Monthly Archive for April, 2008

I’m going to let others who have thought about this more speak to the issue of Miley Cyrus and her backless photo in Vanity Fair. I find it interesting how we are willing to exploit young womens sexuality when it suits us. Look at all the fuss over the TV show Gossip Girl. Two week ago those OMFG ads with teens having sex was plastered all over NY and nobody made as big a stink as they have over Miley’s back. This show appeals to the older tweeners and the kids on that show are drinking, doing drugs, having sex, staying out late, wearing provocative clothes (check out the picture on the cover of last weeks NY Magazine) but you know, its just a TV show…it’s not real. Right. These girls are in a no-win situation. They get ridiculed for not being cute or skinny or sexy and then get punished when they try and look the part. Maybe that’s why the Miley Cyrus thing has caused such a kerfuffle.

Here’s Nancy Gruver’s (from New Moon) take:

Like an iron grip in a velvet glove, the hypersexualization of girls in the media holds actual girls hostage under the pretense of entertaining and informing them. And, like in the Stockholm Syndrome, it’s not surprising when girls start to identify with the all-powerful culture that’s holding them hostage. Stockholm Syndrome in Media

And the always interesting Germaine Greer:

We train female children to be manipulative and to exploit their sex. From the time she is tiny, a girl in our society is taught to flirt. She is usually dressed like a mini-whore in pink and tinsel, short skirt, matching knickers, baby-doll pyjamas, long hair falling over her face. She learns to court attention and, when successful, to hide her face. If she’s lucky enough to get to be a big sister she might get over this sleazy conditioning, but very few daughters these days get to grow out of being “daddy’s girl”. When the time comes she is likely to reject approaching womanhood, desperate to keep her thighs skinny, and nearly as desperate to acquire hard, high breasts. The idea of growing into her own body is charmless, frightening. Sexing it Up

I’ll post other interesting ones that I find.

Dr. Martha Lauzen is my idol. She is the woman who has been tracking women’s representation behind the scenes in the TV and film business for over a decade. Her studies, The Celluloid Ceiling and Boxed In, are the studies used by everybody who tracks issues related to women working in the business. She runs the newly created Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University

She recently appeared on a Movies by Women podcast (click on episode 14, but check out all the other great podcasts they have) to discuss issues related to women working in Hollywood, especially women directors. I highly recommend listening to the podcast but here are some highlighted quotes:

• Most women (across the country) don’t understand the under-representation of women in the business.

• There has been a multi-year decline in women directors (working in films).

• 90% of what we see is a white male view of the world. We are so used to it that we don’t even see it.

• People in Hollywood don’t want to be called racist, but they don’t mind being called sexist.

• When women have power to hire, they do hire more women.

• This notion that women won’t or can’t get along or don’t hire women is not true. It’s a myth which has political undertones that we see across all media. As long as women believe they can’t trust each other, it’s damaging to women as a group.

• We need to get the word out that women are under-represented and that this is a cultural problem.

• The privilege of denial is when people in positions of power encounter a point of view that does not jibe with their own and they say it does not exist.

So what can we learn from this? Being a sexist is a badge of honor in Hollywood, and denying that there is a problem is an effective tool being used to keep women out of positions of power. There has got to be one male executive whose daughter wants to be a director. I wonder what he would do if his daughter was denied a job just because she’s a woman. There needs to be some kind of affirmative action committee to deal with this. It’s such BS.

This comment comes yesterday from the blog Hollywood Elsewhere. I hate giving sexist comments additional air, but this one can’t go by without a WTF! No wonder these women start botoxing themselves at 30. God forbid you should actually look your age. Shame on you Jeff Wells for this lame ass comment.

Slight Disparity
The only “hmmm” issue that may affect What Happens in Vegas is a cultural- chemical rapport thing, given that the Ashton Kutcher-Cameron Diaz romance may seem to some like an older-woman, younger-guy thing. (Which Kutcher is obviously familiar with in real life.) Kutcher turned 30 two months ago; Diaz is now 35. Thing is, Kutcher looks his age (if not a year or two younger) and she looks…well, like she’s almost nudging 40, no? The last time Diaz radiated anything close to a spring-chicken glow was when she costarred in There’s Something About Mary (‘98).

