trinityvixen | (no subject)

A lazy weekend was the answer to last week's insanity. I literally did nothing, and it felt great. We find out tomorrow about the apartment, so I'm anxious again, but quite willing to distract myself with the pleasure of

saikogrrl's company for her last night in town.

So for those of you who don't know, the movie's about a guy who had a really close girl friend who he wanted to be his girlfriend. At the time they were close, said guy was probably close to a hundred pounds overweight in addition to all the usual movie-nerd cliches (the braces, the bashfulness, unruly curly hair). He gets embarrassed when his secret crush is exposed and runs away to L.A. where he becomes Ryan Reynolds, so about 6' 2", 180 lbs with nothing but muscle, perfect teeth and a nice haircut and tan. He then ends up back at home and attempts to rekindle friendship and push his way into something more with the old object of his affection. This being Hollywood, you can guess at the usual bumps and hurdles as well as the inevitable ending.

How infuriating is that? For starters, I think it's fair to say that the girl, who starts out liking him "like a brother" (despite many, many unsibling-like behaviors) and moves towards liking him, is as deep as a puddle. I don't buy the "she always loved him, just didn't know it" excuse. Fact is, he was Ryan Reynolds in a fat suit, and now, through no work or effort of her own, she gets Ryan Reynolds, hot-bodied pretty-faced boy madly in love with her (WHY!?). That she's not impressed with his slick California attitude is clear, but there's never enough made of her not being impressed with his physical transformation to justify her obvious shallowness. First time they meet up, she exclaims happily that she can put her arms around him now. Bitch.

I really hate this attitude towards heavier people in movies. I further hate, much as I like the actor, that they chose a skinny guy to wear the fat suit instead of going with a heftier guy period, letting him stay his own weight and merely altering his attitude, clothing, and grooming habits a little. Furthermore, no stick-insect like this girl should ever attempt at getting sympathy by claiming she's not as trim as the girls out in L.A. If you want the girl of a guy's dreams to be a tad pudgy onscreen, find someone who is about average to act the part so her insecurity rings genuine instead of pathetic. Skinny people are not allowed to bogart overweight people's issues, especially not actresses who've never felt their stomach roll over their jeans when they sat down. Just. No.

The central debate to the film is whether a guy can move out of a girl's "friend zone." In the movie, I definitely agreed with the one angry missive the guy shot off about her--this girl was a cocktease. Much as the feminist in me loathes to say it, that's what she was. She jumped all over her "brother" friend, flashed her panties at him, had sleepovers in the same bed with him, and basically used him to dump all her trauma over other boys on without ever once, that we saw, asking him if that was okay. It's pretty cruel to do to a teenage boy.

However, I find the idea of the "friend zone" particularly heinous because, in the extras on the film, it was clear that it was a phenomena experienced mostly by men, and the way it was articulated by them, I could read between the lines to see as much of their misinterpretation as their having fashioned crushes on girls who led them on. I'm sure there are friendships where girl or boy have had more romantic interests in one or the other partner, but it seems it's a specifically male idea that women are intractable and do not ever switch men between categories of friend vs. lover.

To say that's sexist backlash from some disappointed guys isn't much of an overstatement. As for the specific example in the film, I could defend the girl--we have the right to make friends gender-equal, so that may very well mean making a member of the opposite sex as close to us as a member of the same--but her behavior was flighty, erratic, and prone to 180-degree turnarounds depending on a given situation. A girl like that would give anyone mixed signals. In real life, though, I find it offensive that women should be reprimanded for not having sexual attraction to guy friends with whom they are very close. A lot of the time, the nice part about those friendships is the ability to understand a male perspective in a discussion or just in life without the drama of sex or romance mucking things up (when it gets intimate like that, it takes a long time to build up the trust necessary to just give points of view without couching them or mitigating them).

Not to say I don't believe in true love et al, but if the spark's not there, it just isn't. Being around for a woman as friend may not lead to romantic, sexual love. Then again it might. A lot of this playa-minded confusion and dejection could be avoided if there were more openness in friendships. If you can't talk to your friends--especially about issues so important as love and attraction--that's fairly sad.

I started playing Clive Barker's The Undying again this weekend when I had nothing else to accomplish in the many, many other video games I'm involved with. That game freaks me the fuck out. It's creeeeeepy. And good fun, and silly as all get out. It's like a cheesier, older precursor to something like Eternal Darkness, complete with the melodramatic absorption of magic spells/tomes/scrolls. I think I remember how it ends, but I'm constantly surprised at the events in the gameplay. It makes for a nice hard-core distraction from my OCD addiction to Animal Crossing.

I only need one more new fish before July. One more...