Comedy – Page 9 – Bitch Flicks

I Married a Monster: Female Friendship in ‘The Other Woman’

Instead of hating and seeing each other as competition, the women form a bond, increasing their woman-power. Kate decides that she wants to make Mark pay for his unfaithfulness saying, “I want him to have to start over,” but she’s afraid she doesn’t have the killer instincts to do it. Her new friends step in, telling her that she does and that if they work together, they can get their revenge.

This guest post by Chantell Monique appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

What makes female-centered films compelling is the opportunity they have to challenge stereotypes that normally surround female friendships; instead of showcasing the back-biting, competitive, pseudo-supportive nature of these friendships, they provide an alternative more positive perspective. At first glimpse, The Other Woman (2014) looks like a 2010s version of First Wives Club (1996). While both are centered on female friendships, The Other Woman takes on a somewhat different approach. Instead of being old college friends, the women in The Other Woman are actually The Wife, The Mistress, and The Girlfriend. Even though they’ve been betrayed by the same man, his unfaithfulness allows them to forge friendships that would have otherwise never happened. In addition, through this friendship, the women are given the opportunity to evolve into stronger versions of themselves.

The Other Woman opens on Carly, played by Cameron Diaz, clearly in love with her new beau, Mark King, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. Mark is handsome, sophisticated and sweeping her off her feet with intimate dinners and long conversations in the park.

Carly, a high-powered attorney has “cleared her bench” or in broader terms, stopped seeing other men, in order to focus on her new love interest. It’s clear that this is a big step for her which is made more evident when she decides to introduce Mark to her father Frank, played by Don Johnson. At first Carly is against this but when Mark gives her an “eight-week anniversary” gift, she lets her guard down and agrees to introduce the two.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Carly, Mark is leading another life in Connecticut with a beautiful home and wife. Kate King, played by Leslie Mann, is Mark’s innocent and adoring wife; dressed in bright summer dresses and cardigans, Kate has no idea that Mark is unfaithful to her. She signs any paper he puts in front of her, while lamenting that she needs to go to “brain camp” while also making sure he’s well-dressed and is eating healthy.

Doused in all the love of an oblivious wife, Kate reminds Mark that they are scheduled to have dinner with friends on the very evening Carly has invited him to meet her father. Mark tries to wiggle out of his dinner with his wife but when she offers to visit him in the city, he agrees to the dinner and cancels with Carly, telling her that his place in the suburbs has flooded.

Disappointed at being stood up, Carly confesses her frustrations to her father who insists she gets over it and surprise her boyfriend in a sexy plumber outfit. Empowered by this idea, she arrives at Mark’s home, dressed to kill, and knocks on the door. To her surprise, it’s Mark’s wife, Kate, who answers. After an awkward introduction and a series of embarrassing moments, a mortified Carly hobbles back to the city.

The next time we see Carly, she’s expertly dressed, pulled together and livid. Resigned to the notion that all men are cheats, Carly has sucked it up and moved on. That is until Kate shows up at her office demanding asking questions. In the nicest way possible, Kate inquires as to Carly’s relationship with her husband; Carly politely tells Kate to ask Mark. Kate responds, “Clearly he’s lying to me and sleeping with you.” Carly doesn’t respond to this, and Kate promptly has a meltdown. Poor Kate didn’t think she was actually right when she accused her husband of sleeping with Carly.

Feeling somewhat sorry for her and desperate to end the scene she’s causing, Carly agrees to answer any question that Kate has if she promises to stop freaking out. Kate agrees and they go out for drinks. A drunk and depressed Kate laments about the current state of her life saying, “I quit my job to focus on his career. I even put off having kids!” Unmoved by Kate’s emotions, Carly offers her some “tough love” by telling her that “monogamy is unnatural.” Here we get a clear picture of these two women: Carly, the tough as nails, lawyer who cautiously believed in love only to be reminded that it’s nonexistent and Kate, the sniffling, heartbroken wife who up until now, had no idea how harsh real life could be.

Carly puts drunk-Kate in a car and sends her back to the suburbs, as she screams out the window, “This was the best night ever!” Relieved to be rid of her and content that she performed her “good deed” of the year, Carly returns to her normal life.

Shell-shocked and unable to pretend everything is the same, Kate escapes the suburbs again, returning to Carly’s job with her Great Dane, Thunder, in tow. An annoyed Carly hisses, “You think we’re friends…we’re not. I don’t care about you or Mark or your dog!” she shoos Kate on her way only to find her on her doorstep a few hours later. In tears, she tells Carly that she’s the only person in the world who knows what’s going on—that she has no one else. Carly invites her in; the two bond over booze, laughs, and fancy underwear.

Carly becomes Kate’s go-to-person and while Carly is annoyed by the late night/early morning phone calls, she’s always there for her. For example, when an excited Mark gets back from a business trip, he dotes on Kate with all the love and attention she’s been desperate for. Huddled in a restaurant bathroom, she calls Carly, afraid she’s going to sleep with him. Carly tells her that she’s making a mistake and to leave her out of it. A frustrated Kate hangs up, looks in the mirror, and tells herself to keep it together.

She doesn’t; instead, she and Mark end up making out. Kate tells Mark to hold on as she rushes to the bathroom to get prepared for sex. While waiting, Mark gets a call; he sneaks out of the bedroom, whispering in hushed tones. Meanwhile, Kate comes out and sees him—she realizes he’s still cheating and it must be with Carly.

A hurt and upset Kate confronts Carly who vehemently denies seeing Mark. This is when they realize, he’s cheating on both of them with someone else. After some stealthy maneuvers, they track Mark down and meet his other woman, Amber, played by Kate Upton; devastated that Mark has a wife and a mistress, the bubbly Amber vows never to see Mark again and begs to hang out with Kate and Carly. Carly’s against it but Kate pleads, “Can we keep her?” Instead of hating and seeing each other as competition, the women form a bond, increasing their woman-power. Kate decides that she wants to make Mark pay for his unfaithfulness saying, “I want him to have to start over,” but she’s afraid she doesn’t have the killer instincts to do it. Her new friends step in, telling her that she does and that if they work together, they can get their revenge.

The women set out to destroy Mark with a series of pranks while also trying to figure out how shady his business practices are. The plan moves along smoothly but Kate can’t seem to let go of her perfect life and love for her husband. After spending a weekend away with him, she sleeps with him. She returns to an excited Carly and Amber who have hacked into Mark’s computer and found out incriminating evidence to end his career. Unfortunately, Kate is not on board; she tells them that their plan is more “complicated” than they think. Upon the realization that Kate can’t let go of Mark, Carly lashes out; in order to prove to Kate that he’s still a cheater, she texts him to see if he wants to hang. Kate storms out and Amber follows. Mark immediately returns the text saying, “I’m free on Friday. Let’s do it!”

With the plan on pause, Carly is saddened by the fact that her loyalty seems to come off too harshly. In the meantime, a happy Kate finally realizes Mark is never going to change when he has her blindly sign yet another set of papers. Tired of being treated like she’s stupid or doesn’t matter, she shows up at Carly’s door again but this time to apologize. The two make up; Kate tells Carly that she stole more evidence from Mark’s desk that can solidify their plan to take him down. Unfortunately, Carly is happy for her but tells her that she can’t help—she must move past the whole situation.

But Carly doesn’t keep her word—she shows up in the Bahamas for Kate who is there to foil Mark’s illegal business deal. She even brings Amber along. The crew is back together and has finally figured out how to leave Mark out to dry. Although they succeed in their plan to ruin the man who betrayed them, they ultimately gain friendships and growth that changes their lives. Through this unlikely bond, Carly becomes more supportive and compassionate while Kate realizes she’s smarter and stronger than she thought. Normally when a woman finds out a man is cheating, they go after the woman, creating an enemy, but The Other Woman challenges this notion by showing women an alternative way to view each other. Instead of competing against each other, Carly, Kate and Amber create a nurturing and supportive friendship that allows them to grow into better versions of themselves. It provides viewers with different perspective on female friendships by highlighting their value and importance.

Chantell Monique is a Creative Writing instructor and screenwriter, living in Los Angeles. She holds a MA in English from Indiana University, South Bend. She’s a Black Girl Nerd who’s addicted to Harry Potter, Netflix and anything pertaining to social justice, and female representation in film and television. Twitter @31pottergirl

‘Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion’: Bosom Buddies Against The World

While there’s quite a bit that’s frivolous about Romy and Michele – the film’s tagline is “The Blonde Leading the Blonde” – there is also, much more importantly, the heartwarming love story at the film’s creamy center. But this love has nothing to do with the complications and disappointments that romantic relationships can bring; rather, it’s what the Greeks called agape, or a deeply spiritual, passionate love between intimate friends.

This guest post by Emma Kat Richardson appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

“God, sometimes I wish I were a lesbian.”

“You wanna try having sex sometime, just to see if we are?”

Romy pauses to consider, then scoffs dismissively. “Yeah right Michele, just the thought of having sex with another woman creeps me out.” Then, an afterthought. “…but if we’re not married by the time we’re 30, ask me again.”

Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion was released theatrically in 1997. Presumably at the time, the titular characters – beloved besties, roomies, and even, rather shockingly, bunkies in twin beds – were around 27 or 28 years old. Which would, in 2014, make them both either 44 or 45. Have they done it yet? By this time, I’m even hoping for a marriage license.

Any ‘90s girl worth her weight in Polly Pockets is bound to be intimately familiar with this movie. My first encounter with the duo happened at a sleepover, in middle school. One trip to the video store and credit card swipe from a friend’s “cool mom” later (you know, the kind not deterred by a pesky R rating), and I was suddenly plunged neck deep into the world of gaudy pink boas and four letter words. Admittedly, much of the humor was over my young, inexperienced head – there’s a recurring joke about a male character schlepping around a giant notebook to conceal his erection whenever Michele is around, which I assumed was just a zing at a nerds and their wacky obsession with doing homework. But there was much to love in the brassy confidence, bold aesthetic choices, and chirpy self-empowerment in the two heroines, and it’s this aspect of RMHSR that makes it one of the most important female-driven comedies.

As high school compadres living together in a sizable beachfront Los Angeles apartment (paid for, somehow, by Romy’s cashier salary alone), Romy and Michele are played with aplomb by Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow, respectively. Through a chance encounter with a former classmate from Tuscon (Heather Mooney – a breakout role for the indomitable Janeane Garofalo) the pair finds out that their 10-year high school reunion is coming up, providing the perfect opportunity to stun adolescent tormenters with their adult impressiveness.

There’s just one problem: their lives aren’t terribly impressive. In fact, on paper, they’re kind of losers. Quite literally, on paper – filling out a pre-reunion questionnaire reveals some startling facts to the blissfully ignorant pair: both are in their late 20s, still single, and stuck in menial jobs. Or no job at all, in Michele’s case. Worse still, a clique of popular mean girls from their teen years, the A Group, is bound to show up at the reunion, along with Romy’s senior year crush, a good-looking meathead who agrees to dance with her at the prom, and then disappears with his wicked girlfriend, the alpha of the A Group. Naturally, there’s a bit of pressure to get appearances here just right. What’s the point of going if you’re not going to impress people, Romy moans.

The answer to this sticky situation, it turns out, is to fight sticky with sticky notes. Why not say they invented Post-Its? Roll into town with a “flip phone” in hand (oh, the ‘90s!), conservatively attired in homemade business suits….Everybody’s bound to believe this incredible fib, right? Wrong. This being a warm and friendly comedy, the nature consequence of grandiose foolery is the spectacular flameout.

"As usual, we’re the only ones who don’t look like we’re going to a hoedown." — “As usual, we’re the only ones who don’t look like we’re going to a hoedown.”