It’s perfectly fine and cool for this kind of relationship to be depicted, of course. I don’t have any surveys to point to, but there are presumably plenty of slightly older women going out with slightly younger (or markedly younger) guys. It’s interesting. I can remember thinking when I was in my early 20s that the best women to know were in their early 30s — past the foolishness, earthier, more passionate, etc.

YUCK! Cameron, says it best in the the picture to the left.

Women went to the theatres this weekend and made the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler comedy Baby Mama $18.3 million this weekend. A whopping 68% of the audience was WOMEN so we proved women we are moviegoers and we can definitely open a movie. 55% of the audience was over 25 so that means that us older women (yes, Hollywood thinks you are old if you are over 25) attended the film.

Members of my girl posse and I went to see the film and we enjoyed it. I still wish that Tina would have written it (the film was written and directed by SNL writer Michael McCullers) cause, at times, it felt that they were trying to hard to be funny. But Tina is awesome. (and if you don’t watch 30 Rock on Thursdays on NBC, you are seriously missing something really funny.) The thing about Tina is that she’s funny while being awkward and uncomfortable and unsure of herself which is the crux of her appeal. While the funny guys of Judd Apatow’s comedies are pathetic schlubs that no girl would want to be with (but who always seem to get the girl), Fey is the real girl who is insecure in life while confident at work AND she’s funny, so it’s a winning combination. After this weekend both Tina and Amy’s phones should be ringing off the hook with new jobs.

Tina plays a 37-year-old-woman who has been “getting promotions instead of getting pregnant” and finds out she can’t have kids. She hires a surrogate through a questionable agency run by the freakishly fertile Sigourney Weaver and is matched up with Amy Poehler, a poor woman looking for some fast cash. Honestly, they don’t really do a service to surrogacy since it is a serious process, and most surrogates are women who have previously had kids and are carefully vetted. But it’s a movie, and a comedy, so we’ll let a lot of that go.

What was great to see was comedy vets from SNL and The Daily Show supporting the work of Fey and Poehler. I’m used to seeing the boys support the other guys so it was great to see them support the girls. Steven Martin also gets in on the game and plays the new-agey boss of Tina. Tina also has a love interest in the adorable Greg Kinnear. Their relationship is so different from typical comedy relationships because they actually seem like they could be a couple. They are around the same age and they have things in common, and oh yeah, he actually has a job and doesn’t get stoned all day. He’s a mature adult which, you know, is more attractive to women looking for a partner in life.

I’m not saying this is a perfect movie, cause it’s not. But I have to say that I was so happy to go to a movie where I didn’t want to throw something at the screen, and when I left I still had a smile on my face.

Word is starting to get out about the blog. Here’s a posting from the feminist blog Echidne of the Snakes

Feminism & film (by Suzie)

After many years of promiscuous movie-going, I now avoid ones that don’t have at least one significant female character. I prefer ones that revolve around women, written and/or directed by women. I’m voting with my dollars.

This baffles some friends, who don’t see gender when they look at a movie like “No Country for Old Men,” but accept the idea that men won’t – or shouldn’t – like a “chick flick.” (I hate, hate, hate that term and “chick lit,” which mark stories by and about women as trifles that could not possibly interest men. Ugh, now I have to wipe the foam from my mouth.)

A few years ago, a feminist friend was trying to get me to see “The Perfect Storm.” I argued, “But it’s all about men.” She replied cheerfully, “But in the end, they all die!” The movie is an interesting commentary on the construction of masculinity, but then again, there’s no shortage of movies about men who die while doing something dangerous, adventurous or heroic.

To find movies by and about women, I like Melissa Silverstein’s Women & Hollywood blog. This week on DVD, I saw Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe” and Amy Heckerling’s “I Could Never Be Your Woman.” About Taymor, Silverstein asks what it takes to be an “auteur.” (A penis seems to help.)

In another post, Silverstein explains why “I Could Never Be Your Woman” was released last month, direct to DVD. In the movie, the character played by Michelle Pfeiffer worries about getting too old to be competitive in Hollywood. You might think: “She’s Michelle Pfeiffer, for the Goddess’ sake!” But Heckerling told Entertainment Weekly: ”There was some concern about doing a movie with an older female protagonist — not anybody’s favorite demographic.”

In an interview with the AV Club, Heckerling talks about women trying to look young to keep their careers alive.

