Is Lola Versus a Bad Movie, or Are All Men Sexist?
Lola Versus, a rom-com-ish movie about a woman who goes looking for herself after she's dumped the same day she tries on her wedding dress, opened this past weekend to bad numbers and worse reviews. Starring Greta Gerwig, directed by Daryl Wein and co-written by Zoe Lister Jones, it brought in a meager $31,815 (in New York and L.A. only, but still) and trailed behind its same-genre competitor, Safety Not Guaranteed.
So what do you do when you've poured your heart and soul into a project and it doesn't garner quite the same reaction you thought it would/deserves? Do you slowly come to terms with the sad reality that maybe the movie had some problems with it? Heavens, no. Instead, you fire off a mass email to everyone you know in the biz, blaming the movie's poor performance on the short-sightedness of the withered old men who review movies for a living. Yes, that is definitely something that you should do.
The email that came from "the breaking upwards team," comprised of filmmakers and real-life couple Wein and Lister Jones, was eventually posted on Twitter by Film.com's Eric D. Snider. It read:
Our new movie with Fox Searchlight, 'Lola Versus,' just opened in theaters in NY and LA.
The male critics are attacking the film and our box office really struggled last night. We think this has a lot to do with it being a female driven comedy about a single woman, and the older male critics don't like messy unapologetic stories with women at the center. There was a similar backlash against HBO's 'Girls' at first from men, but we don't have the luxury of a full TV season to change their minds.
I guess now that women are funny and the perennial Girls discussion endures, a negative review coming from a male critic directed at females just doing their female thang (getting dumped, eating ice cream, tripping on their heels, you know) means the guys just don't get it.
So ladies, if you have any girl power solidarity in your heart, you will pretend that you were completely unaware of the whole slew of "female driven comedy['s] about a single woman"—New Girl, Don't Trust the B In Apt. 23, Girls, and of course Bridesmaids—that have already come and gone with positive (and frequently male) reviews, and you will get yourself to a theater this instant. Don't let the men win.
[Image via Getty]