The Screengrab : geena davis

Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

After the big screen edition of Sex & The City exceeded the low expectations of industry gurus who were shocked...shocked...to discover that people were actually interested in a movie about, y'know, gurlz, Missy Schwartz wrote a depressingly familiar story for Entertainment Weekly: “It was an unqualified triumph...one the industry observed in a stunned, slack-jawed state. As the weekend rolled to a close, news outlets filed their reports with words like unexpected, surprising, and shocking. ‘What do you know?’ they all seemed to be saying. ‘Women go to the movies!’”

And if Sex and the City 2 (or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 or Mama Mia!) or any other female-centric movie succeeds in the near future, Hollywood will be surprised all over again, and Entertainment Weekly and other publications will run similar articles about the American movie-going public’s "unexpected," "surprising" and "shocking" desire for strong female characters...a desire Hollywood will more or less continue to ignore as it continues its relentless pursuit of teenage boys, no matter how many Speed Racers crash and burn along the way.

Because, after all, many studio execs are just overgrown boys themselves. They dig gadgets, explosions and special effects, and CGI creations are easy to control and merchandise. Female-centered movies tend to rely on well-written screenplays, relatable characters, nuanced direction and...yecccch...feelings: all the things most studio execs pretend to champion but secretly hate.

But we here at The Screengrab aren’t afraid to get in touch with our feminine sides as we raise our Cosmos to these Top Ten “chick hits”: films that put their empowered female characters front and center (without resorting to stripper poles OR big gauzy Prince Charming/Bridezilla wedding porn).

THELMA AND LOUISE (1991)

Okay, so I’m not sure how empowering it is to drive off a cliff in real life, but this Ridley Scott film (based on an iconic script by wunderkind, zeitgeist-tapping Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri) caused a sensation upon its release by (A) objectifying Brad Pitt as a hunky slab of beefcake (thus electrifying and pretty much launching his career) and (B) allowing Susan Sarandon’s Louise to gun down the scumbag who was raping Geena Davis’ Thelma (and later blow up the truck of a leering male chauvinist pig) without even feeling all that bad about it, just like any number of male actors in any number of male-centric revenge fantasies...except in films like Dirty Harry, Death Wish, Taxi Driver, etc., the male heroes didn’t have to die in the end to satisfy Hays Code-style notions of karmic retribution for stepping outside the lines of acceptable social conduct. Still, the film’s outlaw motif energized female audiences by (melo)dramatizing the common stereotypical perception of men as either (a) dangerous assholes or (b) hapless boobs while providing enough action and sex to attract audiences of every gender.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (2006)

There’s a beloved feminist koan that goes something like this: ruthless, aggressive men who go after what they want are called winners, while ruthless, aggressive women are called bitches. Of course, most thinking people realize that ruthless, aggressive men are actually called assholes...and it’s the universal, gender-blind nature of the eternally confusing success vs. happiness equation faced by Anne Hathaway’s aspiring fashionista “Andy” Sachs that helped to make the film version of The Devil Wears Prada a $300 million dollar monster hit. And, let’s see...two seconds of Googling and...yep! There’s a TMZ article from 2006 with a, shall we say, certain familiar ring to it: “Blah blah blah, female-centered film exceeded all expectations...yadda-yadda-yadda...industry analysts surprised,” etc., etc. etc. As Meryl Streep’s formidable Gordon Gekko-in-stilettos magazine mogul Miranda Priestly might say to those industry Suits who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the existence of fifty percent of their audience, “Details of your incompetence do not interest me.”

