Chick flicks - Jennifer Aniston in 'Horrible Bosses'.
Rob Lowing, The Age, reports
Hollywood is still failing half its audience, but
things are little better in Australian cinema.
In
2006, the US's Entertainment Weekly magazine threw down the gauntlet to
Hollywood. In a scathing cover story, ''Hollywood Doesn't Give A Damn About
Women'', EW suggested ways of fixing a business that mostly ignored half
its film audience.
Six
years on, what's changed? Notably, the audience. According to the Motion
Picture Association in the US, adults of 25 to 60-plus years now make up 63 per
cent of US movie-goers (of whom 51 per cent are women). The over-40 age group
alone comprises 39 per cent of viewers.
Is
that being reflected in Hollywood movie making? Not when two-thirds of the
films released by Hollywood in 2011 surveyed here failed the now-famous Bechdel
test. Popularised in 1985 by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, this defined a
female-friendly movie as one that has two (or more) female characters who talk
to each other about something other than a man.
Hollywood's
approach is still flawed: US box office receipts fell 5 per cent in both 2010
and 2011; US movie attendance is at its lowest in 16 years. Audiences are
voting with their feet.
Why?
Apart from the obvious competition of new movie-on-demand options (downloading,
parallel DVD releases), most recent flicks have been formulaic and/or
infantile. No wonder US publications from Newsweek to Vanity Fair trumpet
''TV is better than the movies'' as US television delivers complex, grown-up
female characters in juicy dramas such as The Good Wife.
In
contrast, the choice for female moviegoers (and female performers) is woeful.
In a February 2011 article for The New Yorker, 42-year-old 30 Rock
creator and Mean Girls scriptwriter Tina Fey satirised her movie
options: she could play ''Magazine Lady'' (workaholic woman looks for love);
''The Wedding Creeper'' (workaholic, etc, sneaks into weddings), ''Disregarding
Joy'' (lesbian in artsy drama) or a villain in the (fictional) ''Moxie Girlz''
blockbuster, opposite a child star who is just ''a tickly feeling in Billy Ray
Cyrus's testicles''.
In
2012, does Hollywood give any more of a damn about women? Let's recap Entertainment
Weekly's main 2006 gripes, and see.
THE FEMALE QUADRANT
In
2006, EW noted that Hollywood marketing was based on audience
''quadrants'': men aged over 25 years; men under 25; women over 25; women under
25.
Sounds
reasonable, if the studios made movies for each quadrant. But as EW
noted, they didn't in 2006 and they don't now.
Only
two in the top-earning 25 movies in the US (Bridesmaids, The Help)
could be considered female-centred; out of desperation, let's include Twilight:
Breaking Dawn - Part 1.
In
the 50 top-grossing movies, at best only 15 could pass the Bechdel test. But
that's only by cheating and assuming Noomi Rapace's kick-butt heroine in The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Muppets' Miss Piggy are so
feisty they're each equal to two female characters.
TO MARKET, TO MARKET
The
top 50 highlights a problem for every thinking adult: Hollywood investment in
mid-budget adult dramas has declined.
It's
the quadrant issue again: studios want to, (a) sell their film in 15- and
30-second TV spots to, (b) grab the most audience in the first weekend. The
marketing ideal is hitting all four quadrants, simultaneously. A Pirates of
the Caribbean franchise? Ker-ching!
''Studios
now are pimples on the arse of giant conglomerates,'' as one (unnamed) studio
president pithily noted in a January 2009 New Yorker article on
marketing. That's bad news for women aged 30-plus who are perceived as - oh,
the horror - choosy: more receptive to reviews; take longer to get to the
multiplex (due to personal commitments) and want more than explosions and fart
jokes.
But
let's play fair. Apart from sampling all Hollywood-produced releases in
May-July 2011 (the traditional season in the US for big-budget
multiplex-targeted ''tentpole'' movies such as Thor, Green Lantern,
etc ), we also sampled November-December 2011 (when many Oscar contenders are
released).
