Broward Palm Beach
Ladies Light
Once grand, The Women is now just another chick flick
By Ella Taylor
published: September 11, 2008
What do you think this is?” cries a lady who lunches in Diane English’s remake of George Cukor’s The Women. “Some kind of ’30s movie?”
Even without the 14-year struggle to get the Murphy Brown writer’s pet project past studio doubters, it would be a tall order to remake George Cukor’s 1939 hit, let alone try to corral its proudly reactionary gender politics for 21st-century feminism (or what’s left of it, if Sarah Palin has her way). For one thing, the original movie was made during a period when Hollywood eagerly cranked out women’s movies by the dozen and raked in the profits accordingly. For another, The Women – a product of the creative tension between Cukor, who in his très gay way loved all women provided they came excitable and well-dressed, and his source material, Clare Boothe Luce’s viciously clever 1936 stage satire of Manhattan society dames – was pretty out there for a mainstream movie. Luce’s play wasn’t just an exhortation to the woman wronged by infidelity to stand by her man and manipulate him back into the nest but also a furiously conservative attack on the modern woman – a play whose respectably married central character, Mary (played by Norma Shearer), entered with a mannish stride, smoking a pipe. It’s only adultery that softens her contours, brings a wistful glisten to her eye at every mention of her husband the heel, and surrounds her with gushy girlfriend gossips who stand ready to rat her out as necessary. For more: Click Here
Hey Mr D & All!
Hmmmm, I had a feeling that reviews like this will come about, particularly about Bette’s “Blink of an eye” performance. I knew that people would have wanted to see her in a much bigger role.
It can’t have been easy for Diane English to restructure the film so it didn’t look like a spin off or rip off of “Sex And The City” also not making it a carbon copy of the original, making it to much like the “First Wives Club” or some bitch crazed bunny boiling movie about revenge.
Personally, I hate seeing Bette in cameos, I want to see more of her, and I think this would have been the perfect movie for her to be thrown back onto the screen in more main stream comedy film projects in the future, but like a said in a previous comment, given her engagement in Vegas there is the issue of time.
Though the reviews are saying good things about Bette’s performance and that it’s a shame she is only in it for a short time, it makes me wonder what the main cast are feeling about these reviews and if it’s poisoning people against working with Bette in future projects because they can’t compete with her? I fucking hope not!
At the end of the day, the proof will be in the pudding and that is the amount of bums they get in the seats in the cinemas, maybe this is going to be one of those film’s where the public are right and the reviewers are wrong.
Big Hugz!
Manny
xxx
Honey, the link for the full article isn`t working…
I couldn’t get the full article to come up either.
And kudos Manny for fitting “bunny boiling movie about revenge” into your description. It made me laugh. I was going to go as Glenn Close in FA for Halloween and just walk around with a battery-operated lamp that I was gonna click on and off.
I didn’t set it up right…it takes you to the reviews page. Scroll down and find the right newspaper for the article. I’ll fix later…gotta run….