and I used less words to do so.
A Fine Romance, by David Denby, at The New Yorker, via Defamer and Jezebel.
For almost a decade, Hollywood has pulled jokes and romance out of the struggle between male infantilism and female ambition.
"Knocked Up," written and directed by Judd Apatow, is the culminating version of this story...
...The louts in the slacker-striver comedies should probably lose the girl, too, but most of them don’t. Yet what, exactly, are they getting, and why should the women want them?...
...one still wants more out of [Katherine Heigl's character Alison] than the filmmakers are willing to provide. She has a fine fit of hormonal rage, but, like the other heroines in the slacker-striver romances, she isn’t given an idea or a snappy remark or even a sharp perception. All the movies in this genre have been written and directed by men, and it’s as if the filmmakers were saying, "Yes, young men are children now, and women bring home the bacon, but men bring home the soul."
The perilous new direction of the slacker-striver genre reduces the role of women to vehicles. Their only real function is to make the men grow up. That’s why they’re all so earnest and bland—so nice, so good...
...how can [Apatow] not know that the key to making a great romantic comedy is to create heroines equal in wit to men? They don’t have to dress for dinner, but they should challenge the men intellectually and spiritually, rather than simply offering their bodies as a way of dragging the clods out of their adolescent stupor...
I'm not the only person who wrote about this disconnect...in May. Way to stay relevant, New Yorker. What's next? Denby's expose on Bruckheimer's Caribbean oeuvre: "Were pirates always this swishy?"?
