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

No Strings Attached

Posted on May 10, 2011 at 8:18 am

This is another one of those romantic comedies where a bland couple has some trivial obstacles to overcome and you just wish they would get out of the way because their surrounding friends and family are much more interesting.

Mindy Kaling (“The Office”), Greta Gerwig (“Greenberg”), Chris “Ludacris” Bridges (“Back for the First Time”), Kevin Kline (“A Fish Called Wanda”), Lake Bell (“It’s Complicated”), and Jake M. Johnson (“Paper Heart”) and the characters they play are each far more deserving of a movie of their own than the dull couple played by Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher.

This seems to be a movie moment for stories about what Erica Jong used to call zipless , the fantasy of an experience that is physical perfection with no thinking or emotion involved at all. “Friends With Benefits” has an almost identical plot to this one and “Hall Pass,” and “Just Go With It” are among the films that focus on the premise of sex without any sort of romantic entanglements or consequences. This made for a pretty good “Seinfeld” episode but I’m not sure there is enough in that premise for even one movie, and this movie does not persuade me otherwise.

First we have to have a reason for both parties to avoid any relationship beyond the physical. It’s pretty weak on her part and pretty ugly on his. Kutcher plays a guy who has been hurt. His ex-girlfriend is sleeping with his father (Kevin Kline) a one-time television star with a taste for drugs and women, the emotional maturity of a two-year-old and the vocabulary of a Penthouse letter. Portman plays a doctor who is just too busy for relationship niceties. Ultimately, we find out there’s a little bit more to it, but it’s too dull to care about. In the meantime, our couple finds out that there’s no such thing as uncomplicated sex.

Um, duh.

Portman does what she can for her character despite her idiotic and inconsiderate behavior. Kutcher plays his usual lovable St. Bernard puppy self, the boyfriend so perfect he even makes a special mix CD for soothing menstrual cramps. But the resolution is so clear from the beginning and the contrast with the more engaging characters around them so clear that it feels like it keeps trying to lose us. Instead of making us care about the couple, it tries to win us over with crassly provocative behavior and language. This movie would be more accurately titled, “a salute to the overshare.” Unless you think it deserves saluting, skip it.

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Comedy Romance