I was watching Joy Behar’ show on the “Oscar curse,” and the male guest said that when actresses are “given this giant gold ballast, men get insecure.” Maybe they could change the shape?
Cure for “Oscar curse”
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Category Archives: Movies
Can’t Sandra Bullock Have it All?
The latest reports of Sandra Bullock’s husband cheating on her may not be true, but remain depressing nevertheless. Stories of Sandra’s husband’s affair burning up the internet as she simultaneously celebrates worldwide public recognition for becoming one of the most powerful women in Hollywood sends an ominous warning to women: don’t rise too high, because if you do, you’ll probably be alone.
Just a couple weeks ago, Sandra seemed to have it all: critical acclaim with her best actress Academy Award win and financial success, her films were also top grossing movies. Many were calling this Hollywood’s “year of the woman.” When Bullock gave her acceptance speech, she thanked her husband, Jesse James, whose love, she has said, made her a better actress, giving her the courage to try new kinds of parts because she had him to come home too. James watched Bullock claim the Oscar with tears in his eyes. Viewing the show I was thinking: it’s so great and so rare to see a man publicly love and admire his woman, sit in the audience and watch her while she shines, so different than the scenario we’re used too of the wife being the cheerleader for her guy, the wives of female politicians always clapping and grinning by their husbands’ sides.
Sandra Bullock
Bullock isn’t the only actress to have her marriage break up after reaching new heights of success.
Reese Witherspoon’s family famously fell apart after her Oscar win for her incredible performance as June Cash in “Walk the Line”. Supposedly her husband, Ryan Phillipe was jealous. The same thing happened after Julia Roberts’ won for “Erin Brokovich.” She was with Benjamin Bratt. Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes also ended their marriage after her win. Other successful actresses whose marriages supposedly broke up because they surpassed their husbands include Hilary Swank and Jenifer Garner, who didn’t win an Oscar but also eclipsed her husband’s TV fame.
Of course, we don’t know why these couples really broke up, but the rumors themselves perpetuate a dangerous myth that becomes real female fear: if a woman reaches too high, she will become unattractive to her partner. Women as a group are permitted one kind of power in our culture: sexual power. But in order to really win at that, they mustn’t get too much of other kinds including money, intelligence, acclaim etc. This is the same philosophy behind the idea that still persists: women can be pretty or smart, the stupid barbie or ugly feminist dichotomy, breast size has an inverted ratio to brain size.
While for a man, just the opposite is true. His intelligence makes him appealing. And the higher he climbs– in sports, in business, in the arts– the more women want him. Sexual desirability is a highly motivating factor to achieve, but too often, it works in reverse for women.
Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillipe
Before all the social Darwinists claim females seeking out powerful males to protect them is in our DNA, that’s just a convenient way to justify the current power structure. If a woman appears weak, it’s easy for a guy to appear strong. When women are told their main power is sexual, and if they try for anything else, that will take away from their attractiveness, it’s an effective tool to keep women in their in place. Allowing women to be smart, rich, and pretty is too threatening– what else might those women do?
Julia Roberts and Benjamin Bratt
I’m not attacking men here, by the way, but the power structure. The gender power gap in our society, or taken to its extreme as in the gender apartheid of the Taliban, doesn’t make any one happy. Men are imprisoned by these roles too because pigeonholing is limiting for everyone. Duh. Being competent, doing something well, is super-attractive in everyone. The world will be so better off when the other half is allowed to shine.
Gabourey Sidibe isn’t too fat for Hollywood, she’s too black
Gabourey Sidibe
Sidibe doesn’t conform to Hollywood’s narrow beauty requirements for romantic leads and stars: actresses should be white women, preferably blonde.
Until Hollywood’s executives start looking more like Sidibe and less like Harvey Weinstein, the fat, white guy who founded Miramax, Sidibe’s going to have trouble getting roles.
