More Trouble for Women in Hollywood

Posted on May 4, 2016 at 8:00 am

It was bad enough when Marisa Tomei was cast as the elderly Aunt May in the next “Spider-Man.” But now the gorgeous Famke Janssen, who has played Jean Gray in the X-Men movies, says she will not be in the next one. As in the last time-spanning film, there will be older and younger actors playing the main characters, except for Gray, who will just be shown as her younger self, played by Game of Thrones actor Sophie Turner, who is 20.

“Women, it’s interesting because they’re replaced, and the older versions are never to be seen again,” Janssen told Entertainment Weekly. “Whereas the men are allowed to be both ages. Sexism. I think that I should be back along with my younger version and the way that we’ve seen it with Magneto and Professor X.”

Janssen, 51, said she had tried to discuss a return for the older Grey with producers but had not received a response.

“I have not heard any feedback on that, other than total radio silence,” she said.

And another beautiful actress, Amanda Peet, wrote an essay for Lena Dunham’s online magazine Lenny, about the pressures on actresses to look like they are under 25.

It’s painfully obvious, but I’m still ashamed to admit this: I care about my looks. How else can I explain my trainer, stylist, and Barney’s card? I’ve bleached my teeth, dyed my hair, peeled and lasered my face, and tried a slew of age-defying creams. More than once, I’ve asked the director of photography on a show to soften my laugh lines. Nothing about this suggests I’m aging gracefully.

It’s painfully obvious, but I’m still ashamed to admit this: I care about my looks.
Yet for me, it would be crossing the Rubicon to add Botox and fillers into the mix. I want to look younger (and better), trust me. The only reason I don’t do it is because I’m scared.

I’m afraid one visit to a cosmetic dermatologist would be my gateway drug. I’d go in for a tiny, circumscribed lift and come out looking like a blowfish. Or someone whose face is permanently pressed up against a glass window. Or like I’m standing in the jet stream of a 747. What’s the point of doing it if everyone can tell? I want the thing that makes me look younger, not the thing that makes me look like I did the thing.

As I’ve said before, these “treatments” too often make it impossible for actors to do the very thing we want them to do — show emotion.

It’s no better behind the camera. Variety reports that producer Heather Rae spoke about the problems she faced in getting support for her new film, “Tallulah,” starring Ellen Page.

“At the time this film was deemed not commercially viable, because it was a woman’s story, and it wasn’t about getting the guy,” Rae said at a private screening on “Tallulah” in New York, noting that executives said as much to her face.

20th Century Fox and Paramount have announced their new lists of films in production — without a single woman director.

Big Data: Movie Talk by Gender and Age

Posted on April 9, 2016 at 8:00 am

Polygraph has taken 2000 movie scripts and broken them down by gender, showing that in, for example Disney films, men have more than 60% of the lines, even in films like “Mulan,” which has a female lead and is explicitly about a female’s wish to have the opportunities and responsibility of the males. Women had the majority of lines in just 22% of the films. They look at age as well and helpfully make the data available so you can do your own analysis.

Rogerebert.com’s Women’s History Month Tribute

Posted on March 31, 2016 at 8:00 am

This week, in honor of Women’s History Month, on rogerebert.com women critics write about film. One featured essay is my appreciation of Nora Ephron, which notes that “Nora Ephron has been portrayed on screen by Diane Keaton, Sandra Dee, Meryl Streep, and Streep’s daughter, Grace Gummer. And that’s just the characters based on her life; her wit and insight are reflected in dozens of other characters she created as well.”

Other highlights include:

Thoughts on the 25th anniversary of “Thelma and Louise”

Jessica Ritchey on “The Double Life of Veronique“

Of the Three Movies Released This Week, the One With the Most Racial and Gender Awareness is….Zootopia

Posted on March 5, 2016 at 12:27 pm

The two live-action releases this week, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” and “London Has Fallen,” featured stereotyping and white actors playing characters of color. So it was especially refreshing to watch “Zootopia,” a Disney animated movie with talking animals, and discover some genuinely thoughtful and sensitive portrayal of race and gender. It is dispiriting to see that in 2016 movies like “Gods of Egypt” and “Whisky Tango Foxtrot” are using American, Australian, and European actors to play Middle Eastern characters. As Ann Hornaday points out in a very perceptive essay for the Washington Post,

, starring Tina Fey as an intrepid, amusingly clumsy television reporter assigned to cover the war in Afghanistan, takes full advantage of its lead actress’s unforced warmth, in the service of a film that balances drama, romance and comedy with admirable skill. But in the midst of what could have been a thoroughly delightful mid-winter diversion, viewers are presented with the off-putting spectacle of two white actors — Christopher Abbott and Alfred Molina — portraying key Afghan figures in the story, one wearing layers of bronzing powder and a native pakol, the other leering from behind a bushy beard.

