-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 4
This is a guest post from Molly Haskell, a critic and author of Frankly My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited.
Karina Longworth describes the orgasm scene in the Ugly Truth as a cynical update of When Harry Met Sally. Women’s pleasure, she writes, has been sidelined. But there’s a reason the romantic comedy is displaying so much anxiety about women’s sexuality. When the Nora Ephron-Meg Ryan-Billy Crystal movie came out in 1989, Meg Ryan’s character was a journalist but most of all a baby-faced cutie pie in no way threatening to the opposite sex during her and Crystal’s 11 years of best-friend foreplay. Now, 20 years later, women have moved up the economic ladder. They’ve become “boss ladies”—that fright word of 1950’s movie heroines—and must deal with the terror they inspire in men, not to mention the insecurities underlying their own perfectionism.
Enter Katherine Heigl, whose Abby is tall, blonde and regal, but also smart, serious-minded, and tightly-wound, hence believable as a woman who is clueless about seduction. When she falls for an orthopedic surgeon, the oafish Mike must tutor her about how to make herself more appealingly feminine, i.e. tinkling appreciative laughter, flowing hair piece, more cover-up for the brain and less for the body. All standard operating procedure for yet another cringe-inducing enactment of our 21st Century version of the Taming of the Shrew.
The movies opens in an insufferably macho way, and it is no high mark in the annals of romantic comedy. But in my reading, Heigl emerges with her integrity intact, both as actress and character, accomplishing something very few stars have done (Cary grant comes to mind). She undergoes the most humiliating and soul-destroying assaults, not just insults but brutal body blows (falling from a tree while watching the hunk next door is one of the more excruciating), mortifications that would destroy a lesser soul, and she keeps her dignity. One of its startling moments is when she defies Mike’s advice and rips off her hairpiece, exposing herself and looking slightly plucked.
I admit to not having been much of a Heigl fan until now. In Grey’s Anatomy her blond Amazon doctor-in-training seemed to exist solely to make her shorter, darker, less dazzling cohorts feel like losers in the beauty contest. In Knocked Up she was a Judd Apatow anxiety projection, every slacker’s nightmare of the new feminine ideal: beautiful, competent and wa-a-ay out of reach. In the otherwise unlamented 27 Dresses she began to show her left-behind side, the inner ugly duckling of the woman who apparently has it all.
And now in the Ugly Truth she shines. A combination of secret self-assurance and refusal to take herself too seriously gives her, like Grant, the ecstatic resilience of a cartoon character. Even the orgasm by remote control at a high-powered company dinner has a kind of weird Hawksian charm in a movie that is indeed about fakeness and authenticity, about the performance expected of women who have to fake not just their orgasms but their very personalities. When Abby reclaims her own it’s a triumph for us all.
Still from The Ugly Truth courtesy of Lakeshore Entertainment.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 1
John Hughes, the writer and director behind such era-defining comedies as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty in Pink, died today of a heart attack. Yes, he gave us Long Duk Dong, but he also gave us Duckie, and for that, almost all can be forgiven.
In honor of the man, tell us your favorite Hughes moments. Was it Ally Sheedy and her dandruff art? Molly Ringwald making that iconic pink prom dress? How about Cameron (Alan Ruck) pushing his dad’s Ferrari through the glass garage wall? Share your memories in the comment thread.
Publicity shot of Sixteen Candles movie poster courtesy of Channel Productions.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 1
Hanna, I agree with you about the unfortunate trend of senators opposing perfectly qualified nominees for the Supreme Court, cabinet posts, etc, just because they are from the opposite party. As Republican Kit Bond said in announcing his support of Sotomayor, "Elections have consequences." And when your party loses an election, you should extend the courtesy of approving the people the president chooses except in the cases in which the person clearly doesn't meet the standards for the job. However, Senator Obama himself was part of this partisan creep. You'd be hard pressed to say that John Roberts and Samuel Alito were not qualified for the Supreme Court, yet Obama voted against both of them because he didn't like their philosophies. So it's dispiriting, but no surprise that President Obama's excellent Supreme Court nominee was voted down by a majority of Republicans.