While there’s quite a bit that’s frivolous about Romy and Michele – the film’s tagline is “The Blonde Leading the Blonde” – there is also, much more importantly, the heartwarming love story at the film’s creamy center. But this love has nothing to do with the complications and disappointments that romantic relationships can bring; rather, it’s what the Greeks called agape, or a deeply spiritual, passionate love between intimate friends. Romy White and Michele Weinberger are heterosexual, and to some degree obsessed with their appearances. Who could forget the sensational mid-movie argument scene; yelling “I’M THE MARY, YOU’RE THE RHODA!” at a friend is still a thing to this day. And yet, it’s the friendship between Michele and Romy that transcends the bounds of what a typical female interaction on screen ought to be, by conventional standards.

Together, the two women draw strength from each other: they face down the members of the A Group in the film’s climactic scene, and in the process expose the cruel, manipulative version of “friendship” that so often plays out in movies. In confronting Christie Masters, a prototype of Mean Girls’ Regina George, Romy and Michele gain a sense of self-actualization by exposing her for the insecure, jealous, hateful person always found at the rotted core of an aggressive, abusive bully. Less-than-princely men are, too, an obstacle of no legitimate threat to the relationship maintained by the duo. As Romy tries and fails to secure reunion-ready boyfriends for them in some of the film’s establishing scenes, she repeatedly strikes out, or finds excuses not to follow through on leads. (“Would you excuse me?” she tells a man at a club, “I cut my foot before and my shoe is filling up with blood.”) One has to wonder if the women might not be intentionally single – after all, aren’t they really the loves of each other’s lives? Their sense of inter-personal connectivity is so ingrained that even a dance with a lover is impossible without the other. “May I have this dance?” Sandy Frink, the aforementioned notebook carrier, gingerly asks the grown up Michele at the reunion. “Only if Romy can dance with us,” is the answer, and it’s hard to imagine such a request being met with any other outcome.

Amid so much calculated superficiality among female friendships portrayed on screen, now, even more than 10 years later, it’s still wonderfully refreshing to watch a movie with such a strong girl-powered relationship at its central focus. Romy and Michele are themselves far from perfect, but that’s the whole point: perfection can never be a substitute for true happiness, itself a thing derived from real love in its most unadulterated sense. The lessons of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion are pure and positive: the love between friends is a potent force against the evils of the world, and remaining faithful to one’s self is the derivative of uncomplicated happiness. Take a lesson, here, and whether you think you’re the Mary or the Rhoda, always do your best to have a Romy and Michele day.

Emma Kat Richardson is a Detroit-reared freelance writer living in Austin, Texas. Her work has appeared in Bitch, Laugh Spin Magazine, 944, Alternative Press, Real Detroit Weekly, and on Bust.com. Tweet her: @emmakat, and read her: emmakatrichardson.com.

Lessons from Underrated Coming of Age Flicks: Part 2: Back To School Edition

Even you’re not in school, September feels like a time for beginnings. It’s when you met the people who would become your close friends, bought new school shoes, and settled into a new year. With that in mind, I decided to look at a selection of coming of age films loosely based around school and learning. As an extra bonus, all five films come from female writer-directors.

See Part 1 here: Lessons from Underrated Coming of Age Flicks

Even you’re not in school, September feels like a time for beginnings. It’s when you met the people who would become your close friends, bought new school shoes, and settled into a new year.

It’s also when you were a bundle of nerves. Will my classes be too hard? Will I wear the right thing? Will anyone want to hang out with me?

I still feel that way in September, and I don’t think it’s an accident; I still have a lot to learn about life–we all do.

With that in mind, I decided to look at a selection of coming of age films loosely based around school and learning. As an extra bonus, all five films come from female writer-directors.

The D.A.R. support each other in their career ambitions.

All I Wanna Do/Strike!/The Hairy Bird (written and directed by Sarah Kenochan, 1998 )

It’s 1963 and headstrong Odette “Odie” Sinclair (perennial 90s coming of age star Gaby Hoffman) is being sent to Miss Godard’s Preparatory School, an all-girl boarding school, against her will. Her parents have discovered she plans to have sex with her boyfriend and believe the all-girl environment will keep her safe from boys. It’s this tension between ambitious girls and their growing attraction to men that sets the films conflict in motion.

At Miss Godard’s, Odie joins the D.A.R. (Daughters of the American Ravioli), a group of girls (including Kirsten Dunst) with the shared belief that they can be more than wives and mothers. When they discover plans for the school to go co-ed, the D.A.R. girls are torn. They like boys and want them about, but at the same time are concerned that the pressure to look good and appear feminine would detract from their learning. In addition, they believe the teachers will concentrate on teaching the boys as their education is seen as more important. First, they try to sabotage the plans and make the boys at a near-by school appear as sex-crazed drunks, then they take over the school and hold a strike.

Writer/director Sarah Kenochan based the film loosely on her own school experiences in that period and it definitely feels true to life. In addition to being immensely quotable (“Up Your Ziggy With a Wa-Wa Brush!”), it’s packed with memorable, off-beat characters and great 60s fashion. Though it’s set in the 60s, the central conflict of girls fighting for the quality of their education and their ability to be successful career women is something we can all relate to.

Lesson: Though many think otherwise, feminism doesn’t mean hating men. You can have crushes and romances without giving up your self and your ambitions. It may have been harder to learn these lessons in the 60s, especially as they didn’t always appear true, but unfortunately women are still fighting for recognition of these basic truths.

Hanna finds herself attracted to her best friend

Emporte-Moi/Set Me Free (directed by Léa Pool and written by Pool, Nancy Huston, Monique H. Messier and Isabelle Raynault, 1999)

In 1963, the Canadian province of Quebec was having a crisis of identity (and many feel it still is). Much of the population felt they needed to their own country rather than a part of Canada. This identity crisis is mirrored in teenage Hanna (Karine Vanasse). Her life is marked by in-betweens: she is not a child or an adult, she is not technically Catholic or Jewish (as her mother is Catholic and her father is Jewish), and as she begins to experiment, she finds she is neither straight nor gay.
She attempts to create an identity for herself by imitating her favourite film star, French New Wave star Anna Karina in the Godard film, Vivre Sa Vie. In one scene, the film cuts between shots of her and Anna Karina doing the same dance. This imitation gets her into trouble when she experiments with prostitution, which she sees as romantic because of Karina’s role in the Godard film, and is raped. After her attack, she finds her own voice by picking up a video camera and creating her own images.
The film feels earnest, identifying its main characters as a clearly working class family, several of whom are struggling with depression and highlighting the appreciation of movies and music so crucial to teenage dreams.

Lesson: You are never going to fit into an image. Your glamourous stars may have tragic pasts, you may have uncool conflicts and interests. Our favourite characters and stars even have fictional, streamlined images meant to tell us the stories we want to hear. They’re never as awkward or as painful as real life.

Harper meets Connie at her sister’s wedding, where she is an overlooked bridesmaid

Guinevere (written and directed by Audrey Wells, 1999)

Harper Sloane (Sarah Polley, now an acclaimed writer-director herself) is Harvard bound and not happy about it. She’s an overlooked younger sister from a buttoned-up, patrician family concerned with status and wealth. Though she plans to attend law school in the fall, she secretly feels uncomfortable about the decision though she’s never thought about what other kind of life there could be for her.

Enter Connie Fitzpatrick (Stephen Rea), a 40-something bohemian photographer, and the only person who sees her secret discomfort. They become lovers and Connie invites her to move in with him, his latest in a long line of muses all of which he calls, “Guinevere.” As a Guinevere, she has to learn some kind of art (Connie’s practices are often referred to as a school she will eventually graduate from), and Harper decides to take up photography. She follows him as an apprentice, not out of her passion for it, but because she enjoys seeing what he does. When she begins to enjoy it and gains confidence, however he is weary about even letting her take a single picture.

Guinevere is set apart from other films with similar stories of romance between young girls and older men, by the constant assertion that Harper is 19 and the relationship is between two adults, though they are often posed as teacher and student. Great care is also taken to show the reality of the relationship, as Harper ends up having to work to support him as his alcoholism and bohemian principles won’t let him. He is not a “sugar daddy” that takes her every care away.

Despite this, it’s unclear what the film’s stance on Connie is, as it makes his program look quite attractive. It helps Harper come out of her shell and establish a fulfilling career. When she returns to him years after their break-up, she is very affectionate toward him and sees it as her responsibility to take care of him as he dies.

Lesson: There’s a fine line between discovering your passion and coming into your own. Be sure you’re really discovering who you are, not who others, your family, your friends, even your mentors and lovers, want you to be.

Bethany graduates valedictorian in a class of one and sees the graduation ceremony as a prolonged humiliation

Sassy Pants (written and directed by Coley Sohn, 2012)

To Bethany Pruitt (Ashley Rickards), pink is the colour of oppression. All her life she’s been homeschooled and forcibly sheltered by her impossibly, even cartoonishly cruel mother June (Anna Gunn). June forbids her to go out with people her own age, has as never let her have a job and steals the money she has saved to go to college. Later on, when Bethany escapes, June even tricks her into coming home by telling her her grandmother is dying. As a budding fashion designer, Bethany’s predicament comes to her clearest in the wardrobe full of baby pink clothes her mother has bought for her.

So begins Bethany’s trip to independence. She packs up whatever clothes are salvageable, moves in with her father and his boyfriend and gets a job at a cool clothing shop where she falls in with a bad crowd and finds herself manipulated by a co-worker. But Bethany doesn’t stay down for long, she works hard and enjoys some success designing clothes for a small store. It’s refreshing how the fact that it is very hard to make it in the fashion world is never on Bethany’s mind, she’s just trying to break into its periphery.

The portrayal of Bethany’s mother, June, is the most contentious aspect of the film. She appears to be a terrible mother and possible sociopath through most of the film; however, it’s possible to interpret this view of her as Bethany’s point of view. In the last act, June’s humanity is carefully revealed and she becomes a sympathetic character.

Lesson: Even the worst monsters have their human moments. You don’t have to forgive the cruelty but you can try to understand it.

Vanessa and her FUBAR friends plan their strategy for Snowstream Survivor

Dear Lemon Lima (written and directed by Suzi Yoonessi, 2009)

Dear Lemon Lima is a charming story about outcasts fighting back, not with force but with friendship. It follows 13-year-old Vanessa (Savanah Wiltfong), a half Eskimo (note: Vanessa and the other characters refer to her as Eskimo, though this is not usually seen as a politically correct term) girl attending an Alaskan prep school on an ethnic scholarship. Vanessa is uncomfortable with the Eskimo cultural identity because her mother is Caucasian and she does not have a relationship with her father and his culture. It represents otherness to her, so she clings to her whiteness, claiming “I’m from Fairbanks!” as proof of normalcy.

To complicate matters, she has recently been dumped by her boyfriend, Phillip, whom she believes is her true love. They had a very close relationship, where she called him “Strawberry” and he called her “Onion.” The fact that Vanessa sees herself an a onion, sour and not easy to like, is interesting. She yearns to fit in and be popular, choosing to use the ordinary backpack from her ex’s parents over the cool sealskin bag from her grandmother. In school, she finds herself clumped into the FUBAR (military slang meaning fucked up beyond all recognition) group. The other outsiders who aren’t worried about their status and feel they have reclaimed the word FUBAR, are ready to befriend her, but Vanessa brushes them off.

It’s this that originally makes Vanessa difficult to identify with. In addition, Philip is so ridiculously terrible its hard to believe she still wants him. Then again, she’s a teenage girl blinded by love and sure popularity is the only important goal in life, so she’s probably more like most of us than we’d care to remember. Eventually she realizes she’s too good for Philip and becomes the leader and advocate of the FUBARs so it’s clear she realizes her mistakes.