Because Hollywood is run by white men, their counterparts will star in films regardless of their weight (see Jack Black or any Judd Apatow movie) or age (Daniel Day Lewis, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Richard Gere, Denzel washington, Pierce Brosnan, the list goes on and on) or acting ability (Keanu Reeves, Tom Cruise). In producing films, white men get to play God just like they do on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, creating their fantasies and selling them to the public. There’s nothing wrong with putting your imaginative stories out into the world, but there needs to be some diversity in the power structure so that other people get opportunities to make their dreams come true too.
There is some evidence Hollywood is slowly changing. The reason “Precious” got made at all is because African Americans busted through the racial/ class barrier. Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry got successful and got rich, so they were able to make and promote a movie. Successful black women in Hollywood include Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Cicely Tyson, Traji Henson, Viola Davis, and Zoe Saldana.
Harvey Weinstein and Gwyneth Paltrow
There are more to be added to the list, but they remain a tiny minority. A woman couldn’t be much skinner or “conventionally beautiful,” than Saldana, the light skinned, African-American star of “Avatar” and “Star Trek.” Saldana says in Us Weekly: “In Hollywood, you hear things like ‘Oh, they loved you but they want to go more traditional.’ That’s the new n-word.”
But when it comes to race in Hollywood, even shock jock Howard Stern skates the issue, sticking with the socially acceptable bias, making fun of fat people. On his Sirius talk radio show, Stern said of Sidibe, “There’s the most enormous, fat black chick I’ve ever seen. She is enormous. Everyone’s pretending she’s a part of show business and she’s never going to be in another movie. She should have gotten the Best Actress award because she’s never going to have another shot. What movie is she gonna be in?” Stern says of Oprah’s speech to Sidibe: “Oprah’s another liar…telling an enormous woman the size of a planet that she’s going to have a career.””
Zoe Saldana
Actress/ signer, Jessica Simpson, no stranger to viscious criticism about her weight, defends Sidibe, but also avoids the race issue, saying of Stern’s comments: “It’s unfortunate because she walked the red carpet at the Oscars and she owned it. She was beautiful. There was no denying that she did not think she was the most beautiful person on that red carpet. She was just owning that moment for herself. She had such confidence and I absolutely 100 percent think she could get anything in the world that she wanted.”
Confidence can only get you so far when white guys run Hollywood. Simpson knows that. Supposedly, in her new show, “The Price of Beauty,” Simpson researched this. I wish Simpson had said something like: “I’ve just done a program abut exploring different standards of beauty around the globe, and here in Southern California, Gabourey has three strikes against her as far as getting part she wants in movies: she’s fat, she’s black, and she’s a woman.”
Here are the Hollywood stats from Martha M. Lauzen’s annual study “The Celluloid Ceiling.” I don’t know what the breakdown is on race.
In Hollywood, women make up:
7% of directors
8% of writers
17% of executive producers
23% of producers
18% of editors
2% of cinematographers
Sidibe does have parts lined up for herself: an upcoming feature film co-starring Zoe Kravitz called “Yelling to the Sky,” and a recurring part in Showtime’s new dark comedy series, “The Big C,” which also stars Laura Linney and Oliver Platt. She also has some powerful people backing her like Winfrey and Perry. But until there are some major changes in the Hollywood power structure, Sidibe will need a back up career
Will boys see movies about girls?
I wanted to respond to the following insightful comment by Pepper-Tumeric on my Puff, the Magic Dragon post on sfgate :
…almost all fictional heroes are boys. And I can only speak for myself in saying that, when I was a girl, I noticed this and was saddened. Even Pooh, which I love, has only one female character, and that’s (uh huh) the mom Kanga. Why couldn’t Piglet be a girl? Nobody was going to have sex with each other, so why did he have to be a he? It didn’t make sense to me, and it made me mad that the only female characters I encountered were princesses in peril or mothers. The message that this sent to me, even as a young girl, was that writers and publishers believe that a girl’s only role was to be rescued or to whelp more boys. In most children’s media, girls really are not expected to do anything useful, so a little “girl power,” even when interpreted as you do, feels like progress. My husband used to work at Leapfrog, so I have an insider’s perspective. Publishers slant the fictional universe toward boys because there is a perception, true or not, that while girls will play along with movies/books/etc that feature male characters, boys will not do likewise with female-cast characters. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a financial calculus. But I for one am going to do what I can to skew the calculus the other way for my girl.