It’s been that way from Sunset Boulevard on. Hollywood is the dream factory, and no one dreams about older women. It’s a youth-and-beauty-obsessed place that sells a certain image. Of course I have sympathy. If you look at all the pictures of women in magazines, everybody’s got a forehead that looks like a billboard. Completely blank. When I was 20, I had these furrowed lines between my brows, because I was always angry. And I was 20. I don’t think that was a mark of age; it was just my personality. Yet these people think that when you have a completely blank head, you can put advertising on it. That’s not youthful. What is that? Some of these young girls that I find and put in films, I see them in a magazine a year later, and they’ve got big fat lips and stick figures. And you go, “Why? Why are you buying into this?”

This is a rare, good weekend for women at the box office. While I have not yet seen Baby Mama, I encourage everyone to go and see it. Here’s why.

First, because Tina Fey and Amy Poehler rule! The first episode when Saturday Night Live returned after the writer’s strike that Fey hosted was clearly the best in a long, long time. Secondly and more importantly, they are bucking the trend of the guy-centric comedies. I am so tired of Hollywood comedies being by and about the guys. While Baby Mama is written and directed by a guy (I’m waiting for Tina Fey to start directing her work too, but she is busy with 30 Rock so I’ll give her a break) it’s the first time in a long time that a female comedy duo has toplined a movie. When was the last one? Do we have to go all the way back to The First Wives Club? I’m no film historian but I can’t remember a single female buddy comedy since then unless I want to count The Devil Wears Prada (which I don’t.)

There is a lot of pressure of Fey and Poehler this weekend, and in turn the pressure is on all of us to support this movie. I can’t understate the importance of this film doing well. If it does well maybe then, Hollywood will see that women can open a comedy and we might be given a reprieve from spending the rest of our lives seeing Judd Apatow comedies. (By the way, not all his films do well, but his juggernaut has not been threatened in any way.)

Here are some points from last weekend’s LA Times piece on Baby Mama:

The unwritten rule of Hollywood comedies is like that classic admonition given boxers the night before a fight: Women weaken legs. Here the legs are a movie’s potential at the box office. Which is why it seems unusual — if not illegal — for two females, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, to have the leads in a buddy comedy, “Baby Mama,” opening Friday.

“Baby Mama” begs to differ. It’s almost like an experiment in comedy science class: What if these roles went to funny women who’ve earned their shot at big-screen success?

Hollywood comedies are normally marketed to 14-year-old boys, but your movie is more adult and well-mannered than that. It’s also about a sensitive issue — women becoming single moms by choice. Do you think it’s a harder sell for Universal because there’s no movie star or large-breasted woman on the poster?

Poehler (laughs): Everything is a harder sell until it’s a success and then it’s not.

Fey: There was no movie star on the “Superbad” poster until they were movie stars.

Poehler: I think we both tend to be kind of late bloomers. We’ve always been attracted, both of us, to late bloomers in general anyway. There’s a lot of women in comedy right now that are actually our age. It’s the same kind of thing, really strong women, let’s say who were mentioned in that Vanity Fair article. All similar age. I don’t know what that means. Fey and Poehler gamble with ‘Baby Mama’

On the other hand, for those in NY and LA, this weekend opens the Helen Hunt directed film Then She Found Me. The film will be rolling out across the country over the next several weeks. I LOVED THIS MOVIE. I can’t say this more emphatically – it is a beautiful, touching film. Here’s my review: Then She Found Me

So here’s my suggestion (not that you asked): Women in NY and LA go and see Then She Found Me. This film needs our support desperately. We need to show that there is a market for these types of films so that it won’t take Helen Hunt 10 years to make her sophomore effort.

Women in the rest of the country: Your assignment is to see Baby Mama. (I will let you know when Then She Found Me opens in your area.)

We need to support films by and about women cause if we don’t, no one will.

It took Helen Hunt 10 years to make her directorial debut with Then She Found Me, but boy was it worth the wait. A beautiful and moving film, it tells the story of April Epner a 39-year-old schoolteacher who longs to have have her own child, but time is running out. She’s also a bit of a wreck. Her recent marriage to the immature Ben (Matthew Broderick) has fallen apart, her adopted mother dies, and then she is approached by her birth mother, local TV talk show host Bernice Graves, played by an over-the-top yet warmhearted Bette Midler. Bernice tells a variety of stories (you never know which one to believe) of how she gave up April all those years ago. A natural-born performer, she tries to win April over but fails miserably. In the midst of all this craziness, April meet Frank (Colin Firth), the father of one of her students, and then on top of it all, finds out she is pregnant by Ben.

