A few weeks ago, I saw the new film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott “Little Women“. I’m told there are seven different versions on film out there – I’ve only seen parts of the 1933 version with Katherine Hepburn, and of course the 1994 version with Winona Ryder (of which the less said, the better).
I liked it. A lot. Yes, it’s a“Chick flick“, and I don’t care, because all I really care about is “is it a good movie“.
Around the same time, I saw a new statistic; a solid majority of doctors under the age of 35 or women.
That’s after a couple of decades in which the share of undergraduate degrees going to women has reached three out of five, on its way to an estimated two out of three in the next decade or two. This, as the education system becomes more and more dogmatically feminized, with the attendant treating of “boyhood“ as a pathology to be medicated into submission , and as the media seems to be incapable of showing males above a certain age as anything but loutish buffoons.
So I could see, perhaps, men staying home from yet another film that shows men as expendable cads (which, by the way, “Little Women“ doesn’t); It’s not like men don’t get a steady diet of that anyway.
But here’s an experiment for you: read this article – not a review – from the utterly underwhelming Kristy Eldridge whom the Times helpfully notes, is “a writer”, entitled “Men are Dismissing “Little Women““. The article points out that the movie finished third in its opening week, behind two tent post blockbusters (Star Wars and the new Jumanji), and throws in a lot of pro forma “men just don’t care about female writers/artists/films“ whingeing.
One thing it doesn’t do is quote any men who don’t actually like the movie, or show any demographic evidence that men are shunning it any more (or less) than any other “chick flick“. Given that the film would seem to be at least a modest success (especially compared to the boat anchor 1994 version, which played like a high school production), that’d seem to be a little impossible if all those female viewers weren’t hauling their boyfriends/husbands along with.
The article promises male rage. It delivers Little Straw Men.
I have to suspect the article was written long before the movie opened
Equality cannot be achieved until all wealth and power is held by women of color.
Saw the movie, my take is that the costumer and set designer need to be flogged. The costumes really bear little resemblance to those that Alcott and her contemporaries would have worn–ahem, men wore tailored garments that didn’t just droop around them at the time, especially wealthy men–and scattering candles and lamps all around the set just begged for fires. Nobody who actually had to depend on candlelight/lamp-light for evening activities would have done that.
Acting was fine, but the costumes and sets really detracted.