Rowena King film clips (samples below).
Scoop's notes:
In our various discussions over the years, we have
established an objective chick-flick measurement from the demographic
breakdowns at IMDb. We subtract the male score from the female score, and
a chick-flick is one in which the average score awarded by females is at
least one full point higher than the score awarded by males. One point may
not sound like much, but even at that modest level of female skew, films
exhibit some serious estrogen levels.
This is a tough enough standard that Gone With The Wind does not even
qualify as a chick-flick, with a score of "only" 0.7. For
years, the
all-time estrogen champion was Dirty Dancing at 1.8, and that movie has
such mystical power that many women will perform oral sex for hours on a
man merely because he is willing to acknowledge (insincerely of course,
but don't tell any women) that Dirty Dancing doesn't totally suck. By the
way, that score has since been eclipsed by the two Sex and the City movies
at 2.2 and 2.3.
At any rate, Wide
Sargasso Sea scores 1.0, and that certainly qualifies it as a chick-flick.
How could it be
otherwise? It is a prequel to Jane Eyre, which is the Dirty Dancing of
novels. Wide Sargasso Sea reveals the story formerly left unrevealed by
Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre: the details of the first marriage of the
dark, mysterious Mr. Rochester to a woman in the Caribbean who eventually
became the madwoman in his attic in England. Jean Rhys wrote the novel,
and she was supremely qualified, not only because of her literary ability,
but also because she grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica, knew the
setting, and understood the relationships between the races on those
islands, having often been the only white child in a playground filled
with dark faces. Fulfilling the expectations of a good ersatz 19th century
romantic novel set in the Caribbean (Caribbean Gothic?), it includes
plenty of obeah magic and colorful patois, as well as a variety of
characters who are mad, drunk, horny, racist, corrupt, or any combination
thereof.
Ms Rhys is a bit of a
romantic mystery herself. She published a few respected but obscure novels
and short stories in the late 1920s and 1930's, when she was already in
her forties, then disappeared from view for twenty years, until the BBC
dramatized one of her works as a radio play in 1958. The popularity of the
show sparked a renewed interest in her writing, so she sat down and worked
for eight years on a new novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. This story was finally
published in 1966, at which point she hadn't published anything meaningful
in a quarter of a century and was almost as old as the universe itself.
(She was 76, to be slightly more precise.)
I haven't read the
book, but found the whole movie pointless and predictable and as boring as
all get-out. Beautiful Karina Lombard couldn't act her way out of a Keanu
Reeves lunchbox. She would be sorely tested to play the part of Karina
Lombard in her own biopic, but her limited abilities were tested far
beyond the edge of the envelope when she was cast as a Welsh/Irish/French
woman, despite the fact that her ancestors seem to have been Native
Americans, Southeast Asians, or Pacific Islanders, and she speaks with an
indeterminate accent. I kept expecting the scriptwriter to work that into
the plot somewhere, perhaps in the revelation of some family secret. At
the very least, I expected somebody else in the cast to ask why that
pretty Cambodian woman was claiming to be Welsh. Nothing like that ever
happened. They just ignored it. An odd touch.
It's a
business-as-usual dudes-with-loose-blouses movie, but there is some good
news for us guys:
- you don't have to go
back and read or re-read Jane Eyre. This story stands alone. That's a
big plus. Scientific studies have shown that most men would willingly
give up a wild threesome with Kelly LeBrock and Jessica Alba if they can
just avoid reading Jane Eyre.
- there's sex, nudity,
and then more sex and nudity, all directed by John Duigan, a celebrity
nudity hall-of-famer. Duigan is the same guy who directed Sirens, the
Citizen Kane of celebrity nudity. His Sirens cinematographer, Geoff
Burton, also collaborated on Wide Sargasso Sea.
