Monday, September 26, 2005

Today's Quiz



You know how liberal the Hollywood establishment is? The wingnuts moan and groan about it daily, and this moaning and groaning may have had an effect on the new batch of movies just coming out. Does "The Exorcism of Emily Rose" support the theory of Intelligent Design? Is "Just Like Heaven" a retake of the Theresa Schiavo case?

I don't know, but a recent movie review in the New York Times suggests that this might be the case, and that more generally the new movies slant slightly to the right. This quote is on "Just Like Heaven" where the heroine, Elizabeth, lies in coma:

Would I have been happier if Elizabeth died? The very absurdity of the question - what kind of romantic comedy would that be? - is evidence of the film's ingenuity. Who could possibly take the side of medical judgment when love, family, supernatural forces and the very laws of genre are on the other side? And who would bother to notice that the villainous, materialistic doctor, despite having the religiously neutral last name Rushton, is played by Ben Shenkman, a bit of casting that suggests a faint, deniable whiff of anti-Semitism? Similarly, it can't mean much that Elizabeth, the ambitious career woman, is sad and unfulfilled in contrast to her married, stay-at-home-mom sister. Or that the last word you hear (uttered by Jon Heder, first seen in "Napoleon Dynamite") is "righteous."

What caught my eye was the little sentence about "Elizabeth, the ambitious career woman" being "sad and unfulfilled in contrast to her married, stay-at-home sister", and I tried to recall at least one movie in the last ten years which would have depicted an ambitious career woman as happier and more fulfilled than a stay-at-home wife. I can't think of a single movie like that. Can you?

For more points, mention the name of at least one movie where a mother holding a job outside the home is portrayed as happy and fulfilled.


For bonus points, mention a movie in which the ambitious career man is portrayed as sad and unfulfilled in comparison to his less ambitious and more relaxed peers.