Oh, good. Because movies have never before invented perfect fantasy women for their male protagonists. I’m excited to see which new entertainment realms this could take us to.
This was written by Zoe Kazan, who plays Ruby. It’s great to see that Hollywood is making room for women to tell stories about men’s fantasies. A giant leap for womankind!
I believe it is patronizing to assume Kazan has nothing interesting or enlightening to say about a woman’s perspective on male fantasies based on a few minutes of trailer footage. Particularly when the more logical assumption would be that she wrote this precisely because she felt she had something to say.
Everything I’ve read about this film so far makes it sound like the story is more about what happens when these fantasy creations become real rather than existing merely as fantasies. The trailer seems a little, well, to type, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
I can only judge what the trailer shows me, and I am only commenting on the trailer. Hollywood could have given us a trailer that offers us something different (if indeed the film does). So why didn’t it? Because Hollywood still wants to sell movies to a very narrow segment of the potential audience.
But you know what? Even if this turns out to be a really amazing movie about a woman’s perspective on men’s fantasies, it’s *still a movie about men’s fantasies*!
I’ve now seen it and while I won’t spoil things, it’s a deeper movie than the trailer leads us to believe. There is a scene toward the end with raw emotions that explodes the usual ideas about male fantasies. This is a film written by a woman for sure.
It’s one of my favorite movies this year, funny, sweet, and disturbing. It has only one message, but it repeats it in at least a dozen different ways, some of them very unexpected. The message is: A person is not your image of her. She isn’t a fantasy. She is herself.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/ruby-sparks-writerstar-zoe-kazan-on-love-relations,82855/
Sounds like she’s trying for something more complex.
-_o
Ooooookaaaaayyy then. I guess she didn’t have any control over the trailer.
She may not have. Trailers are frequently completely out of the director’s hands, unless it’s a very influential director.
How revolutionary – this film is apparently not based on yet another novel by a middle-aged man about how having lots of sex with a manic pixie dreamgirl will solve all the problems of a middle-aged man (which are of course the only problems that matter). Have they run out? Have the film rights got too expensive?
To be fair, there has already been a movie about a female author who conjures up a male character. It’s called “Stranger than Fiction” with Emma Thompson as the author and Will Ferrell as the character come to life. Darn those female protagonists and their manic pixie dream boys!
You think Emma Thompson is the protagonist of that movie?
Darn those female critics and their insightful comments!