All the above insanity might seem chaotic, but in Hunt’s extremely capable hands, we are able to see flawed characters making everyday decisions and the implications each choice has on everyone else. This is an all-around effort for Hunt who, along with directing and starring, co-wrote the screenplay and helped produce the film. The fact that it exists at all is a testament to Hunt’s perseverance. Hunt has said of her characters: “They’re all a little bit awful, they’re all a little bit wonderful, and that makes perfect sense to me.” And it makes perfect sense to the story; all these characters felt real.

Hunt makes a bold statement by making April a normal looking (almost) 40-year-old woman. She’s a teacher, she’s tired, and, above all, she’s been beaten down by life. Hunt lets us see that on her face, allowing herself to be exposed on screen in a very gutsy way. It’s been a long time since I saw a close-up of an actress where she wasn’t botoxed to death and I could actually discern the reactions on her face.

Along with Midler, the supporting class is stellar. My crush on Colin Firth, as the solid but bruised good guy, stands as strong as ever. Matthew Broderick has gotten older (haven’t we all), but he still retains this childlike quality and is perfectly cast as the pathetic Ben, who runs back to his mommy after he escapes April.

Ten years is a long time to try and get a movie made, but sadly for women directors, it’s more typical that you would expect. In fact, two other recent releases by female directors, Tamara Jenkins (The Savages) and Kimberly Peirce (Stop-Loss) both endured 10 long years to get their sophomore efforts into the theaters. Here’s to hoping that it doesn’t take Hunt another decade for her sophomore effort. It would be such a shame after this auspicious debut.

Since I started writing this site several months ago I have been contacted by a variety of women filmmakers who are in different stages of their films. While each woman’s story is different, one thing they have in common is the difficulties each faces, how isolated they feel, and how hard it is to get a movie directed by a woman and/or about a woman to see the light of day.

No one said making movies was an easy business, but it seems that its gotten even harder, especially for women, and it’s even more important that women directors and writers get support because we are in danger of being stuck in a world of film that is seen only from the male directors and male writers perspectives and we can’t allow this to happen.

So, I decided that this site will be a place for women creatives to have their voices heard.

One of these women is Fay Ann Lee, the co-writer, producer, director and star of Falling for Grace an adorable romantic comedy that debuted several years ago at the Tribeca Film Festival to sold out audiences. Fay was hoping that Tribeca would set her up with a distributor but no distributor came calling. The variations of no she heard included, the lack of stars (even though B.D. Wong and Margaret Cho are in it), and the fact because the film stars an Asian woman that mainstream audiences won’t accept it. Can Hollywood really believe that people are that narrowminded? People are longing to see good films, its just that the only things available in their communities are the same old, same old, big Hollywood pieces of crap. And, Hollywood has no desire to even try and figure out how to market movies to women.

Lee refused to give up and has been self-distributing the film herself. This past weekend the film played in Phoenix at the main art house and outgrossed another film that was playing on two screens to her one! They are running for another week in Phoenix (so if you know anyone there send them to the Camelview.)

If anyone is interested in helping Fay get a distribution deal, I will get you in touch with Fay.

You can check out the trailer here: Falling for Grace
Website: http://www.fallingforgrace.com/

The lineup for the 61st Cannes Film Festival was announced yesterday and it’s the same old story, women directors are noticeably missing from the films in competition. From what I can tell, only 1.5 films out of 19 are directed by women. They include: La Mujer Sin Cabeza directed by Argentine Lucrecia Martel and Linha de Passe which is co-directed by Daniela Thomas and Walter Salles.

Un Certain Regard is a bit better with 2.5 out of 19. Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir’s film debut Milh Hadha Al-Bahr (Salt of the Sea) is in the lineup along with and Kelly Reichardt, (Old Joy) with Wendy and Lucy starring Michelle Williams. Joana Hadjithomas co-directed Jeveux Voir with Khali Joreige.

Other women directed films include: Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance; Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and Alison Thompson’s The Third Wave.

Nicole Kidman spent the day at the UN yesterday standing up for violence against women declaring that it is the “most widespread human rights violation of our time.” Go Nicole!

