After explaining why Lionsgate declined to screen the film for critics, Armond White begins his review proper of Why Did I Get Married? on contrarian autopilot: “Most critics don’t ‘get’ Tyler Perry basically because most critics are whites who are not only clueless about Perry’s African-American culture, but unsympathetic to his particular expression.” Okay, probably. But isn’t that obvious? I started to wonder if old Armond wasn’t losing his touch.
Oh, but wait! Further down the page, he hits us Whiteys where it really hurts, by attacking sacred dude-com cow Judd Apatow. “Nothing in Knocked Up is as meaningful as Perry’s spectacle of men who must restrain their anger physically or his politically incorrect fashion show of women proudly, luxuriously wearing furs as signs of pleasure and achievement,” White sniffs. It gets better, when White insists that the derogatory terms most commonly used to describe Trapped in the Closet would be better applied to SuperBad. And I could go on. Just read it in full.
Lions For Lambs, Tom Cruise’s first production as president of United Artists, will open AFI Fest in November. The film, which “explores issues surrounding the war in Afghanistan,” is Robert Redford’s first as director since The Legend of Bagger Vance. Redford, Cruise, and Meryl Streep star. The project is considered a major test for Cruise and his partner Paula Wagner, who were handed the reigns at the troubled UA after their very public split from Paramount.
The call sheet alone sounds like something out of Glamorama: Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Brandon Routh, and Ashley Olsen have joined the cast of The Informers, which will mark Bret Easton Ellis’ first attempt at adapting his own material for the screen. Ellis wrote the script with Nicholas Jarecki; Gregor Jordan will direct.
In what Variety says is the cable network’s “biggest programming purchase in its 17-year history,” E! has spent almost $40 million on the network rights to a handful of NBC/Universal titles, including Knocked Up and Evan Almighty. The former film is the centerpiece of the deal: E! was so anxious to own a film partially shot in its offices that it shelled out for an exclusive 4-year window on the film, meaning no other network will be able to air Knocked Up from 2009-20013.
Andrew Herwitz’ Film Sales Company has brokered a deal to produce an English-language remake of Live-in Maid. The original is an Argentinian film about a broke socialite who turns to the help for moral support; it opened at Film Forum here in New York last month to packed houses and is set to pop up in nine additional cities in the coming weeks. The original is Film Sales’ first foray into distribution; the remake will be their first try at production.
Focus Features has accepted an NC-17 rating for Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, despite the fact that it will seriously hamper the film’s chances of reaching the audience it needs to gain critical mass come Oscar time. According to The Hollywood Reporter, although the film contains no full-frontal male nudity, “male-on-female oral sex, non-S&M restraints and several nontraditional sexual positions are depicted, conveying the aggression and emotional conflict between the main characters.”
Unfortunately, it looks like DGA members won’t be able to enjoy any of that in the comfort of their own homes. First the Directors Guild of America said studios could send their members award season screeners; then they said they couldn’t; then they said they were planning to say they could, but now they’ve said that they can’t.
With male and female audiences divided over the equally drecky-looking Scarlett Johansson vehicle The Nanny Diaries, and the Jet Li/Jason Statham fight pic War, Variety says SuperBad has a chance at pulling off another weekend at the top of the box office. In related news, Knocked Up is a huge hit in Australia and Russia.
Anger Me, a documentary in which former child star/experimental filmmaker/Hollywood Babylon muckraker Kenneth Anger tells stories about his own life for two hours, earns the ultimate backhanded compliment from Variety: “Tech credits are adequate.”
On this week’s FilmCouch we have a leisurely conversation with new SpoutBlog writer Karina Longworth. We talk about the mainstream media’s suspicion of bloggers, and gender politics in pop Hollywood hits like Knocked Up, Top Gun, Risky Business, Miami Vice, and the nearly-female-free sensation, The Shawshank Redemption.
The New Yorker’s David Denby recently published a long essay in consideration of contemporary romantic comedy. Because it’s Denby and it’s the New Yorker, he’s able to wank off for 600 words or so before getting to his not at all uninteresting thesis: “For almost a decade, Hollywood has pulled jokes and romance out of the struggle between male infantilism and female ambition.” Citing Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up as “the culminating version of this story”, Denby then traces a history of the male-female relationship through romantic comedies of the ages, and five pages later concludes that Apatow’s film “represents what can only be called the disenchantment of romantic comedy.”
Denby certainly makes some preposterous statements in the piece–the idea that Vince Vaughn is some kind of second coming of Cary Grant who “has displayed a dazzling motormouth velocity, but” has never found “an actress who can keep up with him” was my personal favorite–but I don’t really have a problem with his methods. A lot of other people do. Of the commentary I’ve read, Emdashes is home to the most interesting/infuriating. The self-professed reader of “The New Yorker between the lines” laments that Denby “doesn\’t seem to have faced what\’s happened to dating”:
Throw in comics, MTV, Sex and the City, reality shows, Neil Strauss, Seinfeld, porn, online dating, and social networking sites, and you\’ve got part of a picture of how fucking romantic (to quote Stephin Merritt) the world seems to be. I\’m not saying no one ever had a sleazy thought before or failed to come through for their sweetheart. What I\’m saying is that just as screwball comedies were shiny fairy tales for the eras of disappointing early marriages, stock-market crashes, and limited opportunity for personal expression, There\’s Something About Mary is a shiny fairy tale for ours.