BRING IT ON (2000)

This broadly played late-summer sleeper is actually packing a lot of heavy metaphorical lumber for a teen flick about a cheerleading competition. Kirsten Dunst is the new head of the Toros, who cheer for the (rich, white) Rancho Carne High School in Los Angeles; they're gearing up for the national championships, which they've won the past six years with the spectacular routines provided by departing team leader Big Red. But when a new girl with a gymnastics background and an attitude -- Eliza Dushku, who was too cool for Buffy the Vampire Slayer's school -- joins the squad, she has unsettling news. It turns out that Big Red was stealing her plays from the fly girls who cheer for the (black, poor) East Compton Clovers, thus making the Toros the cheerleading equivalent of Pat Boone to the Clovers' Little Richard. Dunst actually does her best to rationalize this cultural parasitism rather than destroy her cheerleading institution overnight, but the situation becomes intolerable after the Clovers attend a Toros game and mock their blonde plagiarists by performing the stolen moves in the stands. In the end, both teams attend the finals and show that they can use their brains and talents to compete honorably on the field of battle. There is, however, one scene that shows that contemporary standards of empowerment may be thornier, and weirder, than is commonly acknowledged. Dunst offers the Clovers, who have been prevented from attending the national competition by financial hardship, the chance to come by talking her father into getting his company to sponsor them, but the head Clover (Gabrielle Union) contemptuously rejects the offer, telling Dunst that they don't need her charity; they'll raise the money themselves, their own way. Their own way turns out to be going on an "Oprah"-like TV show and raising contributions by guilt-tripping viewers with their tale of woe. I guess it's honest labor and not charity if it helps "Oprah" kill an hour.

JACKIE BROWN (1997)

Such '70s blaxploitation films as Coffy and Foxy Brown may have made Pam Grier a cult star, but it was always a degraded form of stardom, and not just because the movies were cheap genre knockoffs; she may have had the chance to show that she could hold the camera and kick ass in the final reel, but she still also had to get her top ripped off before being raped by guys who looked like the Ku Klux Klan's answer to Uncle Fester, while being called things like "this big-jugged jigaboo." Jackie Brown catches up with Grier more than twenty years down the road, when she's at an age when Hollywood regards actresses as disposable. It's not a great age to be a flight attendant, either, which is why Jackie is working for a low-grade Mexican airline and acting as a courier for Los Angeles-based gun dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson). Both Ordell and the federal agents setting up a case against him regard Jackie as a pawn who can easily be taken out of play at any moment. But -- and here's the key difference between this and Grier's '70s vehicles -- the movie respects her. The way she looks through Tarantino's lens, you sort of picture the camera shuffling its feet nervously as it tries to work up the nerve to ask her if she's been seeing anybody lately. And so Ordell, whose fearsomeness would cut him a lot more ice in a different Tarantino movie, is reduced to a comic figure; for all his bluster and firepower, his assumption that the middle-aged black woman with the low-paying job must be a bit player (which Jackie will use against him, and against the feds, too), makes him ridiculous. The only man in the movie who can see Jackie for what she is remains Robert Forster's bail bondsman Max Cherry, who, unlike the film's younger, strutting cocks, lacks the ego and capacity for self-deception that might get in the way of his seeing clearly what's in front of him. Tarantino included a riff (borrowed from Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes) on the arrogance of Superman in the second Kill Bill film, and Jackie Brown is in some ways a black, female Superman fantasy, except that Jackie doesn't have to put on a pair of eyeglasses to trick the dull-witted into thinking she's no match for them.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1992)

Long before Joss Whedon was a small-screen institution, he was just a fresh-faced young script doctor with a dream. That dream was to create a richly detailed fantasy world featuring nubile teenage girls. Sure, you’re saying: how does that make him any different than millions of other guys? Here’s how: his nubile teenage girls kicked ass. And not just any ass, but demonic vampire ass! Within a decade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer would find its way onto television and prove a major cult hit, giving the country a brand new definition of girl power and adding an entirely new dimension to teen angst as Buffy Summers and her Scoobies battled monsters and bloodsuckers at Sunnydale High. But it all started with this low-budget big-screen number. Whedon, once he’d decided he was a highbrow auteur, more or less disavowed the Buffy movie, but in many ways, it holds up a lot better than people give it credit for: it doesn’t take itself so deadly serious, it has tons of terrific comic turns from Paul Reubens and Stephen Root in supporting roles, and while Kristy Swanson’s Buffy may not carry the emotional weight that Sarah Michelle Gellar’s did, she looks mighty fine in a half-shirt, and she furthers the cause of female empowerment the way only a vampire slayer can. She’s rough, she’s tough, and she maintains her keen fashion sense: what could be more feminine than that?

