Coming Soon

Will Hollywood ever make a 'Virginity Hit' about teenage girls? by Karen Valby, EW.com.

The low-budget, everyboy comedy The Virginity Hit, about a group of high school horndogs trying to help their buddy lose his virginity, hit select theaters this weekend. (In my hometown Austin, it was playing at just one megaplex at 9:30.) The Will Ferrell/Adam McKay-produced dweebathon is the latest installment to the canon of films about sweaty white boys on a quest to get laid. American Pie, Porky’s, Weird Science, Superbad, Sixteen Candles… The list is long, stuffed with awkward boys and uncomfortable erections and frantic high fives. As in the case of The Virginity Hit, there are always a bevy of unusually attractive girls on the story’s margins. The titular virgin in The Virginity Hit, unknown Matt Bennett, is the recognizably awkward center of his circle of harmless dips*#t friends. Of course his girlfriend is smoking hot, as are all the other girls who inexplicably hang around this pimply crew. In one ridiculous scene the girls don bikinis and smush their boobs against windows at a car wash fundraiser to get porn star Sunny Leone to sleep with Matt. Such generous, comely friends. Come on girls! Don’t you have soccer practice or something? Raise funds for your junior year abroad instead! Male screenwriters are marvelous revisionist thinkers.

So here’s some questions I asked myself in between scenes of bong hits and frat parties. Can anyone out there imagine a similar movie in which a crew of good-natured, dumpy girls obsess unapologetically about sex? Where the object of their desire is not some princess fantasy of first kiss or a prom date or a wedding ring—but rather the uncomplicated thrill of experience.

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Would you want to see a similar movie like this for high school or college girls?

Yes I would. In fact, I would write that movie. Getting it made would be another story.

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I concur, ladies.

ShePop: Time to feed our longtime girl crush on 'Target Women' host Sarah Haskins!, by Jennifer Armstrong, Entertainment Weekly. Emphases mine.

EW: [Your Target Women videos on Current TV] have gotten you enough attention to sell a script.

Sarah Haskins: I’m supposed to technically say it’s been "optioned." It’s called Book Smart. I wrote it with my writing partner Emily Halpern, who’s written for The Unit and Private Practice. I know her from college. It’s about two girls who have been perfect their whole life and they decide senior year they’re going to devote their perfection to the getting of boyfriends. We wanted to do a female take on a typical teen movie. I think just complexity of character is a little bit lacking [in many female-focused films], and I think you’re also missing a broader spectrum of women. There are all these beautiful ladies who can’t get a boyfriend, and it’s like, Really?

Jennifer Weiner, A Moment of Jen. Emphases mine.

Last week, home sick, I read HAPPENS EVERY DAY: AN ALL-TOO-TRUE STORY by Isabel Gillies, the story of a young mother’s marriage falling apart. Probably you’ve seen it – they’re selling it at Starbucks. More importantly, probably you’ve seen Ms. Gillies, who was an actress with a recurring role on Law & Order before she chucked it all to follow her feckless husband to the hinterlands of Ohio, in the name of love.

Gillies is, in a word, gorgeous: a statuesque blue-eyed blond with killer bone structure. But I didn’t know that when I downloaded her memoir, and the Kindle didn’t provide me with either a book cover or an author photo.

In a weird way, the omission made the book a lot more suspenseful than it would have been if I’d had Ms. Gillies’ visage staring me in the face every time I glanced at the back flap. A happy ending would have been a foregone conclusion. Of course she was going to meet “the love of (her) life,” as she wrote on the very last page. Probably on the way back from the post office where she mailed in her manuscript! And she probably got proposed to twice on the way there!

Instead, I read without knowing what the author looked like…although, to be fair, I figured that if she was a working actress she probably did not have the kind of face and figure that would cause observers to run away, screaming…and Gillies notes, more than once, that she considers herself pretty, is considered pretty by others, and often slid by on her good looks.