All well and good, but then Emdashes lets her argument lapse by posting “an email conversation a (female) film-minded friend.” You’ve seen this kind of thing on blogs before, surely, and as usual, what should probably have remained a joke amongst friends takes on a whole new life of its own once posted on the blog. Here’s the part that really rankled me: Emdashes and her friend conclude that Denby has failed to acknowledge the real-world state of contemporary romance. Emdashes’ friend cracks, “Also, if a woman had made Knocked Up, it would have been called Abort It, and it would have been a very short film.” Emdashes responds: “Ha! So true. Especially with Seth Rogen, who is no one’s idea of a catch. I laughed often during Knocked Up, but that’s a premise I couldn’t get over no matter how hard I tried.”
When I hear that kind of argument coming from women, I honestly wonder what kind of lives they lead–as if every 20-something woman in America just has loads of abortions, no big deal. Beyond the cringe factor of the joke, it seems like they’re confining this Abort It fantasy to a realm in which all women who unexpectedly become pregnant are easily able to have abortions–”able” both in the sense that a) they live in a major city where they have easy access to a clinic or doctor that will actually perform the procedure safely and without incident, and b) that they could face the decision to terminate a pregnancy without experiencing any kind of personal moral qualm or emotional trauma. That all seems to me to be more unrealistic than anything Apatow put on screen.
Stepping away from Denby and Emdashes for a moment, this brings us back to the elephant that’s always in the room when talking Knocked Up: the idea that Katherine Heigl’s character is poorly written, because someone like that would never get involved with someone like the character played by Seth Rogen. I know it’s a stretch to ask anyone whose natural analysis of character stops at “Pretty” or “Fat” to think this way, but do you think it’s maybe possible that the Katherine Heigl character was written that way for a reason? Is it so hard to imagine that a woman whose chief asset is her body, whose greatest aspiration is to follow in the footsteps of Giuliana DePandi (no offense to Giuliani), who is clearly lonely as hell (her only friend is apparently her shrewish older sister, who’s clearly occupied with her own pre-midlife crisis) would be lacking in self-confidence and self-worth, and for all of the reasons above, would be attracted to the unconditional love that a baby would represent?
It’s like there some kind of post-feminist block that won’t allow some female critics/viewers to admit that some real-world women are less than total braniacs, and/or that *most* women make decisions from time to time that don’t make total sense, and/or that in real life, attractive-but-dim women often date down the social ladder, picking men who they feel they can control without worrying that they’ll get dumped. At least Seth Rogen’s character showed promising glimpses, signs that he was capable of being genuinely caring, witty and kind. This puts him miles ahead of the average 23-year-old boy.
Here, I’m in agreement with Emdashes–”Spend a few hours reading Craigslist Casual Encounters, Nerve Personals, the multiple choices on social networking sites (what’s the difference between “random play” and “whatever I can get,” by the way?), Maxim, Gawker, ad nauseam, and suddenly Knocked Up is going to look real, real romantic to you”–and so, so glad that I’m not going to have to return to the world of dating anytime soon.
Last week, I introduced a new feature called The Micro Five, with the basic concept being that every Tuesday, I would come up with a five-item list based on a micro-specific topic, and then toss the baton to five other film bloggers, who would then rebut my list with a list of their own. I had fun putting together my list of Five Improbable Werner Herzog Anecdotes, but that whole baton tossing part didn’t work out so great–the feedback I got indicated that the topic was *too* obscure, and that the rules were too vague.
So, we’re trying this again. This time I’ve picked what I think is a more accessible topic, and instead of tagging specific bloggers, I’ll leave it open to anyone who wants to respond with a list of their own. If you put together a list, please paste a link in the comments to this post. If you’d like to put together a list but don’t have a blog of your own, may I suggest starting one for free at Spout? Next week, I’ll do a round-up post linking to all responses.
