Rather incredibly, Gutierrez marketed this movie as giving women in Hollywood more interesting things to do than be "the good girlfriend" or "the bad girlfriend." Well, technically that's true. For example, a third of women in a Gutierrez film can apparently be hookers-with-a-heart-of-gold. Yet more of them can be sexually-available flight attendants and masseuses. A smaller fraction get to be ostensible professionals of some (usually unspecified) kind... although actually all of their story lines turn out to revolve around men, which is only true of one of each among the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold and sexually-available service-industry types, so I guess Advantage: Team Hooker there. Oh, and there's room for a precocious child in there, too, who's like all totally quirky and stuff.
Okay, so maybe it's not exactly promising as a progressive vision for female characters: well-written, well-acted, given believable dialogue and backstory and interesting situations to work with, this could have still been rescued. No such luck, unfortunately. Gutierrez strikes out.
I mean, the actors certainly do their best. But the characters and situations they're given are either dreary clichés or hilariously forced and unbelievable, more often in a lame way than in a funny way. (Yes, it's comedy, but comedy still has to have believable characters in order to work.) Worst of all is that so many of the characters are unbelievably dumb, to an extent that we're basically being invited to laugh _at_ them and by extension at how ridiculous women are: the airheaded blonde flight attendant who agonizes for all of sixty seconds before cheating on her fiancé in an airplane bathroom; neurotic woman-in-a-nice-suit Doris who, in spinning out her absurd life story to a total stranger while they're both stuck in an elevator -- after they've stripped down to their panties, natch -- actually utters the line "I loved him so much I didn't even know I had a meth problem"; Doris' pathetic sister, who takes her daughter to therapy sessions so she can boff her therapist's hubby in an office literally just down the hall.
And then there's Holly Rocket.
There was actually a time when characters like Holly Rocket were a staple of "comedy": the beginning and end of the "joke" was always that this was a bimbo so dumb she could barely be relied upon to spell her own name. Goldie Hawn made her bones cranking out caricatures like this... four decades ago. It's pretty heartbreaking to watch the undeniably talented Adrianne Palicki go through the same grind in 2009, in a movie that sells itself as empowerment.
And Holly Rocket is if anything a far dumber and more insulting caricature than the bimbo-types of yore. She doesn't just speak in malapropisms: she's literally too stupid to know how to get out of the path of a moving car. She doesn't know when her own birthday is. Her poignant backstory involves the one time in her childhood when she let her dog give her head, as a result of which her entire character arc is about her quest to learn how to go down on another woman without puking. More than stupid, she's contemptibly weak, as the film carefully points up when she orders a Pina Colada at a bar, the bartender comes back with a beer instead, and she doesn't say anything. Holly's biggest punchline, right at the end of the film, comes when she shows an astonishing ability to do trigonometry in her head -- certainly a surprising skill for someone who can't remember their own birthday. "Wow!" says Elektra Luxx. "You could get a Ph.D!" "I know," says Holly. "That's why I get tested twice a year." Hyuk! Hyuk! Because she's still just rilly stupid, get it? There's plenty else wrong with this film, and despite the best efforts of Carla Gugino, not enough else right with it to rescue it. But it's Holly Rocket that signals there's something not just bad or clichéd, but rankly misogynistic and creepy going on here. Her character is insulting in such an over-the-top and weird way that it jangles the nerves; and put bluntly, it's hard to come away without the impression that Holly is what Gutierrez *really* thinks of women. Pass.
Okay, so maybe it's not exactly promising as a progressive vision for female characters: well-written, well-acted, given believable dialogue and backstory and interesting situations to work with, this could have still been rescued. No such luck, unfortunately. Gutierrez strikes out.
I mean, the actors certainly do their best. But the characters and situations they're given are either dreary clichés or hilariously forced and unbelievable, more often in a lame way than in a funny way. (Yes, it's comedy, but comedy still has to have believable characters in order to work.) Worst of all is that so many of the characters are unbelievably dumb, to an extent that we're basically being invited to laugh _at_ them and by extension at how ridiculous women are: the airheaded blonde flight attendant who agonizes for all of sixty seconds before cheating on her fiancé in an airplane bathroom; neurotic woman-in-a-nice-suit Doris who, in spinning out her absurd life story to a total stranger while they're both stuck in an elevator -- after they've stripped down to their panties, natch -- actually utters the line "I loved him so much I didn't even know I had a meth problem"; Doris' pathetic sister, who takes her daughter to therapy sessions so she can boff her therapist's hubby in an office literally just down the hall.
And then there's Holly Rocket.
There was actually a time when characters like Holly Rocket were a staple of "comedy": the beginning and end of the "joke" was always that this was a bimbo so dumb she could barely be relied upon to spell her own name. Goldie Hawn made her bones cranking out caricatures like this... four decades ago. It's pretty heartbreaking to watch the undeniably talented Adrianne Palicki go through the same grind in 2009, in a movie that sells itself as empowerment.
And Holly Rocket is if anything a far dumber and more insulting caricature than the bimbo-types of yore. She doesn't just speak in malapropisms: she's literally too stupid to know how to get out of the path of a moving car. She doesn't know when her own birthday is. Her poignant backstory involves the one time in her childhood when she let her dog give her head, as a result of which her entire character arc is about her quest to learn how to go down on another woman without puking. More than stupid, she's contemptibly weak, as the film carefully points up when she orders a Pina Colada at a bar, the bartender comes back with a beer instead, and she doesn't say anything. Holly's biggest punchline, right at the end of the film, comes when she shows an astonishing ability to do trigonometry in her head -- certainly a surprising skill for someone who can't remember their own birthday. "Wow!" says Elektra Luxx. "You could get a Ph.D!" "I know," says Holly. "That's why I get tested twice a year." Hyuk! Hyuk! Because she's still just rilly stupid, get it? There's plenty else wrong with this film, and despite the best efforts of Carla Gugino, not enough else right with it to rescue it. But it's Holly Rocket that signals there's something not just bad or clichéd, but rankly misogynistic and creepy going on here. Her character is insulting in such an over-the-top and weird way that it jangles the nerves; and put bluntly, it's hard to come away without the impression that Holly is what Gutierrez *really* thinks of women. Pass.