Hollywood after Bridesmaids: has the ladette comedy gone too far?

Hollywood after Bridesmaids: has the ladette comedy gone too far? Witty in pink ... Scarlett Johansson leads the lewdness in Rough Night. Photograph: Macall Polay/Sony A woman is freshening up her undercarriage at the sink in a public bathroom when the door unexpectedly swings open. Another is surreptitiously sniffing her pits while strutting to the nightclub flanked by female friends. These lifelong BFFs are headed to New Orleans with the expressed intention of getting “white-girl wasted” and also “pregnant tonight”. Meanwhile, a bachelorette party has just wound up accidentally killing the male stripper they’d hired while high on cocaine. Oopsie! Comedy for and about women once meant dainty romcoms, in which “pretty”, “thin” and “adorably clumsy” were always more important leading lady attributes than “funny”. With Girls Trip (starring Jada Pinkett Smith and Queen Latifah), Rough Night (Scarlett Johansson and Broad City’s Ilana Glazer), Amy Schumer’s recent Snatched and a Bad Moms sequel all due out in the coming months, that has definitely changed. Now, female-fronted comedy means a Bechdel-test-passing bacchanal featuring tequila slammers, toilet humour and absolutely no discernible moral compass. The above might not sound like particularly commendable behaviour, but it’s an achievement of sorts, says film historian Steve Massa. “Most of the feature-length comedies that starred comediennes in the 1920s were Cinderella-type stories where the girl from the other side of the tracks gets her Prince Charming – always a millionaire – by the end of the picture.” Watch the trailer for Rough Night. In Massa’s recently published book, Slapstick Divas: The Women of Silent Comedy, he explores how the personas and performances of early film comediennes such as Mabel Normand, Marie Dressler and Bebe Daniels were circumscribed by social expectations: “[These women] had to remain ladylike, but much of the humour in their films came from them ending up in situations that required unladylike behaviour while they still tried to remain ladylike.” Until relatively recently, this description would have done just as well for much of the mainstream, female-driven movies released in cinemas. But clearly the characters who urinate on themselves while suspended above New Orleans music festival crowds on a zip wire (Girls Trip), or break off from Christmas shopping to give the mall Santa a lap dance (A Bad Moms Christmas), have long since given up being “ladylike”. Girls Trip co-writer Karen McCullah says she’s yet to find a line she didn’t feel comfortable crossing. “There are certain scenes in Girls Trip that are going to surprise a few people, but I don’t know if I’d call them ‘too much’,” she says. “I have a pretty raunchy sense of humour. If something is funny is it ever really too much?” McCullah is also the real-life brainy blonde behind such gently subversive genre classics as Legally Blonde (2001), in which Reese Witherspoon’s sorority sweetheart goes to Harvard to get a law degree (“What? Like it’s hard?”), and 2008’s House Bunny, in which Anna Faris stars as a Playmate who is kicked out of the Playboy Mansion only to discover her true calling is mentoring socially awkward undergrads. Watch the trailer for Girls Trip. Over her years in Hollywood, McCullah has noticed a change of emphasis in comedies for and about women. “It’s definitely less about finding love now,” she says, “and more about finding joy and a sense of purpose in life. If love is part of that, great, but it’s not the only focus for the characters.” When weddings do feature in these films, it’s most likely to be as a disappointingly tame after-party to the main event: the hen night or “bachelorette”. The film that launched this trend – for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in (rude) health – was 2011’s Kristen Wiig film Bridesmaids. Co-written by Wiig and Annie Mumolo (an actor who also appears in the first Bad Moms), it nonetheless went into production largely thanks to the patronage of comedy producer Judd Apatow. “We didn’t think it was any different than something like The House Bunny or Baby Mama,” Apatow told an interviewer for the Daily Beast shortly after the film was released. “So we didn’t think we were breaking any new ground. We just thought it was a fun thing to do.” The film did break new ground, though. As well as launching the movie careers of Wiig and Melissa McCarthy (now among Hollywood’s highest earners), Bridesmaids changed the parameters of studio thinking. Prior to this, hit female comedies had been