This week’s topic was inspired by this blog post, which is just the latest in the “I think Knocked Up is plum unrealistic!” meme that’s been going around all summer. Katha Pollitt’s angle is an interesting one–basically, that Knocked Up isn’t so much about an unwanted pregnancy as it is about Seth Rogen’s character wanting to be saved from himself–but it’s still a bit hung up on the idea that the plot wouldn’t fly if abortions were more commonplace in movies. I personally disagree–I think everything Judd Apatow tells us about Katherine Heigl’s character indicates that she’s exactly the kind of woman who would keep an unplanned baby as part of a quest for unconditional love–but this seems like as good a time as any to compare and contrast unwanted movie pregnancies. So, in no particular order:
Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) loves Guy, but he’s a mechanic, and her mother would prefer her to be with this older businessman dude with a creepy moustache. Guy gets drafted and has to go to war in Algeria; shortly after he leaves, Genevieve discovers she’s pregnant. After a few months of mooning for the absent Guy, Genevieve acknowledges that her mom’s got a point: a rich baby daddy that she doesn’t love but who is willing to financially support another man’s child is better than a genetic baby daddy that Genevieve “would die for”, but who is penniless nonetheless. Demy’s treatment of Genevieve’s situation is frank and nonchalant for its day, particularly considering that the film itself was an homage to Hollywood’s fantasy-driven Technicolor musicals. The final scene (embedded above), in which (spoiler alert!) Guy is reunited with his child, gets me every time.
A near-forgotten gem of 80’s British cinema, Wish You Were Here follows Lynda, an ostentatiously promiscuous 50s-era teen tart (director David Leland based his script on the memoirs of famed madam Cynthia Payne) through a series of seriocomic coming-of-age encounters in her seaside hometown. Lynda’s mother’s dead, and her father can’t be bothered; her sluttishness is clearly coded as “looking for love by any means necessary.” When a friend of the family gets her pregnant and then abandons her, Lynda’s aunt provides the cash required to “take care of it.” Lynda takes the money, skips town, keeps the baby and starts a new life. The unexpected cloying ending (blah blah blah, the baby gives her the love she was looking for all along) works thanks to the mult-layered breakout performance of Emily Lloyd, who was nominated for a BAFTA ad generally became something of an international It girl for a brief time after the film was released.
3. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Not only the only movie I’m aware of that deals with an unwanted pregnancy with a total lack of hysteria, but the only film dealing with the A-word that I could find that was actually directed by a women (Amy Heckerling). All of the drama surrounding Jennifer Jason Leigh’s unwanted pregnancy in this movie has to do with how she’s gonna get to and from the clinic. The douchbag who knocked her can’t even pay for his half, let alone give her a ride. She ends up lying to her brother, telling him that she needs a ride to the mall, and then sneaking off to clinic when she thinks he’s driven off. He ends up following her, and drives her home after the procedure. Today, Heckerling is praised today for refusing to moralize the abortion subplot, but it’s probably worth noting that at the time of its release, Fast Times was widely panned. “How could they do this to Jennifer Jason Leigh?” Roger Ebert wrote. “How could they put such a fresh and cheerful person into such a scuz-pit of a movie?”
Hillary Brougher’s harrowing second film is a study of two very different pregnancies. Amber Tamblyn plays the title character, a religious high school student who loses her virginity to a stranger and gives birth in a public restroom several months later, claiming she never knew she was pregnant; Tilda Swinton plays the pregnant psychologist hired by the court to pass judgment on Stephanie’s sanity. The film revolves around Stephanie’s fractured testimony–is she crazy? Lying? A little of both?–all of which Tamblyn manages to pull together in an incredibly nuanced performance. The film came and went in limited release earlier this year (I saw it at Sundance in 2006), but it’s worth seeking out. The birth scene, shot something like a Lars Von Trier remake of Carrie, is absolutely terrifying.
Many Knocked Up skeptics mention the film in the same breath as Waitress, another 2007 comedy centered on an unplanned (an inexplicably un-terminated) pregnancy. That film’s director/co-star, the late Adrienne Shelly, was best known to many indie film fans for her starring role as a pregnant teenager in Hal Hartley’s Trust. Shelly plays Maria, a gum-snapping suburban high school dropout whose pregnancy prompts her football-star boyfriend to leave her, and her father to drop dead of a heart attack. Matthew, a TV-repairman played by Martin Donovan, is probably twice her age, but he’s struggling to break out from the shackles of his own dysfunctional family. The two form a tentative bond based on their mutual alienation. Matthew offers to marry Maria; Maria, believing Matthew has fooled around with her sister, eventually gets an abortion. Just as Maria and Matthew’s relationship hinges, as he puts it, on mutual “trust, admiration and respect,” Hartley asks us in good faith to invest in a relationship devoid of the usual romantic fireworks, and then suddenly removes the one traditional bit of plot glue holding the two characters together. Due to Hartley’s magic formula of deadpan melodrama, it works.
After explaining why Lionsgate declined to screen the film for critics, Armond White begins 
Lions For Lambs, Tom Cruise’s first production as president of United Artists, will open AFI Fest in November. The film, which “explores issues surrounding the war in Afghanistan,” is Robert Redford’s first as director since The Legend of Bagger Vance. Redford, Cruise, and Meryl Streep star. The project is considered a major test for Cruise and his partner Paula Wagner, who were handed the reigns at the troubled UA after their very public split from Paramount.