I totally agree about Pooh. I loved Pooh as a kid. I had a giant one, one of those super cheap toys stuffed with tiny styrofoam balls, the kind of toy that you win at an amusement park. I loved that Pooh until he was an empty yellow bear skin, his red belly shirt completely tattered. But the no girls thing really bummed me out then and now. I read all the Pooh stories and Pooh poems and when I was grown up, I read the Tao of Pooh. As a parent, I read the stories to my kids and still miss the girls. There’s a cartoon now on TV and they have added one girl human to the troop, thank God, so that’s a little progress.
But what I really wanted to respond to was Pepper-Tumeric’s reference to the popular theory: girls will see movies and read books about boys, but boys will not see movies or read books about girls. This is really important because these kids grow up into adults who were trained as toddlers to think its perfectly okay to divide books into great literature or “chick lit” and movies into award winning films or “chick flicks.”
So why not, instead of helping these kids become tiny experts in gender stereotyping, challenge the toddlers (like we do in every other area to help them learn) and transform Hollywood and “great” literature for future generations? It’s just not true that little boys are only interested in movies and books that are about boys and that girls are just totally fine seeing movies all about the opposite gender with no issues at all.
It is true that all kids are self-centered; they want to see themselves reflected out there. But girls get a great deal of practice, early on, just by the sheer amount of books and movies starring boys, to suck it up. They learn to be open to seeing and hearing about the other gender. We ought to teach boys the same thing.
Ponyo
But instead, a lot of parents feel comfortable when they see their kids neatly fall into established gender stereotypes. It would be great if more parents took their boys to movies starring girls or read them books with multiple girl characters. Teachers too, could select these kinds of books for reading time and assign them to their students. The issue, of course, is complicated by the fact that so many “girlie” books and movies are really bad, often perpetuating the stereotypes we are trying to escape from. There are some exceptions. Ponyo is a great movie that just came out on DVD, a fantastic girlpower version of the horrible movie, The Little Mermaid (where Ariel gives away her voice to land a man.) Ponyo co-stars a very sweet boy who loves and admires Ponyo’s strength and power, so a movie like that could be a good choice to begin the challenge. (It’s also a movie by my all time favorite animator– Hayao Miyazaki.) Part of the reason I started blogging was to create a resource for parents. Please add your suggestions.
On this blog, many parents have commented that their boys do actually like books I wrongly assumed they wouldn’t because they appeared too girlie, even if they weren’t actually stereotypical stories. For example, One commenter wrote that her son loves the Rainbow Fairy Series. I had written that though this is is an action-adventure series where two girls have magical powers, are able to fly, rescue fairies from wicked goblins etc, its so girlie looking on the cover, showing the fairies motion-stopped, like pinned butterflies, long hair flowing, mini-skirted, all sparkly, colorful, glittery. This commentator was offended, and wrote her son loves the series which is great. Maybe there are more moms and sons like that out there?
Here’s the thing: even if your boy or girl refuses to see movie about the other gender– at what other time in your parenting do you allow your three year old to dictate your choices? As parents, we always strive to challenge kids out of their comfort zones to help them grow. When it comes to gender, why do we do a 180, letting them advise the executives at Leapfrog what toys to create? These toddlers ought to be awarded multi-million salaries or at least a consultant fee.
Kung Fu Panda, Wall-E, & more fat jokes
Garfield isn’t the only cartoon hero relentlessly mocked for his weight.
