The Other Guys

Directed by Adam McKay
Columbia Pictures



Adam McKay is one of a million: a writer and director who can put together a great trailer. Too bad the feature presentation of The Other Guys is so long and boring that it chokes on its own machismo.

The underwhelming tragedy of The Other Guys is that Saturday Night Live veteran McKay is the same fellow behind the hilarious Funny or Die short The Landlord and Anchorman. Then again, he’s also the guy behind other Will Ferrell flops like Talladega Nights and Step Brothers. Clearly, the McKay and Ferrell duo is destined to be hit-or-miss.

The Other Guys starts off promising. Two over-the-top cop heroes (Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson) barrel through New York City chasing teenagers who are in possession of a negligible amount of marijuana. They destroy millions of dollars of property and endanger dozens of lives, but they do it to the soundtrack of their own gunfire and acerbic quips. These two men get the glory—and of course, the trophy sex-with-women that goes along with it. The other dozen New York Police Department detectives—they get the paperwork.

This film is the story of two NYPD “other guys.” Desk-ridden detective partners Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) and Allen Gamble (Ferrell) don’t get out from behind their computers much, because one accidentally shot someone and the other craves safety. These two uncover a fishy financial deal, but for reasons completely unexplained (there’s no corruption involved) the police chief and district attorney thwart Hoitz and Gamble’s every move to investigate.

What follows is 107 minutes that will seem like an eternity of you’re-like-a-woman-and-that’s-bad jokes. Because, you see, there are apparently no women in this film’s NYPD (aside from a counselor), and the men basically only insult each other about being effeminate. What defines ladylike in The Other Guys? The way one’s urine sounds hitting a urinal, talking about shooting someone without bragging, and driving a Prius (bonus points for equating environmentalism with emasculation). And what defines manhood? Learning to dance just to make fun of homos, lamenting the fact that your son is bisexual or saying the word bitch ad nauseam. And the thing is, you don’t particularly care if Gamble and Hoitz catch the bad guy (Steve Coogan), because Gamble is an accountant at heart, and Hoitz is just an unrelenting asshole. The bad guy is much more entertaining.

But even if you were following the plot, the barrage of woman-hating language and themes in this film is hugely distracting, although frankly there’s not much to distract from. Aside from the language, there’s the classic (and somehow never not endearing in the world of film) side plot about a girlfriend who went from restraining order to marriage vows in about fifteen minutes since, really, stalking is flattering in romantic courtship.

And then there’s the whole Gamble’s ugly wife jokes. The twist here is that his wife (Eva Mendes) is objectively hot, if you’re into the whole American-beauty-standards ideal. Ferrell’s character spends the whole film lamenting, to her and to others, that she’s an ugly duckling and sucks at cooking. The ways he seems dissatisfied are the things that are traditionally valued in women—beauty and domestic aptitude. Hoitz and the audience wonder throughout the film: What’s the reason for Gamble’s odd point of view? Well, Gamble later confesses that he doesn’t feel he deserves such a wonderful, beautiful wife so he understates her attributes (to say the least) to keep her from leaving him. How sweet, and how unlike real-life domestic violence.

Hands down, the best part of this dud is the credits, which graphically show how a Ponzi scheme works. (I guess all of a sudden this film considers itself to mostly be about finance?) These credits will cool you down from being pissed that you heard the best jokes a month ago when you saw the trailer before Inception. You’ll realize while watching the credits that the inexplicable narration voice you were trying to place is Law & Order’s Ice-T. You’ll also realize you should have lobbied harder to see The Kids Are All Right earlier that evening.

Please, stay away from this drivel. Even the above examples don’t fully capture the constant onslaught of absurd fodder this film gives even the most casual feminist (or person who thinks that women are full humans). Let’s wrap this piece of crap up with a few words of wisdom, courtesy of The Other Guys: “She overreacted… she’s a woman.”

Review by Smalls

Cross-posted at Ladybrain Reviews

Captive Queen: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine

By Alison Weir
Ballantine Books

Alison Weir is first a historian, and it shows in Captive Queen. She studied Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1970s and 1990s and realized one day that “the nature of medieval biography, particularly of women, is the piecing together of fragments of information and making sense of them. It can be a frustrating task, as there are often gaps that you know you can never fill.”

Captive Queen explores Eleanor’s life from just before her marriage to Henry FitzEmpress (later Henry II, King of England) until just after Henry’s death in 1189. There is also an epilogue that covers her death in 1204. At the beginning, there’s a map of lower England and Aquitaine, Normandy, Brittany, and France, which are all parts of present-day France. Also included is a helpful flowchart of Eleanor and Henry’s genealogy, which I referred to numerous times when I was trying to remember minor characters.

