TropeWatch: Putting the "Sex" Back in "Sexagenerian"

1/15/2007
Me, watching the Golden Globes pre-show: "Holy crap, Helen Mirren looks great."

My wife: "Wow."

Me: "Is she kind of... totally hot?"

My wife: "I think she is."




1/15/2007
Defamer.com, as Mirren wins the first of her two awards: "Two words: unexpectedly doable."

1/16/2007
The Hollywood Reporter reveals Mirren's bawdy post-Globes comments:

...Backstage [Mirren] was working blue, cracking jokes about what it means to be an Essex girl ("You know when an Essex girl has an orgasm, she drops her fries"). In fact, the joke carried on to her prospects for an Oscar. "I've never had an 'O.' They said the earth moves," she said. "I can't wait. I'll definitely drop my fries for that."

Mid-January 2007
Mirren appears in a sultry, breast-baring pose on the cover of the February issue of Los Angeles Magazine.

1/23/2007
From ABCnews.com story headlined "Senior Sex Symbols Steal the Screen":

Some might say that no one does a plunging V-neck justice like 61-year-old Helen Mirren.

1/25/2007
Dame Helen is the star of the British Sun's collection of topless shots of all five of Oscar's Best Actress nominees. (Link NSFW.)

Writer Derek Brown, his lust overwhelming his ability to construct a recognizable sentence, pants:

Representing a poignant metaphor of a pair of Wombles’ noses snuffling at a plate of truffles, this modern classic is glandular history at its best on the big screen.

2/4/2007
Damon Dash (!) on Helen Mirren: "She is super, super cute. I tell you, she's just lucky I'm married."


2/25/2007
Michael Sheen on E!'s Oscar pre-show:

She attracts a lot of men and she certainly attracted me. It was a very odd feeling playing scenes obviously with the Queen when you're kind of going, 'She's sexy.'

2/25/2007
The Helen Mirren Is Hott trope reaches its apogee during the Oscar ceremony as Jack Black breaks into his song-n-dance with Will Ferrell:

Helen Mirren? You are just hot. What party are you going to?

The song ends with Black, Ferrell and John C. Reilly singing:

Helen Mirren, and an Oscar, will be coming home with me!

2/26/2007
The trope achieves supersaturation as ESPN's Pardon The Interruption begins with hosts Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon discussing the Oscars:

Wilbon: Tony, the Oscars went almost four hours last night. What was your favorite part?

Kornheiser: The part where Helen Mirren undressed me with her eyes.

Feisty Librarians

The big news takeaway from Thursday's ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference in New York -- a trade-only offshoot of the weekend's New York Comic-Con -- was ICv2 President Milton Griepp's announcement that in 2005, graphic novels outsold traditional comics for the first time ever, and that the margin widened in 2006. I missed the big news takeaway, though, because I didn't arrive in the overheated conference room in the bowels of the Javits Center until well into the second panel of the day, on nonfiction graphic storytelling. A peek over at the notebook of the earnest-looking young man sitting next me revealed no notes about revolutionary sales data but did reveal, in tiny handwriting:

swedes love manga??

The day's third panel addressed manga ratings, and featured some advanced self-congratulation on the part of most of the panelists for their industry's forward thinking. Mike Kiley, publisher of Tokyopop, started by joking about his company's initial poor response to the issue -- "I publish flesh-eating lesbian zombie manga; I'm the worst possible person to address this" -- but then explained that a librarian, Michele Gorman, had come in and helped the company establish new standards. Gorman, a feisty and outspoken presence on the panel, was pleased that the company followed her lead, and stressed that the new Tokyopop ratings system revolves around laundry lists of description rather than actual ratings -- this despite the fact that the handout we'd all been given specifically broke down the system into Under 13, Teen, etc., a point made pretty quickly by an audience member.

