Tag Archives: Kristen Wiig

Women in Hollywood

Russell Crowe is an ass. Everyone knows this. So when he recently went on a rant about how there are plenty of parts for women in movies so they should just shut their yaps and “act their age” no one was surprised by the medium or the message. As long as there’s been movies, there’s been sexism and by god, where sexism goes so does ageism.

Looking at this year’s Oscar nominations it was pretty clear to me that meatier roles go to men, but I’m not going to sit here and lament the missed opportunities when instead I could be celebrating the success.

Earlier today, Paul Feig posted an untitled photo to Twitter featuring Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Leslie Jones. Feig provided absolutely no comment but fans were quick to speculate that this was the cast of his much-discussed reboot of The Ghostbusters franchise. McKinnon and Jones are both current members of SNL while Wiig and McCarthy are already Feig collaborators, having co-starred in Bridesmaids, the highest grossing domestic R-rated female comedy of all time, edging out Sex and the City (2008).

Meanwhile, at Sundance, Emily Nussbaum, award-winning critic for the New Yorker, moderated a panel of “Serious Ladies” featuring the uber-talented Wiig, Jenji Kohan (who wrote for Sex and the City and Gilmore Girls before creating Orange Is the New Black and Weeds), Lena Dunham (creator and star of Girls) and Mindy Kaling (writer\producer\star of The Mindy Project). Although they’re all at the top of their game, they all shared stories about how tough it was to break in. Kohan recalled male-dominated writers’ rooms where one cave-dweller told her “If God had meant women to be in a writer’s room he wouldn’t have made breasts so distracting.” Kaling discussed the pressure to be a role-model versus the artist’s craving to push the envelope and maybe even offend. Sometimes feminism means creating a female character that isn’t necessarily “likeable.”

Dunham, who recently released a memoir, spoke about the difficulty women face in being mistaken for the characters they play (and wondered why Woody Allen and Larry David don’t get pigeonholed in quite the same way). She hopes to one day see women outnumber men in their profession – “That would be my favourite, if guys some day were to say, ‘It’s impossible to get into Hollywood! It’s a women’s club!’ ”

Jenji Kohan pointed out that she was still expected to write material about weddings and motherhood, a notion she challenges with the huge success of her show, Orange Is The New Black. That series, a Netflix original, won big at the Screen Actors Guild awards on Sunday. Uzo Aduba took home Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series that night (she plays “Crazy Eyes), and gave a heartfelt speech. But the best part was the love and support coming from the OITNB table – it’s always heartening to see women cheering each other on. Aduba was back on stage before long – the show also won Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series, wrestling away the honour from Modern Family. What a great sight to see so many strong and talented ladies on the stage at once.

There are still mountains to climb for women in Hollywood, but if you look around (or follow our Twitter feed – @assholemovies ) you’ll find brave mountaineers everywhere. Just today it was announced that Toy Story 4 would be making its way to theatres in 2017 and that Rashida Jones and her writing partner Will McCormack would be tapped for the screenplay. Although they only have one previous credit to their names (Celeste and Jesse Forever), John Lasseter insists he “wanted to get a strong female voice in the writing of this.” This is a nice change from Pixar’s usually male-dominated animated lineup (Buzz, Woody, Nemo, Mike, Sully, Wall-E, etc) and a step in the right direction for us all.

Hateship Loveship

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I’m still wondering if I liked this movie.

It’s quiet and unassuming, much like the drab and dull caretaker character played by Kristen Wiig (who’s so retiring the costume designer actually wraps her up in beige). Sent to help an elderly man (Nick Nolte) care for his granddaughter who lives with him (mother dead, father recently released from prison), the mousey Johanna becomes privy to family secrets and hungers for some kind of belonging. The granddaughter (Hailee Steinfeld) pulls a mean prank on Johanna and starts up a fake correspondence, ostensibly from her father (played by Guy Pearce). Naively, Johanna quickly falls in love and goes to him.

It’s at this point that I started to feel like I knew this story, that I had read it in some very similar, too similar to be coincidence, but not quite the same, form. And it’s true. It’s based on an Alice Munro story called Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, although you have to smudge the details a bit, such as replacing “rural Canada” with “Chicago.”

So Johanna treks out to remote, inaccessible Chicago to be with the man she loves, but who has no idea they’ve been involved in an online relationship. There she finds a coke addict and a thief, but she decides to stay and soon plain Johanna has a green emerald dress and (hello, metaphor!) you know what that means – she is transformed.

The film has a pretty strong cast of supporting characters but I’m not sure I bought Wiig as Johanna. Her dowdiness is expressed in mannerisms familiar to her fans – she started many a character is much the same way, eyes fluttering downward, pursed lips, negative space. So her performance felt a little like an SNL skit without the punchline. Serviceable, but ultimately unsatisfying.

So I guess my feelings toward this movie are as tepid as the movie itself. It veers away from the source material in interesting but fundamentally disappointing ways. Whoever thought they could improve on Munro’s ending should be shot. Munro is much more comfortable with things left unsaid; she trusts her readers to draw their own conclusions. Liza Johnson, the not-so-fearless director, does not. She leaves us with a generic, happy ending instead.

How To Train Your Dragon 2

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Has it really been four years since the first one? No wonder I barely remember it.

I do remember being surprised how much I liked it though. The heroic score and spectacular animation of dragons in flight was impressive even when seen through my tiny portable dvd player. And the story-as best as I could remember about a Viking boy named Hiccup who is the only one who believes that dragons can be our friends- was touching stuff and completely changed the way I felt about dragons.

In How to Train Your Dragon 2, Hiccup has changed his village for the better. Now everyone has a dragon of their own and even have dragon races. Even though he is solely responsible for all these changes, Hiccup still can’t quite fit in and skips the dragon racing to go exploring with his own pet dragon, unsure of who he is because he never knew his mother.

Last time, Hiccup discovered that sometimes, we are afraid of things because we misunderstand them. This time, he will learn an even more grown up lesson- that sometimes we are afraid of things because they are scary. When Hiccup’s dad, the chief, learns the evil Drago is building a dragon army, Hiccup urges everyone to keep calm and let him find Drago and reason with him. “This is what I’m good at”, he says. He will soon learn that “Men who kill without reason cannot be reasoned with” and that Drago really does in fact plan on enslaving all the people and dragons he can get his hands on. What a maniac. Once he has accepted that some men are just bad and need to be fought, Hiccup will finally be able to become his father’s successor as chief, a job that only Hiccup doubts that he was born for.

My memory of How to Train Your Dragon is vague but I remember enjoying it more than I did the sequel. The animation is even more impressive this time around with two battle scenes that I absolutely loved but the story doesn’t add anything to the message of the first one. And Kristen Wiig, as talented as she is, should not be doing voice work.