Wow, I’m tired of talking about Sex and the City. How about you? I’m happy that millions of women found something on a movie screen that appealed to them, even if it’s not something that appeals to me, and I feel like that should be the end of the story. It won’t be, but personally I just want to put the period on this sentence and move on to the next manufactured hysteria. But first, two final thoughts:

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“Smell is very nostalgic.”

Sarah Jessica Parker is talking about her latest perfume. She’s also, indirectly, talking about her appeal, her brand, what she does for a living, the reason why an audience in the low triple digits (mostly female, mostly younger than the actress by a decade) has rushed to the Times Center on a Friday evening exactly four weeks before the premiere of the Sex and the City movie, to see her interviewed on stage by journalist William J. Carter. I was invited to the event as a member of the press; I accepted the invitation in the spirit of making an honest effort to learn something about why adult women find Parker and the Sex and the City phenomena appealing.

The two women sitting next to me, who breathlessly climbed over my legs a few minutes after the program began, left behind their own fragrance trail: hair products, manicures, menthol cigarettes and pink drinks. A surface-only snap-judgment says these women were a representative sample of those in attendance: young(ish), upper-middle-class, not particularly cosmopolitan but enthusiastic about both cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitan.

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• Don’t criticize Chris Matthews when Jeffrey Wells is looking. Says the film blogger of the MSNBC anchor: “He’s the greatest free-associating blabbermouth provocateur on the airwaves right now. A brilliant shoot-from the hipper, an old-school boomer newshound, a Bill Maher facsimile, a sardonic preacher, a print guy from way back, an agitator, a stalker of evasion, a carrier of the old-liberal Kennedy nosalgia flag and a bullshit spotter par excellence.” Also, he really likes movies.
• There have been so many tributes to the late Roy Scheider on the web today that by early-afternoon, I felt like I had nothing else to add. Self-Styled Siren offers her own, as well as a compilation of some of the best from other sites.
• A female writer at Entertainment Weekly contends that an Amy Heckerling movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer is going straight to DVD because movies about middle-aged women are unmarketable. Erin at Steady Diet of Film calls bullshit on that, as well as the notion that Pfeiffer hasn’t worked in six years. “Uhm don’t tell that to anyone who saw Hairspray or Stardust (totaling $335M worldwide).”

Nikki Finke has issued a response to Jeff Robinov’s response to her claim that three producers told her that Robinov is no longer putting films starring women into production. After meticulously detailing a couple of days worth of phone tag between her and Robinov, Finke writes:

Sources inside Warner’s tell me that, 1) Robinov doesn’t believe there’s an actress who can carry a movie worldwide since Julia Roberts, 2) Robinov has now gone so far as admitting to his studio colleagues that the decree I reported was made when he was “in the room”, 2) Robinov is acknowledging that the studio is reassessing the strategy of making action pictures starring women, 3) Robinov was inundated with calls on Monday and Tuesday from media and Hollywood types asking him about my posting, 4) Robinov has three pics currently in production and six in pre-production and not one stars a women as the main lead of the film, and 5) he’s nixed Wonder Woman as a stand-alone film, downgrading her to just one of four superhero characters in the proposed Justice League. Again, I stand by my story.

So, in other words, more of the same. Much more interesting, I think, is an excerpt from Lisa Chase’s interview with Finke in the latest issue of Elle, in which Finke explains why women in Hollywood “can’t get ahead.” More after the jump.

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Warner Brothers’ Jeff Robinov responds to Nikki Finke’s allegations that he’s put the kibosh on producing movies starring women. Anne Thompson writes:

Warner production prexy Jeff Robinov insists he is moving forward with several movies with women in the lead. Indeed, he is offended by rumors of his cinematic misogyny.

Action features starring women remain a hard sell for many moviegoers. But Robinov said he is still willing to put a femme star into an action role. “But, like any other movie, it has to be the right movie with the right actor and the right filmmaker at the right time,” he said.

Much more at the link, but like I said: the news wasn’t that the studio was turning away from (mis)casting female movies stars in action movies; the news was that they cast a bunch of Oscar-winning actresses over 30 in poorly conceived genre fare, and then dropped the ball on marketing. The real news nugget within Robinov’s protestation is that heavy reservation, “the right movie with the right actor and the right filmmaker at the right time.” The optimistic read on this is, “we’re taking a conscious step away from producing movies like The Invasion and The Reaping that bleed money, misuse high-caliber talent, embarrass just about everyone and please almost no one.”

I’ll leave the less optimistic readings to others. At the end of the day, the studio’s slate of projects is going to speak for itself.  Nikki hasn’t yet responded, but you know it’s coming.

This is a holdover from the weekend, but it’s worth going back to: Nikki Finke says three people have told her that Warner Brothers is no longer greenlighting pictures build around female stars. This is apparently in reaction to dismal box office returns for The Brave One and The Invasion, but as Finke points out, those weren’t exactly the chickiest of flicks. Ergo, this seems to be less about the female audience and more about the general audience not responding to female stars. Or, it could be about WB looking for scapegoats to cover their own failure to efficiently market genre fare to grown-ups. Regardless: it looks bad, and, if it’s true, celebrity feminist/attorney Gloria Allred (who has been awfully busy lately with Britney Spears’ custody battle) isn’t going to let it slide. She tells Finke:

This is an insult to all moviegoers and particularly women. It is truly unfortunate that women get blamed for decisions which are made by men…If that studio confirms that their policy is to now exclude women as leads, then my policy would be to boycott films made by Warner Bros.

This will probably go nowhere, because if pressed, WB will be like, “Of course we love women!” And it’ll all blow over as soon as Finke finds a tastier string to pull. But at some point, someone is going to have to explain to me how 40 year-old actresses having trouble finding work is anything other than business as usual.

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 night, Kevin and I watched the film Nail Polish. Today we talked with the director, Jane Ainbinder, the lead actor, Alexandra Lydon, and two of the film’s producers, Randy Sterns and Courtney Lee-Michell. Our conversation flowed from small budgets and semi-autobiographical scripts, to women filmmakers, collaboration, and what it means to throw your heart into a film you believe in. (If you happen to be in Denver this weekend but missed the screening last night, you can catch the film at 4 p.m. on Sunday.)