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No atoning for me this week

Monday, 10th September 2007

I agree completely with Mr Editor about Knocked Up. But let me tell you that, in its own way, Superbad, which is opening in the UK soon, is even better. It's funnier, and its take on gender relations and teen angst is piercingly true.

There was a very silly piece by Joe Queenan last week which argued that Judd Apatow's films are "offensive, misogynist nonsense":

It's leading to a future so dark that women will look back on the decade that brought them The Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, My Best Friend's Wedding and My Big Fat Greek Wedding as a golden age.

Rachel Cooke put the man in his place:

Knocked Up is lots of things - too long, too light on laughs, self-indulgent and sentimental in places - but it is not misogynistic. If Queenan et al want to know what 21st-century movie misogyny looks like, they should catch Julian Gilbey's Essex gangster flick Rise of the Footsoldier, which is the kind of violent and disgusting film that it's worth getting angry about. This is not, however, to suggest that, beside it, Knocked Up is ignorable misogyny-lite.
For all its tit jokes, Apatow's film can accurately be acclaimed as feminist. When was the last time you saw a major Hollywood movie portray a woman's anxieties about her maternity leave? When did you last catch a big studio picture in which a woman tries to hide her pregnancy from her bosses because she fears she'll be sacked?
...I love this new universe, in which men are a bit dumb and muddled and women are clever and sorted; it might be unfair, it might be improbable, but, my God, for so long - too long - it was the other way round.

Indeed. In Superbad, it's the girls who are sassy and in control, and the boys who are airheads and slow to grasp what counts. Sexist? Perhaps, but not in the way Queenan argues.

I have to dissent from Mr Editor, however, when he writes:

Cinema goers will all be planning to go to see Atonement this weekend...

Not me. I'd see it if there was nothing else on, but the clips I've seen look awful - typical English cinema, fey and portentous at the same time. As for Keira Knightley: hasn't anyone else noticed that she can't act. And the views of my esteemed colleague Mr Davis make me even less keen to see it.

The game is given away by Mr Editor's reference to "the queues, which threaten to be of English Patient/Shakespeare in Love proportions". Two more overrated films you could not find. English Patient was simply awful - overblown tosh - and Shakespeare in Love was nothing more than an amiable diversion.

I'll stick to watching the last season of The Sopranos, thanks very much. Atonement can wait for Yom Kippur.