The problem goes behind misrepresentation, authenticity, and making it tougher for non-white performers to get jobs and tell their own stories. “It’s a matter of aesthetics,” she notes. “Rather than getting lost in the story up on the screen, viewers find themselves distracted by a bad makeup job or too-obvious prosthetics. Rather than becoming wrapped up in the emotional truth a performer is trying to convey, they remain at arm’s length from a character that can never be fully, seamlessly realized.” It sends messages that audiences of all races cannot help but absorb about standards of beauty and appropriation.

But “Zootopia,” an animated family movies, has a remarkably sophisticated and thoughtful understanding of race and gender, perhaps because the characters are all animals, so the message is metaphorical. As Slate’s Dan Kois writes in a piece called “Disney’s Zootopia is a Delightful Kids’ Movie that is Also Totally About Racial Profiling,”

The movie gets laughs from some surprisingly touchy racial material: “A bunny can call another bunny cute, but you can’t,” Hopps scolds Wilde. Later, another character gets reprimanded for an impropriety that, famously, black men and women have to deal with all the time: “You can’t just touch a sheep’s wool!”

But as broad as the movie sometimes plays, it delivers a clear message that when individuals prejudge others based on their heritage—or when a police force cracks down on a certain kind of person based only on their own bias and fear—people get hurt and treated unfairly.

The lead character is a small female bunny who responds tartly to being called “cute” by explaining that bunnies can use that term about each other, but it is inappropriate from another species. And the focus on the story is on her challenges in overcoming stereotypes — and realizing that she has some of her own to overcome, too. This is a lesson the makers of films like “Gods of Egypt” and “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” should learn as well.

Trapped

Posted on March 3, 2016 at 5:19 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Not rated
Profanity:	None
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	References to violence against abortion providers
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	March 4, 2016

TRAP stands for Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers. “Trapped” is a powerful new documentary that focuses on efforts to cut off women’s access to abortion by imposing requirements and restrictions on clinics that have no relationship to health or safety.

It could not be more timely, released the same week that the most significant challenge to Roe v. Wade was argued in the Supreme Court, just after the death of Justice Scalia makes a 4-4 split decision a possibility.

Lawyer-turned-documentarian Dawn Porter lets the people affected by these laws speak, interviewing the doctors and staff of abortion clinics to show the absurdity of the claim that the TRAP laws are based on concerns for women’s health and safety. A clinic staffer points to a requirement that “emergency lighting shall be provided in accordance with Sec. 7.9.” But there is no Sec. 7.9. Another says that they are required to spend $1100 a month on medication that has never been used but must be replaced every 30 days because it expires. Meanwhile, a protester stands outside a clinic screaming that women should be adored and cared for by men, while women who come to the clinic are berated.

We see the impact of the disinformation campaigns perpetrated by the anti-abortion forces, with clinic workers forced to provide misleading booklets and a young woman in the clinic worried that the abortion will make her sterile. It may sound reasonable to legislators who are not medical professionals to require abortion providers to have admitting privileges in the nearest hospital, but they do not understand the Catch-22: abortion is so safe that not enough patients are admitted to the hospital to retain those privileges.

And we see Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore speaking at an anti-abortion event. (He has also opposed the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality.)

We see a clinic staff member pray with a patient — and another one decide that “the grass is dry” and so she had better use her remote control to turn on the sprinkler that happens to be near a protester. Another staffer presents a doctor with a defiant bumper sticker: “May the fetus you save turn out to be a gay abortion provider.” We hear about 13-year-old rape victims who may be forced to bear the child of their rapists. What comes through most powerfully is their belief in supporting women in the decisions they have a right to make about what is best for them.