Click here for Part Two!

Related Posts: Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part One & Part Two)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Revenge of the Nerds - The 10 Sexiest Guy Geeks In Cinema (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab celebrated the 10 Sexiest Girl Geeks in Cinema...and now, in tribute to the return of that dreamy Professor Henry Jones, Jr. (in the hotly anticipated Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), we present our equal opportunity list of ten hot nerdy guys.

As with the previous list, most of these so-called nerds, geeks, dorks and maxi-zoom dweebies are played by actors who, in real life, are pretty easy on the eyes. But their characters, at least, are misfits and loners, undervalued diamonds in the rough just waiting to be discovered by some lucky, sharp-eyed lady (or gentleman).

Why lucky? Because as Robert Carradine’s Louis Skolnick says in Revenge of the Nerds (and as we at The Screengrab know oh so well), “Jocks only think about sports, nerds only think about sex.”

10. William Hurt as Professor Eddie Jessup in Altered States

Back in the 1980s, William Hurt was the poster child for brainy-sexy-cool, thanks to his breakthrough role in Ken Russell’s nerd-tastic acid trip Altered States. Hurt stars as Professor Eddie Jessup, a Harvard scientist who is so totally obsessed with his research into universal consciousness that he’d rather “experiment” on himself than have sex with his hot primatologist wife...and what’s geekier than that?

9. Alan Tudyk as Wash in Serenity

Not being a lady or a gay gentleman, I was a little unsure of the actual “hotness” of some of the geeks on this list, and when I ran my original #9 (Jeff Goldblum as doomed scientist Seth Brundle in The Fly) by my wife, she shrugged, “Yeah...uh...I guess.” And while no less an authority than Geena Davis apparently found Brundlefly plenty damn sexy, I nevertheless decided instead to dedicate this space to the late, lamented pilot of the good ship Serenity, who my friend Julia informs me is quite the nerd hottie. Sweet, technology-obsessed and a little bit dorky, poor Wash is gone but evidently not forgotten.

8. Cary Grant as David Huxley in Bringing Up Baby

In last week’s girl geek list, I noted that Scarlett Johansson playing a geek in Ghost World was about as believable as Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist, and I freely admit it seems hypocritical to list this uber-suave icon of urbane manliness in a top ten list of cinematic nerds...yet Grant’s stuffy paleontologist is the ancestor to any number of sweetly sexy absent-minded professor characters too obsessed with their studies to recognize their biological needs or the effect of their powerful chemistry on the world around them. Speaking of which...

7. Ryan O’Neal as Dr. Howard Bannister in What’s Up Doc?

I deferred again to my wife here in the #7 spot after she violently rejected my original pick: Jon Cryer as Phil “Duckie” Dale in Pretty in Pink, about whom I said: “Sure, Molly Ringwald’s Andie Walsh ultimately chose Andrew McCarthy’s limp noodle preppie, but in the same way all my guy geek friends preferred the pre-makeover Allison in The Breakfast Club, just about every alterna-girl I know would have picked Jon Cryer’s sometimes annoying but always stylish and devoted Duckie in a heartbeat.” To which my wife, an alterna-girl in her own right, shot back, “No. He’s not a hot nerd. He’s just a dork.” So, instead, I’ve substituted Ryan O’Neal’s befuddled, wife-approved musicologist as my #7 pick, in part to beef up the 1970s content of this list, and in part because any character who spends the majority of his time obsessed with igneous rock formations yet still manages to attract offbeat beauties like Madeline Kahn’s Eunice Burns and 1970s-sex-kitten-era-Barbara Streisand’s Judy Maxwell is clearly a nerd to be reckoned with.

