Change Your Image
johnfredricksen
Reviews
Shall We Dance? (2004)
Dancing. Emotional Adultery
I am bit late to the dance, so to speak. I just recently watched this "romantic comedy". The movie attempts to dance around the underlying emotional adultery at the heart of this story. A middle aged, successful lawyer is hot for a sexy looking, much younger, dance instructor.
Doh! Who would have thought such things happen? She turns him down, but only rather reluctantly. Our "hero" belatedly turns to his wife and marriage.
Yeah sure...
It is an all too common theme of romantic comedies--chick flicks--that adultery, whether emotional or physical is just what a marriage needs.
How often has anyone ever seen this happen in the real world? Most women, and some men, admit that emotional adultery is far, far more difficult to forget and/or forgive.
In the real world, again unlike the world of chick flicks, adultery most often leads to worse not better marriages, to divorce not living happily ever after. Seeking your "bliss" in the arms of someone other than your spouse may be sexy, may be romantic, may be a hell of a lot of fun, but it will not, or seldom does, rejuvenate a marriage gone stale. It is almost always the signal that the marriage is dead, dead, dead.
But not so in the fairy tales called chick flicks or romantic comedies.
Just an aside: I have seen so many chick flicks in which it is the wife, not the hubbie looking for a little on the side and she usually gets it--gets it all. I wonder why in chick flicks the male with the wandering eyed doesn't go all the way with the object of his desire? Would it have anything to do with the fact that audiences for chick flicks are--surprise--chicks? Nah...
Anyway, if you have bought into the premise that adultery, either emotional or physical, is the way to brighten up a marriage go see this movie.
If you have a hard time buying this cliché of Hollywood do something more constructive with your money and time--like perhaps, spending a romantic evening, dancing or otherwise with your spouse and not the hunk or skirt down the street.
Waitress (2007)
Adulteress Fairy Tale
I recently went to a local movie theatre, in spite of misgivings about going to a chick flick, to watch Waitress. I was told by my female friend that it was a wonderful movie, "very romantic".
The word "romantic" immediately alerted me that I was being asked to go to a) a chick flick, b) in common with most chick flicks it would show men bad, women good, c) yet another movie upholding the virtues of a wife solving her marital problems by "screwing" her doctor, the pool boy, actually any male will do.
He only need be "handy" and ready to meet her needs.Funny how often the path to women's liberation in chick flicks so closely follows the standard porn flick formula of "horny wife" meet "sexy stud" for a night or two of exchanging various body fluids.
Really the only difference between a chick flick and a porn flick in terms of affairs of the loin is that a bit more time is spent on foreplay in chick flicks than in porn flicks. But in the end the results are the same. The wife is bedded and usually enjoys the experience!
The usual formula was followed in Waitress: introduce and get the ladies to hate the husband. The idea being, of course, to give the female lead( the wife) permission to get a little on the side and for the mostly female audience to see it all as different from a guy getting a little on the side.
In fact, it is a given that we would have hated the cardboard-like husband even more if he was shagging one of the local ladies, after revealing to his newly found bed partner that he, of course, was unloved and unappreciated both at home and in bed. Yet, reverse the roles allow the wife to get a little on the side with a sexy looking doctor, after the requisite foreplay, of course, and somehow we are expected to see in this affair of the loins: ROMANCE.
I find it sad that many mothers here thought this is a good film to share with their daughters. What are they sharing? If your marriage isn't working out, if prince charming proves to be as boring and unloving as you that this gives you license to cheat and have sex with whoever whispers "sweet nothings" in your ear. It is not exactly the advise I would want to share with my daughter.
I found the movie predictable and the ending about as clichéd an ending as one could possibly imagine.
If you believe getting a little on the side in a marriage, cheating, withholding your love from your spouse is honourable and life affirming, if you believe a woman is only a woman by having a baby, if you believe getting a divorce subtracts your spouse out of your life once and for all, if you believe that life is all about living happily ever after then you may enjoy this fairy tale.
If not...if you are truly a grown up, why waste your money?
The Divorcee (1930)
A dated exploration of the double standard
Seventy some years after the release of The Divorcée movies need to once again explore the idea of double standards. In the 30s there obviously existed a double standard that taught it was different or somehow o.k. for men to cheat on their wives but not right for wives to cheat on their hubbies.
Today, the situation is reversed. In chick flick after chick flick we are treated to married women finding relief( both sexually and emotionally)in the arms of a man other than their husband. This of course is often shown as romantic and, in fact, is often billed as a great romance story.
Really? I doubt if a move like The Divorcée would be re released today, simply because, now, it is so widely accepted that adultery, for women, is therapeutic or liberating that no one would seriously accept that any man would think it is right for him to have a little on the side and that his wife should not.
The basic premise of many chick flicks is that if the husband is __________(fill in the blank with any one of hundreds of acceptable male put downs...too boring, too nice, too caught up with the kids, too tired...)the only possible romantic response is to shag your doctor or a sexy Greek tavern owner or a dance instructor or...the list is long, if not predictable.
So no there will be no remake of The Divorcée given the double standards that prevail today: adultery bad for men, good for women.