One For The Money
Feb. 16th, 2012 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficYes, they made a movie out of those "Two For The Show/S Is For Strangle" books your mom reads. Remember? It came out this year?
Yeah, the books are outside my niche too, although I have given thought to starting my own series based on the Greek alphabet. Sadly, no publishers are interested in "Beta Version Of A Murder." But the premise goes that Stephanie Plum, your average female character--you know, someone who's supposed to read Cathy and go "That's so me!" instead of "Why am I reading a newspaper comic? What is this, the 90s?"--loses her job and becomes a bail bondswoman. Since she's, you know, a girl, she's all comedically inept at stuff, but she has a swoon-worthy male friend who shows her the ropes as she goes after an ex-boyfriend with a large bounty on his head. He is also swoon-worthy. And I guess down the line the three of them get into all sorts of soap operaing. It's sorta like the dynamic in every urban fantasy novel ever, only no one's a vampire or a werewolf.
The elephant in the room here is Katherine Heigl, blah blah weight joke, who stars in the lead role. She kinda fascinates me, because here's a woman who had it all--the lead role on a popular show, a burgeoning movie career-and basically flushed it simply by acting like a douche. And it's easy to write her off as a douche, but it makes me wonder. Is she getting judged more harshly because she's a woman? Just for instance, she never beat up Madonna, which puts her one up on Sean Penn (unless you really don't like Madonna). But then, a lot of female performers do have diva reputations; you could almost say that's part of their charm. So does she just not have the talent or the prestige to back up her acting out? It's not like she was doing Shakespeare, even at the height of her stardom. So... what is it? Is she just that douchey or are there other factors at work?
The relevance is that One For The Money has gotten some awful reviews. It's a two on Rotten Tomatoes--I didn't know the scale went that low. Like, that's the point where the tomato stops being rotten and becomes some weird mutant thing that goes around trying to impregnate you with its spawn. And OFTM just isn't that... offensive to me. It's not good, but its chief sin is being forgettable. It doesn't actively shit on me, like the Transformers movies, or shit on things I like, like Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, or star Shia LeBeouf, like any movie with Shia LeBeouf in it. It makes me wonder if the movie would get that as much venom if, say, Rachel McAdams were in the lead.
Not that I'm trying to defend it. OFTM (yeah, that's not going to catch on) is in this weird category where if I caught it on TV, I'd say "well, that was okay," but I can see how if you paid ten bucks for it, plus popcorn and whatnot (you fat bastard), you'd be just "fuck you, Heigl!" It's just such a TV movie, the kind of thing you're surprised to see outside its natural environment of the USA network at 2 PM. It stars TV actors like "the guy from Terra Nova" and "the guy from Rescue Me" (and "the girl from Grey's Anatomy" for that matter).
There's even a credits sequence that looks like a TV opening, with Flash animation of bullets next to lipstick containers, because a girl? Carrying a gun? How kooky! It's not like a week before, Underworld: Awakening and Haywire, two films about women using guns, came out.
I miss TV openings. Now everything just has a title card, a musical stinger, and then they roll the credits during the show. Remember in the 80s, when things actually had theme songs? Like The A-Team. Who's starring in this show? George Peppard! What could he do this episode? Maybe he'll smoke a cigar! Or shoot a machine gun! Or dress up as a tree! YOU DON'T KNOW!
Man, Castle would be twenty times better with a big wacky theme song.
Anyway, it's a thriller with no real "thrills" or action scenes (and I know the character of Stephanie Plum isn't a Marine or anything, but even Pineapple Express had fun doing a car chase where the characters really weren't stunt drivers). And it's a comedy without any big comedic setpieces, where the jokes just build and build. Instead it just kinda putters along, waiting for a commercial break. Now, maybe that's true to the book, but if the book is so uncinematic, maybe they shouldn't have made a movie out of it.
So, One For The Money. It's not that bad, but it's still pretty bad.
