What others would you guys add to either list?
I guess I am the exception to the female rule, and probably Sweets is too. I saw the Twilight movies, and yeah, I got all goofy in the theater but you won't catch me at a midnight showing opening night. I refuse to watch tearjerker movies - I have never seen Titanic. And I never will. I will, however, watch anything Sandra Bullock is in - I love her - and Mamma Mia - THE MUSICAL NOT THE MOVIE - holds a special place in my heart due to the circumstances under which I saw it (the week of 9-11, in London). I never watched SATC on tv so never saw either movie.
I can also quote movies about as well as most of you guys on here - you know how I feel about Python. I would not waste time on any Jackass but Borat made me cry laughing, and The Hangover speaks for itself.
However, I don't like any of the Rambo/Predator movies except the first one of each series, but then again, I am not much for seriously violent movies anyway.
So I guess that makes me a chick with guy tendencies. Guess that works for hanging around here.
Cinematic Gender Divide
By Glenn Whipp
Special to MSN Movies
Taken in 30-minute doses, "Sex and the City" the TV show was OK. Tolerable, even. But as a 142-minute movie, it was a nightmare, a shrill ode to narcissism and materialism and cute little $300 throw pillows. (Some) women loved it. Personally I don't know any of these women and, to be honest, I don't really want to know any of these women. I was only dimly aware of the hundreds of girls-night-out parties where the alcohol undoubtedly flowed freely enough to take the edge off the movie's depressing shallowness.
Box-office grosses necessitated a follow-up, the imaginatively-titled "Sex and the City 2," a movie whose mere existence is generating the sort of apprehension generally reserved for swine flu pandemics and Kevin James comedies. This unease is particularly acute for the male gender, a group largely immune to the charms of McMansion-sized closets and the stockpiling of $800 shoes.
But this kind of gender divide cuts both ways at the movies, right? Dudes look at the Sylvester Stallone's upcoming action-ensemble movie "The Expendables" and dream of the jingoistic ass-kickery that lies ahead. Women shrug their shoulders, circle Aug. 13 on the calendar and make sure they're not within a 100-mile radius of their "better" halves on the movie's opening day.
All of which got us thinking: What movies are most likely to send each sex into their respective panic rooms? Obviously, your mileage may vary, but let's offer up a few sweeping generalizations just to get the conversation started.
WOMEN
-- Any sequel in the "Predator" series
Big dumb action movies, particularly ones of the '80s vintage starring Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, engender a type of unquestioning, dog-like devotion that completely baffles women. Some men know John Rambo's back-story better than their own family history. They can tell you how many times he was deployed to 'Nam, what Native American tribe his father belonged to and the precise poly-cotton blend of his bandanas.
We can sort of understand this. (Sort of.) Stallone was Rocky Balboa, after all, and certain men of a certain vintage harbor a profound nostalgia for the big lug. But a lot of these same guys also absolutely love the "Predator" movies. One friend even snuck out of the house on Christmas day three years ago to see "Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem," the godawful sequel to the godawful "Alien vs. Predator." We believe he told his wife he was going for egg nog. We are not making this up.
This guy -- and guys like him -- can go on and on explaining why the Predator creature came to the jungle in the first movie and why it set its sights on L.A. in the second and why the movies where the Predator battles the Alien rank as great B-movie fun. He blanks out though if we ask him the color of his wife's eyes.
That Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura, two of the stars from the first "Predator," would go on to become governors should give one pause when hailing democracy as one of human history's greatest inventions.
-- "Jackass: The Movie" and "Jackass Number Two"
Heh heh heh. He said "Number Two." Heh heh heh.
Why don't more women find the sight of a 400-pound woman belly-flopping on a midget funny? Why didn't your girlfriend laugh when the dude dressed his penis in a mouse puppet costume and offered it to a hungry snake? And why did she break up with you because you wouldn't stop talking about how great it was when Chris Pontius drank a glass of horse semen?
Gee, pardner, we couldn't tell you. Some things in life will just always be a mystery, we guess.
-- Any movie directed by Rob Zombie
Now, obviously we can exclude from this group any of the women Jesse James slept with while married to Sandra Bullock -- or any woman who'd still like to get with Jesse James now that his marriage to Bullock has ended). But outside of a select group of ink-stained Satanists, women have proven resistant to the Bearded One's filmography, be it his original examinations of the human condition ("House of 1000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects") or his determined effort to remove the last vestiges of goodwill we feel for the "Halloween" franchise.
