The current cinema, don't look edition

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• Mark Asch says:

  September 29, 2011 at 9:54 pm

  Not to be a total noodge, but Aziz Ansari does in fact appear in the film as [SPOILER? IS THIS HOW IT’S DONE?] the voice­mail caller at the end of the film.
  His recruit­ment is doc­u­mented in some detail in Tad Friend’s New Yorker pro­file of Faris from this spring; I gath­er Tad Friend is a writer unbeloved by many I respect but it’s a pretty great piece that goes into some detail about the amount of prudish bet-hedging that went into ren­der­ing this premise as appallingly safe as it ended up being.
  Incidentally, to refer back to a joke I just made on Twitter, sorry every­one, in the New Yorker pro­file the part of the stu­dio exec­ut­ive made twitchy-nervous by the pro­spect of releas­ing a com­edy about an unabashedly sexu­al woman is played by 20^th Century Fox’s Tom Rothman: “I voted for a lower num­ber, like one”–which is funny, but not like funny ha-ha, unless you hap­pen to remem­ber his wife Jessica Harper’s not entirely dis­sim­il­ar per­form­ance in PENNIES FROM HEAVEN.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  September 29, 2011 at 10:10 pm

  Friend’s okay a lot of the time; knows how to write, at least. That whole Segway thing he and his less pal­at­able wife did for Slate a long time back though; what the fuck was up with that.
  Years ago Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopulos came to the Première offices for a con­fab or some­thing and we’re all sit­ting around the con­fer­ence table and Mr. Rothman starts talk­ing about how his wife used to be an act­ress and that she was once in this “totally obscure and weird Italian hor­ror movie that nobody’s ever seen” and I said, “Oh, yeah, ‘Suspiria,’ that’s a great pic­ture” and that actu­ally kinda threw him off. Strange. Also strange when you recall that “Suspiria” was in fact dis­trib­uted in America by Fox.
  I did­n’t recog­nize Ansari’s voice but I’m not gonna split hairs, or not split hairs, giv­en that he’s not actu­ally SEEN in the movie. And any­way, the present-day Andy Samberg bit in the tele­vi­sion trail­er isn’t in the final cut, so THEY’RE wrong, too.

• Dan Coyle says:

  September 30, 2011 at 1:28 am

  I saw the House Bunny in the theater.
  That has noth­ing to do with any­thing, but I fig­ure if I say it enough times it’ll some­how make it less true.

• Elizabeth says:

  September 30, 2011 at 2:04 am

  This movie’s premise makes me feel slutty. In a good way. 😉

• Jeff McMahon says:

  September 30, 2011 at 2:34 am

  Rothman’s remark about ‘that totally obscure and weird Italian hor­ror movie’ makes me depressed about what kind of people are work­ing in, you know, the film industry.

• Lex says:

  September 30, 2011 at 4:34 am

  I need to make a point about this: I will see it, des­pite Faris’s ever-encroaching Plast-O-Face and the pres­ence of Poor Man’s Shawn Hatosy Chris Pratt, who was dis­covered by Rae Dawn Chong (ser­i­ously, read his IMDB bio and try not to hang yourself…)
  But the premise of this, like High Fidelity, like One Day, like so many rom­coms, is KIND of bull­shit. I get that, say, John Cusack or Anna Faris in “real life” would prob­ably have a more act­ive sex life than I (a claim that John Pinette could likely make, too), but I HATE HATE HATE these movies where the prot­ag­on­ist can tick off the ERAS in their life by their sexu­al part­ners. Oh, look, it’s the year when John Douchesack dated Lisa Bonet. Oh then he dated that Icelandic chick. Oh, then he dates Catherine Zeta Jones.
  PUH-lease.
  Same deal here, rubber-faced Faris with her gyno ex, her pup­pet­eer ex, her Black Guy Ex… This is some ser­i­ous Hollywood con­struct BULLSHIT that sells this absurd concept that the Average Person has two or three romantic part­ner­ship a year… or decade.
  We all know I’m under­sexed (two part­ners ever, sex less than six times in 40 years), but ser­i­ously, I don’t know FUCKING ANYBODY who dates more than two or three women/men in their ENTIRE LIFETIME. Most people have a high school crush, maybe a col­lege girl­friend (if they’re lucky), then a long dry spell through their twen­ties, then by the time they’re all broken and bored and fat in their early 30s they just rush into a mar­riage, which no doubt fails… then they might– MIGHT– have like one bar pick-up along the way, nev­er hav­ing more than five, six sexu­al part­ners in their entire lifetimes.
  NOBODY has this bull­shit where they have like 200 sex part­ners, and even if they do, they’re prob­ably all doughy white people, not this Movie Bullshit where it’s like OH YEAH it’s the year of My Eskimo Boyfriend, as opposed to The Year of My Semi-Gay British Boyfriend.
  I can GUARANTEE YOU, for example, Jeff McMahon, just to pull a name of his hat, does­n’t have a RAINBOW COALITION of exes to mark off all the DISTINCT ERAS of his life. Nor does Glenn.
  Any man who says he’s had more than four or five sex part­ners ever is either rich, super good look­ing… or super full of shit.

