Tag: Around the Web

The Ugly Truth Roundup


Despite a “rotten” rating of 16%, The Ugly Truth raked in another $7 million at the box office this past weekend (to compare, the by-all-accounts stellar Julie & Julia brought in just over $20 million), remaining in the top 10 two weeks after its release. The real ugly truth is that this kind of tripe continues to sell.

In our last Roundup, we collected discussions of a film that was controversial due, in part, to its played-for-laughs date rape. In this one, we have a romantic comedy, sold to women and packaged as a date movie/chick-flick, that rests on the age-old premise that women love with their minds, and men love with their dicks. Oh, and that successful career women need to be taken down a notch or two–preferably by a lowest-common-denominator-type buffoon–in order to be happy.

Is this just another crappy Rom-Com? Or is it something more? What about the fact that it was written and produced by women?

Here are some things other people are saying:

  • Women’s Glib might give Katherine Heigl a little too much credit, calling her a “part-time feminist,” but they do remind us that this kind of movie ought to be seen as just as offensive to men as it is to women.

And, in the What Were They Thinking? department:

In a shockingly unaware moment, Ruth McCann exemplifies what’s wrong with post-feminism: “But when Mike advises Abby to be ‘the saint and the sinner, the librarian and the stripper,’ how can the hardened, rom-com-hating Thinking Woman not bark a gruff and hearty ‘Ha!’?”

Um, really?

Leave your links & thoughts in the comments section.

A List, An Archive, and Some Wishes

Today I’m posting some great links to things other people wrote. Enjoy!

  • Melissa at Women & Hollywood has created a “highlight reel” of some of her best posts. This is must-read material for anyone interested in movies and the role women play in (making) them. Help her celebrate her 1000th post by sending a donation.
  • The IFC has created a list of the 50 Best Movie Trailers. I’d spend all day watching them if I could. What’s your favorite?

Pay Discrimination in Hollywood, Who Knew?

Forbes recently published a list of Hollywood’s top-earning actresses, for films completed within the previous year.

Please note the following:

“As is still typical for Hollywood, our actresses earned significantly less than their male counterparts. Harrison Ford was the top-earning actor this year with $65 million, $38 million more than Jolie earned. All told, the top 10 actors earned $393 million, compared with $183 million for the top 10 actresses.”

Take a look at the 15 Top-Earning Actresses, along with their respective career Oscar wins and Oscar nominations.

1. Angelina Jolie: $27 million

1 Oscar win, 2 Oscar nominations

2. Jennifer Aniston: $25 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

3. Meryl Streep: $24 million

2 Oscar wins, 15 Oscar nominations

4. Sarah Jessica Parker: $23 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

5. Cameron Diaz: $20 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

6. Sandra Bullock (tie): $15 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

7. Reese Witherspoon (tie): $15 million

1 Oscar win, 1 Oscar nomination

8. Nicole Kidman (tie): $12 million

1 Oscar win, 2 Oscar nominations

9. Drew Barrymore (tie): $12 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

10. Renee Zellweger: $10 million

1 Oscar win, 3 Oscar nominations

11. Cate Blanchett: $8 million

1 Oscar win, 4 Oscar nominations

12. Anne Hathaway (tie): $7 million

0 Oscar wins, 1 Oscar nomination

13. Halle Berry (tie): $7 million

1 Oscar win, 1 Oscar nomination

14. Scarlett Johansson: $5.5 million

0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations

15. Kate Winslet: $2 million

1 Oscar win, 6 Oscar nominations

Total Amount of Money Earned: $212.5 million
Total Number of Oscar Nominations: 35
Total Number of Oscar Wins: 9

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And, just for kicks, here’s the Forbes list of the 15 Top-Earning Actors:

1. Harrison Ford: $65 million
(0 Oscar wins, 1 Oscar nomination)

2. Adam Sandler: $55 million
(0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations)

3. Will Smith: $45 million
(0 Oscar wins, 2 Oscar nominations)

4. Eddie Murphy (tie): $40 million
(0 Oscar wins, 1 Oscar nomination)

5. Nicolas Cage (tie): $40 million
(1 Oscar win, 2 Oscar nominations)

6. Tom Hanks: $35 million
(2 Oscar wins, 5 Oscar nominations)

7. Tom Cruise: $30 million
(0 Oscar wins, 3 Oscar nominations)

8. Jim Carrey (tie): $28 million
(0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations)

9. Brad Pitt (tie): $28 million
(0 Oscar wins, 2 Oscar nominations)

10. Johnny Depp: $27 million
(0 Oscar wins, 3 Oscar nominations)

11. George Clooney: $25 million
(for acting: 1 Oscar win, 2 Oscar nominations)

12. Russell Crowe (tie): $20 million
(1 Oscar win, 3 Oscar nominations)

13. Robert Downey Jr. (tie): $20 million
(0 Oscar wins, 2 Oscar nominations)

14. Denzel Washington (tie): $20 million
(2 Oscar wins, 5 Oscar nominations)

15. Vince Vaughn: $14 million
(0 Oscar wins, 0 Oscar nominations)

Total Amount of Money Earned: $492 million
Total Number of Oscar Nominations: 31
Total Number of Oscar Wins: 7

