Tag Archive for 'Megan Fox'

The NY Times ran two very different stories about two very different young actresses – Megan Fox and Kristen Stewart – who both appear in huge franchises, Fox in Transformers and Stewart in Twilight.  Both women had cover pieces, Stewart in the Arts & Leisure section and Fox in the Magazine.

Both these women are big tabloid fodder.  Their faces are everywhere but there are a lot of differences between these women and I think it illuminates some of the issues facing young women in the business today.

Stewart started her career as an actress before she became tabloid fare.  She first appeared opposite Jodie Foster in Panic Room when she was 11.  She has been acting ever since.  Most of the films she appeared in before Twilight were smaller, indie pics and she is still making indie films even in the wake of her being in one of the biggest movies of the year.

Fox started her career as a sex symbol wearing those tight short shorts as the pretty girlfriend running from peril in Transformers.  Those big commercial movies (especially ones by Michael Bay) are notoriously horrible to women.  They have very few lines and are just window dressing.  Think of Liv Tyler in Armageddon and Kate Beckinsale in Pearl Harbor and you get my drift.  That’s how she entered our world, that’s how we relate to her. But as Lynn Hirschberg writes in her profile, Fox and her team are trying to create a legitimate career for her beyond Transformers and that includes figuring out how to get girls to like her which is a really, really big problem.

Fox says:

“Girls think I’m a slut, and I’ve been in the same relationship since I was 18. The problem is, if they think you’re attractive, you’re either stupid or a whore or a dumb whore. The instinct among girls is to attack the jugular.”

That is probably true, but it was her and her handlers decision to a) not do another film in between Transformers where she took on a different type of role; and b) to cultivate the image of the sex siren to turn on boys and in turn make girls hate her.  How fun is it for a girl to be on a date with a guy and see her on the big screen. I bet not too much fun.  She didn’t care what girls thought of her before and now after seeing the scathing reception for Jennifer’s Body she has a seriously big problem.  I think the problem goes way beyond her speaking her mind and flaunting her sexuality.  Have we ever thought that maybe she just can’t act?  Just because you are sexy in movies doesn’t mean you should have a long term acting career.  I think its really disingenuous to blame girls and women for her problems when she has when she created them.  Maybe she should try acting authentic and she might endear herself to some people.

Ironically, the opposite is true of Stewart.  Girls like her.   She’s one of them.  Twilight would probably be a big hit even with different actors but she is beyond perfect for Bella and you gotta give Catherine Hardwicke some credit for that.  The tabloids don’t leave her alone either and keep speculating that she is not only dating but is engaged to her co-star Robert Pattinson, but she doesn’t play the game.  She seems quiet and uninterested in that world.  She gets called moody, Fox gets called slutty.

“What really kills me — it really rips me up — is when people think I’m abrasive, inconsiderate or ungrateful because I don’t go outside in a bikini and wave to the paparazzi. Come on!”

I wonder what actually would happen if she posed in a bikini.  Would she lose her good girl image?  Would the public turn on her and treat her like Fox?  Just looking at what these two young women have to go through makes me sad.  Your damned if you do and damned if you don’t.  Stewart is difficult because she doesn’t buy into the tabloidization of women, and  Fox has bought into it too much so she is having a hard time getting free from it even if in real life she is nothing like the persona she has created.

But we’ve seen this all before.  Remember Demi Moore and Meg Ryan?  Demi Moore was vilified for her roles in Indecent Proposal and especially GI Jane.  She could not get a gig after that.  Meg Ryan was the girl next door who we all wanted to be until she actually made the mistake of showing that she was human in her much written about, short, relationship with Russell Crowe.

The bottom line is that we eat women for breakfast, lunch and dinner in this culture.  Let’s all keep that in mind the next time we call someone a slut or petulant or ungrateful.  As women we need to figure out how to be better to each other.

Media Vampires, Beware (NY Times)

The Self-Manufacture of Megan Fox (NY Times)

I know I’ve been posting a lot about Jennifer’s Body but I’ve been holding onto these links from interviews with Karyn Kusama and they are too good to not share.

Seems that she even knew (didn’t everyone besides Fox?) that selling the film to boys would flop as she says to Jenni Miller over at MTV.com.  I also love how she stands up for creating a film that reflects women and not men’s images of how women should be and act.

I don’t know if selling the film as a straight horror film and selling it primarily to boys is really going to do any of us any favors, frankly,” Kusama said. “But we’ll see. I’m really crossing my fingers that I am completely wrong and I really hope I am, you know. I really do.

