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chadvanwagner
Reviews
White Palace (1990)
Good performances, irritating story.
We're (justifiably) a little (or a lot) disgusted when a film blatantly panders to creepy old men: middle aged protagonist scores hot woman in her early 20s. Ew.
That's exactly what we're looking at here, except with swapped genders and an extra layer of obnoxiousness. Susan Sarandon and James Spader are excellent actors, and their performances *almost* save it from the source material.
Almost. I would have a hard time believing that ANY self respecting guy would put up with being treated like Sarandon's character treats Spader's. We're supposed to look at her as noble but unrefined, but honestly, she's just selfish, childish and manipulative. There's no sense that Spader's character has anything to learn from this experience, outside of how shallow his friends are. He could have learned that with any "unacceptable" woman: making the woman in question genuinely unappealing is silly.
When you add the younger man/older woman aspect to it, the movie gets downright creepy. We're clearly expected to think that Spader's character has come down to Earth and recognized what's really important, but the only thing the movie proves is that (maybe) he's a masochist in search of a sadist. If you removed Sarandon's character's difference in age, coarse language, and casual racism, you'd still have someone I wouldn't want to be in the room with: I'd have a difficult time believing that Spader would tolerate her character if if she were a hot 19 year old. If she HAD been a hot 19 year old, you could keep everything else and she'd be the spoiled child that the hero got AWAY from, not the one he runs TO.
There are only two explanations that make any kind of sense. One, the film wants to bash poor, middle aged women (no.) Two, it wants to feed a middle aged, female audience the same kind of obnoxious wish fulfillment that middle aged male audiences get with the four decade age difference between Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment. It's creepy there, and it's creepy here.
Every aspect of this film is based on seeing Sarandon's character's world as preferable to Spader's, and it absolutely is not...not because of disrespect to older women, poor women, or unrefined women, but because she's simply irritating. The fact that there is a 20 year disparity to Entrapment's 40 says more about Hollywood's tolerance of old men than it does about its condescension towards older women: this movie screws up so badly that in some scenes the shallow rich people are considerably more sympathetic than the "earthy" heroine.
I suppose that middle aged women are every bit as entitled to wish fulfillment as middle aged men, but creepy is creepy. When you spend more time thinking about the film's target audience than you do about the film, it's a failure (just like Entrapment, actually.)
The Swinger (1966)
Past attitudes are one thing, but...
Mores and values change. Things like misogyny are still very prevalent, but we HAVE made some progress, albeit not enough. When we look back on the past, while we're understandably offended at a lot of things that aren't accepted anymore, but we can't judge people TOO harshly, as they simply didn't live in a time that forced them to confront or even consider ideas that we take for granted now. What's misogynistic now was simply the norm in the past.
So when I say that The Swinger is nauseatingly misogynistic, that's not a judgment made purely on the norms of the present day. After watching Ann Margaret dance around in what is actually a pretty cool into, we're treated to an opening scene where the men of an office actively try to rape (or at least seriously grope) the clearly unwilling women in the office. One woman is literally used in a tug-of-war. This is obviously intended to be light hearted, complete with sped up film that makes it look like the Keystone Cops, but...DAMN.
This makes early James Bond look downright respectful. I'm not just throwing that out there, I mean that there is literally no scene in any James Bond film that I can remember that even approaches this degree of contempt for women (and I know the Bond films inside out.)
I'm usually dismissive of people who leave a film early and call it crap. If they don't see the whole thing, how can they know the film doesn't improve, or even turn itself around and justify the "bad" beginning? Well, unless director George Sidney was making a post-modern deconstruction on society's attitudes, and was using the audience's acceptance of the offensive beginning as a way of showing how complicit we all are in accepting the unacceptable, I feel comfortable saying that The Swinger is sexist crap. And he wasn't.
I'm not even offended, just a bit caught off guard and shaking my head.Who knows, maybe I'm over-sensitive. But man, I don't think so.
Hysteria (2011)
Why bother with the "quirky" setup?
Why anyone would make THIS film with THIS setup? Why not just be honest and make a generic "cute" movie? Predictable films can be undeniably entertaining, but they can of course also be DOA. This is the latter, and the "quirky" setup just makes it that much more obvious.
I was intrigued by that setup, as I'm assuming anyone who's drawn to the film would be. But it doesn't stick around for very long, and frankly, that's probably for the best: wait, bringing old women to orgasm in an old fashioned doctor's office is AWKWARD? Who would've guessed? There are some even more awkward attempts at making that more...I dunno, edgy? But they don't succeed.
(Spoiler, and potentially offensive, I guess: after a doctor brings a patient to climax, he's kicked backwards into a wall and bumps his head. He touches the bump, and gets blood on his hand. Hey, where did he just have his hand? Doesn't blood come out of there sometimes? HA! It's impossible to imagine that the scene was done in innocence and just happened to have the menstrual connotation...and if by some bizarre chance it was, it's even more depressing to think the filmmakers could be that oblivious. Even if you'd normally find the thought offensive, you'd most likely be too busy rolling your eyes for it to actually offend.)
I confess I left halfway through, but even if the concept of the "treatment" had returned in a vastly improved form, it wouldn't have been enough to save the rest. I'm totally good with dumb, predictable rom-coms, but this is way too dull, even without the bait-and-switch of the topic emphasizing the fact. The three stars up there are for Jonathan Pryce, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Rupert Graves. They're enjoyable, but only because they're likable as actors, and even they couldn't rise above the material: stuffy old England, hero decides to marry a "proper" woman, ends up falling in love with her "improper" sister. Happily ever after and all that.
No, I didn't actually stay to see that happen. But trust me, it did.