Network Femonomics: The Women of V

With Lost nearing the end of its six-season run, ABC has been trying to find an action-packed scifi replacement for primetime. One of these new shows is V, a remake of an eighties series wherein aliens come to Earth purporting to help humanity, but with ulterior sinister motives. We don't know yet what those motives are, but I think they are going to eat people. The show has excellent production values, a super-attractive cast, and plenty action and special effects (also fair-to-middling writing, but you can't have it all.) But by far the most exciting part of this show is that it features three women as starring heroes and villains.

Femonomics at the Movies: The Joneses

The Viewer's Angle

The Joneses takes us into the lives of Steve and Kate "Jones," an upper-middle (who are we kidding, upper) class family that literally has it all - the cars, the clothes, the jewelry, the toys. The twist is that this family is actually a stealth marketing unit embedded in the community as taste-makers employed to drive sales of clients' products. I personally enjoyed the movie as fairly light-hearted and mildly thought-provoking, although as Ebert notes in his review, a key flaw is the tone the movie never quite strikes. Is it a romantic comedy or a tragic morality play? It tries to be both, which is perhaps more authentic but makes the narrative jerky and leaves the viewer without resolution.

David Duchovny as Steve and Demi Moore as Kate prove themselves decent actors and do seem made for the role - sex symbols selling a certain type of conspicuously consumptive lifestyle. Ben Hollingsworth and Amber Heard play their children Mick and Jennifer, and it is quite a stretch to imagine these striking actors in their mid-twenties as high school students. Each of these characters is moderately developed in the film, but a lot more could have been done. The writers hew closely enough to common stereotypes (the nymphomaniac, the washed-up athlete, the too-ambitious single executive) that nothing is particularly provocative, a shame when the concept for the film could have been taken further.

Is Precious failing to cross over? Or did its distributors fail it? (And the race controversies of Precious)

EW’s Owen Gleiberman recently ran a piece on whether Precious is failing to resonate with wide audiences after a stellar run in limited release.  In another post, he suggests it “peaked too early.”  He worries that the film was only intensely appealing to African American and Art-house audiences, who largely drove its huge initial run.  Rather than psychoanalyze the film’s mass appeal, I favor a simpler explanation—the film was simply overshadowed by other Oscar-contending and heavily buzzed about pics, and didn’t reach audiences while they still had mental space for it.  To me, it seems like a case of the distributors failing to seize upon the positive initial buzz and expanding while people were still talking about the movie.  Slow releases have worked for indie films before, notably Napoleon Dynamite, but only where buzz was slow to build.  Precious has been out in industry circles since January ‘09, when it premiered at Sundance under the title “Push”, and was generating huge positive press, such as a front-cover Times magazine piece, right around the time of its limited release.  I think the distributors made a mistake by continuing to bank those big per theater grosses, without realizing they were coming at a cost to the film’s ultimate theatrical run.