Even
including female-centric dramas The Iron Lady, We Need to Talk About
Kevin and Albert Nobbs, only 26 out of 72 movies passed Bechdel.
(That's consistent with the entire 2011 Bechdel database, which, at the time of
writing, has awarded smiley faces to only 75 out of 170 movies.)
MONEY, HONEY
In
2006, EW could point to the $1 billion collectively earned by The
Devil Wears Prada, Erin Brockovich, Legally Blonde, Mean
Girls, Sweet Home Alabama and The Princess Diaries and scold
Hollywood for still thinking that female-driven hits were an aberration.
In
2011, the frugally costed The Help ($25 million) and Bridesmaids
($32 million) made $169 million (US) and $287 million (worldwide) respectively.
Compare
that to the last Pirates movie: On Stranger Tides made $1 billion
worldwide but reportedly will return little, due to its huge costs. Meanwhile John
Carter, the mega-flop (so far) of this year, cost a staggering $250 million
to make and market.
What
do Australian women have to look forward to in mid-2012? Franchise offerings
such as The Amazing Spider-Man and ludicrous ''high-concept'' (read:
assembly-line action) movies such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Any
relief? Well, after earning $6 billion from male-centric animated hits such as
the Toy Story trilogy, Pixar Studios finally responded to criticism with
the upcoming, female-centric Brave.
And
while Joss Whedon's The Avengers fails Bechdel (only one female lead),
the director was honest enough to admit, in EW's May 4 edition, ''Studio
executives will tell you a woman cannot headline an action movie. After … The
Hunger Games, they might stop telling you that a little bit.''
Maybe,
although Hollywood's excuse will be that the hit Games was
teen-targeted. (Only time will tell if Kristen Stewart and Charlize Theron's
Snow White and the Huntsman, which just opened big in the US, can please
adults, too.) The irony is little seems to have changed since Ridley Scott (Prometheus)
broke the male-centred action rules with a female lead in his iconic Alien
- 33 years ago.
MIRROR, MIRROR
The
2006 EW article didn't only blame Hollywood. In ''A Note To Actresses -
Embrace Your Wrinkles'', the mag complained ''by artificialising your youth,
you're only encouraging'' Hollywood's youth-fixation. In 2010, EW
collated US critics' comments on the ''mask-like countenance'' and ''big
immovable forehead'' of Nicole Kidman. (It's not just Kidman: who isn't made
uneasy by the rigid visages of Sandra Bullock and Meg Ryan?)
Out
of 2011's top 50 flicks, the only adult women to be presented as real
personalities, not just eye candy, were in The Help (older, African
Americans) and Bridesmaids (notably, the vivacious plus-size Melissa
McCarthy).
The
remainder ranged from generic romantic sidekick (Penelope Cruz in On
Stranger Tides) to Jennifer Aniston's nympho in Horrible Bosses and
assorted dutiful wives and superhero girlfriends. Please, ladies, remember
Helen Mirren (Prime Suspect, The Queen, The Debt): she
kept her wrinkles and her career improved after the age of 45.
HOME SWEET HOME
Australia
follows the US in viewer age patterns. According to the Bureau of Statistics,
cinema attendance by older adult age groups increased significantly between
2005 and 2010: up 4 per cent for 45- to 54-year-olds and 5 per cent for those
over 75.
But
the gender split of total cinema audience is different here: more female movie
viewers (53 per cent) than male (47 per cent). Are Australian women well served
by local flicks? Unwind surveyed 20 films released in the past 12 months: of
those, only five were female-led (Eye of the Storm, Sleeping Beauty,
Here I Am, Oranges and Sunshine, Black & White & Sex).
The rest were either ensembles with strong female characters (such as Face
to Face), male-centric horror-drama (Snowtown, The Hunter, Mad
Bastards), teen-centric (Wasted on the Young) or generic
boy-meets-girl-and-dog/horse/marauding-in-laws (Red Dog, The Cup,
A Few Best Men).
Our
verdict? Australian cinema is more female-friendly than that of the US, but
could do better.
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