But a picture is, as they say, worth a thousand words. Being told someone is a looker is not the same as having the evidence right there in your hand. And so I read, thumbing that “NEXT PAGE” button with the dread you feel watching a horror movie, when the pretty girl whose car breaks down hikes to the creepy mansion on the hill to ask for help, and decides to take her top off beforehand. No! I thought, upon learning that Gillies’ intended had ditched his first wife while she was pregnant. Don’t marry him! It’s not going to end well!

I was charmed by Gillies’ description of arranging wildflowers in Ball jars on the organic farm outside of Oberlin; engrossed as I read about the wallpaper she and her husband chose for their big, brick house, the sweet nicknames they used for one another; enchanted with descriptions of her morning routine and her afternoon tea and the tomato-and-gruyere tart she cooked. My heart was in my throat when the gamine brunette who would eventually steal her husband’s heart showed up on campus. When Gillies, clad in a puffy down parka that probably had Cheerios in its pockets, falls to her knees in front of her husband’s mistress to beg for her marriage, I was right there in the snow with her.

Would I have felt that level of identification, that empathy, that edge-of-my-seat, thrill if I’d known that the author probably hadn’t lacked for male attention since age twelve and wouldn’t be lacking for it long, even with two kids, in the wake of a broken marriage?

I’m not sure. I suspect the truth is that I would have looked at the picture more than once, and read the book rolling my eyes. Those charming descriptions of wildflowers and nicknames and tomato tarts and summers with her still-married parents in Maine would have sounded precious. The drama of the kneeling-in-the-snow scene would have read as melodrama. And the ending would have had me cynically shaking my head: babe lands boyfriend. Stop the presses!

C'est tout.

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"I'm nobody's sassy black friend."

Nor am I "part of a 'niche' audience" called "women".

Okay, so, in reality, I am a few people's sassy black friend. However, new friends (hello, and welcome!), please do not describe me as "sassy". Also, when pointing me out to other people, do not let your first adjective about me be "black". I encourage you to employ phrases including "that funny lady" or "the one with the book" or "some weirdo" when painting the whimsical picture of insanity that is me.

Here is my inspiration for the day:

Diversity in Entertainment: Why Is TV So White?, by Jennifer Armstrong, Margeaux Watson, at EW.com via Racialicious.

and

Hollywood 'Shocker': Women Go To Movies, by Mark Harris, EW.com.

Overall, both articles totally get me and what I'm about. Until I reached this self-congratulatory mess in the first one:

That kind of color-blind casting is something teen-focused networks seem to have down pat: Nary a show has passed through ABC Family or The N without an interracial coupling or a naturally integrated cast. [Nary? Haven't the writers of this article seen Whistler? Neither have I; that's why it got cancelled.] (ABC Family's Greek even has an interracial gay couple.) Those networks' execs say it's a simple matter of economics, that their Gen-Y viewers accept — nay, expect and demand — such a reflection of their multi-cultural lives. "They're completely color-blind,'' ABC Family president Paul Lee says of younger viewers. ''We've done a lot of things wrong as a nation, but we've clearly done something right here. They embrace other cultures.'' Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the most high-profile minority casting for the fall is on another teen show — The CW's 90210 remake, where African-American actor Tristan Wilds (The Wire) will play the central white family's adopted son. ''When we talked about how to make it more contemporary, diversity was a big part of that,'' Ostroff says. ''It feels as if it's a very modern family scenario.''

I'll dissect this pile of colorblind-crazy later. Because wow. There's nothing like two powerful white network executives (I'm assuming they are both white from their pictures) educating reporters about "diversity" and "embracing other cultures". What other cultures are you talking about, Paul Lee?

Though I do appreciate that the writers pointed out the glaring inconsistency of these statements with the facts:

That said, 8 of the 10 regulars on 90210 are white (in addition to Wilds, Ecuadorian actor Michael Steger will play a student at West Beverly High).

Michael Steger-- who is actually of Ecuadorian, Austrian, and Norwegian descent--will be playing Navid Shirazi, who is allegedly Iranian. So, good going Dawn Ostroff and friends, who follow in the steps of The L Word by killing two ethnic birds with one stone.

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