09.22.08
Posted in western, misogyny, reviews at 12:02 pm by FilmFemme
Appaloosa, a stylish Western starring the intimidating and rugged Ed Harris, the sexy and suave Viggo Mortensen (yes, why, feel free to take advantage of me on a staircase, that would be just fine, actually…) and the inexplicably employed Renee Zellweger (I’ll be damned if I’m going to search out the e with an accent mark for her) is only playing in 6 theaters in Los Angeles County. As you might imagine, there are a lot more than 6 theatres in Los Angeles County. Why might that be? Inquiring FilmFemmes want to know!
The answer that I have deduced is that it is because it is such an awful movie.*
Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hicks (Mortensen) — oh god, those NAMES!! — come to Appaloosa offering their services as vigilante law enforcement to take the town back from Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons channeling Daniel Day Lewis channeling Daniel Plainview) and his band of rowdy outlaws who killed the last sherrif, or something. There’s a lot of intimidating, mainly in the form of Viggo Mortensen silently posed with a shotgun and Cole is briefly distracted by the arrival of Allison French (Zellweger) who is single and “not a whore” but is still kind of a whore. Oh yeah, there is nothing likable about any of the women that appear in the movie, either, which is something I tend to note. Anyway, Cole and Hitch’s main objective is to convict Bragg of murder and watch him hang in the name of justice. They encounter obstacles, find out that Allison is kind of a whore, have some gun battles, ride some trains and eventually reclaim Appaloosa. Kind of.
Ed Harris directed the script that he co-wrote which reads like someone had a screenplay checklist that included a couple of plot points and some character quirks. The story is fine, passable Western fare with outlaws, some violence, some horses and a little bit of romance. But the story drags on, the goofy jokes completely negate any sense of caring you might have. And oh, you have to look at Renee Zellweger for a significant portion of the movie.
*Turns out the answer is that it is not in wide release until October 3rd. I like my reason better.
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09.04.08
Posted in misogyny, comedy, reviews at 9:07 am by FilmFemme
Get ready, readers. All 4 of you. I’m about to lose all credibility.
I liked The House Bunny.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it was a good movie in terms of acting, writing or direction. But I did like it. I really did.
I used to watch Anna Faris with a wrinkled nose, begrudging her of her fame, thinking that anyone can play the dumb girl in Scary Movie and wondering why she kept getting parts. When I saw her in the abysmal Just Friends, I changed my tune. Anna Faris is actually hilarious. In The House Bunny, she plays Shelley, an ugly duckling little girl who grew up in an orphanage and then blossomed into a Playboy Bunny who Hef invited to live at the mansion. Isn’t your heart warm already?
But on her 27th birthday, she is unceremoniously kicked to the curb and forced to find her own way in the big wide world of L.A. She quickly latches on to sorority culture and hops her way into the position of House Mother at the Zeta Alpha Zeta sorority. So, with the help of Shelley, the ugly ducklings of Zeta Alpha Zeta learn to be pretty outside and — get this — inside, too! She also teaches them how to get laid.
One caveat, try not to *think* druing this movie. Not about the past or the future or how rush week actually works at a sorority (I pray to god that you don’t even know how rush week works at a sorority) or how Katherine McPhee is too hot to play a misfit and Rumer Willis is too ugly to have spawned from Demi Moore. Just have fun.
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03.11.08
Posted in misogyny, romance, drama, reviews at 1:53 pm by FilmFemme
Sliding Doors is a movie for girls. I am a girl. I love this movie.
It’s one of those WHAT IF movies that starts with WHAT IF Gwyneth Paltrow does a British accent?
WHAT IF she is adorable and misses her train so she doesn’t find out that her boyfriend with the bad haircut is cheating on her with the uber-hot Jeanne Trippelhorn?
WHAT IF she is adorable and doesn’t miss the train, does find out about the philandering, and also does meet the not-so-cute-but-so-charming-and-funny-
even-if-he-is-kind-of-short James?
(Spoiler alert: everything turns out great either way).
