When I got back from the last of the eleventy-hundred trips away from home I took this summer, I discovered two DVDs from Blockbuster that Jack had rented while I was out of town (he reverts to this type of behavior when I’m not around to manage our Netflix queue). Venus and Zodiac were both so long overdue that we now owned them. I didn’t want to watch Venus at all, I was sure that it was going to be a last-ditch effort to show the world that Peter O’Toole was still sexy, and pardon my ageism but: not interested.

But I read a couple of online reviews and decided to give it a chance. Sex is very much the point of Venus, and O’Toole is actually very funny as an aging actor looking for work as a corpse or an invalid or whatever he can get, but as I feared it made me cringe to see him as a dirty old man who beguiles a young woman into a perverse emotional relationship built on her willingness to dole out little sexual favors — he lets him smell her neck, and her fingers after she’s put them in her vagina — in exchange for clothes, or a tattoo, or whatever. It’s not that I object to graphic sex but that I have to question the motives of any woman who performs a sexual act for no pleasure of her own but the earning of male favor, approval, or money. It’s prostitution trying to dress up as empowerment, and it depresses me.

It was hard for me to watch this truculent young woman (beautifully played by Jodie Whittaker) get manipulated — by O’Toole, by a thuggish boyfriend that she follows around like a scared child, and by two experienced filmmakers (the director, Roger Mitchell, and the screenwriter, Hanif Kureishi) who are in love with O’Toole’s twinkling eyes and womanizing reputation but indifferent to the concept of pairing his character with a girl with a little backbone. And please, I know, that’s the point of view they wanted to explore, that of an aging man using his charisma on a sweet young thing. So why does Venus repel me when one of my favorite books in the world is Lolita? Maybe because Lolita is matter-of-fact and insolent and more of a manipulator than Humbert, where in Venus the girl is moody and withdrawn and makes me worry that she’d been abused and was headed for more victimhood.

The movie’s worth watching for many things, there’s no denying: O’Toole’s scenes with his buddies in the cafe are delightful; his exchange with Vanessa Redgrave, who plays his crippled ex-wife, made me wish there was a whole movie about their relationship alone.

It kind of baffles me how all the reviews I’ve read of Venus are so okay with such an off-balance story, but what baffles me even more is that no one mentions the gorgeous music in the film by R & B singer Corinne Bailey Rae. Here’s a link to one of her videos on YouTube — it’s all very Nora Jonesey, if you’re into that sort of thing, and I’m usually not but I think she has real presence and sings with tons of heart.

So, Venus the Movie, I have to say, you really bummed me out but I liked your background music a lot.

In the end, I actually put Venus back in the Blockbuster return slot, I didn’t care that they’d already charged us full price for it. I guess now I’d better watch Zodiac.

This morning my husband, who was sitting about five feet away from me at the time, e-mailed me a link to a story about the opening night of the film Superbad. (If you haven’t yet been subjected to twenty-five minutes of trailers at the movies this summer, a link to the preview is here, Quicktime required.)

My inner thirteen-year-old boy is hoping the movie will be a better than average High School Joe flick. I dearly love Judd Apatow’s work, I have publicly declared my allegiance to Freaks and Geeks, Talladega Nights, and 40 Year Old Virgin to countless actual and virtual friends. Apatow comes from a drastically male point of view, but what saves most of his stuff from the usual vulgar Porkitude are solid gold supporting women characters who get to be as dopey and outrageous as the men. Leslie Mann serves brilliantly in Virgin and Knocked Up, and where did they find Leslie Bibb (Will Ferrell’s wife in Talladega Nights)? She’s perfect. How many examples can you think of within mainstream film and TV of talented women who get to stop trying to be pretty and get the best laughs instead? Seriously, the golden age of AbFab was ten flippin’ years ago; Strangers With Candy has run its course; and as we all know, Saturday Night Live is an unreliable source of actual hilarity.

Unfortunately, according to Entertainment Weekly’s cover story on Superbad, the female characters don’t have too much to do except serve as breast conveyances, and why am I writing about a movie I haven’t seen yet? Because as I was scanning that piece I mentioned at the beginning, on the film’s premier, I came across a list of (male) comedians I’d never heard of who’d attended. So I started searching on YouTube and Googling a few of them, like Jay Chandrasekhar and Aziz Ansari, and I ended up on Aziz’s blog, where I started watching an R. Kelly video, and this swanky R&B started coming out of my laptop and Jack goes, “Is that Dick in a Box ?”

Dick in a Box!

(Maybe not so safe for work.)

I guess one answer to that is the funniest thing I’ve seen in months, The Jeannie Tate Show! [via]

Or there’s also the NSFW Mommy Time! [via]

YouTube appears to be the future for women making their own comedy.

In my efforts to keep up with what the all the kids are hip to these days, I fished a couple of magazines out of the airport garbage when we were traveling last week: Esquire and Spin.

Voilà. And by “the kids” of course I mean, The Boys, and whichever of The Girls is hearty enough to wade through a longish profile of Angelina Jolie written by Tom Junod, a man apparently baffled to find that Ms. Jolie is a woman of actual character and not a 24-hour-a-day sex bomb. Esquire is all about taking half-naked women seriously. I let my subscription lapse several years ago when their admittedly annoying “we’re better than you” editorial voice slipped into the chasm of casual lad mag sexism — they also weren’t submitting to my demand that they replace their editor with David Sedaris. I have to say, though, at least they’re equal-opportunity sexists. They did a piece on Kevin Spacey a few years ago that was relentless in its speculation as to whether Spacey was gay or not. High-minded fashion lit apparently goes down a lot easier with a big helping of What’s In Your Pants?

Spin, on the other hand, is exactly the same. They would have us believe that all Amy Winehouse wants to do is smooch on her fiancé, get drunk, and humiliate the man they sent to write her profile for them. There’s more to the article, sure, but it’s a personality piece, and as such tells us one heck of a lot about the writer’s personality. Editors of music magazines want their writers to write about a musician’s personal life because writing about the music they make is, in my estimation, flat-out impossible. To quote former iconoclast Laurie Anderson, writing about music is like dancing about architecture — in the venn diagram of arts, there isn’t a lot of overlap here, because even though language is used in pop music, music itself is a language that can’t be put into words. In other words, they always get it wrong.

In conclusion I would like to say that magazines are full of crap, but they sure do have a lot of pretty pictures of half-undressed ladies in them. The end.