Full story: Nicole Kidman urges fight to end violence against women (AP)

Photo: AP

One of my favorite issues of my favorite magazines arrived in my mailbox this weekend — the Summer Movie Preview from Entertainment Weekly. Summer is the time where Hollywood makes most of its money, where we see all the tent-pole (boy) action-adventure (boy) films. I love going to the movies in the summer and I am usually less stringent about what I see, cause hey, it’s summer. Here are some movies to put on your list to look forward to.

Sex and the City- loved the show, can’t wait for the movie. I know that some people have feminist issues with the show, I don’t – May 30

Brick Lane- A young Bangladeshi woman in London. Based on the best-selling novel- June 20

Wanted- can’t really tell enough about this except that it looks like Angelina Jolie is back to her ass-kicking Tomb Raider days.- June 27

Kit Kitteridge: An American Girl- for the girl in your life. Those gigantic dolls come to life in the shape of Abigail Breslin- July 2

Mamma Mia!- Meryl sings along with Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and the daughter with the big eyes from Big Love Amanda Seyfried gets her big break playing Streep’s daughter. Can’t wait. July 18

Streep was asked this question by EW: This is a female-centered movie, written, directed and produced by women. How did that feel?

Meryl Streep: Very different. And the story celebrates all the good female stuff. So much of what we see now about girls feels retrograde. It’s all backniting. But this is right smack back to the sisterhood of the ’70s. That made me happy.

Hounddog- Deborah Kampmier’s coming of age story starring Dakota Fanning. July 18

American Teen- Nanette Burstein’s Sundance winning documentary which looks at teens in Indiana- July 25

Frozen River- Courtney Hunt’s Sundance winning dramtic effort tells the story of two women who smuggle illegal immigrants. – August 1

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2- for the tweeners. The film reunites the four actresses who are now in college and navigating young adulthood.- August 8

Towelhead- tells the coming of age story of a 13-year-old girl who is sexually abused by a neighbor. Based on a true story. – August 15

What Else I’ll Be Seeing
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull- can’t wait, especially to see the return of Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood and Cate Blanchett as a page boy haired KGB agent.
Iron Man- the thinking man’s action film
The X-Files- I Want to Believe
Batman, The Dark Knight

When I first started covering the women’s film beat I would introduce myself to the other mostly male critics and bloggers at screenings telling them what I did, and I was usually greeted with a strange look of sympathy and confusion. Some said, you cover films that star and/or are directed by women? How interesting (with a note of condescension thrown in).

Those types of greetings made me even more determined. One issue that seems to get glazed over is the lack of female film critics and bloggers. Blogging is not a male world as the statistics show, but film blogging seems to be, and we need to get more women’s voices to be a part of the mix.

This all began when I jumped in on a conversation on the film blogosphere last week regarding this posting Two Female Leads about how few films feature two female leads. My comments became a post on Awards Daily Women in Hollywood on the Case and Sasha Stone the site editor took it a bit further with these comments:

One interesting development in media lately is that, if you buy the idea that the web has anything to do with the success of film, film sites are dominated by male personalities. Most film critics are male (almost all, frankly); the popular Hollywood buzz sites (so-called) are dominated by males. The female voices out there are few and far between and tend to be judged more on how they look, sorry but it’s true, than what they write – no one cares what the male bloggers look like. Hot and sexy women on the web draw readers in this particular fanboy generation of film coverage on the web. So, women need to shove themselves into the middle of the room and be loud about it

I find very few women infiltrating the fanboy universe — a few here and there. Even Kate Coe, one of the more interesting female voices on the web, was recently fired from Fishbowl LA because she dared to ask for more money to do extra work that wasn’t part of her job. So there’s Anne Thompson, Susan Wloszczyna, Kim Voynar, Kim Morgan – who else? The sexist terrain of the web makes it very difficult for women to rise the same way men do, unless they’re someone like the Wonkette – using a combo of wit, sex appeal, good looks, etc. Yes, it’s a double standard but it won’t change until people start making noise about it and women start getting involved.

Thanks Sasha for the link and for the thoughtful comments. Maybe what we need is a clearinghouse for all the female bloggers and critics? (Update: I added a small blogroll to my site- send me more names.)