An interesting facet of the film is its examination of cultural appropriation. Each year, the school holds a competition called the Snowstorm Survivor championship where the school’s all-white student body (Vanessa is the sole native student) compete in events inspired by native games. These activities include a cringe inducing scene where white students dress up in eskimo costumes and do elaborate cultural dances. In addition, Vanessa realizes her scholarship was sponsored by a known racist who instituted the program as a PR move. By the end of the film she connects to her Eskimo heritage by forming a Snowstorm Survivor team that values the principles of the World Eskimo Olympics, a games intended to bring people together rather than tear them apart through competition.

Lesson: Cheer for everyone, have fun and don’t worry about pointless competition and popularity contests. You’ll regret the friends and the fun you didn’t have.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Six Types of Political Movies (Spoiler: This Genre Includes Literally All Movies)

All art is political. That’s what they teach you in art school, and it’s what they teach you in criticism school. It’s apparently not what they teach you in internet troll school.

Written by Katherine Murray.

All art is political. That’s what they teach you in art school, and it’s what they teach you in criticism school. It’s apparently not what they teach you in Internet troll school. In a turn of events that is both terrifying and depressing, a feminist game critic was recently driven from her home by threats of violence after some men didn’t like a video she made. If you’ve been following the story, one of the ideas that keeps coming up is the notion that this critic was somehow imposing a political viewpoint on a space that was neutral before she arrived. She was, as the troll legends tell it, “ruining” something that was “pure entertainment” by “trying to make it political.”

Film has been treated as an art form, and been subject to the same critical analysis as art, for long enough now that it doesn’t gall people to see a review that focuses on more than the technical mechanics of how the thing was made. Even so, if you’re a critic who’s interested in gender, race, or sexuality, you still get blasted from time to time for “making things political” when they otherwise wouldn’t be.

With that in mind, may I present:

6 Types of Political Movies

1. The Message Movie

The Message Movie explicitly takes a position on some political topic. Brave is about how women have the right to choose their own destinies. Born on the Fourth of July is an indictment of the Vietnam War. Quills at least thinks it’s about how freedom of expression is the most important good.

Message Movies don’t have to be blunt and simple – and I would argue that Brave and Born on the Fourth of July are fairly nuanced in their presentation – but the blunt, simple movies are the ones that are easiest to point to.

For example, Water, directed by Deepa Mehta, is a really nice-looking two hour lecture on how the Laws of Manu have led to women’s oppression in India. The two main story lines – about a young woman who’s forced into prostitution and then shamed into killing herself, and a child bride who becomes impoverished after the husband she’s only met once leaves her a widow – are shaped explicitly to drive this point home, and the movie ends with a third woman chasing after Gandhi’s train, begging him to help the untouchables.

Whether or not you agree with the film’s position on the issue – and I certainly don’t know enough about it to offer an opinion – Water is very straight-forward in its message and intent. It would be hard to walk away from it thinking that it wasn’t political, even if you didn’t know that Mehta’s films have sparked violent protest in India.

The Message Movie is the easiest kind of movie to discuss from a political point of view, because it frames the questions for you and draws attention to the issues it wants to debate.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 1 percent – even if we don’t all agree with or about the film’s message, we all understand that it’s trying to tell us something. Most people think it’s fair play to discuss that.

2. The Implied Message Movie

The Implied Message Movie still offers a strong point of view on political issues, and still seems to be doing it deliberately – it’s just not as explicit as the Message Movie.

One of my favorite films ever, Children of Men, mashes together everything wrong in the world, from terrorism to racism to wrongful imprisonment to war, but never didactically spells out its message for viewers. At the same time, no one would leave the theater believing that director Alfonso Cuarón is agnostic about immigration policy or the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib. The movie is full of disquieting, uncomfortable scenes and topical imagery that make the director’s position on real-life issues quite clear.

It’s the same way that no one would watch Brazil and walk away thinking, “I’m optimistic about the moral path our bureaucratic culture will be walking,” or feel like racial tension is not a pressing issue, based on watching Crash.

The Implied Message Movie has clearly dipped its oar in the river of politics, and has ideas it wants to share with us, even if they aren’t packaged and delivered quite as neatly as the message in the Message Movie.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 30 percent – depending on how abstract the movie’s themes are, there’s a chance someone will tell you that you’re ruining it by making it about real life.

3. The “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie

The “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie also has its oar in the river of politics, but it resists pushing off in any particular direction. Biographical movies, or movies based on a true story, are especially likely to land in this category, since the filmmakers may feel that they shouldn’t “impose” a viewpoint on events.

Zero Dark Thirty, which is about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, was controversial, in part, because it didn’t come right out and say that torture was wrong. The scenes depicting torture are filmed in a cold, emotionally detached way, often taking us outside the point of view of either the victims or the perpetrators. Rather than discussing whether what happened was right or wrong, Zero Dark Thirty seems more interested in exploring the motivations behind it, from a fairly non-judgmental standpoint.

Michael Moore has a pretty persuasive argument for why the film is actually an indictment of torture as an interrogation technique, but your opinion on the events of the film will mostly depend on your opinion of torture in real life.

12 Years a Slave, though it’s not likely to be mistaken for a pro-slavery movie, is also far more interested in exploring the social and psychological dynamics of slavery than in arguing for why it’s wrong. As compassionate human beings, of course we understand that what we’re seeing is wrong, but the movie is leaving us to do the ideological work on our own.

Whereas Zero Dark Thirty and 12 Years a Slave use politically charged issues as their primary content, straight-up biographical movies like Walk the Line and The Runaways – especially when the subjects or direct descendants of the subjects are alive – often try to take a non-judgmental attitude toward the characters, simply reporting what they did, without examining the larger context.

In either case, the “I’m Just Telling You What Happened” Movie leaves you on your own to decide how you feel about what happened and your feelings are probably based on information drawn from outside the film.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 30 percent – depending on how central the issue you want to discuss is to the movie’s themes, you may be accused of reading something into it that isn’t there.

4. The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie

The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie tells a benign, feel-good story that reaffirms what its target audience already believes, while steadfastly ignoring anything else that might crop up.

The Help exists to congratulate me, as a white person, for being less racist than the movie’s most villainous character. It invites the audience to identify with white people who Aren’t Racist, and completely limits the scope of its discussion to the Jim Crow era, avoiding any opportunity to draw a parallel or connection between racism as it existed in the 1960s and racism as it exists today.

Similarly, Forrest Gump takes a long tour through twentieth-century American history, reassuring us at every turn, through the simple, home-spun wisdom of its hero, that life is miraculous, love is important, and we should always have faith and feel hope. As Amy Nicholson recently pointed out in LA Weekly, the movie avoids discussing any of the difficult, contentious issues Forrest encounters, from the Vietnam War, to the AIDS crisis, to women’s rights, to civil rights – struggles that defined the national history it’s asking us to feel good about.

The “Let’s Find Something Pleasant to Agree About” Movie doesn’t just leave us to make up our own minds – it actively steers us away from controversial topics by drawing our attention to the topics we’re most likely to agree about.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 50 percent – this is the tipping point where we start to talk about and criticize what’s not in the movie, and people don’t like that as much.

5. The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie

The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie is aware that it should probably say something about the issues that it’s raised, but it would rather just do that quickly so it can move on.

Sex and the City 2, for example, makes the bizarre, kind-of-orientalist decision to send its characters to Abu Dhabi for most of the film. Once there, they are, of course, confronted with the very complicated and difficult issue of women’s rights within the UAE, which they address by:

Treating it like it’s none of their business, so they can have fun riding camels
Trying to make a culturally sensitive statement about how it’s probably OK to wear a veil
Deciding that the women of Abu Dhabi probably have things under control, since they meet to wear make-up in secret
Behaving in culturally inappropriate ways and then acting surprised when people get angry about it
Spilling a bunch of condoms all over the street and then screaming at people

Sex and the City 2 is in no way equipped to discuss a topic as complex and politically volatile as women’s rights in the UAE, and it doesn’t really want to do that, either. Instead, it awkwardly fluctuates through a series of attitudes wishing, like so many wayward travelers, that someone else’s political conflict didn’t have to ruin its vacation.

Similarly, 22 Jump Street, which I wrote about earlier, is aware that it should say something about gender and sexuality, given that so many of its jokes are essentially gay jokes, underneath. The best it can manage is an inconsistent pastiche of ideas, in which its characters sometimes deliver humorously-timed lectures on tolerance and equality.

The Helpless Shrug and Hand Wave Movie acknowledges that there’s something we might want to discuss about its content, but quietly begs us to just let it go.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 50 percent – depending on how graciously the film has requested that you not do this, and how entertaining it otherwise is, you might get told you’re a buzz-kill.

6. The Invisible Perspective Movie

The Invisible Perspective Movie realistically presents ideas and attitudes that are so normalized within our culture that we’ve forgotten that they form one particular perspective, rather than an objective view of reality.

In The Way Way Back, the film’s teenage protagonist forms an emotional bond with a surrogate father figure who helps him come of age as a man. The film, which is otherwise very thoughtful and enjoyable to watch, takes for granted that part of becoming a man involves learning to objectify women, and battling with other men to win a woman’s loyalty.

Someone watching the movie might say, “Well, that’s what boys learn to do,” and I’m sure that, for some boys, it is. But the fact that the movie doesn’t label or examine this as a political issue – the fact that it treats this as a completely unremarkable feature of gender – doesn’t mean the issue’s not there.

Edge of Tomorrow casually presents a female soldier as being competent and skilled – something that many critics did comment on, since it’s not what we usually see – and it also casually presents the fact that the male soldiers she serves with don’t like her and call her “Full-Metal Bitch” behind her back. Both of those things – the idea that a woman can be a competent soldier and the idea that that means nobody will like her – have political meanings, though you might notice only the first one – or neither – on the first pass.

Every movie that exists is made from a certain perspective, whether the movie calls attention to that perspective or not. And, since we live in a world full of constant political struggle, the perspective a movie is made with can necessarily be read as offering a political viewpoint.

That doesn’t make the movie good or bad – The Way Way Back doesn’t “lose” at politics because it didn’t spend a lot of time interrogating its perspective on gender – it just means that we frame our discussions about it differently. A movie that isn’t specifically trying to impart a political message is still a mirror to the culture that produced it and, by examining what we see in the mirror, we can learn new things about ourselves.

Critics add the most value when they talk about things that aren’t obvious, and help us to consider our assumptions from an alternate perspective. They do, indeed, “go looking for things” to talk about rather than taking films at face value, because that’s how you engage with art as something that’s culturally relevant.

Likelihood that you’ll get blasted for thinking the film is political: 99 percent – people hate it when things are culturally relevant.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

‘What’s Your Number?’: A Feminist’s Guilty Pleasure

The fact that I need “cover” for watching this movie is not because it is a “chick flick.” I’m a feminist, so I don’t think things have less value when they are geared towards women. It’s not that its a lowbrow romcom. It’s 2014, and I try to pretend I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. It’s that this lowbrow romcom chick flick appears to presuppose that a woman could have too many sex partners. And I could pretend I watched this so I could tear it apart on this website, but the truth is I wanted to watch a romantic comedy and this one has Anna Faris and Chris Evans in it. Even though I was 90 percent sure it was going to be sexist. That, my friends, is a guilty pleasure.

Anna Faris in 'What's Your Number?' — Anna Faris in *What’s Your Number?*

Man, I wish I knew that What’s Your Number? had a wedding in it back when I was writing weekly wedding movie reviews, because that would have been the perfect excuse to watch it. The fact that I need “cover” for watching this movie is not because it is a “chick flick.” I’m a feminist, so I don’t think things have less value when they are geared toward women. It’s not that its a lowbrow romcom. It’s 2014, and I try to pretend I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. It’s that this lowbrow romcom chick flick appears to presuppose that a woman could have too many sex partners.