I think boys will really enjoy it, but it makes me extremely, extremely frustrated to imagine that I have been working on this movie for nearly two years now and have committed this much time and energy because, precisely because I felt like if I were nineteen again, I would know someone was speaking to me and gave a s–t about my existence in the pop cultural landscape.

On how things still are the same after 20 years:

It’s a little tough sometimes to feel like things haven’t changed all that much in over 20 years, speaking for my nineteen-year-old self, and 20 years later, things seem as barren… for smart, complicated entertainment [made] for females that boys will also enjoy, you know? It gets under my skin, as you can see!

For those who have followed Kusama’s career she has had her challenges in Hollywood as a female director who directs out of the box.  She started with the amazing Girlfight and also directed Aeon Flux. Here she talks about the challenges facing women directors:

I definitely think it’s a conversation that needs to keep happening,” she said. “As much as I am tired of it, I’m tired more by the fact that it’s a conversation that needs to keep happening. We are not out of the woods, by any means, and I just think we have to sort of accept that information and then try to do something about it, you know? Try to examine it and try to really consider how we’ve gotten here and why we can’t seem to move past it, you know? That’s sort of where I’m at, just sort of trying to understand better the slow march toward change.

It’s hard to get a woman director in Hollywood to say this out loud.  Yes, we are tired of needing to have this same conversation for the past two decades, but if we stop asking the questions and figuring out the answers we will never make change for women directors.

ST VanAirsdale also gets some good nuggets in his excellent interview at Movieline:

About what she was drawn to the Jennifer’s Body script and her passion for horror film:

For me, one of the most interesting ideas in the movie is that the monster is female, but the villain is male. It’s her victimization that creates a monster. And that says a lot to me about femininity.

I’ve been asked countless times, “Why are you drawn to horror films? Why do you think women are drawn to horror films?” And it’s because in a way, it’s one of the few genres that tells it like it is. A lot of times, women do feel like they’re running for their lives somehow.

Lastly, her honesty in the next quote in talking about making mistakes and the difficulties on directing a studio film:

With Aeon Flux, I was so green to the politics of studio egos and agendas that I had no idea I was in trouble — even when I was. This was a different situation. I had people who were equipped and willing to protect me in a completely different way.

I got really lucky with this movie. There were some big disagreements between me and the studio, but ultimately we found our common ground. I don’t know how you make movies — and try to protect the meaning of your work that you know need to still be there — without those disagreements. When you make a studio movie, do you decide to be compliant or resign yourself to it? I don’t, and it might kill me. The system breaks you. It does. In some ways it can really make you a leaner, meaner machine. Maybe I’ll be that. Or maybe as time goes on, the harsher it’s going to be for me. But I think it’s worth fighting for your work. At the end of the life you live, that’s all there is. That’s why I do this.

She has totally impressed me.

‘Jennifer’s Body’ Is Strong Enough For A Man, But Made For A Woman (MTV.com)

Director Karyn Kusama on Jennifer’s Body, Megan Fox and the ‘Crisis of Being Looked At‘ (Movieline)

‘Jennifer’s Body’ Director Karyn Kusama On Women In Hollywood, Diablo Cody And Outsiders (MTV.com)

So Jennifer’s Body tanked at the box office.  From what I can tell the word of mouth among women is way better than the word of mouth among men.  Vic Holtreman at Screen Rant took a unscientific look at the breakdown of the what reviewer thought and found that women liked the film much better than men.

There were many more reviews by men (77) than women (26). The majority of these were culled from the Rotten Tomatoes site, and I included a few (from both sides) from reviewers I know who are not part of the R/T scoring system.

Here’s the breakdown:

Male
movie reviewers: 39% liked it, 61% disliked it.

Female
movie reviewers: 54% liked it, 46% disliked it.

Maybe women — especially young women — will find this film in the coming weeks but most probably it will become one of those movies that becomes a hit when everyone has it at home.

Why did the movie do poorly?  Who knows?  Everyone is speculating and you can read the wrap up from Spout Blog here.   I think that the studio was afraid that if they played up the feminist/girl power angle they would turn off all the first weekend boys who they were trying to get into the theatre to see Megan Fox because they were titillated with a same sex kiss.  I guess that the fan boys were not interested in Megan Fox.  Do we really believe they went to see Transformers for her?  They really don’t seem interested in movies that are women centric at all.  I remember before Twilight opened it was the women who were excited, the guys indifferent.

The press on Diablo Cody, Karyn Kusama and especially Megan Fox has been pretty negative even from some feminists.  I’m not saying feminists all need to march to the same drummer, and I know Fox flaunts her looks and has created a persona that can be a big turn off to feminists, but they need to be appreciated by feminists because they are all outspoken women in Hollywood and that rankles feathers.

