For me, it began with Knocked Up. Of course, rumblings of frustration had been building for a while before that. But Knocked Up really cemented the unfortunate situation in my mind. Katherine Heigl, the break-out star of the film, summed up this frustration perfectly in the January 2008 edition of Vanity Fair. Knocked Up, she claimed in the interview, was “a little sexist. It paints the women as shrews, as humourless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. It exaggerated the characters, and I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy? Why is this how you’re portraying women? Ninety-eight percent of the time it was an amazing experience, but it was hard for me to love the movie.”
For cinephiles such as myself, blessed with double X chromosomes, Heigl expressed an unfortunate truism of recent Hollywood: the distinct lack of funny films being made with women in mind. The ‘Bromance’ movement has brought us some genuinely brilliant comedies such as ‘Pineapple Express’, ‘The Hangover’, ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ and ‘I Love you, Man’ as well as the aforementioned ‘Knocked Up’. However, with the female characters in these films almost always relegated to the role of the ‘bitch’, the ‘shrew’ or the ‘whore, it’s all too easy for girls to get a little tired of the formula. We laugh along of course. But, the cinema is an art form that is built on a system of identifications and women have been frustratingly mis-represented. Is it too much to ask that women have believable characters to relate to on screen?
Three years later and this very same frustration is being voiced by screenwriter Jamie Denbo: in fact it was a scene in Knocked Up which proved the final eye-stabbingly irritating nail in the coffin. “Katherine Heigl’s character makes Seth Rogan give up his bong” she bemoaned, speaking to online magazine jezebel.com. “It just seemed like a metaphor of ‘Put down the bong and we can get married.’ That’s not how it goes in my house…and that was never the women I knew.” That was never the women I knew either. Or at least, any of the women I chose to spend my time with. After all, who wants to be friends with the bitch, the whore or the shrew? Denbo, armed with a script for a new oestrogen-soaked stoner buddy comedy, is determined to usurp what she sees as an imbalance in the films we have seen in our multiplexes thus far. As well as this of course, she just wants to make people laugh. “This is a comedy that’s going to be touted as a chick stoner movie, but hopefully it will be a stoner movie for all stoners…I just wished there was a movie where women got to be funny. Not just a crew of ragtag funny guys and the hot girl…Everyone has a cause. Some people have cancer, some have literacy. Mine is proving that women smoke weed too.”Women are just as inclined to visit an online head shop as any men.
How very noble. If you’re into that sort of thing. Denbo’s screenplay, Best Buds, has been green-lighted for production by Natalie Portman’s production company, Handsome Charlie films. The company was set up by Portman in order to source more interesting projects for the starlet to work on. So far, it’s working well. She’s already got ‘Hesher’ coming out this year – an indie comedy-drama co-starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt which debuted at Sundance this year. After that Portman has bought the rights to Pride and Prejudice with Zombies, the New York Times Bestseller. ‘Best Buds’ is lined up after that, the plot of which centres on a road trip taken by a group of friends on their way to a wedding, very much in the same vein as ‘The Hangover’. However, in this film, the female friends are racing across America to save their friend, the bride: they are bringing her weed. “It’s essentially about best friends and girlfriends”, Denbo reiterates.
Natalie Portman herself is set to star in the film. Anyone who has seen the Saturday Night Live skit in which she pokes fun at her squeaky-clean persona will long have held suspicions that Portman may harbour a naughty streak. “When I was in Harvard, I smoked weed every day. I cheated every test. And snorted all the yay” she raps. Indeed. If, on the other hand however, you don’t buy that, you may find it difficult to accept Portman as a weed-addled stoner. For starters, what would the world-famous vegan do if she got the munchies? Search for some sort of roadside diner that serves tofu? All in all though – Best Buds looks like a good career move for Portman. And, honest depiction or not, it at least means that actresses such as Portman are finally getting to experiment with different comedic roles, devices and situations.
At the time of going to press, the project (admittedly still in the early stages of pre-production) still had no director at the helm. Denbo herself is interested in having a female director in charge. Although, considering that eighty three per cent of directors, producers and writers working on the top 100 grossing films last year were male, finding the right candidate for the job could prove to be a tricky proposition. “It would be great if Kathryn Bigelow had any interest in this. I’m going to guess with her heavy workload and depressing subject matter that she smokes a lot of weed at night. At least, I hope she does. And if she does – Kathryn, we’re open to it.”