I’m embarrassed to admit that before last week I had never been to a show at the Women’s Project, a 30-year-old feminist theatre company based in NY dedicated to presenting theatre by and/or about women. But I remedied my significant oversight and I hope all New Yorkers –both men and women — who are interested in challenging theatre will also take the time out to visit the Women’s Project which is presenting Crooked by Catherine Trieschmann and directed by Liz Diamond.

I don’t want to give anyone the impression that these 90 minutes are easy and light. They are not. They are tough and challenging and full of many different issues, maybe too many (feminism, faith, stigmata, outcast teenage girls, the difficult relationship between mothers and daughters, mental illness) but after processing the play you kind of amazed at how Trieschmann was able to construct the whole thing.

The play is about Laney (Cristin Milioti)a 14-year-old young woman who has the imagination of a person who doesn’t fit in anywhere, and whose body is revolting against her causing a painful hunchback called dystonia. She meets the innocent and maybe mentally challenged Maribel (Carmen M. Herlihy, in a fantastic performance) when she moves down to her mother’s hometown in Alabama. Maribel is a believer. She believes that Jesus is channeled through her, and Laney is so desperate to believe anything (since her feminist mother doesn’t believe in anything and hoping that maybe Jesus could help her and her institutionalized father) that she gets sucked into Maribel’s world.

Showing awkward and messy young women is not something very common in the theatre. They yell and hurt each other and nothing is neat. Laney and her mom Elise (Betsy Aidem), also fight ferociously. Neither of their lives are turning out as expected, and Elise never imagined being back in her father’s house in the southern community she escaped as a young woman, and she is bitter and disappointed. But mother and daughter do have each other and that’s one of the things that comes through in the end.

Julie Crosby took over as the artistic director of the Women’s Project two years ago. She is an experienced theatrical professional and clearly represents a new generation in feminist theatrical leadership (wonder how many others could qualify and feminist theatrical leaders?) Her ultimate goal is to put the need to have a theatre like the Women’s Project out of business, but she knows she has a long way to go. “Things have gotten better but we’re still at 20% of plays produced professionally across the nation and I find that 30 years later that figure is appalling.”

So just like with films, women need to step up and support female theatrical artists. We’re already going to the theatre. Women make up 63% of the Broadway audience and 66% of the Broadway ticket buyers (don’t have the off-Broadway numbers), yet I would venture to say that many have not been to the Women’s Project. Crosby believes that there is an economic disparity holding back producers from signing up plays by women and/or directed by women. “There is a sense that the large venues – Broadway and off-Braodway- that the work of women is not economically viable.” Sound familiar?

Crosby sums the whole problem up perfectly: “We don’t go to see a play written by Tony Kushner and say that it’s a play for men, but we tend to do that with women. It’s like with the chick flick. They’re not women’s issues — they’re everyone’s issues.”

Purchase tickets here: Crooked Tickets

It’s a good thing that its Passover tomorrow night and Sunday (for us Jews) because it is a depressing weekend for women at the box office. The new Judd Apatow misogynistic dick film (there is supposedly 37 frames of full frontal male nudity, and Judd Apatow said on the Daily Show this week that his goal is to get a penis in each of his films. Such an important goal in life, don’t you think?)

But hold tight, next week with the release of the Helen Hunt film Then She Found Me (starting in NY and LA and rolling out across the country throughout May) and Tina Fey’s Baby Mama (which I haven’t seen yet) will make it a much brighter weekend.

So this weekend its time to catch up on what’s been playing so that next week you are ready for the new films.
Remaining in Theatres:
Nim’s Island
Persepolis
Under the Same Moon
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Penelope
My Blueberry Nights
and Kimberly Peirce’s excellent Iraq war movie- Stop-Loss

Karina Longworth of Spot Blog (one of the very few interesting female film bloggers) participated in a critics discussion (how come I didn’t get an invite?) at the Moving Image Institute last weekend. Here is her take on the conversation with legendary film critics Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris. In my opinion, Haskell has written the best book on women, film and feminism: From Reverence to Rape. That book rocked my film loving self.

Here’s a great line from Haskell, worthy of further conversation:

Although both Molly and Andrew were fans of Juno, Haskell says she’s “distressed” by the fact that conversations about women have, over the past twenty years, fallen out of mainstream film discourse. “Now it’s like Feminism is a dirty word,” she said. “I think Hollywood has just gone over to the adolescent male, in terms of both behind and in front of the camera. I think a lot of the violence in the world now is about the threat to male supremacy. And this leads to the Apatow thing…it’s a retreat.”