The novel itself is split into five parts, each representing a stage in Eleanor’s life and marriage to Henry. The first part is a rosy depiction of Eleanor’s early life with Henry. At the time of their wedding, he was eighteen and she was twenty-nine and already had two daughters. They were married just two months after the annulment of her marriage to the King of France, Louis VII. Eleanor’s marriage to King Henry was tumultuous: she fought with Henry often about his rule of her lands. At the same time, however, it was steamy; it wasn’t even twenty pages in before the first bedroom scene occurs. Still, it’s clear she wanted a partnership of equals, not a man to rule over her as husband and lord, which was the norm at the time, especially for women in royalty.

The following four parts accentuate her desire to be included in affairs of state, rule her lands equitably, and be treated as more than “the wife of King Henry and mother of his children.” The second part covers her apparent rivalry with Thomas Becket. In the third part, Weir writes about Eleanor and Henry’s sons: Young Henry, Richard (who would become Richard the Lionheart), Geoffrey, and John (later to become King John, best known for signing the Magna Carta and for being a primary antagonist in most Robin Hood legends).

After encouraging her sons to rebel (unsuccessfully) against their father, Henry placed Eleanor under house arrest for more than fifteen years, most notably in Sarum, Wiltshire (the earliest settlement of present-day Salisbury, England). There, she received very little news from outside the confines of her imprisonment but was finally freed upon Henry’s death in 1189. In the novel, she says to her gaoler, “Master Berneval, I command you, in the name of King Richard, to set me at liberty at once.” And he does.

Two things irked me about Captive Queen, and neither are the author’s fault. The first is Henry’s repeated insistence (and everyone else’s assumption) that women are meant to be child-bearers and nothing more. Eleanor herself even notes that she is most proud of her daughters when they produce children—hopefully sons—for their husbands. The second is that Eleanor’s life revolves around the men in it, no matter how much she wants to rule her lands herself or how intelligent and magnanimous she is in acting as Henry’s regent. The first thing is the unfortunate sexist reality Eleanor had to deal with during her lifetime. The second is related; Weir’s frustration at being able to find only a very few fragments of Eleanor’s life basically forced her to study the men surrounding Eleanor and often make conjectures about her based on what was written about them.

It’s clear in reading that Alison Weir did a lot of research before penning Captive Queen as a fiction. After all, she writes, “What is the point of a historical novel... based on a real person if the author does not take pains to make it authentic as possible?” For fans of medieval Europe, this book is a must read. Just beware that the author made it as authentic as possible, right down to the sexism of the time period.

Review by Viannah Duncan

Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968

By Michael P. Bibler
University of Virginia Press

As Michael Bibler mentions in the introduction to Cotton’s Queer Relations, it seems impossible that there could be enough material out there to serve as the basis for such depth of criticism on an incredibly narrow topic. There are a few notable classics that have homoerotic undertones and even some more overt mentions of homosexual encounters that are discussed in works like The Confessions of Nat Turner, but these queer moments seem like blips in what appears to be an otherwise overtly heterosexual literary scape. Is Bibler reading too much into plantation literature? Are his examples only the result of the passionate desire to find queer meaning in texts where none exists? The answer to both questions seems to be no.

Bibler’s arguments are focused and supported with strong evidence from the texts and the work of other critics. But the argument by Bibler is more complex than a simple acknowledgment of the existence of queerness in plantation literature; he argues that the queer subtexts in plantation literature expose wider social injustices in plantation life, and that queer relations also move racial inequality and sexism to the forefront.

Bibler wants to make it clear that same-sex relations here do not necessarily mean homosexual relations. I will allow the reader of Cotton’s Queer Relations to delve more deeply into the complex reasoning behind his assertion; but in a nutshell, he essentially pleads that the closeness of same-sex relations in the textual examples he uses stand in such conflict of the heterosexualized and paternalistic structure of the plantation that they can be defined as queer even if they are not directly homosexual. It is an interesting take, and one that may initially sound like a bit of a stretch.

Terminology notwithstanding, Bibler offers fresh readings of literary classics like Absalom, Absalom! and gives contemporary insight to controversial texts like Styron’s Nat Turner. He digs deep into Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and is able to juxtapose Big Daddy’s simultaneous tolerance of homosexuality with his unabashed lack of respect toward the black servants he employs, effectively layering new meaning on a well-worn text. He picks apart the relationships of white women and their black servants in the works of Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Margaret Walker, describing them as “romances”—and supports his logic—even though none of the women in the stories share an erotic lesbian moment, or even a kiss. While there are a few minor stretches here and there in Bibler’s text, he overall pleads his case. He certainly does not appear to be afraid of stirring controversy, and does a remarkable job of defending his arguments while he discusses each point.

