Surprise DVD Treat: My Super Ex-Girlfriend

Yeah, I was surprised too, but everyone I know who's seen it liked it. It got savaged by the critics, but who cares, because critics 1) are horrible judges of comedy and 2) despise anything that isn't indy or indy-ish -- and this movie, of course, with its conspicuously commercial high concept, is the antithesis of the quirky indy flick.

Give it a rent. You'll be surprised.

Of course, I went in (as most people I've discussed this with) with low expectations, an advantage I'm stripping away from you by recommending it; still, I think it will hold up. Just don't get your expectations absurdly high. It's a fun, chuckle-every-few-minutes light romantic comedy; it's not Anchorman or anything.

And if you want a great superhero double-feature, rent it along with the huge surprise of last year, Sky High.

Lefty Idiocy: From the amateur web-zine Slate's amateur web-zine reviewer, who finds a silly movie about a neurotic, controlling superheroine to be far too "enranging[ly]" "misogynistic" for her tastes.

Certainly it plays upon the hoariest stereotypes about women -- like how they, you know, sometimes throw a 1500 pound great white shark through your bedroom window. I mean, come on, it's 2006. Didn't we leave that bit of chauvanism back in 1955 with Donna Reed?

A less willfully misogynist movie might have made Thurman's double identity the starting place for an exploration of female power, super- or otherwise. What would you do if your girlfriend not only made more money than you, but knew how to stop an incoming missile with her bare hands?

Oh yeah -- a summer-movie rom-com "exploration of female power."
Sounds like comedy fuckin' gold to me.

That review is from the same silly cow who insists Margaret Cho is screamingly funny via the curious route of not being funny, by the way. So you know where she's coming from. Apparently it's a rule that women can never be portrayed as less than 100% virtuous and psychologically balanced or else a film is "misogynistic."

I have a feeling this movie hit a little too close to home for Dana Stevens.

Stupid Feminist Watch: It's sad that some people are so agenda-driven even when it comes to silly frivolities. I like this anecdote from Fred Wolf, onetime SNL writer, now a screenwriter/actor.

Is this stupid or what?

I had this one sketch. It was about five idiot guys who were working on oil rigs in North Dakota. And they're drilling a hole deep into the earth and out of that hole pops some sort of a subterranean human-- some crazy alien person. And it's Jeneane Garofalo. And these five idiots see her come out of the hole and she tells them that she lives in an underground kingdom, that they've been watching earth's progress over millions of years and they have all the answers to any question that we might have about life on earth. And that she has five minutes until exposure to the air will kill her. [She offers:] "Ask any question you'd like."

Well, when she first pops out of the hole, Chris Farley screams a really high-pitched scream, so after she gives her speech about how they could ask any question they want, the next thing out of Adam Sandler's mouth is, he turns to Farley and says, "What the hell kind of scream was that? When you saw the fish lady pop out of the hole, you screamed like a girl." And then they proceed to spend one minute of her last remaining time on earth arguing over how he didn't screalm like a woman, he screamed like a man. And back and forth. The point of the sketch was that theese guys were idiots and that they were blowing their chance at, you know, at great knowledge.

Jeneane Garofalo raised hell with three or four people before I got wind of it that I was being "disrespectful to women" in that it is a fault of a guy to scream like a girl, that because Farley screamikng like a girl would bring chastisement, she said that meant that women therefore are deserving to be chastised when they scream. It was one of the most convoluted, strangerst, most ridiculous reasons I've ever heard to dislike a sketch.

posted by Ace at 08:03 PM

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