As someone who has tried to create a larger conversation about this Judd Apatow mania (who by the way was on the Daily Show this week and Jon Stewart completely regressed to his adolescent dick humor) there are few takers.

Longworth wrote:

Forgetting Sarah Marshall as smokescreen for a male regression fantasy knee-jerked into motion by endless war? It’s the exact sort of critical thinking about mainstream culture that isn’t happening on any kind of wide scale, much to our chagrin.

We need to have more conversations on why films have become so obsessed with these types of comedies. This summer there will be three or four Apatow films (he almost has his own genre) opening. Will it finally be too much? We can only hope.

Andrew Sarris & Molly Haskell

• Meryl Streep was honored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center this week. Lincoln Center Sings the Praises of Meryl Streep (IndieWire)

• V-Day turned 10 this week and celebrated at the New Orleans Superdome. Rebecca Traister at Salon has her account of the event. Beyond Vagina-Dome (Salon)

• Chick Lit superstar Jennifer Weiner has signed a two year 7 figure development pact with ABC. (Variety)

• Salma Hayek, Diane English, Ginnifer Goodwin and Sherry Lansing will be honored with the Women in Film Crystal + Lucy Awards. Event will be held in LA on June 17.

• Bea Arthur will be inducted into the Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame.

I’ve been a Hillary girl all along. I have no problem telling anyone at anytime that I am proudly voting for the girl. Then again, I don’t work in an office with the boys breathing down my neck with this so-called Obama-mania. Rebecca Traister, one of my favorite writers who focuses on women’s issues in Salon, this week takes on the overzealous boycentric Obama mania here: Hey, Obama boys: Back off already!

Traister writes: I began reporting this story in part because, as a 32-year-old woman who is more liberal than either candidate, and who was quite torn until Super Tuesday, I had found myself increasingly defensive of Clinton in the face of the Obama worship that rules the mostly white, liberal, well-educated circles in which I work and travel.

I am a loud feminist and a longtime Clinton skeptic who was suddenly feeling that I needed to rationalize, apologize for, or even just stay quiet about my increasing unease with the way Clinton was being discussed. Meanwhile, I was getting e-mails from men I didn’t know well who approached me as a go-to feminist to whom they could express their hatred of Hillary and their anger at her staying in the race — an anger that seemed to build with every one of her victories. One of my closest girlfriends, an Obama voter, told me of a drink she’d had with a politically progressive man who made a series of legitimate complaints about Clinton’s policies before adding that when he hears the senator’s voice, he’s overcome by an urge to punch her in the face.

Writing about women, Hollywood and feminism, I spend my time talking with women who work in the entertainment business. Many of them are struggling to get movies made and released that are about women and ALL are having a hard time. I have not talked to a single woman who has had someone, anyone say that they would looove to make her movie about a woman over 40 who… What they hear is there is no audience for these movies and women can’t be counted on to come and and see movies…yada yada yada.

During this long political season every single one of the women I have spoken to has brought up what is happening to Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail in comparison to what is happening for women in the entertainment business. While Hillary is clearly alone in doing what she’s doing, these women also feel alone in doing what they are doing.

As a Gen-X feminist, I’ve been upset at the internecine warfare between my feminist mothers and the third wavers. I’ve never seen the attraction to Obama, but understand the younger women’s desire to believe that we live in a world where voting beyond gender was a feminist act in itself in this supposedly post-feminist world.

But we don’t live in a post-feminist world. We live in a sexist world.

So this week I was happy to see that young women are FINALLY starting to realize that gender is an issue. Amanda Fortini who according to my google search has been a fashion writer at Slate and who recently wrote the Lindsay Lohan piece in NY Magazine where she appeared naked as Marilyn Monroe, takes a big step forward for herself with a terrific piece in this week’s NY Magazine entitled The Feminist Reawakening. She spoke to many young women who were sadly too fearful to use their names to discuss how gender in the presidential contest is playing out in workplaces and in conversations across the country.

Here are some really good quotes:

Many women, whatever their particular feelings about Hillary Clinton (love her, loathe her, voting for her regardless), began to feel a general sense of unease at what they were witnessing. The mask had been pulled off—or, perhaps more apt, the makeup wiped off—and the old gender wounds and scars and blemishes, rather than having healed in the past three decades, had, to the surprise of many of us, been festering all along.