Photograph of Barack Obama by Alex Wong/Getty Images.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 0
Senate decorum is made for “historic moments,” and there was much of it on display in the vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina Supreme Court Justice: the wooden benches, Robert Byrd being wheeled out of the hospital for this special occasion. But none of it could cover up the very modern and petty reality of the partisan split. Only nine Republicans voted for her. Compare that with Ruth Bader Ginsburg who, only 16 years ago, was confirmed by a 96-3 vote. Even Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and keeper of the bipartisan peace, declined, for the first time, to confirm a Supreme Court justice. Sotomayor spent her entire confirmation hearing distancing herself from President Obama’s “empathy” standard. The Republicans are desperate to win over Latinos. And still, neither of those incentives trumped the apparently urgent need to crush the opposing team.
Photograph of Sen. Jeff Sessions (AL), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT), by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 0
I haven't read the book either, Nina, but I feel as if I've already seen the film adaptation of The Lovely Bones. It was called Murder in Greenwich, told the story of Martha Moxley's violent death in Belle Haven, and aired on USA in 2002, the same year Sebold's book came out. Both stories involve the deaths of pretty teenage girls (Moxley was 15; Sebold's character, 14) and take place in the mid-'70s (Moxley was killed in 1975, Sebold's character in 1973).
The true-crime version has a more interesting cast of characters; Mark Fuhrman wrote Murder in Greenwich, and Ethel Kennedy's nephew (a distant relation of mine) was eventually convicted of the murder. But both screenplays, weirdly enough, involve the victims themselves sweetly narrating the search for the killer from heaven. Is surveying the application of justice from another world just something we expect adolescent girls to do?
Still from Murder in Greenwich trailer courtesy of Columbia TriStar Entertainment.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 11
During Michelle Easton’s half-hour speech at the National Conservative Student Conference, the audience responded in unison at all the right moments—cheering when Sarah Palin was referred to as a “gun-toting, moose-hunting former beauty queen," booing when a photo of Gloria Steinem appeared on screen.
Easton sped through a recitation of things that are bad for women (women’s studies classes, the Vagina Monologues, Take Your Daughter to Work Day) and people who aren’t (Palin again). But cracks in the anti-feminist façade appeared as soon as the Q&A started. The first questioner was a young woman who identified herself as a physics major from a small school in Wisconsin. She was conservative, she said, but she thought there were some good things to be learned in women’s studies classes. She wanted to know, “how women can proclaim their feminist ideas when they’re in a Republican environment, without being considered a loony.”
Easton was temporarily flummoxed. “Well,” she said. “I just told you why that’s not a word that I choose to use…” and then rehashed her reasons for hating the word “feminism,” what with its association with bra-burners and man-haters. But she didn’t engage the heart of the question, which wasn’t about vocabulary. It was about why so many conservatives refuse to entertain even the possibility that feminists might be right about some things.
I caught up with Easton’s questioner after the session was over. Her name is Charlotte Evans; she is on her way to becoming the first woman to graduate from Ripon College’s physics program, and she’s all set to join ROTC. This girl is going to be an engineer for the Army—she should have some serious conservative street cred, right?
Wrong. Even though Evans agrees with Easton on most political issues, she’s in the uncomfortable position of knowing that Easton probably doesn’t have much use for her interest in Betty Friedan.
Evans’ desires aren't complicated, but they're conflicting: she wants a good job that she got because she earned it, not because she has two X chromosomes. (Classic conservative, this one!) She wants to be able to get that job in a traditionally male field. (What a feminist!) Because she wants both, she finds herself trapped in conference rooms where she listens to people boo the women she has learned to respect, if not always agree with. That leaves her with another desire: “I want to be able to identify myself as a feminist without being looked down upon.”
Photograph of a woman at the Republican National Convention by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 7
Alice Sebold’s juggernaut bestseller The Lovely Bones is getting a big-screen adaptation courtesy of Peter Jackson, who directed the even more massive Lord of the Rings trilogy. The film—about the spirit (ghost? soul?) of a young girl who watches her family try to solve the mystery of her murder—doesn’t come out until December, but the trailer has just been released. It looks fantastical, creepy, and awesome. Based on the trailers alone, I’m much more excited for this than I am for the year’s other big softly-sci-fi screen adaptation, The Time Traveler’s Wife. (Plus I can’t get enough of that Saoirse Ronan, who played the little linchpin in Atonement.)