And I could pretend I watched this so I could tear it apart on this website, but the truth is I wanted to watch a romantic comedy and this one has Anna Faris and Chris Evans in it. Even though I was 90 percent sure it was going to be sexist. That, my friends, is a guilty pleasure.

Ally's number is 19 which is allegedly a problem of some kind — Ally’s number is 19, which is allegedly a problem of some kind

Here’s the sexist premise in full: Anna Faris plays Ally Darling, who gets dumped and fired in the same morning, and then discovers an even bigger problem with her life: she has nearly twice the average American woman’s number of lifetime sex partners, and is one partner away from the scientifically determined unmarriagable boundary of 20. She decides she can’t have sex again until she meets “The One.” Oy.

But for about 90 seconds during the opening credits of What’s Your Number? I got really excited that this might be a stealth-feminist film. The camera pans over pages from women’s magazines, with headlines perfectly illustrating the judgment, shame, contradictory advice and demented priorities that populate those pages: “Change Too Much For Your Man?” “Decorating Your Bedroom *With Him in Mind,” “Does He Only Want You For Your Bod?” and my personal favorite:

"When Your Sister Is Just Plain Better Than You" — “When Your Sister Is Just Plain Better Than You”

This movie gets it! Women’s magazines are sexist trash piles that primarily function to make women feel inferior. Ally is going to learn not to let a magazine define how many sexual partners she “should” have. Ally is going to learn to tell the slut shamers of the world to shove it and then she’ll go bone the hot guy across the hall.

Shirtless Chris Evans in 'What's Your Number?' — Shirtless Chris Evans in *What’s Your Number?*

Well, spoiler alert: only the second part happens, and only after lots of get-together plot and mutual declarations of L-O-V-E, which she never would have found with this Chris Evans-shaped charmer who makes her laugh and gets her weird art and is shaped like Chris Evans had she just jumped his bones the first time she saw him mostly naked (which he is, in like, more than half of his scenes, adding another dimension of guilty pleasure. to this movie, because sexually objectifying people is wrong, but…):

I mean seriously. This happens in more than one scene.

Chris Evans-shaped Colin only has one night stands, you see, because he becomes paralyzed with fear of hurting women if he knows any humanizing details about them, such as “she once was a child.” So he loves ’em and leaves ’em to find their own way out of his apartment while he hides out in Ally’s. But there’s no article in GQ criticizing Colin’s sexual behavior, and neither he nor Ally really question it, even though her number teetering at less than one tenth of his has sent her life spiraling. This is one of many missed opportunities for What’s Your Number? to critically engage with its central premise.

Colin teaches Ally you can Google people.

The bulk of the plot is a High Fidelity-style tour of exes, as Ally figures out the loophole where she can get back with someone she’s already banged without adding to her number. [Colin helps her track down these guys with “cop family” secrets he has like being on Facebook.] So we get lots of amusing cameos and windows into different ways Ally has changed herself to get a man’s approval, from dressing like a senator’s wife to pretending to be British. And yes, yes, “You’ll be happiest with someone you can be yourself with” is a fine message, but movie, YOU ALREADY HAVE A MESSAGE, that no one should let a magazine tell them how many people they should have sex with. Right? RIGHT?

The caption of this gif is not "I'll have sex with as many people as I want." — The caption of this gif is not “I’ll have sex with as many people as I want!”

Sigh, no. The “to hell with Marie Claire!” moment I was waiting for never came (I should have known that Marie Claire wouldn’t have agreed to product placement if that was coming). And worse, in the last scene of the movie, Ally gets a voice mail from one of the guys on the list clarifying their sexual history (they only did it “dry style”), and she can triumphantly declare that Colin “is my 20!” and their love is not doomed. Barf.

But, Hera help me, I still really liked this movie. Anna Faris is just so charming! Chris Evans wears nothing but a tea towel in multiple scenes! They have chemistry! Amusing cameos! Including Anthony Mackie miming handling four penises! No “my younger sister is getting married” panic! Said younger sister is Ari Graynor! Raunchy comedy geared toward the women in the audience and not just to appease their male dates! Sex positivity (yes, seriously, in the movie borne from slut shaming)!

"I'm like, super gay." — “I’m like, super gay.”

Seriously, this would be a glowing review of an underappreciated gem if you could just cut out the bullshit last scene (although work the words “dry style” into some other part of the script, because that’s hilarious) and throw in some real talk about how ridiculous our obsession with “Numbers” is. We could have had it all, movie. Instead, What’s Your Number? only bumps up my number. My number of Antifeminist Guilty Pleasures. Which is way, way higher than 20.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town. Her number is somewhere between negative three and seventeen thousand.

When is This Movie Going to End? or, Extended Adolescence and Meta Moments in ‘Freddy Got Fingered’

I know the nineties are over, but I’m still a fan of Tom Green and his eccentric brand of humor. When critics and filmgoers dismiss ‘Freddie Got Fingered,’ I feel it’s for the wrong reasons; to pass the movie off as a cinematic abortion of sorts is narrow thinking. People probably still wonder, “Who gave Tom Green money to make a movie?” I know, it’s like writing a kid a blank check and sending him into a candy store. However, if we’re not receptive enough to uncover the ideas and themes Green presents, and to assess their relevance to Hollywood ideals, celebrity status, and family politics, we need to re-evaluate how we watch film. There’s good stuff to be found in ‘Freddy.’

Written by Jenny Lapekas.

I know the 90s are over, but I’m still a fan of Tom Green and his eccentric brand of humor. When critics and filmgoers dismiss Freddy Got Fingered, I feel it’s for the wrong reasons; to pass the movie off as a cinematic abortion of sorts is narrow thinking. People probably still wonder, Who gave Tom Green money to make a movie? I know, it’s like writing a kid a blank check and sending him into a candy store. However, if we’re not receptive enough to uncover the ideas and themes Green presents, and to assess their relevance to Hollywood ideals, celebrity status, and family politics, we need to re-evaluate how we watch film. There’s good stuff to be found in Freddy.

In the trailer for Freddy, Green tells us, “If you like acting, then you’ll like Freddy Got Fingered.” The film itself works as a commentary on the movie-making process and essentially laughs in its face. Green’s declaration is meant as a sneer at the generic nature of not only popular film, but the reasons behind that popularity: that many viewers hold low expectations when evaluating movie quality. The mantra throughout Freddy seems to be “I’m a 28-year-old man”: Green’s character asserting his maturity to his parents, who are well aware that their baby is still very much a baby at 28 years old. While his mother would prefer her baby boy to stay at home, Gordy’s father (played by the incomparable Rip Torn) wants to see his son succeed and make something of himself.

When Roger Ebert reviewed this film, he had this to say: “This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. The movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.” Then why mention it? It’s clear that Green doesn’t want to be taken seriously. He spends his time satirizing movie tropes and evading the cinematic qualities that define film as a meaning-making process. To discuss Freddy alongside Hollywood blockbusters is apples and oranges.

Even the film’s cover–Green mimicking the gesture filmmakers use when describing their creation or cinematic vision–pokes fun at itself.

When we meet Gordy, his placement as an overgrown child is solidified when we watch him laying in bed, describing the absurd backstories that accompany the comics he’s drawn, which are actually quite good and show a great deal of artistic talent. Gordy’s job at the cheese sandwich factory is a satirical commentary on the struggling artist who works the meaningless, manual labor job while attempting to aspire to something greater in this life. Gordy’s departure from this job also serves to confirm his authentic identity as an animator.

The comical depiction of extended adolescence, especially in men, is seen often in film (see Step Brothers, Slackers, and Young Adult), yet it rarely seems tackled as a topic for discussion. Green’s lunatic brand of surrealist humor (see Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and The Mighty Boosh) and viewers’ not so warm reception of his film are a reflection of people’s desire for logic and the comfort we find in the assurance that gravity still exists each day when we wake. In an interview on the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Green even explains that he was trying to make the “stupidest movie ever.”

Green pokes fun at the “feel good” moments we come to expect in films, the moments that inspire us and evoke tears. We see such a moment when Gordy spontaneously delivers a baby and has a revelatory moment about his life (see Mixed Nuts and Saved!), and again when Betty (Gordy’s love interest) invents a rocket-powered wheelchair.

Signature of Green’s absurd humor, he shows up at a swanky L.A. restaurant to track down bigwig Dave Davidson (Anthony Michael Hall) to see if he can score his own television series based on his drawings, all dressed as an English bobby.

The head of Radioactive Animation Studio patiently explains to Gordy, “Your drawings are pretty good, but it doesn’t make any sense, OK? It’s fucking stupid,” which incidentally describes Green’s humor as well as the general theme of Freddy. We have these moments of raucous laughter, but we can’t explain the bizarre satisfaction we gain from watching Green’s stunts, which includes a fair amount of physical comedy in the same vein as Jackass, such as crashing into people and doors as he awkwardly moves around in the film, very much resembling a clumsy, pubescent boy. When Davidson tells him that his characters are lame, Gordy pulls out a gun and puts it in his mouth: more satire relating to the extreme measures artists take when their art goes unrecognized or they fail at becoming rich and successful (see Airheads).

"I'm a loser! I wish I was dead!!!" — “I’m a loser! I wish I was dead!!!”

Freddy is a hyperbolic look at the consequences of extended adolescence, and several scenes exemplify this theme, particularly those involving Gordy and his dad. When Gordy is forced to move back home, he insists he’s going to eat a fast food chicken sandwich at the dinner table after his mother has made a lovely roast beef dinner. He argues with his father, citing his age as the reason that he can do as he pleases–a sure sign of adolescence–and his father sarcastically tells him how “impressive” it is that he can eat the food he chooses independently. This scene of family dysfunction is so telling and significant; the child-parent relationship is just that: between parents and a temperamental child who desperately wants to convince his parents that he’s not worthless. Gordy’s insistence to his father that he’s an adult and can make his own decisions–at the very least, what he chooses to eat for his dinner–serves as proof that he’s in fact not an adult at all.

Amongst his antics, Gordy dons scuba gear in the shower, where he pretends he’s diving for buried treasure, and he dresses as “the Backwards Man,” a tragic inversion of the savvy businessman his father dreams he could become.

When Gordy decides to quit the “sandwich business” once and for all to fulfill his dreams of becoming an animator, his father even tries grounding him and sending him to his room. Ironically, Gordy’s fed up dad propels his son into success by showing up at his pitch and trashing the office of Davidson, who’s under the impression that it’s all a creative act. Although Gordy spends most of his million dollar check to drug his father and bring him to Pakistan, he finally proves himself by selling his “doodles” and taking on a job.

Aren’t we thankful there’s a movie out there where we can see Rip Torn spanking Tom Green like a naughty child?

The title, admittedly, has very little to do with the plot of Freddy, if we can get away with claiming that the film does indeed have a plot. Gordy accuses his father of molesting his brother, Freddy, which is, of course, untrue. In accordance with this theme of extended adolescence, the 25-year-old Freddy–ambitious and cocky, and hence Gordy’s polar opposite–is taken into custody by Child Protective Services, and we see him in an orphanage watching television with young children. Gordy also makes sure to downplay his little brother’s success by telling him over breakfast, “You work at a bank. Am I supposed to be dazzled? You live in a tiny little shit hole, and you can’t afford breakfast, so you come here and eat for free.” Gordy has a point and manages to cast doubt on Freddy’s pride and sense of accomplishment. Despite Gordy’s talent as a troublemaker and Freddy’s work ethic, Gordy somehow remains the favored of the two sons.

