Mindy Kaling on Women in Movies

Posted on September 28, 2011 at 12:38 pm

Producer/writer/actress Mindy Kaling of “The Office” has a great piece in the New Yorker about women characters in movies.

hat I’d really like to write is a romantic comedy. This is my favorite kind of movie. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity. But that has not stopped me from enjoying them.

I like watching people fall in love onscreen so much that I can suspend my disbelief in the contrived situations that occur only in the heightened world of romantic comedies. I have come to enjoy the moment when the male lead, say, slips and falls right on top of the expensive wedding cake. I actually feel robbed when the female lead’s dress doesn’t get torn open at a baseball game while the JumboTron camera is on her. I regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world operates according to different rules than my regular human world. For me, there is no difference between Ripley from “Alien” and any Katherine Heigl character. They are equally implausible. They’re all participating in a similar level of fakey razzle-dazzle, and I enjoy every second of it.

Kaling describes some of the outlandish categories assigned to women characters from the clumsy klutz (“When a beautiful actress is cast in a movie, executives rack their brains to find some kind of flaw in the character she plays that will still allow her to be palatable. She can’t be overweight or not perfect-looking, because who would pay to see that? A female who is not one hundred per cent perfect-looking in every way? You might as well film a dead squid decaying on a beach somewhere for two hours. So they make her a Klutz.”) to the ethereal weirdo, the career-obsessed no-fun girl, the skinny beautiful woman who eats all the time, the “mother” of the young actor who is only a few years older than he is (Jessie Royce Landis was actually the same age as Cary Grant when she played his mother in “North by Northwest”), and the girl who works in an art gallery because “It’s in the same realm as kindergarten teacher or children’s-book illustrator in terms of accessibility: guys don’t really get it, but it is likable and nonthreatening.”

Read the piece to see what the guy-equivalent of art gallery worker is and why it is just as unrealistic.

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Understanding Media and Pop Culture

Network Television’s Distressing New Word

Posted on September 23, 2011 at 3:51 pm

Years ago, “Saturday Night Live” had a funny “Wayne’s World” sketch with Bruce Willis as the high school cool kid, who appeared on the show to reveal to Wayne and Garth what the new cool insult word of the year would be. I’m not going to reveal that word here, but I am beginning to suspect that somewhere there is a Bruce Willis equivalent who decides what boundary-crossing word will all of a sudden be prevalent on broadcast television. Last year it was an ugly and misogynistic term for an outdated product used for intimate female cleansing. As in the “Wayne’s World” sketch, this year’s word is an anatomical reference, used to insult or provoke. According to the New York Times, all of a sudden the most popular new word is the clinical term for what are sometimes more politely referred to as lady parts. Sadly, in many cases the scripts are written by women who seem to think that it makes them cool enough to be in the TV boys club instead of understanding it makes them look undignified, insecure, and trashy.

Two female writers who are behind three of the shows that use the word commented:

I think our tolerance for what is edgy is changing,” said Cummings, who, besides writing her own comedy for NBC, also wrote “Two Broke Girls” with Michael Patrick King, a longtime producer and writer of “Sex and the City.” “We’re getting a little desensitized, so sometimes you have to be more and more shocking because now you have YouTube and the Internet and all the rest that’s available for us to watch.”

…

“I think it’s great this is all coming from women,” said Liz Meriwether, the creator of another new show, “New Girl.” “This is all part of the human experience”…As for the reasons to use it, she added: “Sometimes you use crudeness just for shock. But sometimes you’re using crudeness because it absolutely is the funniest joke. I think the best comedy is the stuff that does make you a little uncomfortable.”

I think the best comedy does not confuse cheap shocks with what is genuinely provocative.

Jim Emerson Deconstructs ‘The Dark Knight’ Action Sequence

Posted on September 14, 2011 at 8:00 am

Jim Emerson of Indiewire takes viewers through the truck chase scene in “The Dark Knight” and explains how an action sequence works (and does not work). This is a superb lesson on visual story-telling, highly recommended.