I was shocked at the continual stream of fat jokes while watching the animated hit, Kung Fu Panda. The story is about a panda, Po, who dreams of becoming a martial artist instead of a noodle seller like his father. What holds him back is his weight. The Furious Five, a pack of martial artists he idolizes– who are all male except for a token female voiced by Angelina Jolie– constantly make fun of Po’s weight. When these characters mock Po, surprisingly they retain their hero status; they are not portrayed as cruel bullies. Kids watching this movie see that it is OK and justified to put Po down for his body size. It’s espcially odd to witness teasing behavior shown as acceptable and funny, because making fun of others is a constant theme in kids movies; but it’s always potrayed as bad and wrong, acted out by the villians, not the good guys. Unless, I guess, the teasing is focused on fatness. Then it’s OK, just funny and true. Po’s teacher, Si Fun, constantly beats him up to convince him to quit his training, because he’s too fat to succeed. This prediction seems justified also.
In one scene, Po explains that the brutal training and beatings he suffers are mild compared to the pain
he experiences every day “just being me.” Then he looks down sadly at his big stomach, equating “me” with his body size, obviously feeling a lot of shame.
Po explains that when he’s upset, he eats. The turning point in his training comes when Si Fun realizes that Po can be motivated to perform amazing acrobatic feats by a jar of cookies on a high shelf. They begin to train with food as a reward. Po does pushups over hot coals while trying to slurp noodles from a bowl of soup. Po and Si Fun battle over a bowl of dumplings. It’s good, I guess, that Po doesn’t end up becoming thin in order to be a master. But the way this movie uses fat and food to advance its plot line and character development is truly odd and confusing if you’ve taught your kids– as I have– not to experience food as a reward and not to think fat people are bad, or to be made fun of, or that they are not as good as thin people. After about two hours of fat jokes, my kids came out of the movie with lots of questions about why being big is funny and bad why don’t I think so too?
Another popular animated movie, Wall-E (also named for its star male character) has a central plot line where the fat aliens are mocked. The aliens have evolved into an existence where machines do everything for them. They are fat, lazy, and nasty. Lucy asked me during the movie, “Why do they all look like that?” I guess I was supposed to say, “because they don’t get exercise. They’re lazy.” The message that fat people lie around all day and that if you don’t work out, you will look like a fat, pink alien is not something I want my daughter to learn. She’s six years old. I’d rather her do the monkey bars and play soccer because she loves it and it’s fun. I’d like my girls to learn to use their bodies out of joy and pleasure, not fear, for as long as possible– their whole lives?
Hayao Miyazaki
Awesome. I adore this guy. He’s the best– both in animation and girl power. I know he’s a guy, so that’s the only drawback I guess, but that can be a plus too, that he has that kind of insight. Spirited Away, his classic, is my favorite. It’s just beautiful to watch. And Sen, the main character, is brave and cool and also emotional and real. Her parents turning into pigs did freak my kids out, it freaked me out; that scene is intense. I also love Kiki’s Delivery Service. recently, I saw Ponyo in the movie theatre whichw as such a great, powerful take on the lamest of movies– The Little Mermaid. My only issue with MIyazaki is you have to be in the mood, it s a commitment to watch one of these epic films and sometimes my mind drifts. And I suppose, with Ponyo, it really was much more about the animation that the story, there wasn’t much tension or conflict. The boy– I forget his name right now– is in love with Ponyo the fish, and his love is tested but you never doubt that this earnest, sweet boy’s love is true. Miyazaki gets my highest rating GGG.
Scooby Doo Rating ***GG/S***
Scooby Doo isn’t bad. I was thrilled that my daughter preferred it to all the princess moview. It’s all about solving mysteries. There are three males, one is a dog and the title charcacter. Being the title character is prime real estate and a girl character rarely wins it unless she’s a princess. Shaggy and Scooby are the stars and role model male friendship. Many kids movies are full of females who hate eachother– wicked stepmother and jealous stepsisters. Scooby Doo is your classic guy buddy movie. Velma is a strong character, the smartest of the bunch. Th eproblem is because she is smart, she seems to be unable to be attractive. daphne is obviously the hot girl– played my Sarah Michelle Gellar in the movie version, and Daphne is always worried about her hair and always wants to go shopping. The rest of the gang is often telling her to get over this and Daphne can come through with solving a riddle or saving someone from a monster. Often the wicked characters are female also. All in all, I’m pretty happy when my kids opt for Scooby Doo.