A few women told me that when they raised this issue with men, the discussion broke down, with the men arguing that racism was far more pernicious than sexism. “If you say anything about the specificity of Hillary being a woman, you’re just doing the knee-jerk feminist stuff, that’s the reaction,” said one woman who asked not to be identified in any way. “Thinking about race is a serious issue, whereas sexism is just something for dumb feminists to think about.”

I am proud to be one of those dumb feminists!

And some of the quotes that relate to Hollywood:

…many women were clued in to the numerous gender-related issues that lay, untouched and unexamined, at some subterranean level of our culture: to the way women disproportionately bear the ills of our society, like poverty and lack of health care; to the relentlessly sexist fixation on the bodies of Hollywood starlets—on the vicissitudes of their weight, on the appearance and speedy disappearance of their pregnant bellies—and the deleterious influence this obsession has on teenage girls.

A high-powered film executive for a company based in New York and Los Angeles recounted a heated debate she engaged in with two of her closest male friends; she finally capitulated when they teamed up and began to shout her down.

It’s just a vibe when you’re a woman and you walk into a room and you’re in a position of power and you have to convince them of something,” a movie producer told me. “You’re constantly juggling: When you’re soft, you’re too soft; when you’re strong, you’re too strong. It’s a struggle in business and a struggle in relationships. It’s always a struggle.”

What these pieces, the campaign, and my work shows is that we really, really don’t want to talk about or address gender issues. It’s easier just to ignore them. If nothing else comes from this feminist reawakening maybe, just maybe, those of us who think and write about gender won’t be called “dumb feminists” anymore. Maybe we’ll be called what we know we are already “kick-ass smart feminists.”

(BTW Traister’s article has garnered over 1100 comments in the two days since it was posted and Fortini’s only has 33. Guess most people read NY Magazine in print.)

A couple of weeks ago I saw Lara Flynn Boyle on Law & Order and she was virtually unrecognizable. I was very disturbed by her puffy face and lips and itty bitty body. But, I didn’t write anything about it because, well, I hate writing about women who get botox cause I don’t want to bring more attention to the issue.

An article in Sunday’s LA Times which talks about women on TV and botox made me change my mind. We need to talk about this a lot more. I remember that first time I became aware of botox was when I saw Beaches and Barbara Hershey’s lips look like mine did when I was stung by a bee. But that was 1988 before we had public conversations about plastic surgery.

I can understand (but disagree) when a woman hits a certain age (in my book I think its over 50 or 60) and decides to have a face lift or something else done. But, I don’t see why Lara Flynn Boyle at 38 feels the need to get botox. This is out of control. Women in Hollywood are under increasing pressure to look younger and younger and younger while the guys seem to be concerned about how to get a penis in every movie he makes (yes, you Judd Apatow.)

The scary thing about botox is that is doesn’t make these women look better, it makes them look scary and fake. Is this what we want young women and girls to think real women look like?

On TV: Botox. Face-lifts. Reconstructive surgery.

Couldn’t resist
Spain’s new cabinet: 9 women, 8 men.

New defense minister reviewing the troops 7 months pregnant.

Lifetime is trying to get younger. That is, they are trying to get younger women to watch the network. They announced their slate for the upcoming season and some shows are worth noting. Now that they stole Project Runway from Bravo they are on a mission.

Their big coup is that Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay Scarpetta novels, has sold her novels for adaptation for the first time. Adaptations will begin with At Risk and its upcoming sequel The Front which will be released shortly. Have to say that I am disappointed. I’ve been waiting years for Scarpetta to come to the screen. (I dreamed that Kate Mulgrew would play Scarpetta).

Other shows include:

• Mistresses, based on a BBC series that follows a group of friends from college through their adult years.
• Drop Dead Diva, a light fantasy revolving around a demanding young actress who dies and returns to Earth in the body of a brilliant but “unpolished” attorney.
• Rita Rocks, with Nicole Sullivan as a besieged wife and mother who forms a garage band
• Libertyville, with Christine Ebersole as a divorced mother who’s dating again while having to put up with zingers from her 24-year-old daughter and retired father.

Best news – they are adapting the fantastic British miniseries The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, about a former supermarket manager who becomes prime minister. Loved that mini-series. Can’t wait.