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STUDIO: New Line
MSRP: $24.98
RATED: PG-13
RUNNING TIME: 114 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Additional Scenes
• “The Women Behind The Women”
• “The Women: The Legacy”
The Pitch
Women watch shitty movies.
The Humans
Meg Ryan, Candice Bergen, Carrie Fisher, Bette Midler, Eva Mendes, Debra Messing, Jada Pinkett-Smith and Annette Bening
The Nutshell
George Cukor originally crafted a charming tale about the struggles of the rising independent woman. That was way back in 1939. Now, we’ve got a rather half-assed look at how much of a backslide has been taken in the 70 years since that initial film. Meg Ryan isn’t Joan Crawford by any stretch of the imagination. So, sit back and take a gander at one of the worst films of 2008.
How many people killed themselves after seeing In the Cut? The entire population of New Zealand? Really? I’d like to see some numbers to back that up….I’ll wait.
The Lowdown
The Women wants to be a bold statement about the role of women in the new century. What unravels over the course of 114 minutes is an exercise in estrogen-powered bullshit. It’s easy to fault the off-mark writing of Diane English or to pin the blame on the unbalanced ensemble of actresses. Hell, you can even pin the failure on the bizarre black and white sentence that looks shoe-horned in as B-Reel material. But, that’s making excuses for a film that was destined to fail from its inception.
I honestly could give two shits about the Feminist movement. So, I’m not going to wax poetic about how great the original Cukor flick was. It was dated about a decade after release, as it over indulged in the maudlin bullshit that was the backbone of mainstream drama in that era. Diane English makes a mistake with her remake that doomed to damper her film before time manhandled it. She became so involved with making a revelant piece about being a woman, that she forgot about making a functioning story.
The dialogue is pretty fucking wretched when you consider writer/director Diane English’s background. That leads into where the central plot doesn’t work. Through sheer gossip, the lead woman finds out that her husband is cheating on her with a shopgirl. Does anyone bother to find out more than this? Is anytime spent on Meg Ryan’s character figuring out what led to this betrayal by her husband? No. She calls on her girlfriends to come together and eat comfort food. There’s no rationality or human growth shown in her actions. Meg Ryan just gets a few scenes of ‘tarding out and sinking further into Pia Zadora territory.
The Women is a mess. Halfway through the film, I feel that Diane English was picking up on this. You see her break out the aging stalwarts of the Hollywood machine. Well, it’s mainly a collection of female actors that owed her favors or needed the cash. Carrie Fisher, Bette Midler and Candice Bergen are fucking better than this. Getting five to fifteen minutes to make a quick bow and to spout some witty lines of inspiration is beneath them. That might as well have wheeled out Charlotte Rae’s bloating fat ass to make Meg Ryan look semi-human when talking to her daughter about using tampons.
The Package
The Women comes
to
Blu-Ray with a thud. New Line shat the bed earlier in the year, so they placed the Blu-Ray responsibility on Warner Brothers. WB said fuck it to making new features for the BR version and what you get is a non-HD version of supplementals. But, do you really need to see Botox faces bragging about a shit film in HD? EPK material is such garbage anyways, I don’t need a gig of the disc given to it.
The
special features don’t really offer up much for the replay value. Hell, if you make it to the supplementals…I’d be impressed. I’d also call you a liar, but shit movies like this make me hostile. All I see when watching this flick is money that could’ve been spent on better things. Things such as buying cocaine for starving kids or what have you.
I know that most of the CHUD faithful will not even give this film a second glance. Honestly, don’t even give it the first glance. If you’re lucky to have a significant other, explain to them how this film is a visual Holocaust. A cacophony of aural/visual mindfucks that work together to make you simple. If she still wants to watch this, then you could always kill yourself. It’s a one-time Get Out of Jail Free card.
Someone farted in binary code. Guess who?