Dispatches from the department of small victories: Danny Boyle just won this year’s DGA award for “Slumdog Millionaire” (result!) and the efficient little Liam Neeson actioner “Taken” dethroned “Paul Blart, Mall Cop” at the box-office over the weekend.
Also good news: Renee Zellweger’s romantic comedy “New in Town” barely registered at all, coming in a distant eighth. So maybe we can finally throttle down on the adorable squinkling, and get back to real acting soon, huh?
Still, people do like their fish-out-of-water romances. So much so that I’ve devoted a whole Sympatico/MSN gallery to ’em this week. I really wanted to do a “Give Me Back My Family!” gallery to tie in with “Taken”, but my editor thought it would be unbalanced by all the Mel Gibson and Harrison Ford movies, and I can’t say she was wrong.
One small thing in favour of Legally Blonde…I had a daughter the right age to take to this when it came out, and the fact that the character actually buckled down, studied, and qualified to get into Harvard Law School was a nice detail (leading to the one great put-down line I remember from the movie…”What? Like it’s hard?”…to her obnoxious ex-boyfriend). Better than the “example” set by Pretty Woman. Since tween girls see a lot of movies like this, small things like this are surprisingly welcome.
And just about anything would be a better example than the Twilight crap. I’m all for romantic fantasies, and I like me some vampires…Frank Langella. But I’ve had the chance at my store to skim through the book Twilight, and the last book in the series, Breaking Dawn, where Bella and Edward get married and she gets pregnant on their honeymoon leading to some gory consequences. I think these books should be taught to highschool-age girls, explaining that this is what emotional abuse looks like. In the last book, it becomes physical abuse, with Bella waking up after her wedding night covered in bruises, thinking only that she had wanted Edward to hold her tighter and being pleased when he did. The life-threatening pregnancy that follows (of course Bella couldn’t possibly have an abortion), involves still-human Bella drinking blood for the fetus and enduring broken bones from its kicks. She has an emergency amateur C-section when the baby’s life is in danger, without waiting for the morphine to kick in, and her spine is broken by convulsions during labour. Luckily, vampire venom will heal that, as Edward fulfils his promise after the baby is born to make her a vampire. Then…THEN…(she types with outrage)…Bella endures the change to being a vampire, feeling like she is burning right down to her bones. This continues for a couple of days, with Bella not letting herself answer Edward’s concerned queries, lest she start screaming in pain AND THEREBY MAKING EDWARD!!! FEEL WORSE. Sorry for all the spoilers…you weren’t planning on reading these, were you? It’s bad enough you’ll have to watch the movies when they come out.
This series, which is disgustingly popular with teen girls, makes even Pretty Woman look like Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Legally Blonde look like the Equal Rights Amendment.
Well, I’m happy to take every opportunity to point out the movie’s ridiculous, patriarchal abstinence metaphor … but I’d never looked at it from that specific angle, and I have to say I find it shudder-inducing.
Kate’s reading the series now, and processing it (rather perversely) as the junk food that it is. I don’t even want the books on my side of the bed.