When women tank at the box office they suffer way more than men.  Fox is already being written off, people are happy that Diablo got put in her place (even though Toni Colette won a best actress Emmy for her show The United States of Tara) and Kusama one of the only women who directs action films will have a harder time getting her next gig made.

Yet Brandon Camp who co-wrote and directed Love Happens which also tanked last weekend is not receiving the same post-mortem as Jennifer’s Body.  (According to imdb we has both writing and directing projects in the pipeline.)  I have seen both films and Love Happens was one of the worst films I’ve seen in a while.  The bottom line to me is that studios that are making movies about women and girls need to figure out a way to step up and market to them and get them into the theatres. We buy tickets and if we are excited and engaged we will go and see it.  If you are afraid and mix the message then you turn off the men and the women.

Here is one of the best takes I have read on the film from ScarletScribe aka Genevieve:

And why don’t they understand the film? Because it’s one of the very few honest-to-goodness feminist films out there — and more so then being feminist, it’s one of the few films that views things from a female lens…For once we have a story with female main characters who aren’t obsessing about, fighting over, or bitching about boys every five minutes. Jennifer’s Body is about women and how they relate to each other, the horror moments are there for style and allegory, but at its heart the movie is about two girls whose own toxic friendship is eating them both alive.

In recounting this tale, Jennifer’s Body is packed with humor, one-liners, great moments of cheesy horror, and some poignant moments between Needy and Jennifer that will resonate with the female audience more than males. And that’s the problem.

Actually, no, that’s not the problem. That’s what makes the movie so great. The problem is that many audience members refuse to try to understand Jennifer’s Body and are subsequently calling it a failure because of that. For decades women have lived in a male-dominated world of cinema and have had to take things at face value but, thankfully, have found their understanding of men the better for it. How many male-bonding movies and buddy-comedies haven’t we watched with silent nods of “Oh, so that’s how guys interact when we’re not around. Good to know and I’m happy for that peek into something I normally wouldn’t see.”

Here are some other worthy links on the topic:

Rallying the Troops for ‘Jennifer’s Body‘ (Cinematical)

Jennifer’s Body and the Feminists who Hate It (Girl Drive)

Jennifer’s Body written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama is exactly what I expected.  It’s a campy, women centric look at the atrocities of being a teenage girl.  For some of us who have been there, the first line of the film “Hell is a teenage girl” seems just right.  Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried play two best friends who have grown apart.  Jennifer (Fox) is the nasty sex pot and Seyfriend plays Anita (Needy) the nerdy girl with the cute boyfriend who has become Jennifer’s lapdog.

Much has been made about how Diablo Cody wanted to put a feminist bent on the horror genre which she loves.  I’m not a big horror fan and this was way more campy than scary.  It’s about revenge on all the people who do you wrong.  Jennifer becomes evil “not high school evil” as Needy says but evil evil when an idiot band of indie rockers decide that the best way for them to become famous is to sacrifice a virgin to the devil.  (Go with it.)  Since they are in a small town, they think all the girls are virgins and so we know there will be trouble when Jennifer gets into their van looking for fun pretending she is a virgin.  Clearly, she doesn’t know what they have in mind and quickly believes she is about to be gang raped.  The ritual goes awry when the idiots sacrifice a non-virgin and so Jennifer becomes possessed by a demon.  (Go with it.)  And the demon wants revenge.  She wants revenge on all the guys who treat high school girls like crap.

Cody said in an interview with Reuters: “(Director) Karyn Kusama and I are both outspoken feminists. We wanted to subvert the classic horror model of women being terrorized.”

So now the terrorized is the terrorizer.  I want to make it clear that this film is by no means a work of art.  Megan Fox is beyond plastic looking and her acting is atrocious and on the whole the film is not particularly scary.  But as a fan of Cody’s work I love how she takes expectations and messes with them.  I also love the pop culture laden language and while Cody has talked about the feminism as being subversive, I found it to be very present and overt.

Here’s my favorite line: “PMS isn’t real.  It was created by the boy run media to make us seem crazy.”

Any movie that has the guts to say a line like that gets points in my book.

Film opens wide tomorrow.

Megan Fox seems to have stirred about a big pile of poo by talking to a magazine about Michael Bay and his dictatorial tactics on the set of Transformers.  Setting aside her talent — or lack thereof –  (she was so bad in the first Transformers but I don’t blame her since I know the part was written for her to just look like a sexpot, and she is really bad in Jennifer’s Body) she has guts to call a spade a spade.

Here’s part of the quote of what she said to a magazine:

He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he’s a nightmare to work for but when you get him away from set, and he’s not in director mode, I kind of really enjoy his personality because he’s so awkward, so hopelessly awkward.

