13 Going On 30 (The Female Peter Pan)

(Josie and the Pussycats, however, that was an "ouchie! I'm laughing at myself!" laugh.)

The music was slightly wrong - it was supposed to be taking place in 1987, but most of the tracks were from 83 or 85 - but hey, maybe that's how long it took those songs to filter down to middle school.

Dunno about the Petra Pan thing - did you find the same thing with Freaky Friday (The original, haven't seen the remake yet)? I guess the message is more about inter-generational bonding, which 13 going on 30 cleverly avoids - on the whole.

but i don't think that's a bad thing, either. i'm 'grown up' enough to be responsible about things i must do, can hold down a job and all that. even so, i still am basically living the student life (going out every night, staying up way too late, living in rented flat, not in a 'career oriented' job, etc) and don't mind it at all. i get depressed hanging out with friends that suddenly feel 10-15 years older than me, just because they've 'settled down' (not only related to marriage, BTW, but often the two go hand in hand...)

i don't imagine i'll settle down for a good long while.

I have suddenly been confronted with the idea of growing up. Like I said, I was joking with Joe a few months ago, that I spent a decade being 22, and suddenly woke up and found myself 33, with no idea how to settle down. Having to be a grown up, with no idea how to do it, or indeed now, person to marry/settle down with any more.

The film upset me, because the girl in question didn't just renounce her shallowness and get back in touch with roots, family, etc. It seemed like she had to renounce her entire life/dreams/ambitions. Not to get into spoilers for those who haven't seen it (and Colette, you, especially should see this film!) but it didn't get into the other aspects of her life post-decision time - did she get to have a fabulous career in the alternate reality of the ending?

I guess in my own life, it was the other way around - the fabulous career (as rock star, though, not as editor of Edgy Style Magazine) collapsed, forcing me to decide to grow up and settle down. What if it had been a choice I had made, rather than a decision forced upon me?

You know, I didn't even think about how she has to give up her job. Why can't she be a good person (good daughter, friend, partnet, etc) without giving up her dream? hmm... The whole movie is so escapist. She is in hell as a teen and suddenly she gets to leave that scenario. Then she's in hell again with these coworkers and she gets to just leave and not deal with that any more either.

All of the women I work with in their 30s say they still feel like they're in their 20s and they often forget their age. Even the women in their late 40s say they don't feel old.

so i saw this the other day largely because of max's stanning. i salute the filmmakers for resisting the temptation to 1) make ruffalo's fiancee an evil bitch and 2) having "hilarious" drunk jokes about a 13-year-old trying to handle five pina coladas in a row

however i loathed the ending

sorry i should be clearer: they DID resist the temptation to show jennifer garner being obviously drunk on the pina coladas

ultimately i think that if everyone could go back in time and marry their 13-year-old crush the world would probably be a much worse place

yeah but isnt the point sort of that she DIDNT marry her crush, instead she married, the guy, who actually care for her?

i tht the point was that she couldn't realize that she actually had a crush on ruffalo until she became 30, at which point tha roof was all she could think about

why he cared, in turn, for such a massive suck-up is beyond me

don't get me wrong, i liked a lot of things about this movie, but jennifer garner just doesn't push my sympathy buttons.

and dude, the supposedly inspiring "vision" she had for the new-look magazine?? if i was the obligatory gay/british editor in chief i would have been like, you're fired! you're all fucking fired!

all i will say is--any movie with the message "your nerdy best friend who is really into gay bands would make a good boyfriend and will grow up to be totally hot" is a movie i can get behind 100%, and a movie i wish had been made earlier, and that, maybe, a lot of girls at my high school, would have seen it

hahaha yeup

Awwwww Max.

Most of my nerdy male American (high school) friends who liked the Pet Shop Boys et al did in fact turn out to be gay, but none of their British contemporaries into the same things (including camp films and art eg john waters/gilbert and george) were anything other than straight.

I don't know what that says about me, or Minnesota, or both.

I'd look on youtube for a compilation of actresses in these movies suddenly grabbing their boobs in character, but I'm at work.

haha yes max totally true.. and i wondered how she would have felt about mattie if he had wound up as richard belzer

you mean if instead of being 30 some reverse magic to hers made him 130?

btw that is my understanding of the love story in benjamin button

this movie is on tv now i love it so much mark ruffalo is such a dreamboat

six chicks? six little douchettes morelike.