Gordy tries to impress Betty by pretending he works as a stockbroker. — Gordy tries to impress Betty by pretending that he works as a stockbroker.

The role of Gordy’s love interest, Betty, is interesting. Betty is in a wheelchair and is called a “retard slut whore” by Gordy’s dad, representing a demographic that mistakes physical disability with mental impairment. Gordy purchases a ridiculous bag of jewels that he presents to Betty after stepping off a helicopter on top of a building, and she rejects them, claiming, “I don’t care about jewels. I just want to suck your cock.” We’re confronted with an image of female sexuality that many viewers find problematic; disabled female characters tend to be desexualized in film and TV, and we’re also faced with the challenge of negotiating Betty’s voracious sexual appetite with our own misgivings about kink, foreplay, and sadomasochism.

While attempting to give Gordy a blow job, Betty finds his umbilical cord taped to his stomach, a clear reference to his permanent infantilization, which he seems to simultaneously embrace and loathe.

So why watch Freddy? How does the “stupidest movie ever” redeem itself for viewers unwilling to understand surrealist humor? The meta moments we find in the film culminate in the grand conclusion that “the Hollywood movie” can be interpreted as a pretentious joke, and Green is not taking his own film seriously enough to even stumble upon any form of success. Green’s treatment of this concept undermines critics’ ability to evaluate his film.

If you’re still skeptical, watch Freddy if only for Julie Hagerty’s performance. Hagerty, who’s always fabulous as “the mom” (see Just Friends, She’s the Man, and Storytelling) plays Gordy’s nervous, overprotective mother, even though Gordy is practically 30 years old.

At the advice of Gordy, Julie Brody leaves her husband and begins sleeping with Shaq.

Green explains that the point of the movie was to be polarizing and that he found further humor in the highly divisive viewer responses. Green makes us question our own sense of rationality and how we’ve constructed reality thus far in our lives. Freddy is funny for its unpredictable and nonsensical nature, not its inability to paint a picture of logic and reason. If viewers feel violated after watching a subversive film that simply cannot be explained away or dismissed, there are plenty of movies that contain tired tropes and stereotypes (see The Women–Bechdel Test, anyone?–and every Tyler Perry movie ever).

In the film’s trailer, Green even tells us, “I don’t really know how to make a movie.” When Gordy shows Davidson his drawings, he schools Gordy on narrative structure: “There actually has to be something that happens that’s actually funny. What the fuck is happening here?” We may ask that very same question about Freddy. What’s going on here? Using surrealist humor to question social contracts and deride an audience that is too entrenched in the trite, the cliche, and the creatively irresponsible, that’s what.

Moments before the film ends, a self-deprecating meta reference.

Any “hard-hitting” criticism of Freddy or movies like it is like judging the lasagna some nut brought to the National Pie Championships. Ebert was right: Freddy doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel, because Tom Green is too busy wearing the barrel on his head and making everyone uncomfortable to notice. Green’s movie inherently resists critique, which in fact makes this review, in a certain philosophical sense, nonexistent.

____________________________________________

Jenny holds a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at a community college in Pennsylvania. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. She lives with two naughty chihuahuas. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.

‘Baby Mama’ Makes Fun of Pregnancy More Than Poor People

Shockingly, despite both Tina Fey and Amy Poehler being on my Fantasy Dinner Party Guest List, it took me six years to finally watch Baby Mama, the 2008 surrogacy comedy starring everyone’s favorite FFBFFs (famous funny best friends forever). I made the classic error of judging a movie by its trailer and thought ‘Baby Mama’ was going to be 90 minutes of “this old bat has such raging baby fever she lowers herself to associating with—get this—poor people!” and/or “This chick is so poor she sublets her uterus! It’s funny because she’s poor.”

'Baby Mama' movie poster — *Baby Mama* movie poster

Shockingly, despite both Tina Fey and Amy Poehler being on my Fantasy Dinner Party Guest List, it took me six years to finally watch Baby Mama, the 2008 surrogacy comedy starring everyone’s favorite FFBFFs (famous funny best friends forever).

Aside from having been released during the pop culture blackout period that was my first year of law school my giant mistake, I also made the classic error of judging a movie by its trailer and thought Baby Mama was going to be 90 minutes of “this old bat has such raging baby fever she lowers herself to associating with—get this—poor people!” and/or “This chick is so poor she sublets her uterus! It’s funny because she’s poor.”

Amy Poehler's Angie holds breast pumps over her eyes. — Amy Poehler’s Angie holds breast pumps over her eyes.

Fortunately, Baby Mama is not as grossly classist as I feared. Yes, Tina Fey’s Kate, the wealthy businesswoman who can’t get pregnant, is shocked by her surrogate Angie (Amy Poehler) for everything from her diet (heavily featuring Tastykakes and Dr Pepper) to her manners (discarding gum under a reclaimed barnwood coffee table) to her interests (the American Idol karaoke video game Kate bought for her niece). But the audience is invited to laugh at both sides of the class divide between these characters, and there are actually significantly fewer jabs at Angie for being insufficiently classy than there are at Kate for being a yuppie snob. It’s just that peeing in the sink makes for better trailer material than jokes about forced nicknames for gentrified neighborhoods.

"You peed in the sink, isn't that against everyone's rules?" — “You peed in the sink, isn’t that against everyone’s rules?”

However, if you’re looking for any kind of meaningful exploration of the power dynamics and body politics inherent to contracted surrogate pregnancies, Baby Mama is not your movie. This is strictly a situation comedy, with a surprising reliance on plot twists and a mostly superfluous romantic subplot involving Greg Kinnear as a slightly more sincere yippie (Young Urban Professional Hippie) than Kate. A lot of the humor is derived from the absurdities that apply to pregnancy and parenting more generally rather than surrogacy specifically: birth shaming, strollers with airbags, books like 101 Things That Can Go Wrong With Your Pregnancy.

Kate reads 101 Things That Can Go Wrong With Your Pregnancy — Kate reads *101 Things That Can Go Wrong With Your Pregnancy*

But, the surrogacy forces the Hollywood Movie Unobtainium that is a central female relationship. And it is the chemistry between Fey and Poehler that keeps this movie afloat despite its meandering pace, some repeated jokes that never quite land (Steve Martin as Kate’s boss is one yuppie joke too many, Sigourney Weaver as the surprisingly fertile surrogacy agent), pointless tertiary characters (Maura Tierney as Kate’s supermom sister, Romany Malco as Kate’s weirdly ubiquitous doorman), and a final plot twist that made me feel like I had morning sickness.

Really, if the combined powers of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler can make a movie as thoroughly mediocre as Baby Mama so much fun to watch, we should probably be legally requiring them to make at least one movie together a year. Call your congressperson.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town who just looked up how many days there are until the next Golden Globes (129).

‘Mannequin’: A Dummy’s Guide to True and Everlasting Love

By any regular standards, even the 1980s, ‘Mannequin’ is a TERRIBLE movie. It never should have been green lit, let alone hit wide release. It’s often lumped in with other Brat Pack pics, thanks to the presence of Andrew McCarthy and James Spader, but it really should be categorized separately, as a romcom gone wrong. Showroom dummies that come to life after hours should be the stuff of horror movies, or episodes of ‘Doctor Who,’ not fluffy fantasies starring a nearly naked Kim Cattrall. John Hughes wouldn’t have touched this material with a ten-foot pole.

This guest post by Karina Wilson appears as part of our theme week on The Brat Pack.

By any regular standards, even the 1980s, Mannequin is a TERRIBLE movie. It never should have been green lit, let alone hit wide release. It’s often lumped in with other Brat Pack pics, thanks to the presence of Andrew McCarthy and James Spader, but it really should be categorized separately, as a romcom gone wrong. Showroom dummies that come to life after hours should be the stuff of horror movies, or episodes of Doctor Who, not fluffy fantasies starring a nearly naked Kim Cattrall. John Hughes wouldn’t have touched this material with a ten-foot pole.

It’s hard to believe the filmmakers ever thought audiences would fall for the outrageous plot. An Ancient Egyptian princess, Emmy (Kim Cattrall), escapes arranged marriage to a camel dung salesman by disappearing in a puff of smoke and reincarnating as a showroom dummy in 1987 Philadelphia, where she finds true love with the career-challenged Jonathan (Andrew McCarthy) inside a glittering retail palace (Wanamaker’s, now Macy’s Center City). She exploits the well-documented Philadelphian obsession with classy department store window displays to turn Jonathan’s life around, defeat the bad guys, and [SPOILER ALERT] get married (in a climactic window display!) and live happily ever after.

Critics, understandably, hated it. Roger Ebert thought it was, quite literally, DOA (“Mannequin is dead. The wake lasts 1 1/2 hours, and then we can leave the theater”). Janet Maslin in the New York Times lamented the lack of substance (“In place of a real story, there is just the spectacle of stock characters being put through their paces to fill up the time”) and lousy performances (“It’s never a disappointment when the mannequin, which comes to life only intermittently, turns back into wood”). Leonard Maltin called it “absolute rock-bottom fare. Dispiriting to anyone who remembers what movie comedy ought to be.” Yet it was a hit – grossing more than $42 million off a $6 million budget – and was nominated for an Academy Award – for Starship’s theme song, “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.”

I willingly confess to loving Mannequin. It’s so wrong, it’s absolutely right. It’s a big, tatty rescue pooch who plants her paws on your chest and gives you a slobbery kiss of a movie: certain people, dog people, Mannequin people, can’t help but be charmed. Even now, watching it as a hard-bitten 40-something, it invokes my inner impressionable teen.

I adore the unromantic hero, Jonathan Switcher, because he manages to be simultaneously weird and endearing. There’s something a bit off kilter from the top: when we first meet him, he’s salivating over a naked clothes dummy. He exudes every which way of warning signal, from the pronounced doll fetish to the Frankenstein complex to the social ineptitude. When the dummy-making gig doesn’t work out, he is hired and quickly fired from a succession of menial occupations, which consequently causes him to be dumped by his improbably put-together girlfriend, Roxie (Carole Davis). Poor Jonathan would drown instantly if forced to dive into the perilous depths of the 2014 dating pool. However, this was the 1980s, when you could splash about in the shallow end and still qualify as Kim Cattrall’s dream date. On the plus side, Jonathan rides a Harley, lives in a sweet studio apartment (obviously comes from money, yay 1980s!), and he’s Andrew McCarthy. Andrew fucking McCarthy. Be still, my perpetual adolescent heart.

For those of you who don’t recall, Andrew McCarthy was the Beta Male of the Brat Pack. He wasn’t as beautiful as Rob Lowe, or as badass as Judd Nelson, or as peppy as Robert Downey Jr., but you’d take him over Anthony Michael Hall or Jon Cryer any day. He had a burning blue stare, a voice that dropped to a creaky growl when – as often happened – his character was wracked with emotion, and a lift to his chin suggesting a stubborn streak a mile wide. He was cool enough to pop his collar and run with the in-crowd, but he was also sensitive enough to be an individual, even (shock!) an artist, and follow his dream. He was the Nice Guy before the term became so ridiculously devalued. He was the boy who might, quite unexpectedly, offer to walk you home after prom turned to tears, and then turn misery and humiliation into the most enchanted evening of your life through the power of his goofy grin and kind eyes. I loved him then and I love him still.

He’s wasted in Mannequin. He does his best with the material, and manages to make Jonathan geeky and adorable, a whisper away from quietly insane: in lesser hands, the guy would be plain creepy. McCarthy makes it halfway believable that Emmy, who has had her pick of hot dates (Christopher Columbus!) throughout history, might finally settle for the lowest status employee in the store. And Cattrall keeps up Emmy’s end of the deal, regarding Jonathan as a feline would a toy stuffed with catnip – with unadulterated delight. She bats him between her paws, chews on him gently, and, when the montage is done, curls up beside him and goes to sleep. Girl clearly likes to dominate, and there’s a coy whiff of BDSM about some of their dress-up-and-play. What else are they going to do with those tennis racquets other than spank each other’s ass?

