Critics Insist 'The Women' Sets Back Chick Flick's Rights Several Hundred Years
There's no good parts for women, the old Hollywood saying goes, and apparently that even holds true for a chick movie featuring only parts for women called, uh, The Women. Hitting theaters tomorrow, the updating of the 1939 classic hasn't exactly electrified the critical community: Its current Rotten Tomatoes score—hovering there like a pair of neglected ovaries—is 00%. Here's what some of nation's reviewers are saying about it: · "It's finally here, and it's a major dud." [Rolling Stone] · "The Women is such an arduous patchwork of 'issues' it ends up a Frankenstein's monster of a chick flick." [EW] · "This new version of The Women fails to celebrate its characters as women. It patronizes the C-list cast of Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Debra Messing, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Bette Midler and Candice Bergen as politically correct pawns." [New York Press]· "The Women clangs with so many false moments that you practically leave the theater with tinnitus." [MSNBC] · "The Women isn't so much incompetent — though it has all the visual sumptuousness of a suburban rummage sale — as it is hopelessly tame and muddled. It certainly doesn't help that the movie's lead is completely lacking in the mature glamour that so entranced women filmgoers bracing for a world war, and has had so much plastic correction that her features — all but the ingénue eyes — are immobilized (and this in a movie that sucks whatever laughs it can muster from the Botox-and-surgery subculture). Could that be Meg Ryan peering out from Goldie Hawn's face? Since I have yet to encounter a Ryan comedy in which she fails to flap her hands while pulling on or peeling off woolly socks several fetching sizes too large for her dainty feet, it must be she." [LA Weekly] · "Watching the high profile unveiling of The Women taking over billboards and window displays all over N.Y.C., it's hard not to be reminded of the fanfare surrounding John McCain's introduction of Sarah Palin as his pick for VP. Both are strategic attempts to court the coveted adult female demographic. Both claim to be exactly what the ladies of America have been waiting for. And both miss the mark entirely." [Premiere]