If you’re a woman who roared, snorted or snickered at Bridesmaids, you should see it again because the hit comedy written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo turns out to be one of the few films about women released this season by a major studio.
From now through August, U.S. films will again be almost all-male almost all of the time (the occasional decorative gal pal notwithstanding) as this year’s boys of summer — Green Lantern and Captain America, Conan the Barbarian and Conan O’Brien — invade the multiplex.
Mind you, there are a few high-profile girls and women here and there, including the title character of Bad Teacher (opening June 24), with Cameron Diaz as the romance- and etiquette-challenged educator who, at one point, washes a car in slow motion while wearing hot pants.
Mostly, the latest distaff stories look a lot like those from previous years: smaller dramas and romances from studio divisions and independents. In Friends With Benefits (July 24), Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis play acquaintances who try to keep the romance out of the bed just as Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher did in No Strings Attached.
Danish director Lone Scherfig ( An Education) has the dewier-looking One Day (Aug. 19), a romance through the years with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess ( Across the Universe).
Every so often, you can even look forward to a shock of free thinking, as in The Sleeping Beauty (in limited release on June 24), a riff on the classic tale from French director Catherine Breillat. Breillat has spent her career making the type of pushy, aggressively impolite movies about women, sex and desire that are almost unknown in the United States outside the avant-garde.
U.S. women working in the commercial field, both studio and independent, tend to skew softer and safer, quirkier and cuter. And really, considering how tough a sell women’s stories are, it’s no wonder.
U.S. independent filmmaker Miranda July wrote, directed and stars in The Future (Aug.17), a relationship story that works quirky and cute hard, every so often piercing through its insistent whimsy to get at something like life.
Considering the gender segregation that characterizes U.S. film — Bridesmaids for her, The Hangover Part II for him — it’s no surprise that July isn’t the only performer who has provided herself a juicy role. In Higher Ground(Aug. 26), Vera Farmiga makes her uneven, if very watchable, directing debut with the story of a woman who finds religion and lives to regret it in a movie that, intentionally or not, works as a nice Hollywood metaphor.
Another actress doing it for herself is newcomer Brit Marling, who stars as a potential space traveler in Another Earth (July 22), a moody sci-fi drama she helped write. Marling has voiced reasonable reservations about being labeled an “it girl,” but she is lucky to be among the chosen few.
If she’s smart, Marling will continue to write her own material and steer clear of the chick flick, a genre ghetto that has contaminated the very idea of the women’s picture.
Last year, two female-oriented films were deemed surprise hits, as periodically happens when a movie catches industry handicappers off guard and is all too often the case when a movie about women scores with audiences.
Black Swan and The Kids Are All Right reaffirmed that stories about women can sell tickets and win critical love and awards.
Along with the Twilight juggernaut and successes such as True Grit and Salt, they are part of a cautiously promising, fairly recent swell of female-oriented stories that tend to re-emerge in the fall, only to disappear again in the summer.
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