viewed as fluke-ish and hard to repeat – notably, both My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Sex and the City had sequels that flopped. Bridesmaids demonstrated that films about women, which focused on female friendship and relegated romance to a subplot, could do big business at the box office. Or, depending on your viewpoint, it showed that women on screen could be just as gross, outrageous and R-rated as anything in the 2009 bachelor party hit The Hangover. The wedding’s a bit off ... the cast of Bridesmaids. Photograph: Universal/Ko/Rex/Shutterstock Either way, this 2011 release changed the Hollywood notion of suitable content for mainstream female-fronted comedy. As McCullah summarises, “Since everyone pooped in the sink in Bridesmaids, I think it’s pretty much been an open playing field.” It’s no particular surprise that in TV, where audiences tend to skew both slighter older and more female, women who behave badly in amusing ways have already become a comedy staple. Fleabag, Girls, Broad City, Issa Rae’s Insecure and Idiotsitter with Rough Night’s Jillian Bell have built on a template established by Sex and the City, Sharon Horgan’s Pulling, and even Ladette-era TV such as The Girlie Show. The film equivalents, though, are notably both more hedonistic and broader in tone. Instead of the slow deterioration of one woman’s dignity, they’re most likely to concern themselves with the group dynamics of that big blow-out weekend or night on the town. But not everyone is down for another round of celebratory shots and a Single Ladies dance-off. In a tweet last month – which has since been liked nearly 7,000 times – Jenny Slate, the star of 2014’s more introspective comedy Obvious Child and a Girls guest star, expressed her dismay with the way things are going. “It makes me feel despair to continually read broad comedies where ‘cool women’ just speak like basic, gross men,” she wrote. “TEAR DOWN THE SYSTEM, PLEASE.” The replies did the naming and shaming that Slate’s propriety (or character count) would not allow. “By system you mean Amy Schumer then, right?” wrote one. “I don’t mean to slag comedic queen Melissa McCarthy,” wrote another, “but this applies to almost all of her roles since The [sic] Bridesmaids. And I hate that fact.” A third offered simply a two-word guess: “Rough Night?” Rough Night has also been critiqued in some publications more notable than Jenny Slate’s Twitter mentions. In her New York Times review, critic Manohla Dargis verbally rolled her eyes at a trend in which “partying hard is meant as a stand-in for [gender] equality”. Still, to write off these films as merely the gender-flipped take on the blockbuster raunch comedy is missing the point, says Rough Night’s director and co-writer Lucia Aniello. “Candid, true reactions from women in certain situations can be ‘raunchy’, though I kind of hate that word! … As long as it’s honest, people will laugh.” Girls gone wild ... Amy Schumer (left) and Goldie Hawn in Snatched. Photograph: Justina Mintz/AP Aniello and her co-writer Paul W Downs honed their approach working together on some of the best and weirdest episodes of Broad City, so are largely inured to implicit judgments about how women should and shouldn’t behave. “These women are based on my real friends,” explains Aniello. “They find themselves in an unfortunate situation, and this is how they would honestly respond. They’re not ‘bad’, they’re just real.” Girls just wanna have fun, and women just want a cinema that properly reflects the breadth of their experience, affords them the same subjectivity as male characters, and is also really, really funny. This tends to have the best chance of happening when women are making creative decisions behind the camera as well as performing in front of them. Yet, despite the movie success of individual female comedians, Aniello feels that a female version of Apatown, Judd Apatow’s loose bro-com creative collective, may be some way off. “There are many women who champion other women’s voices,” she notes. “Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Jill Soloway and Wanda Sykes, for example. But it’s not like there are a ton of my friends with TV shows on air and movies in theatres.” Even if such a comedy coven were to appear, it would only solve the artistic problem, without getting at the more pressing commercial one. While men are in control of the film industry (and they are; all 18 CEOs of major Hollywood studios are male), fun films about real female characters are never going to get green-lit as easily as their male-fronted equivalents. This thinking was outlined by producer Michael Shamberg in a 2011 New Yorker profile of Anna Faris, published the month before Bridesmaids went on release. “If you make a guys’ comedy, you can get girls,” he said. “But if you make a girls’ comedy the guys will go, ‘That’s just chick stuff.’” Depressingly reductive, perhaps, but the maths bear him out – Bridesmaids was a huge international hit, making more than $288m worldwide, and yet it was still outperformed by The Hangover, by $179m. Men behaving sadly ... the stars of 2009’s male-skewed gross-out hit The Hangover. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros It’s not that these films don’t make men laugh. Girls Trip, says McCullah, is “absolutely geared toward women, but men seem to be enjoying it just as much from the preview screenings. I saw it in a tiny room full of male agents and they were dying.” Aniello reports a similar experience with Rough Night. The problem is more persuading a paying male audience to venture into the cinema in the first place. Hollywood doesn’t require men to project themselves into the female head-space if they want a good night out at the movies — male leads outnumbered female leads by a factor of two to one in the top 250 films of last year – so why strain those empathy muscles when you don’t have to? While female cinema-goers are forced by necessity to take an interest in male stories, lack of male interest puts a ceiling on the potential of female-fronted comedy. Girls Trip has already had a very respectable opening at the box office, but if Rough Night and the rest underperform internationally we can expect Hollywood to quickly revert to boys’ club business as usual. In order to exceed expectation, these supposedly free-spirited, independent women, will have to actively court male approval. And sometimes it seems the only way the average movie-going man will bear witness to a group of women having a good time is over his dead body. You know, like in Rough Night. Rough Night is out on Friday 25 August; Girls Trip is out now Tom Koehler, traded by Marlins to Blue Jays, ‘would have loved to have gone out on different terms’ Tom Koehler figured he wouldn’t spend his entire career with the Miami Marlins, because almost nobody sticks with one team forever these days. And he figured he might get traded, since he was pitching poorly in the majors and well in the minors, so he couldn’t help but wonder what other opportunities might be out there. But when Michael Hill, the Marlins’ president of baseball operations, told him Saturday that the Marlins traded him to the Toronto Blue Jays, it didn’t change the reality: A significant era of Koehler’s life had come to an end. “When you get the phone call … you just don’t know how to feel,” Koehler said in a phone interview. “I’ve been with the Marlins for so long. I’m beyond excited for my opportunity with the Blue Jays organization, but you’re leaving behind something that’s a huge part of your life. “Obviously, I would have loved to have gone out on different terms with the Marlins and would have loved to have an ERA in the threes and 15 wins and not have it happen the way that it did. But I know I have a lot left in the tank and a lot to offer, so I’m excited to go out and be able to show it.” The trade, which included cash considerations for Toronto and the Marlins receiving minor league righty Osman Gutierrez, brought an unceremonious end to the Marlins career of one of the team’s longest-tenured players. Koehler had been a Marlin since June 2008 — 10 months shy of 10 years ago — when the club picked him in the 18th round of the draft. He was a senior out of Stony Brook, with pretty good numbers in an OK conference, signing for very little as far as amateur draft budgets go. “They gave me an opportunity,” Koehler said of the Marlins. “I don’t think a lot of people would have thought that I would’ve gotten as far as I have, and they gave me a chance to do it.” After debuting in the majors in 2012, Koehler got married, had two kids and planted year-round roots in South Florida, living in Miami during the season and in Jupiter in the offseason. Koehler became an anchor of the Miami rotation, priding himself on taking the ball every fifth game. From 2014-16, the Giants’ Madison Bumgarner was the only National League pitcher to start more games (99 to 96) than he did. At the start of this season, Koehler was the Marlins’ No. 3 starter, declaring in spring training: “I expect a lot of myself. I feel like if we want to get to where we’re hoping to go, I’m going to be a big part of it.” The Marlins have not gotten where they were hoping to go, and Koehler was