BEFORE: Well, "Wonder Woman" is sort of DC's take on the old Greek Gods, at least it was in the past, with some stories depicting her as the daughter of Zeus and Hippolyta. By coincidence, I've just started watching the third season of "American Gods" on Starz, which is based on a novel from Neil Gaiman, one that mashes up the Norse, Greek, African and other gods, pitting them against the newer gods like Technology and Media in a giant battle that the show never seems to want to get around to depicting. I mean, this is how TV can really ruin a story, by annoyingly never getting to the point, to the climax of the book. This should have been a one-season miniseries, and now the show is in its third, and hopefully final, season. But I don't want to peek ahead at the listings, or even remind myself of the plot of the book, which I DID read, because I've kind of forgotten what happens at the end, so this way, no spoilers. But come on, already...
Also, speaking of superheroes, I just found out that Marvel's "Black Widow" film has been delayed yet again, and the release date has been moved from May 9 to July 9 - of course, because just last week I figured out a path from my Easter film all the way to where I could review "Black Widow" on May `10 or 11. Silly me, my mistake was making a plan and getting excited about it. So now maybe I need a new target for May, like maybe Mother's Day, and I'll try to work backwards from there and see where I can intercept the chain I already set up, and then table "Black Widow" ONCE AGAIN for July.
I hope today's film is appropriate for Women's History Month, yesterday my focus was on a female superhero, and today it's female bosses. Natasha Rothwell carries over from "Wonder Woman 1984".
March 24 in Women's History marks the anniversary of the start of the 1921 Women's Olympiad, the first international women's sports event - that feels like something. It's also the birthday of American poet and composer Fanny Crosby (born in 1820), Japanese chemist Chika Kuroda, first woman in Japan to get a Bachelor of Science degree (born in 1884), African-American civil rights and women's rights activist Dorothy Height (born in 1812), and actresses Annabella Sciorra, Lara Flynn Boyle, Tig Notaro, Alyson Hannigan, Jessica Chastain and Lake Bell. (It's Steve McQueen's birthday, too, but clearly I celebrated that three days too early.)
THE PLOT: Two friends with very different ideals start a beauty company together. One is more practical while the other wants to earn her fortune and live a lavish lifestyle.
AFTER: Ugh, I wasn't expecting this film to be "Citizen Kane", but still, I'd hoped it would be better than this. Even though it's a comedy, there was an opportunity here to depict women as competent business owners and still be funny, but the filmmakers just thought it would be easier to just throw the whole gender under the bus. The two lead characters are business partners who NEVER agree, and yet somehow they both end up being wrong about everything, which doesn't seem like it should be possible. I mean, with any business decision you have to figure that if they disagree one should be right and one should be wrong, or at least "more right" or "less wrong", but nothing ever seems to work that way.
Instead, one will propose something and the other one will immediately disagree, then they go back and forth on that issue for a while, then nothing gets resolved because one will just give up and walk away. Nobody on earth could hope to run a business this way, it's not an environment conducive to getting things done. Perhaps the writers should have just watched ANY episode of "Shark Tank", because there's this thing called negotiating where two parties maybe can come gradually closer together and eventually land on some kind of deal or resolution, but nearly everything here is black or white, yes or "HELL, no!" and it's neither realistic or funny, not in the least.
The two women are supposed to be best friends, but they never really act like it - except maybe when you consider they live together, and one is always doing things for the other, like putting the toothpaste on her friend's toothbrush. Umm, but nobody ever does that for someone else in real life, unless it's for a small child. Did the writers not understand friendship either, so they had to create some kind of equivalent co-dependency kind of messed-up relationship thingie? Because that's what this is, only it takes the characters the length of the entire movie to become aware of this. This partnership needed therapy from the start, and then mixing this messed-up thing-that-resembles-friendship with a bad business plan, that's a recipe for disaster. The intention here was to have one friend/partner with the confidence to succeed, and have the other one more practical and able to handle the realities of business, only then if that's such a good match, why not have that, you know, WORK?
Salvation seems to come in the form of a more successful businesswoman with a more successful cosmetics company, who appears to like a couple of Mel and Mia's ideas, so she offers to absorb their debt, in exchange for 49% of their company, with the proviso that if one of them quits the company, she then gets controlling interest. In case you can't figure out what's coming, their savior, Claire Luna, then sets out to make life miserable for the two women, so that one of them will quit. But before that, there's a lot of the same, over and over, with one partner afraid to mention how deeply in debt they are, and the other one automatically saying NO to whatever the first one says YES to. Again, they just keep disagreeing way too much to be considered anything even close to friends - even Simon and Garfunkel stayed friends long enough to make a couple of albums before self-destructing.
Worse, this plays into all the bad stereotypes about women in business - the woman who's more realistic about money and risk doesn't have a plan for how to get the company out of debt, and her partner who's more talented with the make-up ideas can't bring herself to complete a task or tidy up after herself, so no discipline. And the more successful woman apparently only got to be that way by lying, cheating and firing her partner back in the day. (Careful, don't trip over the several obvious mentions of her old partner, because that could be important later...) As buddy comedies go, this one somehow manages to make "Superbad" and "Step Brothers" subtle by comparison.
Then there are the extra gags that go nowhere, from the drones that fly around the cosmetics company for no stated reason, to the bit with the ghost pepper that just shows someone trying to copy the formula of "Bridesmaids" or maybe "Girls Trip". This is from the same director as "Duck Butter" and from three writers with not a lot of screenplay credits, and it really shows. It makes me wonder if the writers had ever even SEEN a movie before, let alone written one - if you told me there was no credited writer, I would find that easy to believe.
Really, just a modicum of research into the cosmetics industry would have helped here - these writers believe that owning a cosmetics company is the same as owning a hair salon, and it's not. Mel and Mia run some kind of make-up salon, which I'm pretty sure isn't even a thing. Being professional make-up artists and being cosmetics designers or manufactureres are also two different professions, but this movie doesn't make any distinction there, either - it's all lumped together in a big pile. And most business deals require contracts and lawyers, but why get bogged down in all that realism when everyone involved is able to shout out contract terms which are then somehow legally binding? Then, of course, every new product is launched via a party, not a print campaign or a TV commercial or a meeting of sales representatives. It's baffling that anyone could look at this and see any reflection of the real business world.
Also starring Tiffany Haddish (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie") Rose Byrne (last seen in "Instant Family"), Salma Hayek (last seen in "Drunk Parents"), Jennifer Coolidge (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Billy Porter, Ari Graynor (last seen in "What's Your Number?"), Jessica St. Clair (last seen in "The House"), Karan Soni (last seen in "Always Be My Maybe"), Jacob Latimore (last seen in "Collateral Beauty"), Jimmy O. Yang (last seen in "The Happytime Murders"), Ryan Hansen (last seen in "Bad Santa 2"), Lisa Kudrow (last seen in "Booksmart"), Veronica Merrell, Vanessa Merrell, Caroline Arapoglou, Catherine Carlen
RATING: 3 out of 10 amateur ceviches
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