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In the past year, the top-earning men made over twice the amount of money as the top-earning women. Perhaps the Oscar info might seem arbitrary; the films that usually gross the most money (summer blockbusters, Apatow, etc) don’t necessarily line up with the many low-budget films that garner Oscar nominations for the performances (The Reader, Rachel Getting Married).

But I still find it disheartening, to say the least, to look at a list where the highest paid women in the previous year, who have won more Oscars overall (arguably the most prestigious award in the history of fucking filmmaking), and who have been nominated for more Oscars overall, still earned less than half of what their male counterparts earned.

***************************************************************

Now, to get really super-crazy, let’s look at the highest grossing films that the top five earning actors and actresses released last year, specifically noting who starred, the exact box office gross, and the overall “fresh” rating on rotten tomatoes (a high percentage means critics thought it rocked; anything lower than 60% usually means it was a piece of shit).

Actresses

1. Angelina Jolie: Kung Fu Panda
Box Office: $215,395,021
RT Rating: 89%

2. Jennifer Aniston: Marley & Me
Box Office: $143,084,510
RT Rating: 61%

3. Meryl Streep: Mamma Mia!
Box Office: $143,704,210
RT Rating: 53%

4. Sarah Jessica Parker: Sex and the City
Box Office: $152,595,674
RT Rating: 50%

5. Cameron Diaz: What Happens in Vegas
Box Office: $80,199,843
RT Rating: 27%

Total Box Office Gross: $734,979,258
Average RT Rating: 56%

Actors

1. Harrison Ford: Indiana Jones … Crystal Skull
Box Office: $316,957,122
RT Rating: 76%

2. Adam Sandler: Bedtime Stories
Box Office: $109,993,847
RT Rating: 23%

3. Will Smith: Hancock
Box Office: $227,946,274
RT Rating: 39%

4. Eddie Murphy: Meet Dave
Box Office: $11,644,832
RT Rating: 19%

5. Nicolas Cage: Knowing
Box Office: $79,911,877
RT Rating: 32%

Total Box Office Gross: $746,453,952
Average RT Rating: 38%

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Basically, the women made much better films according to critics. And while the men grossed more at the box office, by $11.5 million, it’s hardly worth mentioning when you’re talking about $746 million versus $735 million. And yet, the top five actors still earned more than double ($245 million) what the top five actresses earned ($119 million).

Will someone please explain to me how this isn’t blatant gender-based discrimination?

Misogyny Still Reigns at the Box Office

Despite its abysmal reviews, Transformers: Rise of the Fallen took home the top spot at the box office over the weekend.

Here are some highlights from Rotten Tomatoes:

“It’s a wad of chaos puked onto the big screen, an arbitrary collection of explosions and machismo posturing.” –David Cornelius, eFilmCritic.com

“Will insult your intelligence, hurt your eyes, and offend your sense of decency until you worry that your skull might explode while your brain trickles right out of your ears.” –Tricia Olszewski, Washington City Paper

“A perfectly dreadful sequel that’s the filmic equivalent of a 150-minute waterboarding session.”

–Matt Brunson, Creative Loafing

“Put in your earplugs and grab the aspirin. Enjoyable for the [sic] only the easiest to please 10-year-old boys; this deafening, tiresome epic is a skull-splitting hot mess for everyone else.”
–Diva Velez, TheDivaReview.com

And, my personal favorite: “Only an a*****e could have made this film.” –Rob Humanick, House Next Door

I share these snippets to illustrate, if you weren’t already aware, that this movie was clearly made for, and marketed to, young fanboys who like to watch shit blow up. But what else do they like to see? If you guessed “Megan Fox dry-humping a motorcycle,” you are correct.

In a recent interview, Fox told reporters, “Women in movies, in general, are sexy—especially in Michael’s movies. And if you want to make movies that people want to see, that’s part of it. That’s part of the formula.”

The director, Michael Bay, also chimed in. Referencing the shot of Fox sprawled across a motorcycle in hot pants and biker boots, he says, “We got that first shot out of the way, just to get it out for the young boys … and moved on.”

So, according to Fox (and Bay), making movies people want to see entails objectifying and exploiting women. And what’s worse, Fox goes on to say that making these Transformer films and gaining so much exposure (for her hotness) has opened up many doors for her—she’ll soon star in one film opposite John Malkovich and another film penned by Diablo Cody.

