Tony James

Musician

Hollywood, CA 2010

Fever Blister: Burlesque Performer

Hollywood, CA 2010

“Dead Girl”

Fever Blister – Burlesque Performer

Hollywood, CA 2010

Blaire Von Bitchbag

Hollywood. 2009

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After the recent success of live action toy franchises to hit the big screen it comes as no surprise to hear that Mattel’s Barbie doll is getting the Hollywood treatment.

As a child I couldn’t see the point of Barbie when my brother had much more fun toys to play with like Action Man and racing cars. I ditched the doll and played with the boys.

It’s too early to say which direction Universal will take on one the most famous dolls in the world. My hope for a black comedy starring Anna Faris in the role of the blonde who has every thing is rather doubtful.

Check out Aqua’s Barbie Girl and Julie Brown’s Cause I’m a Blonde from Earth Girls Are Easy.

I get tired of reading paternal journalism coining films about feminine stories; with women, about women, by women, as “chick flicks.” They are always dismissed as “chick flicks” as if there was anything wrong with this genre. You’d think this media despised genre was about some small section of society instead of the 51% of the population it aims to attracts.

The term “chick flick” is so ingrained in movie journalism that female journalists, including, yours truly, have coined the term whenever a particularly bad film that just happens to be about women, hits the multiplexes. Yes, I despise the genre that insists that women must find a male mate in order to be happy, or that women must go about their lives within groups of clucking women hens where each female and generation offers some sort of feminine advice to living as a straight woman in modern times. But three out of ten of these movies (if only Hollywood made this many) offer something unique about the feminine condition. As for the other seven, well, these are as bad as the testosterone and gun toting male centered movies that are made in droves. These “dick flicks,” as I like to call them, are violent stories of male egos, hot girls, guns, and explosions. These “dick flicks” start with a gun and end with a gun. As usual, these tedious “dick flicks” are never derided by male journalists and the male centric media, so women have to put up with incredibly awful “dick flicks” and the continued put downs and insults for every intelligent and real story that addresses the female condition.

“Dick flicks.” Despise them.

HBO Films has optioned Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s not-yet-finished book, “Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,” about the behind the scenes look at the 2008 presidential election. It’s early days yet as to who will play the lead roles.

This fall was privy to Hollywood firsts and Hollywood backstabbing at its finest with director Catherine Hardwicke ‘s teen phenomenon, ‘Twilight,’ grossing $70 million at the box office in its first weekend and welcoming Hardwicke as the first woman director ever to dominate Hollywood with such a high return. Stephanie Meyer’s adapted first novel had already grossed more than $160 million dollars in its first few weeks and Hardwicke was touted as the industry insider to finally shift Hollywood from its paternal hands of testosterone theatre, (the same Hollywood who had recently declared Nicole Kidman as box office poison because she is a woman), and proved that teenage girls, once forgotten, were a viable and lucrative audience. But Twilight’s producers, Summit Entertainment, fired Hardwicke mid-promo junket, demanding the second installment of the franchise to begin principle filming in the New Year; Hardwicke wasn’t ready. When a director makes a movie for $40 million and that movie grosses more than four times that amount in its initial release, it’s not often the director is fired. It seems Hollywood is ready for a black male president but not yet ready to trust the keys of the city to its creative women.

Ginger Liu