And then, WHAT IF you think about this movie and its implications too hard?
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03.01.08
Posted in misogyny, family, comedy, animated, reviews at 8:09 pm by FilmFemme
Ratatouille just beat out Persepolis for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars (boo) and then it showed up from Netflix yesterday! Since it beat such an awesome (if subtitled) movie and has been advertised as The Best Reviewed Movie Of The Year, I was hoping it would be pretty great. But it was pretty mediocre.
The oh-so-complicated plot involves a rat named Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) who wants to be a chef so he teams up with this kid named Alfredo Linguini (oh, great name.) who has a job in a kitchen but is completely inept at cooking. Together, they have to save the restaurant without letting people know that a rat is actually doing the cooking. I know, you’re totally in suspense right now, but I’m not going to spoil it for you!
Ok, I will.
The restaurant gets shut down by the health inspector but it’s OK because they open a new restaurant that magically doesn’t have to adhere to health codes and everyone lives H.E.A. Also, they convince a critic to stop being a jerk and Alfredo falls in love with Jeanine Garafalo who has a French accent. (The movie takes place in Paris, but most of the people & rats aren’t French for some reason).
So, it’s no Toy Story - in terms of story or voice talents - but it’s OK, not bad, great for kids probably.
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12.28.07
Posted in misogyny, thriller, action, sci fi, reviews at 10:33 am by FilmFemme
I Am Legend.
Will Smith is ripped.
Dogs are awesome.
Chicks suck at surviving the apocalypse.
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12.27.07
Posted in misogyny, documentary, reviews at 3:23 pm by FilmFemme
Ok, maybe I’m on some totally misogynistic kick because like, my estrogen levels are depleted or something crazy, but once again, I hated this totally woman-centric ‘documentary’: Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project. So, the movie was actually made by a couple of dudes (if I’m remembering right, because IMDb sure doesn’t know) but it’s about this woman/model/photographer, Tierney Gearon, who goes to visit her schizophrenic mother in upstate New York to take pictures of her. Through the course of filming, she also gets pregnant, moves from London to L.A. and does her very best to completely fuck up her kids. Seriously, I hate hate hate this woman.
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Posted in misogyny, indie, drama, reviews at 2:59 pm by FilmFemme
Friends with Money came on TV last night. I had been wanting to see it (I like Catherine Keener and am a little smitten with Jennifer Aniston. I mean, come on, who isn’t?) so I watched it all the way through.
It’s telling that this is the first review where I felt compelled to add an “indie” tag. It’s just one of those movies, you know? It’s funny at parts (not that funny) and sad at parts (never too sad) but mostly it’s just kind of an ambling portrait of marriage and relationships and life for women in Los Angeles.
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12.19.07
Posted in best of, misogyny, romance, comedy, reviews at 3:02 pm by FilmFemme
I really miss the days when it was totally acceptable for someone who looked like Dexter Fletcher (nice name!) to be the romantic lead opposite Ione Skye at the peak of her hotness. Actually, no, I don’t. But such was the world in 1989 and it was this world that brought us The Rachel Papers and what amounts to a lot of misogyny, not nearly enough Jonathan Pryce, a few jokes and Ione Skye’s tits (nice rack!).
In 80s teen movie fashion, British guy Charles (Fletcher) lives in London, has a computer and wants to get laid. He meets Rachel (Skye) and decides he MUST have her. So he employs all sorts of tricks, including keeping info on her in a database (creep!), and finally wins her over. Then they have tons and tons of sex. Then they decide that she should come to stay at the house that he shares with his sister and her crazy husband (Pryce!). But, despite the really unnecessary amounts of fucking, he gets sick of her. Read that again. HE gets sick of HER. After all the time he spent (dirty) spreadsheeting her and wooing her away from James Spader (Oh, did I not mention that? I thought ‘1989′ implied that James Spader was involved in some nefarious way), he gets sick of her because she’s always horny and expects him not to fuck other girls. GO FIGURE. So he cheats on her. And she finds out because she comes over to fuck his brains out and is like “Oh, get a condom” and he says he’s out and she says “No, you’re not, I just saw them this morning” and THEN HE TRIES TO FUCK HER WITH A USED CONDOM. Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew.