• Oliver_C says:

  September 30, 2011 at 6:17 am

  Gawsh darn it Lex, you missed the chance to reply to a thread entitled “Don’t look” with the words “LOOOOOOOOOOK AT HER!” 😉

• Lex says:

  September 30, 2011 at 6:28 am

  Yeah, I almost went there, almost wondered if Kenny was dar­ing me to do it, since it seemed inev­it­able, but I’m not sure Faris is a full LOOK AT HER any­more, even though she used to be.
  But if you look at that pic the right way it totally looks like her BJ face.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  September 30, 2011 at 6:40 am

  Wow. I knew that AIDS and oth­er factors con­trib­uted to a, um, gen­er­a­tion­al shift, but I did­n’t know things had got­ten THAT bad. Seriously. But thanks, Lex; for the first time in a while, I feel act­ively happy to have been born in 1959. And I was a late bloom­er, as it were.

• Michael Adams says:

  September 30, 2011 at 8:35 am

  What’s wrong with hav­ing sex with doughy white people?

• Yishai Milhender says:

  September 30, 2011 at 9:50 am

  Interesting com­ments…
  as a male I’ve had many romantic part­ners, and many that I’ve been in lov­ing rela­tion­ships with. That said..women can/do have even more sexu­al part­ners than men. why? they can.
  Is this movie stu­pid and boring…I don’t know. Probably.
  But the can of sex worms it opens is real, many women feel bad for hav­ing had so many part­ners, and so many men feel bad for not hav­ing had enough.
  Obviously I love the fantasy that every woman I’ve been with has,(at least for dis­ease pur­poses), had very few part­ners, but alas, that is usu­ally not the case.
  Girls are ho’s – deal with it. And guys will be ho’s if they are as a pre­vi­ous poster com­men­ted “rich, good look­ing, or full of shit”…well I’m good look­ing and have a per­son­al­ity, that’s really all it takes. And I“m look­ing to up my number.

• Andrew Bemis says:

  September 30, 2011 at 10:10 am

  I worked as an extra on this, in the final scenes. I had to sign an agree­ment not to talk/write about it and spoil the end­ing. I thought their con­cern was sweet. Also, my mind was blown when I real­ized the DP, J. Michael Muro, was also the dir­ect­or of Street Trash. I was sorry I did­n’t get an oppor­tun­ity to thank him for that one.

• jbryant says:

  September 30, 2011 at 11:15 am

  Yishai, meet Elizabeth. 🙂
  Lex, Rae Dawn Chong rocks! As for Pratt, I don’t watch PARKS & REC, but I under­stand he is gold in that. I liked his appear­ance on CONAN earli­er this year. Seems like a funny guy.
  I like Faris a lot, but this looks like a lat­er­al move for her. Maybe the suc­cess of BRIDESMAIDS will inspire someone to let her run with a vehicle like that instead of hedging their bets. OBSERVE AND REPORT showed she’s will­ing to push the boundaries.

• Eddie Carmel says:

  September 30, 2011 at 11:48 am

  Maybe it’s because I’ve had some­what the same exper­i­ences (I’m young­er than Lex but I have a sim­il­ar track record) but Lex’s com­ment struck a chord in me. I’m a pretty phys­ic­ally unat­tract­ive fel­low on the fringe of the theatre busi­ness in the Midwest (the “Eddie Carmel” name was just some­thing I picked up from a satir­ic NEW YORKER piece about play­bills before I real­ized that he indeed was a real and tra­gic per­son) and maybe it’s my upbring­ing or maybe just an unfor­tu­nate defect in my per­son­al­ity, but sex is just some­thing that is not in the cards for me over­all (and I say this as a married-probably soon to be divorced-man in my late 20s who’s been in ther­apy for clin­ic­al depres­sion for a while.) Obviously sex sells in films, which is not exactly a stop-the-presses point, but I think there’s some­thing to what Lex is allud­ing to, re: the vast dis­con­nect between what stu­dio exec­ut­ives THINK American sex lives are like and what they actu­ally are, though the stu­pid­ity of the WYN premise seems to fur­ther muddy the point (Yes, yes, I know you’re going all Larry-Summers-in-SOCIAL NETWORK and say­ing “Please, ARRIVE at the POINT.” In a second, Mr. President!)
  But actu­ally, Glenn, your review reminded me of the films of your bête noire, your per­son­al Kenny Bania, Mr. Joe Swanberg. The very premise of WYN sounds like some­thing the Great Swan might execute in a er, dif­fer­ent style, giv­en his taste for graph­ic sexu­al­ity and sup­posed hyper­con­nec­tion to these kids today: I’m mostly famil­i­ar with Swanberg due to his YOUNG AMERICAN BODIES web series, which I’ve watched because of (see list of my per­son­al defects above) not cine­mat­ic qual­ity, and I have to say, com­bin­ing what passes for big-studio sex com­edy and Swanberg’s style, as it were, might open some doors to America’s sexu­al men­tal block, not that I’d want to be any­where near when that happened.

• Jeff McMahon says:

  September 30, 2011 at 12:29 pm

  And Lex’s use of ‘every­one on the inter­net’ as his sub­sti­tute ther­ap­ist continues.
  My favor­ite phrase of the week: “can of sex worms”.
  I don’t think it’s neces­sary to view the mul­ti­tudin­ous sex lives of people in Hollywood movies as any­thing more than amus­ing fantas­ies, along the same lines as the idea that ‘any­one can shoot a gun while slid­ing across the hood of a car’ or ‘uncon­ven­tion­al rebels always know bet­ter than by-the-book fol­low­ers’. They’re all genre con­ven­tions, but the sex thing raises a great­er sting of inad­equacy in some people than the others.

• Escher says:

  September 30, 2011 at 2:06 pm

  re your char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of Tom Rothman, it’s more likely he was actu­ally being a little self-deprecating by describ­ing Argento and SUSPIRIA in that man­ner– pree­mpt­ively let­ting you off the hook in the event that you did­n’t know the dir­ect­or or the film, rather than name-dropping or brag­ging. Before becom­ing a stu­dio exec­ut­ive, Rothman was a New York enter­tain­ment law­yer, a protégé of the great Arthur Klein, and the per­son who handled Jim Jarmusch’s deal­ings at the begin­ning of his career, and not­with­stand­ing the com­mer­cial imper­at­ives of his job and their con­sequences with regard to Fox releases, he’s cer­tainly a guy who can talk to you about movies.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  September 30, 2011 at 2:24 pm

  @Escher: All due respect, but that was not the impres­sion I came away with at the time. But my point isn’t that Rothman’s not eru­dite, or does­n’t love movies, but merely that his perspectives/sensibilities are cir­cum­scribed in a par­tic­u­lar way.

• Not David Bordwell says:

  September 30, 2011 at 3:27 pm

  Jesus Christ, Lex is totally right about this. We’re the same age, I just did the math, and, uh… the fig­ures are the same.
  One of the best lines of the ancient F/X Jay Mohr vehicle “Action” (which I always thought must have been killed by the notori­ously sens­it­ive Bobby G—I mean, Barry Diller):
  Joe Isuzu guy: “I’ve been tak­ing les­sons with Rae Dawn Chong. She’s really help­ing me to open up my vehicle, if you know what I mean.”
  JeffMCM, is that really you?

• Asher says:

  September 30, 2011 at 6:58 pm

  While I fall into the Lex class, for vaguely Aspergian reas­ons (as I sus­pect is the case of Lex) that really isn’t at all my impres­sion of how people in their 20s and 30s (I’m 26) live their lives these days. Farris’s “num­ber” seems quite typ­ic­al. Hollywood only seems off in its por­tray­als of American sex lives in that the people in those sex lives are always really good-looking. That said, they’re more real­ist­ic in that respect than Classic Hollywood, inas­much as there are no Robert Mitchums or Hedy Lamarrs in film nowadays.

• Victor Morton says:

  September 30, 2011 at 7:56 pm

  This ques­tion (how many sex part­ners does a typ­ic­al per­son have, and what would be con­sidered an extraordin­ar­ily high, i.e., slut­tish, num­ber) has been the res­ult of numer­ous sci­entif­ic sur­veys. There is an answer to it (and yes, it is that 19 is extraordin­ar­ily high).
  http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/abc_list_n.htm#numberlifetime
  Median num­ber of female sexu­al part­ners in life­time, for men 25–44 years of age, 2006–2008: 6.1
  Percent of men 25–44 years of age who have had 15 or more female sexu­al part­ners, 2006–2008: 27.2%
  Source: NHSR No. 36, Table 4  [PDF – 836 KB]
  Median num­ber of male sexu­al part­ners in life­time, for women 25–44 years of age, 2006–2008: 3.6
  Percent of women 25–44 years of age who have had 15 or more male sexu­al part­ners, 2006–2008: 10.4%
  Source: NHSR No. 36, Table 3  [PDF – 836 KB]
  NOTE: Includes part­ners with whom respond­ent had any type of sexu­al con­tact (vagin­al, oral, or anal sex)

• Glenn Kenny says:

  September 30, 2011 at 8:47 pm

  Oh my God, you POOR KIDS!