In a cute subversion of romcom norms, then, Emmy is the Alpha Female who picks out the Nice Beta Male early on in the narrative and seduces him with a plastic smile. She has been dating for millennia. When she sees it, she knows exactly what she wants – and it ain’t the traditional alpha hero. Jonathan and Emmy are perfect for one another from the moment they lay eyes on one another. There’s no need for a makeover montage. This is due to bad storytelling rather than feminist innovation, but it’s so refreshingly unusual, it works. She’s content to dazzle, he’s content to be awed – and when required, he saves her life. We should all aspire to such a Mr. Right.

The writers, Michael Gottlieb and Edward Rugoff, manage to throw a few obstacles in the happy couple’s way (the course of true love never did run smooth) in the form of manic supporting characters. Forget three-dimensional, thinking, feeling, human beings – crass stereotypes abound. There’s flamboyant, gay, black, promiscuous Hollywood (Meshach Taylor), the set designer who takes Jonathan under his sateen wing. Estelle Getty pops up as the store’s owner, Claire Timkin. G.W. Bailey reprises his Police Academy shtick as Felix, the bumbling security guard – Cattrall was a fellow alumni, best known for her sex kitten turns in Porky’s and Police Academy at this point, so he must have felt at home. And there’s the villainous Richards, James Spader abandoning his usual sexy-husky bad-boy turn in favor of playing a rival storeowner with cartoonish slicked-back hair and outsize spectacles. None of it makes much sense. But somehow Jonathan and Emmy win and Richards and Roxie lose and the finale is all “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” most triumphant good.

That’s all, folks. Mannequin is fun, but wafer-thin. Although considered a cult classic, it has zero cultural significance, especially when compared to the canon Brat Pack hits that defined a generation. It’s a vapid Technicolor fantasy that, by being so poorly conceived and written, accidentally manages to subvert all the other Pygmalion stories. Flimsy as she is, Emmy is the romantic heroine who doesn’t have to be reshaped or reinvent herself in order to deserve her adoring swain. All she needs is for us to believe she’s real.

Karina Wilson is a British writer and story consultant based in Los Angeles. She writes a regular column on horror fiction at Litreactor and can also be found at Horror Film History.

‘Sixteen Candles,’ Rape Culture, and Anti-Woman Politics

Holy fuck this movie. I started watching it like OH YEAH MY CHILDHOOD MOLLY RINGWALD ADOLESCENCE IS SO HARD and after two scenes, I put that shit on pause like, WHEN DID SOMEONE WRITE ALL THESE RACIST HOMOPHOBIC SEXIST ABLEIST RAPEY PARTS THAT WEREN’T HERE BEFORE I WOULD’VE REMEMBERED THEM.

Nostalgia is a sneaky bitch.

Movie posters for Sixteen Candles

This post by Stephanie Rogers appears as part of our theme week on The Brat Pack.

Nostalgia is a sneaky bitch.

I wanted to write about all the wonderful things I thought I remembered about Sixteen Candles: a sympathetic and complex female protagonist, the awkwardness of adolescence, the embarrassing interactions with parents and grandparents who JUST DON’T GET IT, crushing hard on older boys—and yes, all that stuff is still there. And of course, there’s that absolutely fantastic final wedding scene in which a woman consents to marry a dude while under the influence of a fuckload of muscle relaxers. OH WAIT WHUT.

Ginny Baker getting married while super high

Turns out, that shit ain’t so funny once feminism becomes a thing in your life.

The kind of adorable premise of Sixteen Candles is that Molly Ringwald (Samantha Baker) wakes up one morning as a sixteen-year-old woman who still hasn’t yet grown the breasts she wants. Her family, however, forgets her birthday because of the chaos surrounding her older sister Ginny’s upcoming wedding; relatives drive into town, future in-laws set up dinner dates, and poor Samantha gets the cold shoulder. It reminded me of the time my parents handed me an unwrapped Stephen King novel on my sixteenth birthday like a couple of emotionally neglectful and shitty assholes, but, you know, at least they REMEMBERED it.

Anyway, she rides the bus to school (with all the LOSERS), and in her Independent Study “class” the hot senior she likes, Jake Ryan, intercepts a note meant for her friend Randy. And—wouldn’t you know it—the note says, I WOULD TOTALLY DO IT WITH JAKE RYAN BUT HE DOESN’T KNOW I’M ALIVE. Well he sure as fuck knows NOW, Samantha.

Samantha and Randy, totally grossed out, ride the bus to school

So, these are the important things in Sixteen Candles: Samantha’s family forgets her birthday; she’s in love with a hot senior who’s dating Caroline (the most popular girl in school); and there’s a big ol’ geek (Farmer Ted) from Sam’s daily bus rides who won’t stop stalking her. Oh, and Long Duk Dong exists [insert racist gong sound here]. Seriously, every time Long Duk Dong appears on screen, a fucking GONG GOES OFF on the soundtrack. I suppose that lines up quite nicely with the scene where he falls out of a tree yelling, “BONSAI.”

Since the entire movie is like a machine gun firing of RACIST HOMOPHOBIC SEXIST ABLEIST RAPEY parts, the only way I know how to effectively talk about it is to look at the very problematic screenplay. So, fasten your seatbelts and heed your trigger warnings.

The 80s were quite possibly a nightmare.

Long Duk Dong falls out of a tree (BONSAI) after a drunken night at the homecoming dance

The first few scenes do a decent job of showing the forgotten-birthday slash upcoming-wedding fiasco occurring in the Baker household. Sam stands in front of her bedroom mirror before school, analyzing her brand new sixteen-year-old self and says, “You need four inches of bod and a great birthday.” I can get behind that idea; growing up comes with all kinds of stresses and confusion, especially for women in high school who’ve begun to feel even more insecure about their bodies (having had sufficient time to fully absorb the toxic beauty culture).

“Chronologically, you’re 16 today. Physically? You’re still 15.” –Samantha Baker, looking in the mirror

While Samantha laments the lack of changes in her physical appearance, her little brother Mike pretends to almost-punch their younger sister. When he gets in trouble for it, he says, “Dad, I didn’t hit her. I’d like to very much and probably will later, but give me a break. You know my method. I don’t hit her when you’re just down the hall.” It’s easy to laugh this off—I chuckled when I first heard it. But after five seconds of thinking about my reaction, I realized my brain gave Mike a pass because of that whole “boys will be boys” thing, and then I got pissed at myself.

The problem with eye-rolling away the “harmless” offenses of young boys is that it gives boys (and later, men) a license to act like fuckers with no actual repercussions. The “boys will be boys” mantra is one of the most insidious manifestations of rape culture because it conditions both boys and girls at a young age to believe boys just can’t help themselves; violence in boys is inherent and not worth trying to control. And people today—including political “leaders”—often use that excuse to justify the violent actions of men toward women.

Mike Baker explains to his dad that he hasn’t hit his younger sister … yet

Unfortunately, Sixteen Candles continues to reinforce this idea throughout the film.

The Geek, aka Farmer Ted—a freshman who’s obsessed with Samantha—represents this more than any other character. The film presents his stalking behavior as endearing, which means that all his interactions with Samantha (and with the popular kids at school) end with a silent, “Poor guy!” exclamation. Things just really aren’t going his way! And look how hard he’s trying! (Poor guy.) He first appears on the bus home from school and sits next to Samantha, even though she makes it quite clear—with a bunch of comments about getting dudes to kick his ass who “lust wimp blood”—that she wants him to leave her alone. Then this interaction takes place:

Ted: You know, I’m getting input here that I’m reading as relatively hostile.

Samantha: Go to hell.

Ted: Come on, what’s the problem here? I’m a boy, you’re a girl. Is there anything wrong with me trying to put together some kind of relationship between us?

[The bus stops.]

Ted: Look, I know you have to go. Just answer one question.

Samantha: Yes, you’re a total fag.

Ted: That’s not the question … Am I turning you on?

[Samantha rolls her eyes and exits the bus.]

POOR GUY! Also homophobia. Like, all over the place in this movie. The words “fag” and “faggot” flood the script and always refer to men who lack conventional masculine traits or who haven’t yet “bagged a babe.” And the emphasis on “Man-Up Already!” puts women in harm’s way more than once.

Samantha looks irritated when her stalker, Farmer Ted, refuses to leave her alone. Also Joan Cusack for no reason.

The most terrifying instance of this happens toward the end of the film when Ted ends up at Jake’s party after the school homecoming dance, and the two of them bond by objectifying women together (and subsequently creating a nice little movie template to last for generations). The atrocities involve a very drunk, passed-out Caroline (which reminded me so much of what happened in Steubenville that I had to turn off the movie for a while and regroup) and a pair of Samantha’s underwear.

This is how we get to that point: After Jake snags Samantha’s unintentional declaration of love during Independent Study, he becomes interested in her. He tells a jock friend of his (while they do chin-ups together in gym class), “It’s kinda cool, the way she’s always looking at me.” His friend responds—amid all that hot testosterone—that “maybe she’s retarded.” (This statement sounds even worse within the context of a film that includes a possibly disabled character, played by Joan Cusack, who lacks mobility and “hilariously” spends five minutes trying to drink from a water fountain. Her role exists as nothing more than a punch line; she literally says nothing.)

Joan Cusack drinking water (queue laughter)

Joan Cusack drinking a beer (queue laughter)

Jake’s girlfriend, Caroline, picks up on his waning interest in her and says to him at the school dance, “You’ve been acting weird all night. Are you screwing around?” He immediately gaslights her with, “Me? Are you crazy?” to which she responds, “I don’t know, Jake. I’m getting strange signals.” Yup, Caroline—IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD NOT REALLY.

Meanwhile, in an abandoned car somewhere on school premises (perhaps a shop lab/classroom), Samantha sits alone, lamenting Jake’s probable hatred of her after their interaction in the gym where he said, “Hi!” and she freaked out and ran away. Farmer Ted stalk-finds her and climbs into the passenger seat. Some words happen, blah blah blah, and a potentially interesting commentary on the culture of masculinity gets undercut by Ted asking Samantha (who Ted referred to lovingly as “fully-aged sophomore meat” to his dude-bros earlier in the film) if he can borrow her underwear to use as proof that they banged. Of course she gives her underwear to him because.

Ted holds up Samantha’s underwear to a group of dude-bros who each paid a buck to see them

Cut to Jake’s after-party: everyone is finally gone; his house is a mess; Caroline is passed out drunk as fuck in his bedroom; and he finds Ted trapped inside a glass coffee table (a product of bullying). Then, at last, after Jake confesses to Ted that he thinks Samantha hates him (because she ran away from him in the gym), we’re treated to a true Male Bonding Moment:

Ted: You see, [girls] know guys are, like, in perpetual heat, right? They know this shit. And they enjoy pumping us up. It’s pure power politics, I’m telling you … You know how many times a week I go without lunch because some bitch borrows my lunch money? Any halfway decent girl can rob me blind because I’m too torqued up to say no.

Jake: I can get a piece of ass anytime I want. Shit, I got Caroline in my bedroom right now, passed out cold. I could violate her ten different ways if I wanted to.

Ted: What are you waiting for?

C’MON JAKE WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR GO RAPE YOUR GIRLFRIEND. Or wait, no, maybe let’s let Ted rape her?

Jake: I’ll make a deal with you. Let me keep these [Samantha’s underwear, duh]. I’ll let you take Caroline home … She’s so blitzed she won’t know the difference.

