WHAT MEN WANT

WHAT MEN WANT is exactly the kind of film you watch after a year in lockdown when you have no social life and nothing better to do. I knew the reviews were bad, but I had a genuine fondness for the 2000 original WHAT WOMEN WANT and saw Tracy Morgan on the cast list and thought, well, how bad can this be? 

The answer is very, very bad indeed. This film is so humourless, joyless, lacking in originality or surprise, that it genuinely boggles the mind. Adam Shankman (BEDTIME STORIES) directs like a hack. Scenes slickly move forward, but nothing coheres, nothing moves, whether to laughter or tears. It's all just deeply blah.

Taraji P Henson is utterly wasted in the Mel Gibson role. She plays a tough as nails sports agent raised by her single dad (Richard Roundtree). She fears she's being blocked from promotion because she's a woman. But one of the more troubling aspects of this film is that while she IS being disinvited from the boys' poker games, she's actually being blocked not because she's a woman but because she's just not very nice, and certainly not a team player. So essentially this is a film about how its progonist is a dick, and the men are actually okay. Weird. 

Also this may be one of the very few films in which Tracy Morgan - playing the dad of the young sports star the heroine has to sign to make promotion - is just annoying and unfunny.  What a crime against cinema! All of the scriptwriters -and there are many - need to go and sit in the corner and think very carefully about what they have done.

WHAT MEN WANT was released in 2019 but is now streaming on Netflix. This makes the marginal cost of watching it zero but that's still too much.  It is rated R and has a running time of 117 minutes. 

TRUMBO - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day 3

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It isn't too hard to imagine a time when an over-weaning government declared an un-ending war against an abstract noun and used that war to invade its citizen's privacy and over-ride their constitutional protections.  But I suppose there is some savage comfort in knowing that there are no new challenges that haven't already been overcome.  And as the protagonist of this new movie tells us, there are no heroes or villains, just ordinary people victimised by the terrible choices they should never have been asked to make.

So let us turn to the particular. It's the late 1940s and America is in a Cold War with the Soviet Union.  It's government has decided to investigate communist party members at home, despite the fact that it is not illegal to be a member of the Communist party.  In Hollywood, a group of right wing fearful and powerful individuals - including Ronald Reagan and the influential gossip columnist Hedda Hopper - make it their business to expose the Communists and blackmail any studio who hires them with picket lines and protests.  They might act from a misplaced sense of patriotism but the tactics are dirty, and hint at the latent anti-semitism in the Hollywood system at the time. 

RECOUNT - liberal masochism

RECOUNT is a HBO movie depicting the fateful period after the 2000 US Presidential Election. The confusing design of the ballot led Democratic voters to vote Republican, and the Gore campaign asked for a recount. The Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, effectively stopped a full recount letting the pro-Republican result stand - a decision sanctioned by the US Supreme Court. And so the world was saddled with W. To those of us with a liberal turn of mind, the result was a travesty of justice and democracy. This movie panders to those views. To our opponents, the movie will be seen as partisan and therefore rejected. 

So let's assume that only liberals have a desire to watch this film, does it deliver? No. Because Jay Roach (MEET THE FOCKERS) can't decide whether he's directing a serious political expose or a broad comedy. As expose the movie fails because it doesn't actually tell us anything we don't already know. The Gore camp played by the rules, lacked the stomach for a balls-out cat-fight for the presidency and lost. The Bush camp had better lawyers, owned the institutions in Florida, and triumphed. Re-heating the debacle is just pure masochism. Sure, Kevin Spacey and Denis Leary as Gore campaigners do their best to look horrified by the lack of commitment on the part of their bosses and the evil machinations of the GOP, but seriously, what do we learn? 

Worse still, the broad comedy undermines the seriousness of the issues, and is, in fact, unnecessary. Katherine Graham is ludicrous enough without Laura Dern's caricature, and Tom Wilkinson's James Baker is a pantomime villain. The real truth of the recount is horrifying enough without camping it up.

Overall then, as someone who loves politics and thinks of herself as a liberal, I was sorely disappointed by this movie. I can't help but think that a more balanced documentary would've served us better.

RECOUNT is an HBO TV movie shown in 2008. It was released in the UK, Spain, Switzerland, the Philippines and Hungary last autumn and is available on DVD.