This rhetoric reminds me an awful lot of other excuses actresses have made for the roles they choose. Katherine Heigl famously called Knocked Up a sexist film, and then went on to star in a slew of women-friendlier movies, such as The Ugly Truth and 27 Dresses.

And Elizabeth Banks often finds herself in the same predicament: “‘You can go be in a female-driven indie and make two cents and maybe get an Independent Spirit Award, but then you can’t pay your car lease,'” she says. “‘So Vince Vaughn makes movies, he needs a girl to be in it with him, it might be me.'”

I understand and sympathize with actresses in today’s Hollywood climate. Studios continue to argue that actresses can’t open movies, that any successful women-centered film (Sex & the City, Mamma Mia!) is merely a fluke, and that they don’t find it profitable enough to continue greenlighting movies that exclusively focus on women.

I get that it’s a rough climate out there for young actresses especially, but I’m not exactly sure what the solution is. We need more women filmmakers, obviously. And we especially need women audiences to stop seeing every single ridiculous incarnation of The Proposal and He’s Just Not That Into You. While I don’t want to play into the blame-the-victim ideology, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for these actresses to take themselves a little more seriously as actresses and a little less seriously as male fantasies.

Making blatantly misogynistic films clearly pays the bills for them, but at what cost to women as a whole?

Observe and Report Roundup

April is National Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

An odd coincidence is that Jody Hill’s Observe and Report is currently in theaters, and getting all kinds of attention for a rape scene that’s played as comedy. Worst of all, many out there are defending the movie as an edgy, dark comedy, and arguing that the scene doesn’t depict rape at all.

I’ve hesitated writing about the film; movies this noxious don’t deserve whatever free press a site like ours provides (assuming that all press is, in some way, good press). With no plans to ever see OaR, I don’t know that I could contribute a whole lot to the discussion personally, but thought I’d compile a list of what other smart people are saying, and give you a glimpse of the R-rated trailer–with hopes that it shows you as much of the movie as you’ll ever want to see.

A lot of the discussions center around the question of whether or not the sexual encounter shown in the final seconds of the trailer is actually rape. Stupid question; yes, it is. Period. The more interesting debate, which not many are taking up (according to my reading) is why a film like this is being made at this time. I’m all for dark comedy, though this doesn’t really seem like one (MaryAnn Johanson asks whether the movie is a comedy at all in her weekly column at AWFJ), and what worries me is the kind of cultural work being done. All those people who like to shout about how movies are just entertainment and say people like us have no sense of humor, or take things too seriously, are underestimating the power of representation–of the arts in general, film-making included. Although the movie has an R rating, we must ask who the intended audience of such a movie is. Clearly, it’s male, and the movie has a ring of adolescence about it (an epidemic of our time), with its “jokes” about sex, drug use, alcoholism, violence, and whatever else I’ll miss by refusing to see it, which clues us into the fact that it is for people who are still in a phase of their lives when they figure out their own values.

People are seeing OaR, too. It finished fourth in the holiday weekend box office, selling over $11 million worth of tickets. There’s a desire for this sort of thing, and the interesting question is: Why?

Here are some highlights (and lowlights) from the blogosphere:

And some mainstream reviews:

  • Observe and Report by Michael Phillips @ The Chicago Tribune (In a review that otherwise seems fair, writer Micheal Phillips seriously drops the ball–to say the least–when he claims: “The best, riskiest bit in Observe and Report involves Faris, with wee vomitous spillage drying on the pillow by her slack jaw, underneath Rogen, who cannot believe the dolt of his fondest desires is trashed enough to give him a toss.”)
  • Mall Crisis? Call Security. Then Again, Maybe Not by Manhola Darghis for The New York Times (Darghis can be counted on as a female voice in the NYT, but she often–and this is no exception–offers more respect than is due.)
  • Observe and Report by Peter Travers for Rolling Stone (The most appalling of all the “official” reviews I’ve read, which should be no great surprise, considering the source. Here’s a sample: “Props to Hill and Rogen for believing you can play anything for a hoot, including R-rated sex and violence.” Yeah–props. That’s what I was going to say.)

Other sickery:

  • Writer Jody Hill describes his latest movie as “a dark, crazy, awesome journey” in “An Auteur of Awkward Strikes Again” in the NYT
  • An apologist for the rape scene, in a column from New York Magazine, says:


But, given all the horrible things Ronnie does later in the movie — out of spite, or stupidity, or flat-out psychosis — this scene winds up seeming a lot less awful as the movie goes on. For one thing, as horribly misdirected as it becomes, his “courtship” of Brandi is the only thing in Ronnie’s life that comes partly from a place of sweetness rather than entirely from a place of darkness.