Ted carrying a drunk Caroline to the car

And then Ted throws a passed-out Caroline over his shoulder and puts her in the passenger seat of a convertible. This scene took me immediately back to the horrific images of two men carrying around a drunk woman in Steubenville who they later raped—and were convicted of raping (thanks largely to social media). This scene, undoubtedly “funny” in the 80s and certainly still funny to people who like to claim this shit is harmless, helped lay the groundwork for Steubenville, and for Cleveland, and for Richmond, where as many as 20 witnesses watched men beat and gang rape a woman for over two hours without reporting it. On their high school campus. During their homecoming dance.

Jake and Ted talk about how to fool Caroline

People who claim to believe films and TV and pop culture moments like this are somehow disconnected from perpetuating rape need to take a step back and really think about the message this sends. I refuse to accept that a person could watch this scene from an iconic John Hughes film—where, after a party, a drunk woman is literally passed around by two men and photographed—and not see the connection between the Steubenville rape—where, after a party, a woman was literally passed around by two men and photographed.

Caroline looks drunk and confused while Ted’s friends take a photo as proof that he hooked up with her

And it only gets worse. Caroline wakes up out of nowhere and puts a birth control pill in Ted’s mouth. Once he realizes what he’s swallowed, he says, “You have any idea what that’ll do to a guy my age?” Caroline responds, “I know exactly what it’ll do to a girl my age. It makes it okay to be really super careless!”

It makes it okay to be really super careless.

IT MAKES IT OKAY TO BE REALLY SUPER CARELESS.

So I guess the current anti-choice, anti-contraception, anti-woman Republicans found a John Hughes screenplay from 30 years ago and decided to use this cautionary tale as their entire fucking platform. See what happens when women have access to birth control? It makes it okay to be really super careless! And get drunk! And allow dudes to rape them!

Of course, believing that Caroline is raped in Sixteen Candles requires believing that a woman can’t consent to sex when she’s too “blitzed to know the difference” between her actual boyfriend and a random freshman geek. I mean, there’s forcible rape, and there’s not-really rape, right? And this obviously isn’t REAL rape since Ted and Caroline actually have THIS FUCKING CONVERSATION when they wake up in a church parking lot the next morning:

Ted: Did we, uh …

Caroline: Yeah. I’m pretty sure.

Ted: Of course I enjoyed it … uh … did you?

Caroline: Hmmm. You know, I have this weird feeling I did … You were pretty crazy … you know what I like best? Waking up in your arms.

Fuck you, John Hughes.

Caroline wakes up, unsure of who Ted is, but very sexually satisfied

And so many more problems exist in this film that I can’t fully get into in the space of one already long review, but the fact that Ginny (Sam’s sister) starts her period and therefore needs to take FOUR muscle relaxers to dull the pain also illustrates major problems with consent; her father at one point appears to pick her up and drag her down the aisle on her wedding day. (And, congratulations for understanding, John Hughes, that when women bleed every month, it requires a borderline drug overdose to contain the horror.)


Ginny’s dad drags her down the aisle on her wedding day

The racism, too, blows my mind. Long Duk Dong, a foreign exchange student living with Samantha’s grandparents, speaks in played-for-laughs broken English during the following monologue over dinner: “Very clever dinner. Appetizing food fit neatly into interesting round pie … I love, uh, visiting with Grandma and Grandpa … and writing letters to parents … and pushing lawn-mowing machine … so Grandpa’s hyena don’t get disturbed,” accompanied by such sentences as, “The Donger need food.” (I also love it, not really, when Samantha’s best friend Randy mishears Sam and thinks she’s interested in a Black guy. “A BLACK guy?!?!” Randy exclaims … then sighs with relief once she realizes the misunderstanding.)

Long Duk Dong talks to the Baker family over dinner

And I haven’t even touched on the problematic issues with class happening in Sixteen Candles. (Hughes does class relations a tiny bit better in Pretty in Pink.)

Basically, it freaks me out—as it should—when I watch movies or television shows from 30 years ago and see how closely the politics resemble today’s anti-woman agenda. Phrases like “legitimate rape” and “forcible rape” shouldn’t exist in 2013. In 2013, politicians like Wendy Davis shouldn’t have to stand up and speak for 13 hours—with no food, water, or restroom breaks—in order to stop a bill from passing in Texas that would virtually shut down access to safe and legal abortions in the entire state. Women should be able to walk down the street for contraception in 2013, whether it’s for condoms or for the morning after pill. The US political landscape in 2013 should NOT include talking points lifted directly from a 1984 film about teenagers.

I know John Hughes is a national fucking treasure, but please tell me our government officials aren’t using his screenplays as legislative blueprints for the future of American politics.

Family, Friendship, and Getting By: The Two Mrs. Harts of ‘Reba’

Like many of us, I’m a child of divorce, and I saw firsthand the lasting effects of infidelity and separation. For years, I’ve turned on ‘Reba’ because I find it comforting; everything from the stills of the cluttered kitchen to Reba’s adorable southern twang make me feel very tranquil as I clean or type on my laptop. I detect similarities to my own experiences, such as living in close proximity to a parent’s ex or a father who seems to abandon his former life for a newer, shinier one. ‘Reba’ normalizes these experiences and reminds viewers that every family has its issues.

Written by Jenny Lapekas.

Like many of us, I’m a child of divorce, and I saw firsthand the lasting effects of infidelity and separation. For years, I’ve turned on Reba because I find it comforting; everything from the stills of the cluttered kitchen to Reba’s adorable southern twang make me feel very tranquil as I clean or type on my laptop. I detect similarities to my own experiences, such as living in close proximity to a parent’s ex or a father who seems to abandon his former life for a newer, shinier one. Reba normalizes these experiences and reminds viewers that every family has its issues.

Reba McEntire herself is a sort of meta presence on the show since she plays herself, in a sense–her character’s name is Reba Hart, she sings the theme song at the beginning of each show (“I’m a Survivor”), and her own values seem to be infused into the show’s script and episodes. The character of Reba also seems to be a direct reflection of Reba the person and musician: genuine, caring, and down-to-earth. We enjoy her interactions with Barbra Jean, whether they’re volatile or pleasant. We like it when they bond and get along (not just for the family but because they are true friends), but we also like it when the two fight or when Reba expresses her annoyance at the tall blonde’s routine antic behavior. Certainly, the show’s plot is unrealistic, but I’d argue that it’s still worthwhile to explore this unique friendship shared by two very different women who discover they indeed have more in common than Brock.

It took Reba several seasons to warm up to BJ's manic energy. — It took Reba several seasons to warm up to BJ’s manic energy.

The impossibility of the “new wife” (and former mistress) and ex-wife becoming best friends is at the forefront of this implausibility. Brock is a good father and still “visits” as if he never moved out. Rather than focus on the unbelievable nature of this female friendship, I’d suggest we turn our attention to the healthy post-divorce relationship we see between Reba and Brock. Sure, it’s fantastical and silly, a departure from reality, a pleasant vision of what could be, but also an image of maturity and sophisticated understanding amongst adults–although Kyra usually ends up being the only “adult” when familial conflict arises. The show’s framework suggests not that this type of female friendship is possible (especially involving rivalry and “sharing” a man, in some sense), but that families function even when they don’t function, that hostility and resentment are normal and even healthy components of any family unit.

BJ and Reba in a 'Single White Female' moment. — BJ and Reba in a *Single White Female* moment.

When Reba’s friend asks her, “How can you even let that woman in your house?!” Reba calmly explains that the kids need to see their father and BJ (go ahead and giggle) is now “part of the package.” However, the relationship between the two Mrs. Harts grows into something more complicated than that: Reba genuinely likes BJ. Contrary to the fear that she may be seen as a powerless doormat, Reba displays incredible strength, patience, and maturity by inevitably becoming BJ’s best friend, despite Reba’s best attempts to prevent the pair’s apparent non-relationship from evolving into anything greater. Viewers may interpret this move as a decision to lay down and endure Brock’s adultery; however, the friendship the women share is an acknowledgment of forgiveness, a radical surrender that frames the world as one that keeps spinning in the face of conflict. There is in fact life after divorce.

BJ represents a very negative stereotype and a cliche: the mistress who ruined a marriage by having an affair with another woman’s husband. However, BJ challenges this stereotype we long to hate so much; she is a larger than life presence, a walking, breathing caricature that we come to adore. As the family celebrates Jake’s birthday party, Kyra eloquently explains that it’s not enough for BJ to plan or attend the party, she is the party. She substitutes the ogre we imagine her to be, the “type of woman” who breaks up a marriage, who sleeps with a married man. BJ humanizes the typecast role assigned to her–she’s charming, she longs to help those around her, and she’s a genuinely good person. Reba explains, “This hasn’t been easy for me, Barbra Jean,” and BJ retorts, “It has just been a freaking picnic for me!” As BJ explains that she’s the “other woman” and is affected by the gossip and phoniness that surround her as well, we’re allowed a glimpse of what it’s like to be blamed for destroying a marriage. Deep down, all BJ wants is to be liked and accepted. In fact, sometimes it seems that she’s willing to forfeit her marriage with Brock in favor of taking on Reba as a permanent partner instead.

The pair attend a women's self-defense class, but inevitably beat up each other. — The pair attend a women’s self-defense class, but inevitably beat up each other.

When an elderly babysitter proves incapable of managing the kids and the household in Reba’s absence, BJ steps in, cooking delicious meals, organizing the kitchen, and even pouring Reba a glass of wine to help her relax after a long day. Inevitably, Jake hugs BJ and calls her “Mommy,” and Reba is left bitter and horrified. During “girl talk,” Brock wanders in and asks BJ if she’s ever coming home, and BJ informs him that she didn’t make enough food to include him in dinner. Thrilled with BJ’s domestic skills, Reba tells Brock, “I’m starting to see why you left me for her,” and Brock says, “You’re the one with the new wife.” As a result, the house becomes a venue to celebrate this pseudo lesbian relationship, where the needs of the kids are put first, and yes, Brock is still a guest. Although none of the characters realize it, this short-lived partnership is one of great power, demonstrating household productivity and childcare at its zenith.

At times, the trio also seems to mimic a polygamous relationship, such as when Reba tries to repair Brock and BJ’s rocky marriage by counseling them and even offering tips on how to improve their sex life. Much of Reba’s advice is comically common sense, such as instructing Brock to tell BJ that he reversed his vasectomy or telling BJ not to have an emotional affair with the OnStar guy inside the couple’s car. Despite Brock’s past indiscretions, Reba’s priority is the wellness of her family, which includes a successful second marriage for her kids’ father. It’s no mistake the family’s last name is Hart; Reba is clearly the heart of the family, the force around which the others gather, the light BJ finds herself so drawn to.

BJ is eager to exploit Reba's temporary blindness in order to gain her trust. — BJ is eager to exploit Reba’s temporary blindness in order to gain her trust.

Even if mine isn’t a popular assessment of BJ’s character, we must admit that we need BJ’s wacky shenanigans to counterbalance Reba’s responsibility, earnestness, and sophistication; there’s no denying that the women’s joint energy creates a dynamic force that carries much of the show. BJ’s character challenges our assumptions about the labels we quickly and often unfairly place on women both real and fictional: home-wrecker, whore, gold-digger, etc. While Reba offers guidance to the naive BJ, the nutty blonde often includes Reba in her misadventures, such as setting up Reba on a blind date or caring for the stubborn redhead after undergoing corrective eye surgery. Regardless of how we feel about the plot of Reba, BJ bursting through the door unannounced and uninvited, along with Brock freely coming and going in a house he no longer lives in draws not an image of turmoil but one of family. BJ’s involvement as a stepmother doesn’t spell dysfunction; rather, the relationships we see on the ABC Family show are nothing if not healthy and honest. In fact, the unlikelihood of the Hart clan’s situation may be exactly why Reba has had such success. My advice: Let the marital stuff go; sit back and enjoy the fact that we’ve been drugged by a witty script, inspiring messages, and a variety of comedic personalities who easily suspend disbelief, all on one lovely show.

