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Rod at
Dos Vidas. Photo by Thomas Kist from the 2006 Arjan Vlakveld film “Rod
McKuen: A Man Alone” for Netherlands Public Television. Photo ©2006,
2007 by Stanyan Audio Video Archives. All Rights Reserved.
A Thought for Today
Life is loud and so it follows that we
should accept each solitary day as some prized gift.
TO BEGIN WITH
This week Burt Bacharach turns 80 and somewhere in high-art heaven
Katharine Hepburn hits 100. If she were still with us my old pen-pan
Daphne DuMauriar would be celebrating 99 years of being more or less
Daphne DuMauriar.
POINT OF VIEW
IS THERE A REAL WOMAN IN THIS MULTIPLEX?
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published in the New York Times May 4, 2008
“The Incredible Hulk”
IRON MAN, Batman, Big Angry Green Man — to judge from the new popcorn
season it seems as if Hollywood has realized that the best way to deal
with its female troubles is to not have any, women, that is.
Not that it hasn’t tried to make nice with the leading ladies, in films
like “The Invasion” (with Nicole Kidman) and “The Brave One” (Jodie
Foster). Yet, after those Warner Brothers titles fizzled, the online
chatter was that the studio’s president for production, Jeff Robinov,
had vowed it would no longer make movies with female leads. A studio
representative denied he made the comments. And, frankly, it is hard to
believe that anyone in a position of Hollywood power would be so stupid
as to actually say what many in that town think: Women can’t direct.
Women can’t open movies. Women are a niche.
Nobody likes to admit the worst, even when it’s right up there on the
screen, particularly women in the industry who clutch at every pitiful
short straw, insisting that there are, for instance, more female
executives in Hollywood than ever before. As if it’s done the rest of us
any good. All you have to do is look at the movies themselves — at the
decorative blondes and brunettes smiling and simpering at the edge of
the frame — to see just how irrelevant we have become. That’s as true
for the dumbest and smartest of comedies as for the most critically
revered dramas, from “No Country for Old Men” (but especially for women)
to “There Will Be Blood” (but no women). Welcome to the new, post-female
American cinema.
Nowhere is our irrelevance more starkly apparent than during the summer,
the ultimate boys’ club. Over the next few months the screens will
reverberate with the romping-stomping of comic book titans like Iron Man
and the Hulk. The sexagenarian Harrison Ford will be cracking his Indy
whip (some old men get a pass, after all, especially when Steven
Spielberg is on board) alongside the fast-talking sprout from
“Transformers.” Hellboy will relock and load, tongue and cigar planted
in cheek. Action heroes like Will Smith, Brendan Fraser, Nicolas Cage,
Mark Wahlberg and Vin Diesel will run amok, as will funny guys like Adam
Sandler, Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, Mike Myers, Steve Carell, Jack
Black and Seth Rogen.
The girls of summer are few in number, and real women are close to
extinct. The teenage Emma Roberts plays a Malibu brat shipped off to
boarding school in “Wild Child,” and little Abigail Breslin has gone
blond for “Kit Kittredge,” the first big-screen spinoff from American
Girl dolls. Meryl Streep stars in the adaptation of the jukebox musical
“Mamma Mia!,” and the cast from “Sex and the City” hits the big screen,
though as that HBO show’s fans know, its four bosomy buddies are really
gay men in drag. Angelina Jolie flaunts big guns in “Wanted” amid a
so-called fraternity of assassins. Cameron Diaz stars opposite Ashton
Kutcher in the comedy “What Happens in Vegas,” in a role that shrieks
Brittany Murphy five years ago.
And in August, Anna Faris stars in a comedy called “The House Bunny,” in
which she plays a Playboy Bunny who is ejected from the Mansion because
she’s too old. In a trailer for the movie Ms. Faris’s pretty-in-pink
character responds to her firing with surprise. “I’m 27!” she yelps.
“But that’s like 59 in Bunny years,” a male friend explains. In
Hollywood years too, he might as well have added.
I admit that I laughed at the 59 line, mostly because Ms. Faris — who
could be the next Judy Holliday but without the right material will,
alas, probably end up the next Brittany Murphy — tends to do the
dumb-blonde thing with sizable quotation marks. But I also winced. You
can’t judge a film by its trailer, so I won’t boil this bunny sight
unseen. I’ll just point out that it looks like a clone of “Legally
Blonde” (meaning, yet another iteration of “Pretty Woman”), one of those
aspirational comedies in which women empower themselves by having their
hair and nails done. In this case Ms. Faris’s character takes charge of
a sorority of unkempt brainiacs with boy troubles. Cue the group
makeover and pop-tune montage.