part of it for a time, posting a 7.92 ERA and 1.73 WHIP in 12 starts while being demoted to Triple-A New Orleans twice. That ties into his biggest — perhaps only — regret. Koehler, like the rest of the current Marlins, was never been a part of a winning team in Miami. “I’ve always felt like we were so close, and that’s really what the fans deserve,” Koehler said. “It wasn’t for a lack of effort. It wasn’t for the team not being prepared. It’s just unfortunate. I hope the fans get to see it soon. “The people were always great to me. There are groups of fans I know by name, I can pick them out of a crowd, that my wife will walk through the stadium and see and say hi to. Those are the things that I’ll miss.” thealey@sunsentinel.com; @timbhealey To sign up for the Sun Sentinel’s Marlins newsletter, click here. How “gone” is Steve Bannon really? In some ways it’s kind of amazing that in the midst of terror attacks abroad, racial unrest at home and police shootings in two states overnight there is a big segment of the media still focusing more on Steve Bannon than anything else. The catnip factor is understandable of course, particularly for those of us who live and breathe American politics, but normally the dismissal of a problematic adviser really wouldn’t be such a huge story. But it is what it is and now he’s gone. But is he really? Mike Allen at Axios is pitching an alternate theory (parts of which I actually subscribe to) mixed in with a heaping dose of some back yard fence style gossip. His opening gambit is a series of both off-the-record and on-the-record quotes and factoids meant to indicate that the Trump – Bannon relationship is really on the rocks. (Emphasis in original) At the end, Trump was beyond fed up, viewing Bannon as a self-aggrandizer who had built a personal narrative as the grand puppetmaster. “Who the f**k does this guy think he is?” Trump has said incredulously to associates. Axios’ Jonathan Swan tells me it’s no surprise Trump didn’t issue a farewell message on Friday: The president can’t stand Bannon at the moment. (Trump tweeted a belated “Thanks S” about Bannon on Saturday morning.) But few people are ever really gone from Trumpworld, and we bet it won’t be long before Bannon is regularly gossiping with Trump and counseling him. Some of this is, to be clear, the beltway and blogosphere equivalent of the latest hot rumors about who hates who this week in the Kardashian clan. (Or whether it’s really splitsville for Oprah and Stedman, for you older readers.) Steve Bannon was, from the beginning, probably the most controversial person in the Trump inner circle and even as the President seemed to remain loyal to him, it was a race between the Democrats, the establishment Republicans and the media to see who hated him the most. Detecting any blood in their chummy swimming pool would be huge news for those looking for another crack in Trump’s armor. But are things really so bad between the two men? You might get that impression from Axios, but then we’ve got Bloomberg reporting that Bannon is saying he’s “going to war for Trump.” (Which, if you’re in the Oval Office, is far preferable to going to war against Trump. You can insert some wisdom of the elders here about having a guy inside the tent peeing out rather than vice versa.) Indicators like that may support Mike Allen’s next point (that being the one I agree with), saying that Bannon really isn’t all that gone and will soon likely hold his old post again, but unofficially and operating out of the Breitbart offices rather than the White House. So Steve Bannon will remain in the president’s ear and in his head, telling Trump to be Trump. And that’s a message this president has never been known to resist. Having Bannon on the Security Council was obviously a burr under many saddles, along with any other official duties which may have shown up on his daily schedule. But what was his primary job to begin with? He was a presidential adviser. That’s about as vague of a title as you could ask for, and if that’s the voice and style that Trump likes to hear while mulling things over, how long do you suppose that relationship is put on hold? So meetings inside the Oval Office wind up being replaced by DMs on Twitter at all hours of the day and night? It’s true that Bannon won’t be there to personally badger the more establishment, globalist voices in the Oval Office inner circle, but something tells me that his opinions on other personnel will still be heard when the President is looking for advice. So is Steve Bannon gone? Well… at least physically, yes. But he’s most likely very far from forgotten.