A Treat for ‘Say Anything’ Fans — Deleted Scenes!

Posted on September 6, 2011 at 8:00 am

It’s the movie Entertainment Weekly called the greatest romance of the past 25 years. Boom boxes have come and gone, but the iconic image of John Cusack holding his over his head so that Ione Skye can hear their song is all-but-universally recognizable. “I used to think I had a crush on John Cusack,” a 20-something friend told me. “But I really had a crush on , Lloyd Dobbler.” A lot of the teen girls in the audience (and even the grown-up women) identified with Corey, DC, and Rebecca, who said, “If you were Diane Court, would you honestly fall for Lloyd?” “Yeah.” “Yeah.” “Yeah!”

Diane (Ione Skye), the high school valedictorian memorably described as “a brain…trapped in the body of a game show hostess,” does fall for Lloyd, then breaks up with him after pressure from her father (John Mahoney), then comes back to him when it turns out her father, the person she trusted most, was stealing from his nursing home residents to get money to give Diane lavish gifts.

Susannah Gora of Salon notes that writer-director Cameron Crowe (“Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “Almost Famous,” and the upcoming “We Bought a Zoo” with Matt Damon) has been posting deleted scenes, just the screenplay, not footage, on his website.

Gora says:

Crowe had based the Lloyd character on a real-life man named Lowell Marchant, who was his neighbor in Santa Monica during the time he was working on this script. Marchant was an optimistic 19-year-old kickboxer from Alabama, who, as Crowe told me when I interviewed him for my book “You Couldn’t Ignore Me If You Tried,” “would knock on the doors of his neighbors to make friends. And you’d answer it, and he’d be like, ‘Good afternoon, I’m Lowell Marchant. And I would like to meet you. I’m your neighbor, and I’m a kickboxer. Do you know about kickboxing?’ And he would wipe off his palm on the side of his pant leg, and shake your hand. And it was just such a great thing.” Crowe told me that Marchant’s simple, thoughtful gesture of wiping his palm before going for the handshake “was the first little spark for the bonfire that would become getting the character right.”

But what struck me as perhaps the most interesting and most significant finding in all the newly released material was this: Originally, Lloyd had a line at the very beginning of the film in which he asks one of his friends, “Did ever say anything about me?” The line was ultimately scrapped, which may seem insignificant if not for one thing: That was the only time that Cusack’s character ever uttered the phrase that was the title of the film. As it stands, that phrase, “say anything,” is spoken many times — but only by Diane and her father.

It is a lot of fun to read over the script for the famous dinner scene and see the stage directions, and understand how much Mahoney, Skye, and Cusack brought to the film, and to see the portions that Crowe wrote but did not use. And if it inspires you to watch the movie (again or for the first time), that’s good, too.

New ‘Star Wars’ Blu-Ray Creates Controversy

Posted on September 4, 2011 at 8:00 am

George Lucas can’t stop fiddling with “Star Wars.” This week’s highly anticipated Blu-Ray release of Star Wars: The Complete Saga films has 40 hours of extra material, which will make the fan-boys happy, but it also tinkers with the original films so significantly that some of the hardcore fans are calling for a boycott and have even set up a Facebook page to get support for the boycott. For example, you won’t see the famous “Han shot first” scene in the Blu-Ray.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1YbFnkZwZk

And the Ewoks now have CGI-enhanced eyes that blink.

Nikki Finke cheekily quotes from Lucas’ 1988 testimony before Congress to her story on the controversy:

People who alter or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit or as an exercise of power are barbarians, and if the laws of the United States continue to condone this behavior, history will surely classify us as a barbaric society.

In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be “replaced” by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.

Attention should be paid to this question of our soul, and not simply to accounting procedures. Attention should be paid to the interest of those who are yet unborn, who should be able to see this generation as it saw itself, and the past generation as it saw itself.

Ross Lulppold of The Huffington Post has a funny piece with some other suggested changes Lucas might want to consider. Chewie in pants? Googly eyes for the Sarlaac? Stay tuned.