“The House Bunny” is being released by Sony Pictures, which this summer
is also distributing the newest Adam Sandler comedy (“You Don’t Mess
With the Zohan,” co-written by Judd Apatow), the latest Will Smith
vehicle (“Hancock”) and two Apatow-factory productions (“Step Brothers”
and “Pineapple Express”). The studio also has the newly opened “Made of
Honor,” which is being sold with the pretty face of Patrick Dempsey and
the tag line “It takes a real man to become a maid of honor.” In brief,
“Made of Honor” is just a redo of the studio’s 1997 hit “My Best
Friend’s Wedding,” with Mr. Dempsey playing the role originated by Julia
Roberts, the character who realizes that she (now a he) is in love with
her (his) engaged friend.
Such transgender gamesmanship isn’t new in Hollywood, but has reached
its apotheosis in Mr. Apatow’s comedies. With his rambunctious court of
jesters, this new king of comedy has brilliantly gotten around the
tricky, sticky female issue by turning his slackers and dudes into,
well, leading ladies. These aren’t the she-males you find in the back
pages of The Village Voice, mind you. The Apatow men hit the screen
anatomically intact: they’re emasculated but not castrated, as the
repeated images of the flopping genitals in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”
remind you. These guys talk plenty dirty, but they’re also kinder,
gentler, softer and way weepier than most of their screen brethren. They
ache just like women and break like little girls, but they always,
always score.
In “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” the lucky guy is Peter (the screenwriter
Jason Segel), whose stunning conquest, Rachel (Mila Kunis), is so out of
his league as to be in another universe. No matter. Peter snags this
prize specifically because — from his full-frontal nudity to his
penchant for hugs and voluble crying jags, for which he’s literally
mistaken for a woman — he’s basically another chick, or what Arnold
Schwarzenegger once called a girlie man. (The softly plumped Mr. Segel
even looks as if he could fit into an A cup.) In one scene Peter goes
swimming with Rachel only to end up clinging to the side of a cliff.
Rachel, who has already taken the plunge, laughingly yells up at him, “I
can see your vagina!”
Better a virtual vagina, I suppose, than none at all. Last year only 3
of the 20 highest-grossing releases in America were female-driven, and
involve a princess (“Enchanted”) or pregnancy (“Knocked Up” and “Juno”).
Actresses had starring roles in about a quarter of the next 80
highest-grossing titles, mostly in dopey romantic comedies and dopier
thrillers. A number of these were among the worst-reviewed movies of the
year, including “Premonition” (Sandra Bullock) and “The Reaping” (Hilary
Swank), the last of which was released by — ta-da! — Warner Brothers.
The days of “Million Dollar Baby,” for which Ms. Swank won an Oscar, and
“Speed,” which rocketed Ms. Bullock to stardom in the summer of 1994,
feel long gone.
There may be more women working in the industry now — Amy Pascal is a
co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment — but you wouldn’t know it
from what’s on the screen. The reasons are complex and certainly beyond
the scope of a seasonal rant like this one. Some point to the lack of
female directors, whose numbers in both the mainstream and independent
realms hover at around 6 percent. Others blame the female audience,
though the success of “Baby Mama” indicates — just as the summer hit
“The Devil Wears Prada” suggested two years ago — that if given
something decent that speaks to their lives and lets them leave the
theater without feeling slimed, women will turn out. The Apatow she-male
isn’t bad, but give me the real deal any day.
Among the pleasures of the movies are the new worlds they open up, but
there are pleasures in the familiar too, like seeing other women bigger,
badder and more beautiful than life. And whether it’s Sigourney Weaver
in “Alien,” Rosario Dawson in “Death Proof” or Meryl Streep in whatever,
I am there. The black filmmaker Tyler Perry has built his success partly
on the truth that when audiences look up at the screen what they want to
see are faces much like their own. In 2008, when a white woman and a
black man are running for president and attracting unprecedented numbers
of voters partly because they are giving a face to the wildly
under-represented, you might think that Hollywood would get a clue.
Nah.
©Copyright 2008 The New York Times. All Rights Reserved.
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