The films predominantly focused on white dudes (The Nice Guys, Nine Lives, Popstar) had the most trouble finding their audience — even when they were good movies. Well, two out of three. Neither best-selling SNL stars nor battle-tested movie stars could bring audiences out in the droves that wanted something a little fresher than a body-swap comedy.
Copyright 2016 Warner BrothersThough Neighbors 2, Mike and Dave, and Bad Moms fail to fully explore their potential, they engage with a female perspective. Each have a strange, imperfect feminism that embraces raunchiness and empowers its female leads to various degrees. Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick, Kiersey Clemons, and Mila Kunis want to let loose and these movies, learning in hiccups and starts from Bridesmaids, are the R-rated comedies to let audiences live vicariously through them.
That Zac Efron stars in two of these shows that he has savvy taste in roles and that those seeking him understand his ability to play within comedy while being the object of female gaze. It’s the Hemsworth factor from Ghostbusters. Though that female-driven film had the biggest live-action comedy opening weekend of the year, its insane budget and marketing push (not to mention the kind of fanboy outrage that would keep Suicide Squad in the top spot three weekends in a row) meant it was fighting an uphill battle before it even opened.
Copyright 2016 Warner BrothersWhile Ghostbusters overspent and overhyped, Central Intelligence made a little bit more on a third of the budget and a tiny percentage of the marketing. The two PG-13 titans were the main contenders for the middle and high schoolers that wanted a comedy this summer, though they’re all sneaking into Sausage Party now, I’m sure.
Taking away from this, we can see that if you want to spend more than a very modest amount on your comedy, you better have some diverse stars that can play to both adults and the kids off of school working summer jobs. Some dumb fun with extremely likable leads and no baggage (the original property Central Intelligence had very few internet protesters) means that you can target your budget on where it matters for your audience.
Old films are disintegrating, and we risk losing forever indispensable works of art and cultural artifacts. In an article in the New York Times, movie critic Manola Dargis describes another challenge: there were different versions of some earlier films, so detective work is required along with preservation of the fragile nitrate prints.
Preservationists seek out both the best-preserved prints and elements from different film copies, and often work with outside technicians. (Some handle the visuals, others the audio; some work with photochemical elements, others with digital.) It’s like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from many copies of that puzzle — pieces that sometimes need to be shipped from France and spruced up in Los Angeles. Flaws remain because, Mr. Pogorzelski said, he has “to stretch dollars as far as they can go.” Carrying out a “100 percent frame-by-frame cleaning” and focusing all of the archive’s resources on one film might mean ignoring dozens of others.
And she reminds us why it is so important.
All movies are time machines, and restoration helps bring the moving-image present together with a past that is always — as prints decay, labs close and money ebbs — moving further away.
If you are in the Washington DC area and would like to learn how to write a movie review, please join me for a free workshop on Saturday, Sept 10, 2016, at the Landmark E Street theater. It’s a part of the DC Shorts Film Festival. You can register here.
What should you include in a film review? Should you write about characters, colors, sounds, camera angles, etc? How much should you write about filmmaker? Should you write about the filmmaker? Join us, as these and many more questions will be answered.
#8 Nora Charles (Myrna Loy in the “Thin Man” series)
Movies love to tell us stories about falling in love: the rush of emotion, the fear of intimacy, the exquisite romantic thrill. And it is not hard to find a movie about the agony of love, the anguish of betrayal, the pain of loss. But it is very rare to see a movie about being in love, and almost impossible to find a single film, much less a series, where the lead characters are a married couple who do not just love each other and support each other – they get a genuine kick out of each other. They make marriage seem sexy and fun.
Only one couple in movie history fits that category: the witty, glamorous, but down-to-earth Nick and Nora Charles in the “Thin Man” series of six films about a debonair detective and his society wife. Myrna Loy played Nora opposite her 14-time co-star William Powell, and there has never been a better on-screen match for impeccable comic timing and romantic chemistry.
As the first film begins, they are near-newlyweds. After marrying the wealthy Nora, Nick has retired from detecting and they seem to be living a life of champagne and caviar. Nick is asked to help an old friend find her missing father (the “thin man” of the title, not Nick). Nora is a game girl, whatever is up, whether it is matching Nick by downing a half-dozen martinis or hosting an elegant party for low-lifes and crooks. “Oh, Nicky. I love you because you know such lovely people,” she says, and she means it. She is confident in herself and their marriage. When she sees him hugging the girl he is helping, she is not at all jealous – they make faces at each other over the girl’s shoulder, communicating to themselves and to us their instinctive understanding. Their relationship is never in question.