She dumps him. She moves to New York. They go to a museum a while later (as friends) where she wears a hideous pantsuit and, I guess he learned his lesson?
I know I learned mine: Don’t ever be hornier than the guy you’re fucking. Because he’ll cheat on you.
Wait, what?
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12.13.07
Posted in misogyny, opinion, drama, reviews at 2:30 pm by FilmFemme
I was not a cool kid. My parents didn’t turn me on to The Beatles or The Who or, more relevantly, Bob Dylan, when I was 8 or anything like that. After talking to or seeing my parents, a lot of times I’m left wondering how I ended up with any kind of good taste at all. The point being that, I’ve only liked Bob Dylan for a couple of years and didn’t truly fall in love with him until I saw Don’t Look Back in college and love love loved it. In that documentary, D.A. Pennebaker created this whole compelling character out of Dylan’s tour around England in 1960-something and I absolutely love it.
And I loved I’m Not There.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t even the Cate Blanchett parts, that parallel Don’t Look Back that I found the most compelling. The character that I really liked (in a totally self-loathing way) was Heath Ledger’s ultra-misogynistic but oh-so-sexy Jack Rollins (or whatever, I can’t keep all the character names straight [His character is named Robbie Clark but he plays Jack Rollins in a movie which is the name of Christian Bale’s character {also, can we talk about how much HOTNESS is in this movie! Jesus!}]) and his romance with/divorce from the beautiful French artist Claire (Charlotte Gainsborough). I think it was how I identified with/was compelled by this story and specifically by Claire, that made me go home last night and write the rant that you’ll find after the jump. I’m hiding it with a click-through because, honestly, it’s pretty ‘bloggy’ and possibly even a little ‘LiveJournal-y’ (does that still exist?) but hopefully a little interesting and a tiny bit insightful. Hopefully.
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10.22.07
Posted in misogyny, opinion, comedy, drama, reviews at 11:39 am by FilmFemme
So, it might be a tiny bit of a stretch to connect this LA Times article by my new favorite person Carina Chocano to my recent viewing of Shopgirl, since it’s not a comedy and does center around a woman, but the article really forced me to reconsider my feelings about the movie. I watched Shopgirl yesterday and I thought it was so charming. And it made me feel really lonely and almost desperate. You know, in a good way.
Then I read this article, which (READ IT!) articulates in a public forum what I’ve been talking about for a long time (oh yeah, I’m totally OG on the oppression of women and how Hollywood perpetuates it…um, not so much). Chocano’s driving question (thesis? no thanks) is basically: WTF happened to good female comedic characters? Shopgirl isn’t a comedy (though there are some really funny parts [”It’s a mint.”]) but there is still this undercurrent, when I look back on it, of Claire Dane’s Mirabelle (something about that name is so fake - and not in a whimsical way, in a way that it was so clearly invented by a man…) being kind of worthless. She is the titular ’shopgirl’ who literally stands at a counter waiting for life to happen to her. It does, in the form of Jason Schwartzman’s Jeremy who she meets at a laundromat (I’m clearly going to the wrong laundromats, because there are never cute hipster boys when I go - just fat women washing sheets and little kids running around screaming) and later Steve Martin’s Ray. Sure, she’s ‘an artist’ and she’s ‘depressed’ and she ‘has a cat’ and I guess the point is that at the end she *does* do something, but it happens so easily that it’s hard to connect her invisible struggle (her depression manifests itself only in laying in bed for a few days when she goes off her meds) with her ultimate success. It doesn’t feel triumphant, it feels just like her chance encounters with either of the guys that form a tenuous ‘love triangle’ with her - lucky. In retrospect (I will heartily admit that I am still smitten with this movie) it is so obvious that this story was written by a man.
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