Audiences are happy when Ronnie ends up with shy coffee girl Nell, someone who he’s built up a narrative-long relationship of openness and trust. When Brandi tries to get back in his good graces, Ronnie gives her a public kiss-off that centers on her sleeping around.

and, best of all

So which is it? Rape, or the reality of dating circa 2009? As with anything Hill has to say, the meaning is not clear. Feminists have the right to be angry, especially when a mainstream Hollywood movie offers such a backward vision of male/female fornication. But is Observe and Report really saying anything new? In this Girls Gone Wild dynamic of brazen openness and complete lack of shame, should a drunken slut bear any of the blame? It’s not a question of that horrid old excuse “she had it coming.” It’s more of a mirror on where society has sunk since women were empowered to ‘take back the night.’ Clearly, had Hill meant the scene to be something akin to pure sexual assault, Brandi would have been treated like a piece of dead meat.

A Big WTF to the NYT

Published in the New York Times on Saturday, March 20, “An Entourage of Their Own” by Deborah Schoeneman, highlights the friendship of four women writing in Hollywood today: Dana Fox, who wrote What Happens in Vegas and the screenplay for The Wedding Date; Diablo Cody, who wrote (and won the Oscar for) Juno, the upcoming Jennifer’s Body, and the Showtime series The United States of Tara; Liz Meriwether, who is beginning a screenwriting career after a successful run as a playwright in NYC; and Lorene Scafaria, wrote the screenplay for Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist.

Here’s what’s great about the article: In these writers, we have four talented women who give us a positive model of the power of female solidarity, especially in an industry not known for such behavior. In the mode of ‘all publicity is good publicity,’ the article brings attention to women working in Hollywood, and wants to be about how these women navigate life, work, and success in a deeply sexist industry.

Here’s the trouble: “An Entourage of Their Own” appears in the Fashion & Style section.

Why are we reading a fashion article about these women? Especially when there’s very little discussion of fashion or personal style?

Okay, so the four women—who happen to be screenwriters in an industry hostile (at the very least) to powerful women—have a certain kind of style that is more hipster than glam…we guess. Fine. But the way the (female!) writer depicts these women, using the language of submissive sexuality, is atrocious.

Take the opening paragraph:

Cross-legged in one director’s chair was Lorene Scafaria — black pants, brown high heels, amused gaze — leaning in to ask the next question. Waiting to answer, cross-legged in another, was Diablo Cody, struggling to keep her short blue dress from riding up.

This is a style piece (and lifestyle, to be more exact), but why the need to immediately objectify—and sexualize—the women, particularly Cody, with her near-exposure? The first four paragraphs include “cross-legged,” “crossed legs,” “gaze,” “leaning in,” “struggling,” “short blue dress,” “riding up,” “gorgeous,” “naked,” “plunged,” “revealing,” “intimate glimpse,” and “nudity.” At this point, readers are not thinking about fashion or style–much less what they’re interested in writing about–we’re thinking about these women as sexualized objects.

The writer is quick to remind us how hard they work, and how few women can achieve their level of success (!) in Hollywood, and how that success can’t be attributed to their looks, but, just as quickly, she undermines their hard work by quoting men in the biz.

“When you read a screenplay, it doesn’t come with a picture on the cover,” said Adam Siegel, president of Marc Platt Productions, a producer who is friends with all four women and has worked with all except Ms. Cody. “I know a few beautiful women, but none of them write like Dana, Liz, Lorene or Diablo.”

What, exactly, does beauty have to do with writing? If their success cannot be attributed to their good looks, why the incessant need to talk about it? Why is coverage of female filmmakers relegated to the style section of the paper? Finally, if we’re going to have a style piece about the “Fempire,” how about some discussion of their personal style and the way it reflects their confidence, or how it differs from other women who have achieved a similar level of success and power in Hollywood?

Feminism 3.0?

Julia Barry writes of her experience with feminism in the media, and the ways some women have adopted tactics of the patriarchy to compete against other women. Not only is feminism the new “f-word,” but women have favored individual accomplishment over group activism. She claims that this isn’t simply a Hollywood problem:

Independent media supposedly eschews this world of profit values in order to communicate in a more free, honest, and genuine manner. But, as a female indie filmmaker/feminist activist, I have experienced sexism, aversion to “the f-word” – usually predicated on assumptions that feminists are either mean-spirited men-haters or naïve pot-smokers – and bureaucratic coldness like that found within the commercial film industry amongst colleagues and independent media makers. And what upsets me most is that the majority of these experiences have happened with other women. Why?

Read Barry’s article, posted on the MediaRights website, here.

NYT Recognizes a Problem

Manohla Dargis, New York Times film critic, writes about the lack of women in this summer’s blockbuster fare, and the way new Hollywood has become a post-female Hollywood.

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.

Read the full article, titled “Come Summer, Is There a Real Woman in This Multiplex?” here.