Another audience member -- in fact, another feisty librarian -- asked why, if all the publishers on the panel (Tokyopop, VIZ, Del Rey, and Yen Press) were so committed to being proactive on the issue, they didn't share a ratings system? Everyone sort of hemmed and hawed for a while, and failed to answer the question, when of course the answer is they're not so proactive as they make themselves out to be. Having just watched Kirby Dick's documentary THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED -- which asks some potent questions but sadly abandons most of them in favor of Michael Moore-style windmill-tilting -- I'm particularly skeptical of the efficacy of ratings systems, especially the more standardized and industry-run they become.

I spoke with Gorman after the panel and asked her how Tokyopop's new system dealt with gay themes, surely the biggest upcoming stumbling block in manga's relationship with middle America. She proudly noted that the ratings system didn't differentiate between gay and straight sex: "That was important for me; I told them I couldn't be involved in this if they didn't handle it that way."

But sometime in the next year, some PTA on Long Island is going to get in the New York Post because they find a volume of teen yaoi in the school library -- yaoi without explicit sex, but still exploring a gay relationship, placed there by a hip and feisty librarian, no doubt. And they'll be on every talk show demanding, like, Congressional hearings on the manga menace. What then, I asked?

She didn't really know: "I like to think that publishers like Tokyopop will stick to their guns. I hope they will." Gorman, who recently moved to Charlotte from Austin, is familiar with the ways that anti-gay uproar can derail worthy local arts institutions -- after all, I don't imagine you can live in Charlotte long without hearing about the 1996 Charlotte Rep Angels in America brouhaha. We'll see, I guess, how manga publishers will handle a similar situation. I look forward to the hysterical news coverage such an event will occasion.

Either Way, There's Insanity In There

On our way back from vacation we spent a day in Washington, DC, possibly the only market in America where Billy Ray's film Breach is being heavily advertised. It seemed as if radio spots for the movie ran as often on WTOP as traffic and weather on the 8s. (The advertising directors at Washington radio stations must have impressively broad Rolodexes, because companies that would never advertise on the radio anywhere else spend a lot of money advertising on WTOP. The station also played ads for a company that specializes in building ships and helicopters for the Coast Guard, and for the "Homeland Security Expo 2007.")

The movie, in which Chris Cooper plays turncoat spy Robert Hanssen, is getting nice reviews despite having been dumped into the Bermuda Triangle of February.




The radio ads end with one of the clunkiest lines of dialogue I've heard in quite a while. After Laura Linney's character explains the deaths Hanssen may have caused and the damage he's done to American espionage, Cooper says, portentuously:

HANSSEN
Maybe I'm insane. Or maybe I'm insanely brave.

[Pause]

Take your pick.

[Pause]

Either way, there's insanity in there.

Now I'm no screenwriter, but I think I can identify a clear case of overwriting when I hear it. The first part of the line is already a little on-the-nose (though I think I'm remembering it even more lamely than it was written). But if the screenwriters had left it there, probably the line would've worked okay. After a pause, though, they can't resist giving Hanssen a little fillip, a button to make the line seem cooler.

And even that probably would have been fine. But then, after another pause, Hanssen spells out the line for dummies, in case they didn't get it. This dialogue reminds me of nothing so much as a particularly silly Will Ferrell improvisation. In fact, if you read the line in Ferrell's Talladega Nights accent, it becomes quite funny. I can imagine a fourth line, added after an excruciatingly long pause: "Did you get that? Insanity. I unpacked the deft rhetorical trick folded into my initial statement."

Then he would nod.

Vacay

We are off for a week in the sun -- escaping the bone-shattering cold just in time.

In the meantime, the Cribbie nominations have been released. Hollywood cheers and weeps, you know, depending.

Choice quote from the press release:

Matt Damon's nomination for Best Actor in THE DEPARTED came as a sweet surprise. "Despite the fact that I gave the best performance in that movie," Damon said in an interview, "everyone fucking ignored me in favor of Leo, and Jack, and goddamn Marky Mark. Marky Mark! This Cribbies nomination is pretty great. Suck it, everyone else." Asked how it felt to be nominated five times in his career, Damon said it felt great. "I'm proud of all five nominations, with the possible exception of my nomination for Best Bit Part in 2005, when I was nominated as a puppet version of myself who could only retardedly slur my own name, in TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE."