Feminism Taking A Stand in Comedy
There has always been a long-existing stigma surrounding funny women and women in comedy within our society. But why is it so surprising that women can be funny?
And why are male comedians who make light of subjects like rape and sexual abuse not given a second thought? Is it because our society views degrading behavior towards women as “just joking?” It isn’t “just joking.” And thankfully, the strong presence of feminist female comedians and their even stronger comedic style addresses these feminist issues.
Comedian Jessica Williams of "2 Dope Queens,” who also makes appearances on the Daily Show, expresses her pro-feminist comedic style; it shines light on the issues, while making the audience laugh. These are two separate entities, rather than taking these critical issues lightly through the crutch of comedy.
Jessica Williams also stated in an interview that she was a victim of sexually harassment, and by a famous actor; this shows how even a strong woman of color, not only in society but as a powerful woman in television, can be taken advantage of by a man. But it's William’s courage to share her story, rising against those men that feel they can control and silence women. But Jessica is one heroing example of women who stand up and fight.
Another feminist female comedian worth mentioning in this article is Emily Heller. Heller discusses feminism and feminist issues as a comedian. She talks about the cliches associated with feminists/feminism and the real issues. Heller presents these issues in a way that is funny but doesn’t take away from their value or make them less meaningful through the use of comedy.
One of the most recognizable female comedians in the past year, Amy Schumer, has also faced issues of slut-shaming in relation to comedy. In one interview with comedian and actress Amy Schumer, the male interviewer had the nerve to call Train Wreck "autobiographical." He then proceeds to say that Schumer’s performance in said movie portrays her as a “skank” and that it is a depictions of “the character of the movie.” Amy Schumer’s comedic style is hilarious. She uses her own personal experiences to poke fun at herself and make light of her insecurities. As a result, she make others laugh. The audience does not laugh at her expense, but at the delivery of her jokes. It makes us, the audience, look at ourselves and attempt to take our own insecurities as light-heartedly as Amy Schumer.
The presence of feminists comedians is not only existent in females, but also feminist male comedians. Comedians Seth Meyers and Jay Baruchel have said some of the strongest women they know are those they’ve worked with. Even Louis C.K. has addressed feminist issues in his comedy stand-up performances. “Globally and historically, we’re (men) the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease,” Louis C.K. said.
This joke addresses that there is a historically proven problem in which men treat women in our society; however, Louis C.K. has had seemingly mixed views on his feminist position, or at least in terms of those views he has outwardly expressed.
But some men in the public eye that consider themselves as feminists remain firm on their position as such. “I’m constantly annoyed by how terribly written most females are in most everything - and especially in comedy. Their anatomy seems to be the only defining aspect of their character, and I just find that untruthful and it straight up offends me. A lot of the strongest people I know are chicks. As a viewer, I get a kick out of watching actual women. And I like writing strong women. Because as a straight male, there’s nothing more attractive to me than a strong girl,” says comedian and actor Jay Baruchel.
It is men like Baruchel who not only recognize women's ability to be talented within the world of comedy; but also men who work alongside these strong females comedians, and treat them as such.
Seth Rogen Trips on Drugs in Red Band Trailer for The Night Before
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Finally, a Christmas film that isn't a Christmas film! The Night Before stars Seth Rogen (The Interview), Anthony Mackie (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Sin City: A Dame to Kill For) as Isaac, Chris, and Ethan, three long-long best friends celebrating what might be their last Christmas together. The shenanigans begin to unfold after Ethan gets the trio into a huge Christmas party and Isaac is given shrooms and coke as a present by his wife (Workaholics' Jillian Bell).
The trailer starts off on a high note as the trio play Kanye West's "Runaway" on a large toy piano, reminiscent of Tom Hanks's 1988 film Big, then runs through a litany of jokes, such as Ethan telling Isaac's unborn child that Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with at a family dinner, Isaac tripping on the drugs in a limo and weirding out Chris, and a cameo by Mindy Kaling (The Mindy Project) and Lizzy Caplan (Masters of Sex) praising Miley Cyrus's "Wrecking Ball."
The Night Before reunites the trio of Rogen, Gordon-Levitt, and writer/director Jonathan Levine, who all worked together in 2011's 50/50. The film should also give fans a chance to Mackie's comedic side following his more recent Marvel film appearances. The Night Before will be coming to theaters on November 25th.
[via Rolling Stone]
Key & Peele to End After This Season
After Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key started their Key & Peele sketch show on Comedy Central back in 2012, their comedy was finally noticed by the world. The two have been working together for a long time (since their time on MadTV, and long before that too) and now it's time for their work to hit the next level. After five successful seasons, their show is coming to an end. The duo told The Wrap:
This is our final season – and it’s not because of Comedy Central, it’s us. It was just time for us to explore other things, together and apart. I compare it to Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. We might make a movie and then do our own thing for three years and then come back and do another movie.
I’m thinking we could do that every three years – take a year, go bang out a movie. That’s the plan right now.
It makes sense given how much they've got on their plate. There's Keanu, the film about two guys posing as gangsters to save a cat, there's a Police Academy reboot, their "Substitute Teacher" sketch is getting a full movie treatment, Key has been popping up in a lot more films, and Jordan has plans to direct a film soon. If the show is any indication of where their career is going, we're in for some great comedy. It's a good thing the show's ending now, too, since a lot of sketches aren't hitting as hard as they used to. There is a sense that the show is losing steam. It's better to go out on top before it runs itself into the ground. Season 5 has already been filmed in full, and it's final episode will air sometime in September. Just for fun, here's my favorite sketch.
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[via The Wrap]
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler Reunite in Sisters Trailer
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The team of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler has become a force to be reckoned with in recent years, strengthened by their real life friendship (and the public spillover that has ingratiated the duo even more with fans). They're banking on their natural comedic chemistry with one another to empower their upcoming film, Sisters, teamed together with another rising comedic voice in Pitch Perfect director Jason Moore.
Fey and Poehler star as polar opposite sisters who have to clean out their childhood bedroom before their family sells the house. Wanting to re-live the glory days of their youth, they decide to throw one final house party. The script is writer Paula Pell's first feature screenplay, but she has also written for Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock, Bridesmaids, and This is 40.
The trailer has its ups and downs, but the real highlights are when Fey and Poehler can build off of one another's jokes, the kind of chemistry we've grown to love in Apatow films. Plus, the more we can get out of Fey and Poehler sharing screen time, the better.
Sisters will be out in theaters on December 18th.
Alison Brie and Jason Sudeikis Star in Sleeping With Other People Trailer
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Alison Brie has been a charming presence on both Community and Mad Men over the years, but finally, it's time for her to break out and cement herself in Hollywood. What better way to do that than by starring in a sex-filled rom-com?
Written and directed by Leslye Headland (About Last Night), Sleeping with Other People stars Alison Brie and Jason Sudeikis (SNL, Horrible Bosses 2), two sex addicts who've reunited years after their first encounter. As they both face similar problems, the duo decide to keep their relationship platonic despite the intense attraction they feel towards one another. As is often the case, shenanigans and antics arise that will test just how strong their will is.
Sleeping with Other People premiered at Sundance earlier this year, and while I didn't get a chance to catch the film due to scheduling conflicts, it's been on my radar since. Hopefully, general audiences will keep it on theirs when the film hits theaters on September 11th.
Amy Schumer is a Trainwreck in Trailer for Judd Apatow's Next Film
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Can you believe it's been three years since Judd Apatow's last directed film, This is 40, was released in theaters? The director who practically single-handedly changed the R-rated comedy game with his directorial debut The 40-Year-Old Virgin is returning to the big screen next month, but is changing the formula up a bit. Known for casting everyman types as the leads in his films, Apatow's next film, Trainwreck, will have a female protagonist, answering the question that's sure to be on everyone's minds: Can Judd Apatow find the same success with a female lead?
Short answer: yes, especially when one of comedy's top ladies is in the role. Amy Schumer (Inside Amy Schumer) stars as Amy, a commitment phobe focused on her career as a fluff magazine writer. When she's assigned to write a profile on a sports surgeon (Bill Hader), she suddenly finds herself falling for him, despite learning from an early age that "monogamy isn't realistic." As you can expect from Apatow, the trailer is filled with sex jokes and pop culture references, as well as appearances from LeBron James and WWE star John Cena. One of my favorite indie actresses, Brie Larson (Short Term 12), also leads a supporting cast that includes Tilda Swinton, Dave Attell, and Ezra Miller (The Stanford Prison Experiment).
Trainwreck will be crashing into theaters on July 17th.
[Review] Burying The Ex
Joe Dante is one of those directors you wish would get more work. At a time when any semblance of identity or creativity in blockbuster filmmaking is being increasingly calculated, focus-tested and formula-driven out of existence, Dante at his best brings a spirit of gleeful, unpredictable anarchism, a joy at throwing away the rulebook that is both very much his own and the product of his mentorship at the hands of the great B-movie maestro, Roger Corman.
Burying The Ex sounds like ideal Dante material, concerning a young horror buff, Max, struggling in his relationship with a controlling girlfriend, Evelyn, only for her to be hit by a bus on the day he finally decides to break up with her, then come back from the dead in zombified form just as he moves on and meets a kindred spirit from a nearby ice cream parlour. Unfortunately, despite all the premise's potential for Dante's brand of gunk-splattered cartoon chaos, he struggles to bring any life to an uninspired, pedestrian script that feels more like the extended pilot for a middling network sitcom called So I Dated A Zombie than a comeback cinematic outing for a great genre director.
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Burying The Ex
Directors: Joe Dante
Rating: R
Release Date: June 19th, 2015
The movie is rated R, specifically for sexual content, partial nudity, some horror violence, and language. All of that may be technically true - the 'nudity' is especially partial - but far from any degree that one might expect to trouble the censors were this a higher budget release, backed by a more influential major studio. There's plenty of blood, but mostly used to cover faces rather than douse the walls, while a brain-eating scene is edited in such a way that any real semblance of gore is restricted to quick flashes. Dante's affection for discharging large quantities of boldly coloured gloop is satisfied by the zombified Evelyn projectile-puking embalming fluid all over the terrified Max, but played strictly for laughs - none too effectively, it should be said, making a jarring tonal shift amid one of many lackadaisical, drawn out dialogue scenes that should be more fun and energetic considering the material being covered - and hardly the sort of thing to turn away from. It's one of the tamest R-rated movies for a long time and the feeling pervades that the rating gives the movie's horror bona fides more credibility than they deserve.
Part of that is surely a result of the low budget, which leads to a significant number of scenes taking place in Max's front room. Dante had great fun contrasting the safety of suburban decorum with the ravages of the supernatural in Gremlins, but Alan Trezza's script denies him the chance to really dig into what zombified havoc Evelyn is capable of unleashing on Max's slow-paced hipster existence beyond one bout of vomiting and a handful of demonstrations of super-strength. In fact, there's a real argument that she does more damage in redecorating his front room prior to her (first) demise than she ever does following her resurrection. What's left is a series of quickly wearisome back-and-forths in which Evelyn re-asserts her desire to covert Max to the undead so they can be together forever, followed by his expressions of disgust at that desire and her steadily decaying flesh.
The unadventurous script limits the strong cast, of which Anton Yelchin, playing the put-upon Max, feels most subdued. Yelchin is a charismatic actor who has made a good impression in minor roles in not-so-good movies, but he plays Max so sleepily and lacking any response beyond mild surprise and concern at what should be a terrifying situation that he's hard to have sympathy for when he himself barely seems concerned by what's happening. True, he's not supposed to be a character of any great assertiveness or courage, but Yelchin tips the balance too far until it drops into virtual indifference. His half-brother, Travis, is supposed to be the more ribald and confident of the two, but is such a tedious slobby womaniser stereotype that, rather than being an invigorating presence who pushes Max to stand up for himself, it's a relief whenever he exits a scene. It also speaks to the movie's disappointing safeness that he boasts of sleeping around not with centrefold models from Playboy, but FHM, a magazine, like the character, stuck in eye-rolling late-90s ideas of laddish masculinity.
Ashley Greene fares better as Evelyn, pushing back against the tame material to unearth a little of the sadness behind her character's anger and control-freakery. The obsessive, domineering ex-girlfriend is another tired cliché, but Greene's history with the Twilight franchise makes for savvy casting as she finds small traces of humanity in her zombified form. Perhaps one of the movie's most debilitating flaws is that it in fact makes the living Evelyn too likeable and sympathetic, justifying her controlling nature with a sad backstory and a genuine, if overbearing, desire to love and be loved. Her eco-conscious do-goodery (working for a firm called 'Live Green Or Blog Hard', one of a number of not-quite-funny-enough Simpsons-esque workplace names) may be pushy and annoying, but it's hard to deny she has a point when calling out Max for not showing any motivation to improve his lot despite constant complaining. She's the most fully rounded character in the movie, far moreso than Alexandra Daddario's dreamgirl sweet Olivia, entirely defined by liking all the same stuff as Max, a dating site approach to a romantic lead where compatibility is calculated exclusively by the number of shared interests.
What is the real stake through Burying The Dead's heart is that Shaun Of The Dead, an even more low-budget zom-com, did everything Dante's movie tries to do to much greater effect eleven years earlier. The movie skirts around the idea of relationship angst among geeky mid-twentysomethings, but Shaun committed more fully to the idea of the difficulty of youngish men finding a direction in life outside their nerdy and nostalgic preoccupations, all the while being significantly scarier, gorier, sweeter and funnier. Nick Frost's Ed, in particular, is a much more sharply observed depiction of what Travis should have been.
There are glimpses of the picture Dante might have made had his budget been bigger, the writing been sharper, and had he himself maybe been twenty years younger, but they are few and far between, in the end only growing the disappointment that what ended up on the screen is so consistently stuck in second gear and tepid in its execution of already underwhelming ideas. Ashley Greene in particular deserves better, while Alexandra Daddario continues her wait for a movie role which puts her natural affability to more lively use than the girlfriend role. A Dick Miller cameo and a handful of amusing sight gags provide the slim pickings for Dante's fans, but as welcome as it is to see him back in any sort of cinematic work, it's a shame the result shows few real signs of life.
[Review] Spy
After achieving stardom with her standout performance in Bridesmaids, Melissa McCarthy has become a divisive figure, at once a reliable box-office draw while being frequently accused of only being able to play one type of character and one style of comedy. Spy is her third collaboration with director Paul Feig, for whom she will also be headlining the female version of Ghostbusters in 2016. Her work with Feig has generally coincided with her best reviews, with the pair sharing a fondness for subversive, proto-feminist genre spoofs.
Those who have found McCarthy's schtick offputting in the past won't find much to win them round in Spy, an uneven but occasionally amusing bounce through the familiar stable of spy movie clichés. McCarthy's character, Susan Cooper, certainly fits comfortably into the actress' pantheon, exhibiting the expected reliance on pratfalls and foul-mouthed tirades that both fans and detractors have come to expect. What elevates Cooper above the likes of Tammy Banks, of the dreadful eponymous 2014 vehicle which deservedly earnt McCarthy many of her worst notices, is a willingness to allow McCarthy to explore a more outwardly vulnerable, yet secretly competent, side to her familiar persona.
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Spy
Director: Paul Feig
Rating: R
Release Date: June 5th, 2015
As would appear to be the case with the upcoming Ghostbusters, and was to an extent also true of the previous Feig-McCarthy team-up, The Heat, Spy's most noteworthy trick of genre subversion is casting women in roles typically occupied by men. This idea drives the narrative more than might be expected. Cooper starts out as a highly skilled if unconfident CIA analyst, whose job is to support superspy Bradley Fine (Jude Law) via earpiece with all the information he needs to know to complete his missions, while she watches from the safety of her desk via camera and satellite feeds. When Fine and all the CIA's other agents are compromised, Cooper, the only agent unknown to the enemy, is sent out into the field by her boss (Allison Janney) to retrieve a nuclear weapon before Rayna Boyanov, daughter to a deceased supervillain, can sell it on the black market.
The idea of women taking over a traditionally male game is a rich one, but Spy doesn't offer as much of an original take on the genre as hoped. The movie ventures little towards exploring what unique approaches and challenges a woman, especially a 'plus-sized' woman, might face in the field - the only exception being Cooper having to fend off the advances of Peter Serafinowicz's lecherous Italian agent, which is never as funny as the movie seems to think it is and Peter Serafinowicz seems mildly embarrassed to involved. The female friendship angle is fun and affectionate, but has limited impact on the main plot beyond bringing hero and villain together. Instead, the same spy tropes which have provided easy fodder for spoofs since the James Bond phenomenon came into being in the mid-sixties are dusted off for another airing, even if most of them have long since been left behind in the genre's modern iterations and were already more effectively and lovingly sent up in the first Austin Powers movie. Cooper's competence is very welcome, encouraging viewers to laugh with rather than at, but has been an integral part of creating a likeable goofball spy ever since, to a less obvious extent, Get Smart.
The presence of women in the lead roles does give the movie a novelty value on which it cruises for a while, albeit one which is more the result of the spy genre's near total absence of diversity in its leads than anything much this movie in particular has to say beyond noticing it. Like Kingsman: The Secret Service, the movie promises an anarchic, progressive spin on a typically very conservative enterprise, this time focusing on gender rather than class, but lacks the strength of its convictions to allow its non-traditional protagonist to display anything more unique to them than the standard heroic traits. In fact, it's Jason Statham's Rick Ford who offers the funniest, most determinedly radical spin on the action hero archetype. The character exaggerates Statham's persona by a factor of ten, resulting in a deranged, hyper-masculine doofus with total confidence in his own ridiculous abilities and contempt for anyone, especially women, barging in on his territory. Statham's performances have always carried an undercurrent of self-parody, so it's no surprise to see him shine when given his first chance to play unabashedly comedic material.
That's not to suggest the women fare at all badly: McCarthy is perfectly likeable as Cooper, whose lack of self-belief and frustration at being stuck behind a desk make it all the funnier and more engaging when she's finally allowed to break free of her shackles and start tearing things up. Where a previous McCarthy character threatening to chop a henchman's dick off and stick it to his head (thus making him, to quote, a 'limp-dick unicorn') would've relied on nothing but abrasiveness to get the laugh, here there's a palpable sense of relief as Cooper finally finds the freedom to fully express herself without reservation. Rose Byrne's clipped, arrogant Rayna makes a terrific foil, and her double act with McCarthy allows for some of the movie's most memorable, often seemingly improvised, exchanges. Miranda Hart, likely less familiar to US audiences than UK ones, also does solid work as Cooper's gawky co-worker and best friend, Nancy.
Feig directs with a sure enough hand and shows a reasonable aptitude for action, especially in a one-on-one knife fight in the final act, but there's never any sense of him stretching himself or going the extra distance to give the movie any sort of visual identity of its own. Perhaps symptomatically of the material, his work is functional and fit for purpose, but utterly unremarkable in all respects bar giving McCarthy the freedom to improvise some sparky one-liners into an otherwise drab script, and on the negative side, not immediately vetoing Jude Law's dismal attempt at an American accent, presumably put in place upon realising that three of the five main CIA characters were being played by Brits.
Spy doesn't break as much new ground as it thinks it does when it comes to spy spoofs, and the lack of substance behind its gender-swapping conceit doesn't bode especially well for Feig's Ghostbusters reboot. It is, however, sufficiently lightweight and amiable to be a serviceable diversion at a time when the quality of big screen comedy has taken a slide when compared to that on television. The nuances added to McCarthy's character allow the actress to bring some depth and pathos to her confrontational persona, even if it's Jason Statham's balls-out lunacy which ends up stealing the show as one of the few genuinely surprising and chaotic elements in an otherwise entirely forgettable affair.