6. Wes Bentley as Ricky Fitts in American Beauty (by Paul Clark)

When we first came up with the idea for this list, we went back and forth about the idea of including Ricky Fitts. Sure, he's an outcast at school, but does that make him a true geek? Ricky certainly doesn’t fit the mold on the surface -- no horn-rims, not especially studious, and so on. But, to quote American Beauty's tagline, "look closer." With his ever-present camera and intense gaze, he has the bearing of someone who's spent his life on the outside looking in, the way all geeks feel during their high-school years. Listen to his famous monologue about the plastic bag -- there's an analytical mind at work here that distinguishes him from his more socially-adept, less self-aware peers. Being a loner has given him plenty of time to step back from life and think about the world around him in a way most people his age don't have time for. It's also given him a serene acceptance of his life that proves irresistible to his troubled next-door neighbor Angela (Thora Birch). When she's not sneaking him up to her bedroom to have sex, he's everything a good boyfriend should be -- sensitive, empathetic, a good listener, the whole shebang. So Ricky doesn't look the part, but so what? In many ways, he's the real deal in a way those Urkel wannabes aren't, and a kind of ideal for young women who find themselves frustrated with the limited possibilities of dating popular jocks. -- Paul Clark

Click here for part 2.

Kisses for My Precedents

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Writing in Newsweek, Joshua Alston reflects on the history of fake black presidents and woman presidents in the movies and on TV, a lineage that may have greased the way for the real-life battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It's sobering to realize that the very notion of a woman or an African-American becoming president has, until recently, been treated mostly as a subject for comic or something close to science fiction, as in the 1964 movie Kisses for My President, which is all about how emasculating it is for Fred MacMurray to be cast in the role of First Husband after his wife, Polly Bergen, is elected president. Bergen eventually resigns the presidency to answer to what the film sees as a woman's higher calling: she's pregnant, and her family needs her. At least she was actually elected. The first black president in the movies, Douglass Dilman, played by James Earl Jones in the 1972 The Man (adapted, from an Irving Wallace novel, by that exemplar of socially conscious entertainment, Rod Serling), rose to the office after a perfect storm hit the line of succession. He just happened to be the President Pro Tempore of the Senate when both the president and the speaker of the house are killed by a collapsed roof in West Germany. After the ailing, elderly vice-president politely declines the job because he already has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, the cabinet actually urges the secretary of state to ignore the rules and jump ahead of Dilman; he turns them down (no Al Haig he), but The Man remains rooted firmly in the concept that a black man could become president only through a surreal set of circimstances and that much, if not most of the country would balk at regarding his presidency as legitimate. At the end, Dilman is planning to fight to hang onto the job (no Polly Bergen he), but in order to demonstrate that white America can trust him to govern in "moderation", he has to turn over a black revolutionary (Georg Stanford Brown) to the apartheid government of South Africa.

A lot has changed since then, but as recently as 2003, the Chris Tucker-Bernie Mac movie Head of State was predicated on the idea that a black president was both unlikely and hilarious, and more recently than that, the TV series Commander in Chief, in which Geena Davis ascended to the president after the guy who was elected at the top of the ticket suffered a cerebral aneuryam, earned a fair number of perplexed and hostile notices just for its premise. On the other hand, that show also set off a fair amount of tsk-tsking and throat-clearing among people who were appalled to discover how many people still felt comfortable with expressing dismay at the very concept of a woman president; in that sense, Commander in Chief may have been more successful at propelling the debate into, say, the twentieth century than it was as entertainment. Of course, the real triumph may be in Jack Bauer's alternate universe. 24, a show frequently criticized as right-wing propaganda (and one that premiered in the fall of 2001, shortly after Everything Changed), began with David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) campaigning for the presidency and wound up with him becoming first leader of the free world, then a martyr, and finally, with his little brother following him to the Oval Office, as the head of a dynasty. In the next season, Cherry Jones is set to play the first woman president who'll be telling Jack who to blow up next. The show has had its share of white male presidents, too, but they have tended to be a far less inspiring lot. After the last one, the Nixonian President Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin), Jack Bauer might not ever have take orders from another white guy again.