• Jeff McMahon says:

  September 30, 2011 at 9:15 pm

  Not David Bordwell: Yes?

• Asher says:

  October 1, 2011 at 12:01 am

  To be picay­une, your num­bers say that 10.4% of women have had 15 or high­er, so 19 isn’t extraordin­ar­ily high, any more than a 6’3 man (6’3 is the 95^th per­cent­ile for height) is extraordin­ar­ily tall. And of course, I don’t know how accur­ate these self-reported num­bers are, though I sus­pect people lie in both directions.

• Stephen Bowie says:

  October 1, 2011 at 1:01 am

  Wow, it’s like the inter­net sud­denly turned into a con­fes­sion­al train­wreck or something.

• jbryant says:

  October 1, 2011 at 6:34 am

  Personally, I’m quite the hand­some stud, and my ‘num­ber’ puts Wilt Chamberlain’s to shame. As far as any of you know.

• The Siren says:

  October 1, 2011 at 9:24 am

  Don’t you think we could more prof­it­ably move the “miso­gyn­ist” dis­cus­sion up here? This movie’s idea that there’s a num­ber, ANY num­ber of sexu­al part­ners that makes a woman out of bounds, in her mind or any­body else’s … at a min­im­um it goes into my ever-increasing file of “Topics I Can’t Believe Are Still Part of the Cultural Conversation.”
  And Jbryant is right. As I once said on a pod­cast, this is the Internet. We’re all sex sym­bols here.

• Joe says:

  October 1, 2011 at 9:58 am

  Siren: Yeah. Sheesh.
  To con­tin­ue the theme of per­son­al con­fes­sion that runs through these com­ments, I’ve recently had a rather tox­ic rela­tion­ship that has just ended; I prom­ised a friend that if I talked to my ex again, I’d go see “What’s Your Number” and sit through the whole thing. So far it’s been a suf­fi­cient disincentive.

• Stephen Whitty says:

  October 1, 2011 at 11:35 am

  I just love the still that Glenn chose. Looks like some­thing from a Bert I. Gordon movie; “Attack of the Amazing Tiny Person.”

• That Fuzzy Bastard says:

  October 1, 2011 at 12:49 pm

  Siren: But isn’t the whole point of the movie that the lead’s belief that there’s a num­ber is totally wrong, and she’ll only find twue lurve once she gets over that belief? I mean, not that it makes the movie good, but it’s hardly endors­ing the whole num­ber thing.

• jbryant says:

  October 1, 2011 at 6:56 pm

  That’s right, Siren. I’m a Self-Styled Stud. 🙂

• Eddie Carmel says:

  October 1, 2011 at 11:04 pm

  What the Siren said: in that vein, I found Rothman’s com­ment about “a lower num­ber” prefer­ably one, to be par­tic­u­larly tox­ic. I don’t want to get on the whole madonna-whore-complex psy­cho­lo­gic­al train here, but com­ments like that show that it’s at least a real, if appalling, mind­set for some. I wish someone as tal­en­ted as Anna Faris could do a Barbara Stawyck-esque 1940s throw­back where a woman with sexu­al exper­i­ence could be shown as smart and did­n’t have to be por­trayed as a slut or a kook (THE LADY EVE comes to mind, as do some more of Sturges and Wilder’s films…any more peri­od examples I’m miss­ing? I’m talk­ing Code films, not pre-Code when that was more common.)

• Terry McCarty says:

  October 2, 2011 at 2:04 am

  Hi Glenn,
  Know this is off-topic, but I’m curi­ous if you have any­thing to say regard­ing Jim Sheridan’s DREAM HOUSE. My wife and I are going to see it tomor­row in spite of the it’s-bad-bad-bad advance word.
  Just curi­ous if there’s any rum­blings on wheth­er or not the film in its cur­rent form reflects James Robinson and Morgan Creek more than whatever Sheridan might have had in mind.

• robhumanick says:

  October 3, 2011 at 12:04 pm

  I’ll stay home and watch those DVDs of The House Bunny and Smiley Face I’ve had sit­ting around for years. One of them’s bound to be good. I hope.

• Glenn Kenny says:

  October 3, 2011 at 12:23 pm

  “Smiley Face” is REAL GOOD.