Review by Emily S. Dunster

Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (10th Anniversary Edition)

By Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Ten years ago, my concept of feminism consisted of white lesbians with unshaven legs and armpits who hated men. Fast forward ten years later–past many existential crises, a couple of college degrees, and a hard drop from blissful ignorance–and my feminist tendencies have even leaked into my chivalrous desire to open the door for men. In no way am I trivializing a movement based on the social, political, and economic equality of those with and without a Y chromosome, but I have come to the realization that I've always been a feminist, right down to the minutiae of my life.

Manifesta serves as a comprehensive guide with which to weave through a world land-mined with sexism. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards wittily point out how our responses to, and habits accumulated from, sexism have become so ingrained into the psyche of many women that what often lies beyond recognition are these habits and responses themselves. This makes it difficult to correct what we don’t realize is wrong.

The issues covered in this book are so vast and diverse, but are not in the least bit overwhelming to comprehend; from a historical time line of feminism, to the basic distinctions between the first, second, and third waves, to the influence of feminism on and by the media, Manifesta reveals generational perceptions of feminism and the disagreements and realisms about how to implement feminist ideas, even about what feminism is or isn't. Without a bias toward one view or another, Baumgardner and Richards state facts and opinions of feminists from all walks of life, including those who do not identify with the label but may live similarly to a feminist. Most importantly, they take the mystery out of feminism by helping to put its very definition into the hands and lives of those who choose to be affected by it.

Baumgardner and Richards are not such smart alecks that they lose the reader in self-serving sarcasm, but they use just enough humor to make people wonder what you’re laughing so intensely at should they be sitting next to you while you’re reading Manifesta. Feminists are not just white, not just lesbians, and not just women. Feminists wear lipstick and frilly whatnot, as well as combat boots, hairy armpits, and burqas–perhaps all five simultaneously. What is feminist to some may not be feminist to others, but realizing a need for equality across social, political, and economic spectra of gender is beyond the need for a label.

Review by Olupero R. Aiyenimelo

Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

By Natasha Walter
Virago Press

Shhh, stop and listen for a moment. Listen to the radio, to TV ads, to government policy, to toy stores, to popular magazines, and (OMG) to "science." If you are a fan of equality and freedom of choice, you may want to listen up. And when you’ve had your fill of propaganda it may just be time to shout, "Sexual discrimination never died!"

Natasha Walter’s latest book, Living Dolls, uses an array of examples to outline perfectly how un-free "liberated" women really are. There is a momentum building in the men vs. women camp again, and this isn’t just old fashioned sexism where women are fine so long as they knew their place. This is super sexism, where women are best not looking too real (for fear of causing offense), and where being like Barbie is the ideal. Living Dolls strengthens this premise at every turn.

The book starts with a trip to a multilevel toy shop in London where one can take the elevator to a floor "for girls" that is all decked out in that colour that we females find irresistible: pink. If it wasn’t clear before this floor spelled it out, little girls like to play dress-up as princesses, homemakers, nurses, and brides, and play with baby dolls and other soft, squishy games. Of course, girls do like all of this. (Being the mother of two daughters, I have waded through my fair share of pink landscapes and lamented the fact that one of my daughters wore nothing but pink for two years of her pre-school life before going to real school turned her into a goth. Black is now her favourite); however, girls also like doing other things. They like getting dirty and exploring, climbing trees, inventing stuff, solving puzzles, and smashing things up. In my experience, when free to choose girls and boys end up playing pretty similar games until gender is made an issue—and that’s the problem. Sexism starts early and it seems that in today’s world you are either all boy or all girl; blurring that line can spell social and emotional disaster.

Sound a bit dramatic? Well this is only the beginning of the book, but I can attest to the jeering that happens when a girl admits to preferring Legos over Barbies or tree climbing over playing house. Is it any wonder that when we create planet boy and planet girl in kindergarten that we need a manual to help us decode those beings from Mars or Venus once when we hit puberty?

I was fascinated by the part of the book that reviewed a series of research projects that claim to have found differences between the male and female brains. Walter shows how these experiments are rife with bias. This section makes for fascinating, and somewhat challenging, reading. I have often fallen into the ‘gender brain’ trap when describing people I know or situations that I’ve observed. It may be natural, but that doesn’t mean it’s only biological! Our brains may or may not have the same capabilities, but we wouldn't know because our society and social interactions thrive on nurturing difference. It’s a crazy dichotomy that we are creating.

I always enjoy reading books that make me want to go out and change the world, and Living Dolls certainly does that. It makes many valid and scientifically rigorous points. Read the book and challenge stereotypes. I didn’t come out of a box, and I’m not going to make one my home now. So there!

Review by Amanda Foxon-Hill

Excerpted from Realize Beauty