Why pick on Zombie and not, say, Eli Roth or those cut-ups from the "Saw" movies? Well, the others aren't quite as robotically pointless or utterly bereft of ideas. But it's a small distinction. You'd have better luck taking your special lady friend to the morgue (where you'd probably run into Zombie) than to any of these movies.
-- "Wild Things"
The smart, sleazy 1998 thriller "Wild Things" came blessed with a knowing cheesiness (and a great supporting turn by Bill Murray) that was impossible to resist. So why did so many resist it? (It grossed a paltry $30 million at the box office.) Easy: Women looked at the "Wild Things" one sheet and deduced, correctly, I might add, that the movie existed as a flimsy excuse to put Neve Campbell and Denise Richards in bikinis and, eventually, bed together.
The direct-to-DVD sequels to "Wild Things" did little to dispel this notion. "Wild Things 2" and "Wild Things 3: Diamonds In the Rough" switched the actresses, but kept the threesomes. This year's "Wild Things Foursome" promises to add a new wrinkle to the series, though, from the title, we're not sure if they're going for a sex act or a day at the golf course.
-- Any movie with a memorable quote emblazoned on a t-shirt
Men quote lines from movies far more than women. And, for the most part, the ladies are not as impressed with your arcane ability to conjure up dialogue from, say, "Talladega Nights" as you might think they should be. Quote "The Godfather" and you might win grudging respect. Quote "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"? Borderline. More annoying than winning, really. Go around quoting "The Goonies," and ... well ... let's just say you'll never have to deal with the opposite sex in any meaningful fashion.
MEN
-- Any movie starring Sandra Bullock (except for the one where she's driving the bus)
Yes, as per Constitutional requirement, we like Bullock. She's smart, funny and seemingly down-to-earth. She also makes a lot of crappy movies. There's the one where she and Keanu Reeves discover a wrinkle in the space-time continuum and fall in love with the help of a magic mailbox. There's the one where she pretends to be the fiancée of a comatose man, deceiving the man's family in a host of cute and unforgivably cruel ways. There's the one where her husband's dead ... except he's not. There are the dozen others where she plays an impossibly adorable wounded bird. And there's the one that won her an Oscar for playing a saintly (and feisty!) mother hen who takes in a homeless African-American kid and teaches him to play left tackle.
Again, we like Sandy. We'd love to grab a bowl of gumbo with her in her newly adopted New Orleans digs. But she chooses material that Oprah's Book Club would throw out on the first pass. And "The Blind Side" made football boring. Guys can forgive a host of transgressions, but don't f*** with football, Sandra! It's important.
-- "Beaches"
Just like there's no crying in baseball, guys don't want to be dabbing their eyes in the movie theaters. "Beaches" may not be the worst manipulative tearjerker ever made, but it might be the most shameless in the way it collects the clichés of the genre. Women like fatal illness movies. Men do not, particularly ones that have Bette Midler constantly breaking into song.
-- "Marley & Me"
What's worse than a sappy tearjerker, though, is a movie that markets itself as a comic romp involving man's best friend (Woof! Woof! Good boy!) and then proceeds -- in exacting, excruciating detail, mind you -- to kill man's best friend on the vet table, leaving you reduced to a wet washcloth and hating yourself for it. Let me repeat: They killed the dog. In. The. Movie. You saw the needle, the dog's eyes closing and, like the vet said, Marley just slips away. IN EXTREME CLOSEUP. How can you not cry? But they're tears of rage, bitter tears that we've saved and stored in a jar, a container we will hurl at Owen Wilson's feet the next time we see him. Judas! We expect this from Luke, but you? We thought you were a better man.
-- "The Twilight Saga: The New Moon" (and probably every future "Twilight" sequel)
No one begrudges fan girls their right to their own geeky franchise. And we could even get with the first movie (a little), thanks to Kristen Stewart's instinctive intensity and the way director Catherine Hardwicke bored into all the young lust and longing. But when "Twilight" became "The Twilight Saga" with its second entry, "New Moon," it became pretty clear that faithfulness to the doorstop-sized source material would prove more frightening than anything a sparkly vampire could offer. Guys are willing to put up with a lot, but spending 130 minutes with the brooding Belle in "New Moon" didn't exactly serve as a jumping off point for an evening of romance. And, really, why else would a dude go to one of these movies?
-- "Mamma Mia!"
Strike one: Abba. Strike two: Pierce Brosnan singing Abba. Strike three: Pierce Brosnan singning Abba ("S.O.S.," if you want to get specific) that has been scored too high for his (how shall we put this?) *modest* vocal abilities. But, really, you were out with strike one. The rest just intensified the ensuing punishment.
2 Replies
737 Views