There were about 100 things in that article that made me angry but clearly this man has no eyes if he says:
In a comedy movie, the male wacky sidekick can be the chubby Zach Galifianakis or the nearly deformed Steve Buscemi. But if the female wacky sidekick isn't attractive, like the overweight Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids, then every scene needs to be about how ugly and fat and mannish she is. That has to be the core of her character.
Melissa McCarthy is really pretty, and Steve Buscemi is pretty darn sexually attractive to a bunch of women, myself included.
I think he's saying that McCarthy is an exception because she is attractive, but the rest of the fatties out there have to be shamed on screen to be permissable.
And he's not necessarily saying he believes these things, he's saying that's the reaction of many people--which is sadly very true.
And the Bridesmaids character was not at all done up to be conventionally pretty, not like McCarthy herself.
I think he's saying that McCarthy is an exception because she is attractive, but the rest of the fatties out there have to be shamed on screen to be permissable
...I think he was pointing out that BECAUSE she's fat (regardless of if some people find her pretty), to be a sidekick she had to be all about grossness and fatness and NOT be pretty. Whereas a guy sidekick can be ugly (c'mon, even if some people find him attractive, Steve Buscemi is weird looking to most people) and that's just an extraneous fact--he can do other sidekick-y things, and not every scene has to be "OOOH, HE"S SO FAT! LOOK AT HIM HITTING ON THAT GIRL, HE"S MAKING A FOOL OF HIMSELF!" (ie McCarthy in the plane scene)
Yeah, looking at it again it's not as clear. And I haven't seen Bridesmades, so.
I thought he was carving out some kind of exception for her (which is problematic anyway - "except for this
one
attractive fattie..."). But I totally agree about his larger point.
Yeah, the writing in that sentence is unclear, so I wasn't sure whether McCarthy was the proof or the exception to the rule.
It's slightly off because that character was so out-of-the-ordinary for McCarthy herself -- I mean, usually her characters are cute and put together, right?
Thanks guys. I'm really nervous about what's going down this week, medically, and I wish my migraine doctor was more accessible. I was supposed to have an appointment with him tomorrow, which they wanted to move to today, but there's no way I could miss the 9AM meeting. So, no go. And no firm rescheduled.
I just..I don't know what's going to happen when I show up this weekend, and I'm scared. Because this has been a pretty crappy month.
The meeting has gone pretty well so far. It's the weekly "stand up and take credit for the system outages" meeting, and up until this week, that was never my job. But someone made a call somewhere to put me front and center for a couple applications I work on, from putting out the outage alerts, to shepherding the troubleshooting process (miraculously, I seemed to have worked out what was wrong with the intranet server, because I told the developer-with-no-more-ideas to google the answer, and that's when he discovered he couldn't google from that server, and voila! I'm so brilliant. Uh huh.) to explaining them to upper management.
I thought I could take the afternoon off, but I just got put on a meeting that no one can even give me context on, so I can't make an informed decision about crying myself back to sleep like I really want to.
I think the cracked.com author sounds pretty critical of the whole thing, and with the level of thought he put in to come to those conclusions as well as the blame he seems willing to shoulder I don't see where it's an endorsement. It seems like both an explanation and a criticism, just not a suggestion for how to fix things. Which, you know, I couldn't make either, so I'm not mad at him.
My primary criticism would be that it's totally heterosexist. Secondarily it does seem to blame everything on the sex drive of the (straight) man, whereas I just really hope not. Gross contributor perhaps, but please not everything. That makes me too sad.
