of the leading cast of Sidewalks of New York, playing a soulful schoolteacher torn between ex-husband Ben (David Krumholtz) and new prospect Tommy (Edward Burns). While we are not fans of Edward Burns as an actor, a writer, or a director, he probably gave her more interesting or life-affirming things to do and say than anything she found on the set of Pluto Nash.

Rare indeed is the entertainment product in which the heroine is not a pretty white girl, and her friend is not a less-pretty or non-white girl. (Fourteen years after Hairspray, for instance, we can count the number of fat-girl protagonists in subsequent movies on our fingers with room to spare.) Michelle Rodriguez and Rosario Dawson have realized early on that they can't expect a steady diet of meaty, fulfilling roles, so they snack on clichéd tough-girl sidekick jobs in order not to get actor's scurvy. Or something.

Advantage: Dawson. She's a better actress, and her jaw-dropping beauty doesn't hurt either.