I missed the original Lovely Bones craze—as I somehow manage to do with every big book universally declared to be awesome—but seeing the trailer makes me want to just wait for the movie, so I can be totally surprised. Good idea? Bad idea? What did you all think of the novel—and does this trailer meet your expectations?
Still from The Lovely Bones trailer courtesy of DreamWorks Pictures.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 0
Some smart bloggers seem terrifically excited by this finding, which purports to show that the well-established relationship between kids and happiness does not hold. Says econo-superblogger Tyler Cowen: "If you measure people's thoughts, rather than asking them about their feelings, it seems they really enjoy the time they spend with their kids." I can't quite parse that sentence, but the study Cowen points to does nothing to negate the previous studies that show parents take a happiness hit with each new kid. Ask parents to write down how they feel while completing various tasks, and spending time with their children ranks very low on the happiness scale. Ask parents of young children how they feel about their lives, and on average they'll report lower levels of subjective well-being than their childless counterparts. The newly hailed survey data, by contrast, asks parents to consider their previous day and determine whether an activity was "worthwhile" or "meaningful." Unsurprisingly, parents think spending time with their kids is both.
Of course, no serious researcher has argued that parents don't find the act of raising children fulfilling in some larger sense; the claim has always been that at any given moment there are many things an adult would rather do than wipe ice cream off a toddler's face, and that parents with kids at home report less life satisfaction overall. Researchers asked parents to record their base level of enjoyment in a particular activity precisely to filter out mid-range evaluation of an activity's meaning or satisfaction, both of which are going to be heavily determined by ideology and rationalization. I don't doubt that kids are meaning-making, but it wouldn't be culturally acceptable to say that taking care of your kids is meaningless even if it were.
More interesting to me than this study is the apparent hunger for some evidence that previous findings were incorrect or irrelevant. In his book Gross National Happiness, for example, American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks makes a very big deal out of the fact that religious participation tends to increase self-reported happiness, but plays down similar data showing kids tend to lower the same. (I believe the data in both cases, but that doesn't mean I think it should determine one's decision to either believe or breed.) One needs to attribute incredible weight to this most recent survey to argue that it discredits previous findings, and yet the survey doesn't even seem to say what its pro-child promoters want it to. Yes, adults say they find parenting relatively worthwhile and satisfying. But they find one activity even more rewarding: Work.
Photograph of a baby by Media Images/PhotoDisc/Getty Images.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 0
Are the rest of you as horrifyingly riveted by the Diane Schuler story as I am? This monstrous woman put her son and daughter and three nieces in the car, downed the equivalent of 10 shots of Vodka (she was probably just pouring the bottle into her mouth), got stoned on pot, then took them all for a wild, 60-mile ride that ended with her driving the wrong way on a New York freeway, killing everyone but her son. There is, of course, mad speculation as to what happened the morning of the crash when Schuler and her husband, who had been camping with the kids, parted to drive home separately. The police say they are getting “limited information” from the family, but I assume the story will eventually come out. It’s hard not to speculate that this was a Medea-like act on Schuler’s part. In the comments section of the New York Daily News, a poster calling himself “DougInHouston” came to the same same conclusion, and told his own chilling tale:
39 years ago, on the day my dad told my mom that he was leaving us for another women, she drove the car head-one [sic] into a tree. I was in the front seat and my two sisters were in the back. It was a biga$$ car so luckly none of us were seriously injured. I took the worst of it, cracked skull and broken arm from smashing into the dash board. And yes I had my seat belt on. Back then we only had lap belts... no shoulder harnesses. She said she couldn't see because of the tears in her eyes. But I could see her and she wasn't crying. She was just really really mad.
-
- |
-
- |
- |
- 0
KJ, you asked for health care reform’s poster girls. This week a few have emerged. Our own Sarah Wildman was called to testify on the Hill about her health insurance nightmare during her pregnancy. And Regina Holliday, a Washington neighbor, is featured today in the Washington Post. Her husband died of kidney cancer seven weeks ago on the day the Senate took up health care reform. He couldn’t afford health insurance, so he never got the tests that would have detected the cancer early. She and her two young sons are about to lose their own coverage. Holliday is now painting a 20-foot-high mural of her husband on his deathbed, near a bookstore I pass almost every day.
Comments