That’s not so bad to me.  But then some idiot anonymous crew members (and yes you are idiots) decided they had to to defend Michael Bay from Megan and escalated the rhetoric by calling her “dumb as a rock” on Bay’s site.

Yes, Megan has great eyes, a tight stomach we spray with glycerin, and an awful silly Marilyn Monroe tattoo plastered on her arm that we cover up to keep the moms happy.

AND

So this is the Megan Fox you don’t get to see. Maybe she will learn, but we figure if she can sling insults, then she can take them too. Megan really is a thankless, classless, graceless, and shall we say unfriendly bitch. It’s sad how fame can twist people, and even sadder that young girls look up to her. If only they knew who they’re really looking up to.

But ‘fame’ is fleeting. We, being behind the scenes, seen em’ come and go. Hopefully Michael will have Megatron squish her character in the first ten minutes of Transformers 3. We can tell you that will make the crew happy.

Bay removed the letter from his site and then added this:

I don’t condone the crew letter to Megan. And I don’t condone Megan’s outlandish quotes. But her crazy quips are part of her crazy charm. The fact of the matter I still love working with her, and I know we still get along. I even expect more crazy quotes from her on Transformers 3.

Another crew member has stood up and used his name to defend her from the crew rant

Contrary to popular belief, she is like us (human) and has both good and bad days as well. Working on the Transformers movies can be intense at times and sometimes intense situations cause intense moments.

So now Fox has been chastened and released the following statement: “I am very fortunate to be involved in this amazing franchise and look forward to Transformers 3.”

So why do I care about this.  It’s Megan’s job to do press.  It’s part of her job to create interest in the film to keep people coming back for more and more.  It’s not the job of anonymous crew members to defend their star director who is known in Hollywood for being a sexist.  To me, Megan and Michael Bay seem to have developed some sort of sick back and forth about the film.  He discovered her so probably feels she should be like most women pretty and silent.  But she’s not, and clearly she’s not as dumb as a rock which you can tell from earlier statements she has made about the film business.

This is about getting Megan to shut up.  This is about getting women to shut up.  It’s about using sexist insults like being pretty and dumb to shut up a woman with opinions.  Not cool.  But I guess all the press this week will help drive up the grosses of Jennifer’s Body which opens on Friday.

Another Megan Fox Letter — This One Sings Her Praises (EW)

Megan Fox is dumb as a rock,’ claim Transformers film crew (Daily Mail)

Michael Bay’s Crew Bitchslaps Megan Fox (Deadline Hollywood)

I basically dismissed Megan Fox as a pretty, not very smart young woman trading on her sexuality to become a movie star.  I saw the first Transformers film and thought she and the film were terrible.  But I did get interested when she was cast in Jennifer’s Body the new film written by Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama that comes out this fall.  On the surface it looks like a horror movie, but I hear it’s really funny so I am getting interested in seeing it.

I was kind of wrong about Fox.  She is clearly is trading on her sexuality to become a big movie star but she is far from stupid.  In fact, from this interview in Entertainment Weekly she comes off as a smart young woman who knows the rules of Hollywood and is using them to her advantage.  Lots and women and men play the Hollywood game but few are honest and vocal about how they go about it.

But, I am still conflicted.  Just by virtue of her platform and exposure to younger and impressionable girls and women the message she gives off if that you need to use your sexuality and sell yourself to be successful in Hollywood (especially big mainstream films.)  That’s not a great message.

But on the other hand she does call herself a feminist and is honest about what she is doing.  I guess that people are put off by her because he is confident in herself, comfortable in her sexuality and is gorgeous.  It also seems that the media plays up that aspect of her and she makes it easy because she is complicit and sells it big time.

Here are some of her quotes from the interview.

How did you feel about being sexualized like that when you were 15?

I thought it was awesome. I was going to a Christian high school and I wasn’t a feminist yet. I hadn’t sat back and analyzed society yet. I was 15! I just did what I was told to do.

What did your parents think?

My mom was with me! I was always übersexual, so she wasn’t shocked. I was always wearing the smallest clothes I could find. I would go to the mall like that — in a short, short skirt and a giant wedge heel. That’s what you do when you’re a teenage girl in a small town.

You up for a third Transformers?

Sure. I mean, I can’t s— on this movie because it did give me a career and open all these doors for me. But I don’t want to blow smoke up people’s ass. People are well aware that this is not a movie about acting. And once you realize that, it becomes almost fun because you can be in the moment and go, ”All right, I know that when he calls Action! I’m either going to be running or screaming, or both.”