Dashiell Hammett based the character in part on his long-time love, playwright Lillian Hellman. She described Nick and Nora as “maybe one of the few marriages in modern literature where the man and woman like each other and have a fine time together.” And we have a fine time watching them.
#33 Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday)
Ann (Audrey Hepburn) is the princess of a small, highly civilized country on a diplomatic tour. She is to be unfailingly polite and gracious, promoting trade relations with her always-uncontroversial elegance. Her activities are limited to receptions, photo ops, various ceremonies and speeches like “youth and progress.” “Everything we do is so wholesome,” she sighs.
She is a Cinderella-in-reverse, losing her shoe at the beginning of the story. She has been standing so long in a receiving line, greeting an endless line of dignitaries, that she discreetly takes her sore foot out of her high heel to stretch it, and accidentally knocks it over so she cannot find it again without revealing her indiscretion. That night, she rebels and is given medicine to help her sleep and advice to so “exactly what you wish for a while.” While under the power of the drug, she runs away and ends up falling asleep in the apartment of an American journalist (Gregory Peck).
Ann seems to have everything and so she is an unlikely heroine. But she gets our sympathy because of her wish for the simplest of pleasures – to sleep in pajamas, to get her hair bobbed, to buy an ice cream, to walk around without handlers or photographers, to talk to someone who does not know she is a princess. Hepburn, who would win an Oscar for her first lead role, is enchanting as the princess who longs for the joys of a commoner. Seeing her discover them for the first time makes us rediscover them for ourselves.
#48 Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith in “Working Girl”)
Tess (Melanie Griffith) wants to believe that being smart and working hard will make it possible for her to realize her dream of becoming an investment banker. But the sexist jerks she works for as a secretary will not take her seriously. And her new boss, a woman (Sigourney Weaver), pretends to support her but steals her idea. A boyfriend betrayal and a Valium later, she is stealing her boss’s dress, cutting off her Staten Island poof hairdo (“You want to be taken seriously, you need serious hair”), and pretending to be in the job she wishes she had.
Way too many movie heroines have destiny-changing makeovers. But there is no trying-on-outfits montage here. Yes, she looks ravishing in her boss’s glamorous cocktail dress. But it turns out she has made a mistake. Dress for the event is business attire. She is still out of place.
And yet, looking different brings her to the attention of Jack (Harrison Ford, terrific in a highly unusual supporting role). When they meet in “her” office the next day, he is as won over by her “head for business” as by her “body for sin.”
In a crucial moment, Tess is able to show that the business idea her boss has stolen is hers by owning her intelligence, hard work, judgment – and her roots, acknowledging that it was reading one of the “lower class” newspapers led her to the idea that is going to be worth a great deal of money to her company and its client. She shows us and herself that it is her Staten Island savvy as well as her Wall Street ambition that make her indispensible to Jack, to her new employer, and to us.
Wloszczyna wrote:
*Among the most popular types of characters, based on how they are primarily portrayed onscreen, few are mainly defined by their relationship to a man or a child. There are six action heroes; five journalists/writers/editors; five girls in their teens and younger; four upper-class/socialite/royalty types; two housewives, one mother and one mail-order bride and mother; two office workers; two waitresses; two teachers; two business owners; and two law enforcers.
*18 of the characters resulted in acting Oscars for the actresses who played them, with many more leading to Academy Award nominations. In other words, if you build great female characters, they will likely be noticed and rewarded.
*Only three films that produced worthy Wonder Women had female directors—the 1994 version of “Little Women,” “Whale Rider” and “Winter’s Bone.” However, 18 out of the 55 characters—almost a third—were conceived wholly or in part by women screenwriters and/or authors. “I don’t think men can’t write great parts for women, since we have many on our list,” Ferdinand says. “However, the insight that women can bring to these characters and their lives is self-evident in the results. We know when something feels true and right to us.”
We will let AWFJ’s own Wonder Woman, founder Merin, have the last word. “These characters represent our good friends,” she says. “This is a list of films that every mother will want their daughters (and their sons) to see. It could serve as a primer for a course on women’s images in film through the years.”
Be sure to check out the whole list and watch all the movies! Let me know of any you think we left out. Remember, these are fictional characters — we hope to do a list based on real-life characters like Helen Keller, Tina Turner, and Erin Brockovich next.