Yeah, the books are outside my niche too, although I have given thought to starting my own series based on the Greek alphabet. Sadly, no publishers are interested in "Beta Version Of A Murder." But the premise goes that Stephanie Plum, your average female character--you know, someone who's supposed to read Cathy and go "That's so me!" instead of "Why am I reading a newspaper comic? What is this, the 90s?"--loses her job and becomes a bail bondswoman. Since she's, you know, a girl, she's all comedically inept at stuff, but she has a swoon-worthy male friend who shows her the ropes as she goes after an ex-boyfriend with a large bounty on his head. He is also swoon-worthy. And I guess down the line the three of them get into all sorts of soap operaing. It's sorta like the dynamic in every urban fantasy novel ever, only no one's a vampire or a werewolf.
The elephant in the room here is Katherine Heigl, blah blah weight joke, who stars in the lead role. She kinda fascinates me, because here's a woman who had it all--the lead role on a popular show, a burgeoning movie career-and basically flushed it simply by acting like a douche. And it's easy to write her off as a douche, but it makes me wonder. Is she getting judged more harshly because she's a woman? Just for instance, she never beat up Madonna, which puts her one up on Sean Penn (unless you really don't like Madonna). But then, a lot of female performers do have diva reputations; you could almost say that's part of their charm. So does she just not have the talent or the prestige to back up her acting out? It's not like she was doing Shakespeare, even at the height of her stardom. So... what is it? Is she just that douchey or are there other factors at work?
The relevance is that One For The Money has gotten some awful reviews. It's a two on Rotten Tomatoes--I didn't know the scale went that low. Like, that's the point where the tomato stops being rotten and becomes some weird mutant thing that goes around trying to impregnate you with its spawn. And OFTM just isn't that... offensive to me. It's not good, but its chief sin is being forgettable. It doesn't actively shit on me, like the Transformers movies, or shit on things I like, like Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, or star Shia LeBeouf, like any movie with Shia LeBeouf in it. It makes me wonder if the movie would get that as much venom if, say, Rachel McAdams were in the lead.
Not that I'm trying to defend it. OFTM (yeah, that's not going to catch on) is in this weird category where if I caught it on TV, I'd say "well, that was okay," but I can see how if you paid ten bucks for it, plus popcorn and whatnot (you fat bastard), you'd be just "fuck you, Heigl!" It's just such a TV movie, the kind of thing you're surprised to see outside its natural environment of the USA network at 2 PM. It stars TV actors like "the guy from Terra Nova" and "the guy from Rescue Me" (and "the girl from Grey's Anatomy" for that matter).
There's even a credits sequence that looks like a TV opening, with Flash animation of bullets next to lipstick containers, because a girl? Carrying a gun? How kooky! It's not like a week before, Underworld: Awakening and Haywire, two films about women using guns, came out.
I miss TV openings. Now everything just has a title card, a musical stinger, and then they roll the credits during the show. Remember in the 80s, when things actually had theme songs? Like The A-Team. Who's starring in this show? George Peppard! What could he do this episode? Maybe he'll smoke a cigar! Or shoot a machine gun! Or dress up as a tree! YOU DON'T KNOW!
Man, Castle would be twenty times better with a big wacky theme song.
Anyway, it's a thriller with no real "thrills" or action scenes (and I know the character of Stephanie Plum isn't a Marine or anything, but even Pineapple Express had fun doing a car chase where the characters really weren't stunt drivers). And it's a comedy without any big comedic setpieces, where the jokes just build and build. Instead it just kinda putters along, waiting for a commercial break. Now, maybe that's true to the book, but if the book is so uncinematic, maybe they shouldn't have made a movie out of it.
So, One For The Money. It's not that bad, but it's still pretty bad.
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-16 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 03:16 am (UTC)I do think that her being a woman might have had something to do with the collapse of her brand, but Heigl's primary constituency in her prime was women themselves. I think the problem was that her offscreen personality became such a clash with the sort of role she tended to play onscreen that female audiences began to reject her.