Then why are people so obsessed with you and hiring you for movies?

I can’t figure that out. I mean, Transformers made $700 million and that opened a door to introduce this ”new girl,” and I happened to be such an outrageous personality that people wanted to start writing about me because it was deemed controversial. I think if I had been a typical Hollywood actress and I said all the right things and I had been a publicity android, it wouldn’t have escalated to this level.

You’ve only done a couple of movies, so you’re still mostly known as a sex symbol rather than an actress.

It doesn’t bother me. I don’t know why someone would complain about that. That just means that the bar has been set pretty low. People don’t expect me to do anything that’s worth watching. So I can only be an overachiever. I think all women in Hollywood are known as sex symbols. That’s what our purpose is in this business. You’re merchandised, you’re a product. You’re sold and it’s based on sex. But that’s okay. I think women should be empowered by that, not degraded.

You also said that when you go to Hollywood parties you feel like chum to these creepy older guys…

I notice them circling me and deciding what their plan of attack is going to be, and I think that’s because I have this image of this little sex kitten — this oversexed wild child. So they think that I’m ready to throw down. And so everybody wants to try and, like, get in there. And I’m actually not that way at all.

I love the comment about how older guys look at younger women.  I have to say that I am impressed with her honesty about the misogyny in Hollywood and how younger women are treated.  They are like bait being dangled in front of sharks.  I have never read another young woman in her position ever being this honest about her work and the business.  She gets points for that.

I hope she is given opportunities to act in ways that are not only focused on her looks.  I’d love to see if she can actually act cause as of right now, I have no clue.

Megan Fox: Fallen Angel (EW)

Megan Fox Q&A: Her comic-book obsession, her raging libido, and more... (EW)

Transformers 2 has made over $200 million dollars in less than a week.  It’s a monster hit.  I saw the first one and thought it was terrible and had no desire to see this film.  I found this review from a Laura Sundstrom who blogs at Adventures of a Young Feminist and she was kind enough to let me cross post it.

I saw “Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen” for the second time last night when I took my neighbors to see it. I was interested in seeing it again not only because I like action movies but also because something about it bothered me the first time. I thought that seeing it a second time would help me get past the explosions and loud noises to help me better understand what bothered me about it the first time.

It was obvious, even the first time, that there were racial stereotypes (even though Michael Bay, the director, claims it’s just comedic relief) and it was also obvious that Megan Fox’s character didn’t really serve a whole lot of purpose, at least not to me.

I’m not going to talk too much about the racial stereotypes, there has been a lot of discussion of that (see Newsday and Valley24 – for a more positive review of the movie). What I do want to talk about is the obsolete character of Mikaela Banes, played by Megan Fox.

To me, it seems like the only thing that Fox seems good at in this movie is having pouty lips and wearing low cut shirts while running in slow motion and falling cleavage first in front of the camera. And the main storyline surrounding Mikaela Banes is her trying to get Sam (Shia LaBeouf) to tell her that he loves her.

The first time she tries to get him to say those three words she changes into a white dress to look like the hot, innocent girl. Throughout the movie, she brings this up numerous times and threatens to leave him if he doesn’t say it. The message that I got out of this is that to get boys to love you, you have to look hot and wear low cut shirts and very high heels and this is your whole purpose in life. You can’t contribute meaningfully to saving the world from killer robots, you just have to get the guy to want you. What kind of message is this sending to the teenage (and younger) boys and girls that are populating the theaters in the thousands (or more, I don’t know exactly)?

When I saw this last night, I took four children (1 girl and 3 boys) all under the age of 12. I didn’t know what to tell them when they asked why I didn’t like Megan Fox’s character. Do I tell them that she’s only there as a sexual object whose only purpose is to have teenage boys stare at her for hours on end (and Fox likes it that way)? What I did end up telling them was that she was setting a bad example for women and teenage girls. But they didn’t really understand what I meant.

How do we talk to children (especially ones that aren’t your own, in my case) about what Megan Fox and her character mean for women? How do we expect these children to grow up to have healthy relationships if they keep seeing these types of ones in the media where girl is desperate to be desired and the guy refuses to say “I love you” until the girl says it first? Not to mention how do you discuss the racial stereotypes of the Transformers with them?

Maybe it’s just me or the fact that these children aren’t my own (I don’t want to step on the toes of their parents), but it was a really awkward moment for me when they asked why I didn’t like Megan Fox. If they don’t understand why this character is harmful to women, what does that mean for them when they grow up?

Laura Sundstrom is a recent graduate with a degree in Women’s and Gender Studies with specific interest in reproductive rights and pop culture who is just trying to find her way in the world.