________________________________________________

Jenny holds a Master of Arts in English, and she is a part-time instructor at a community college in Pennsylvania. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. She lives with two naughty chihuahuas. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.

‘The One I Love’ and the World’s Strangest Marriage Retreat

If you’ve seen an ad or trailer for ‘The One I Love,’ you probably still don’t know much about it. After watching a trailer you’d think it’s a movie about a couple going in and out of doors. All of film’s advertising hinted at, but never revealed the Charlie Kaufman-esque twist at the heart of its story, telling intrigued audiences only that an amazing twist existed and that critics agreed that it would spoil the film to reveal it. Which is pretty odd, because the twist in question takes place only 20 minutes in. Right off the bat I should probably tell you I’m going to spoil this movie, mostly because I want to talk about it.

Poster for The One I Love — Poster for *The One I Love*

If you’ve seen an ad or trailer for The One I Love, you probably still don’t know much about it. After watching a trailer you’d think it’s a movie about a couple going in and out of doors. All of film’s advertising hinted at, but never revealed the Charlie Kaufman-esque twist at the heart of its story, telling intrigued audiences only that an amazing twist existed and that critics agreed it would spoil the film to reveal it.

Which is pretty odd, because the twist in question takes place only 20 minutes in. Right off the bat I should probably tell you I’m going to spoil this movie, mostly because I want to talk about it.

The One I Love, Charlie McDowell’s directorial debut, is a very small film on paper. The vast majority of the thing takes between lead actors Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men and Top of the Lake, and Mark Duplass (The League, Safety Not Guaranteed), who play Sophie and Ethan, a couple on the brink of divorce. Sophie is still reeling from the news of Ethan’s infidelity and for his part, Ethan is frustrated by his inability to recreate the romantic gestures that used to come so naturally. As Ted Danson, who steps in for about five minutes to play the couple’s marriage counselor, tells them, they are no longer in harmony. His prescription? A weekend at his idyllic country estate, supposedly to rekindle their romance.

Sophie and Ethan are a couple on the brink of divorce

McDowell and writer Justin Lader use this familiar set-up to lull viewers into false sense of comfort. It all seems on track to be another feel-good Hollywood fluff-fest in the tradition of Hope Springs and Couples Retreat.

And it is, but only for a short while. On the first night, Sophie and Ethan make dinner together, get high, have sex in the guesthouse, and rediscover the playful spontaneity of their earlier relationship. They seem to be back in sync, until Sophie returns to the main house and discovers Ethan remembers nothing about their night together. The next morning, Ethan wakes to find Sophie happily preparing his breakfast with no awareness of the previous night’s fight. He knows something truly strange is going on when he realizes the breakfast she’s made includes bacon (“You hate it when I eat bacon,” he accuses).

These strange confusions keep piling up until Sophie and Ethan realize that when one of them enters the guesthouse alone, they encounter a doppelgänger of their partner. It seems like an outrageous and complicated twist, but the gradual revelation, skilled direction and comedic dancing around the conclusion make it appear strangely natural.

Sophie and Ethan’s doppelgängers are not exact copies but idealized version of the couple. They each represent the fantasy each person has of their partner and what they have been missing. Fake Ethan is playful and athletic and wears contacts instead of the glasses Sophie hates. He’s sensitive. He likes to goof around and play little games and enjoys Sophie’s idiosyncrasies. Most importantly, he would never dream of cheating on her and even apologizes for Ethan’s cheating in a way that melts Sophie’s heart.

Fake Sophie is clearly inspired by Ethan’s attraction to 50s housewives. She rises early to cook him a full and very greasy breakfast, as she is clad in satin and lace and chirps at him with perpetual enthusiasm. However, Ethan never displays any sexual interest towards this version of Sophie, preventing her from being a fetishistic sex robot. Instead, it is Sophie who is tempted by Fake Ethan and displays both sexual and romantic attraction toward him. A love triangle quickly develops between Sophie and the two Ethans, with Fake Sophie swept off to the sidelines as a mere distraction.

Elisabeth Moss subtly portrays the differences between Real Sophie and Fake Sophie with slight changes in hairstyle and expression

Both actors portray two physically identical versions of their characters who seem completely different just based on their voices, facial expression and small differences in hairstyle. Through Moss gives a particularly impressive performance, softening her voice and giving flirtatious looks as Fake Sophie, she isn’t given nearly as much opportunity to shine as Duplass. Moss is able to hint at hidden depths in both her characters, transforming them from mere hero and villain to three dimensional characters.

For his part, Duplass is great, highlighting the difference between schlubby real Ethan and cunning Fake Ethan just by adding or removing his glasses, mussing up his hair and subtly contorting his face. Sophie quickly falls in love with Fake Ethan and it’s easy to see why. He gives her the understanding she craves, allows romantic moments to unfold without contrivance and tells her exactly what she wants to hear about Ethan’s reasons for being unfaithful. It’s clear that the gulf between the man Sophie wants him to be and the man really he is ever widening. More and more, Fake Ethan seems like the man she should be with. Especially as the real Ethan spies on their time together, after agreeing to give her her privacy and pretending to be Fake Ethan to seduce her, a betrayal which makes Sophie feel violated.

As the conflict worsens, the film focuses on Ethan’s point of view, shifting away from the original marital conflict and into a more standard love triangle plot, only with Ethan competing against himself for his wife’s affection.

Ethan grows jealous of Sophie’s attraction to Fake Ethan and spies on them together

As Ethan and Sophie’s relationship weakens, the doppelgängers get stronger and are allowed more free movement, eventually leaving the guesthouse and acquiring cell phones. The whole thing is turned upside down midway through when the real couple are confronted by their doubles and the most awkward double date in history ensues.

Interestingly, the doppelgängers appear to be actual people with their own concerns and lives, which do not revolve around Ethan and Sophie. Like real Ethan, Fake Sophie feels she is losing the love of her life to another and her point of view is given just enough space in the film to be tantalizing.

Fake Sophie, reminiscent of a 50s housewife, is an intriguing character and a wasted opportunity

This is where I felt the film went off the rails.

I breathed a sign of relief early on when the film appeared to abandon the always unsatisfying path of trying to explain the supernatural element. Unfortunately the last third of the film stumbles around through establishing a mythology. Here, filmmakers appear to have grown bored with exploring Sophie and Ethan’s crippled marriage; instead The One I Love becomes full-on science fiction and a creeping sense of dread falls over the proceedings, though the film never commits to making the situation seem truly dangerous instead of goofy dangerous. An explanation for the magic of the guesthouse is hastily introduced, leaving more questions than it answers, as well as a frustrating amount of plot holes. Based on the care put into making the doubles feel natural, I didn’t feel the film needed any sort of explanation. Indeed, it stripes away the naturalness from Ethan and Sophie’s conversations, forcing them into repetitive arguments.

Ethan’s doppelgänger seems like a perfect match for Sophie

The last few minutes are particularly unsatisfying and confusing, giving us a variation of the cliche “shoot her!” “no, shoot her!” from most doppelgänger stories.

Overall, the film’s eventual shift to toward sci-fi dilutes the message it intends to convey. Rather than ending on the relationship and our concerns of whether harmony has been restored, viewers are left questioning one last sci-fi twist that seems plucked from an entirely different movie. In the end, the film doesn’t deliver on the message its premise implies: that we must come to terms with the flaws in our partners and learn that if they were perfect, they would be a stranger to us. But I’m not sure if the long strange trip of the film wasn’t all the better for subverting this expectation.

After watching the film it’s amusing to see how slyly the film’s promotion alluded to the twist. The film’s poster shows Sophie and Ethan half submerged in water, so their reflection take up half the available space. And official summaries for the film describe the purpose of the retreat as an attempt to “discover their better selves.”

While the ending got quite muddled, the story was full of twists and turns and glided smoothly from plot shift to plot shift. Moss and Duplass deliver captivating performances as both Sophie and Ethan and their mirror images, complementing each other perfectly. It is a joy to watch them deftly portray subtle changes in personality and opinion.

They are aided by a creative script and skilled direction, which dare the viewer to think (perhaps uncomfortably) about their own relationships and the self they present to the world.

Where the film missteps, with its attempt to explain where the doppelgängers come from, could have been avoided with a lesson from Sophie. After discovering their doubles, she suggests it’s just a magic trick–the best experience comes from enjoying the mystery.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

Working My Way Through Feminist Film History: Art and Intimacy in ‘I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing’

This post is inspired by Alison Nastasi’s “50 Essential Feminist Films,” an excellent survey of films that is a kind of resource guide for those of us interested in exploring feminist film history. Though not exhaustive, Nastasi’s list is an exciting place to extend the conversation about the ways that feminist questions and concerns have been depicted in films in and outside of Hollywood in the past several decades. What’s more, this list is also a site for discovering films I didn’t even know to look for.

The Canadian director Patrica Rozema directed this quietly charming film, which stars Sheila McCarthy. McCarthy plays Polly, whose videotaped confession frames the story and immediately establishes our curiosity. What crime could this anxious and seemingly guileless woman have committed? Polly is in her early 30s and enjoys a solitary life filled with frequent bike rides to various spots around Toronto, which she eagerly absorbs in her photography. She develops the pictures in her darkroom, and we see her still images enlarged by her imagination into elaborate fantasies wherein she can fly like a bird, engage in erudite conversation about psychoanalysis, and conduct magnificent symphonies. Although there is something slightly melancholy about her, Polly appears content with the simplicity of her life.

As she tells the video camera, “It all started” when she begins working as the “Girl Friday” for a curator, Gabrielle. Polly rapturously describes how taken she is with Gabrielle, who Polly exclusively refers to as “the curator.” Gabrielle is sophisticated, confident, and serious. Most of all, she is generous toward Polly, who falls under a spell of childlike adoration. Remarkably, their dynamic is one of mutual respect, even despite their differences. Gabrielle appreciates Polly, and offers her a permanent position. However, Polly is as innocent and naïve as Gabrielle is weary and cautious, and this contrast intensifies when Mary enters the scene. An artist and former lover of Gabrielle’s, Mary is young enough to make Gabrielle feel too old to be with her, and we soon learn that the curator has an inner life that is fraught with insecurity about both aging and art.

On the latter, Polly feels a kinship with Gabrielle, who drunkenly confides to Polly that despite her accomplishments and status, she craves not to “die with her body.” Gabrielle tells Polly that she desires the immortality of creating a beautiful painting that will endure after she is gone. Polly’s openness and curiosity is a marked contrast to Gabrielle’s self-centeredness, but the intimacy of this scene makes it hard not to sympathize with both characters. When Gabrielle expresses shame around have her paintings rejected for acceptance in a university art course, Polly lovingly asks if Gabrielle will show her a painting. Gabrielle is flattered by her request, and opens the door to a room with a shining canvas that Polly finds enchanting. Even though Gabrielle and Mary are lovers, it is with Polly that Gabrielle can express her deep yearning to be known as an artist.

At the risk of spoiling this film any further, I’ll just say that what follows is an act that Polly commits with the most heartfelt of intentions but leads to a series of betrayals compelling her to document her account on video in the hopes of sharing the truth. Though not fundamental to enjoying nor understanding the film, it is interesting to revisit the poem from which the title of Rozema’s film is lifted: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Just like T.S. Eliot’s narrator, Polly dares to “disturb the universe.” In so doing, she illustrates the sacrifice inherent in sharing one’s art.