"i don't wanna be beautiful in my own way"

watching this with my sister btw. I feel like we are *connecting*

actual q.: is wishing dust something that was actually commercially available? bc wtf.

you have to find the right kind of mushrooms in the lost woods but once u do any ole witch can grind some up for you

I need to watch this film again. I barely remember anything about it at all.

Kinda ironic how many of the ladies in the first part of the thread are now married and at least two of them have babbies now.

I think it would just irritate the shit out of me now, mind you. (But that could just be because I skipped straight to bitter old age.)

ugh, in the film they came prepackaged.xp

i feel like as someone who has never been there, the depiction of new york in this city is worth a million vampire weekend alb. reviews in terms of explaining the narrative of "gentrification" or w/e also lol why is andy serkis in this?

In my mind this movie has just merged with The Devil Wears Prada which is kinda the less fairy-tale version of the same thing yes/no?

no bc mark ruffalo is more hottt than stanley tucci

if you mean that this movie is abt ~becoming~ then yeah i guess but there are loads of movies that are like that. the devil wears prada is almost exactly like working girl minus class struggle

God, you're more boy crazy than I am. :-P

x-p

And no, I mean very specifically the whole "smart but misunderstood girl moves to NYC starts writing for edgy style magazines because she wants to be AN WRITER thing" - but like I said, I have forgotten whole chunks of 12 Going On 30 so the writing part of her career might have been more incidental than the woman in TDWP.

yeah its she just says that is poorly-reviewed (and worries that means the death of female comedies) but... i thought 'bad teacher' actually did p well at the box office and had decent word of mouth?

I used to have an awesome promo t-shirt for this movie

xp - we were gonna see horrible bosses instead, but it was sold out, so we saw bad teacher instead, because the friend i went with said they were kinda the same thing.

The article was posted the day before "Bad Teacher" came out.

The movie had a $20 million dollar budget and made over $151 million dollars.

so, um, there are some assumptions there that weren't actually borne out by reality

it's well-written total rong, tho

the parts that aren't about bad teacher specifically aren't rong! lay off my molly lambert.

the parts that aren't about bad teacher specifically aren't rong!

well sure, but it's an argument against a situation that never actually happened so it ends up coming across as a well-reasoned, convincingly argued viewpoint from someone who doesn't actually know what they're talking about

lay off my molly lambert.

whoops

i don't know, it's just about making movies about women? i can't think of a movie about a party girl as protagonist since sweetest thing actually? maybe i will turn out to be rong because i never even see movies anymore but i vibe with the paranoia about movie industry types deciding that you can't sell that kind of movie, being a movie about a woman who gets to be a person.

i vibe with the paranoia could be my epitaph, really

the point is that molly lambert did not in fact see bad teacher for you so now you have to see it yourself

i can't think of a movie about a party girl as protagonist

House Bunny?

i haven't seen house bunny. i guess i could see both and return to this thread with informed opinions.

The article builds most of its thesis on contrasting two current movies, one successful (Bridesmaids) and one unsuccessful (Bad Teacher), using one to show how a female raunch comedy could work and the other to fear that Hollywood is going to pull another post-The Sweetest Thing embargo on female-led R comedies, leading to situations like people completely misreading/underappreciating women in comedy a la Christina Applegate in Anchorman. The argument doesn't really work if Bad Teacher is successful (which it was!).

but that's still only two movies. the thing she's talking about is still a thing.

i probably should have found a different molly lambert blog post to be fair.

i don't like my theorizing to be bogged down by facts anyway

House Bunny is good/funny and I heart Anna Faris but otoh it is totally about girls trying to get guys to sleep with them. otoh, most of them are nerdy/conventionally unattractive girls (with a glaring exception)

xp

oh anna faris! she knows about this thing! i should totally see that.

it's her best movie imho

tbh when she was talking about a female "Porky's", my first thought was "I wonder if 'The House Bunny' fits that description"

(in the article, I mean)

What would a Porky's for girls look like? Would it make guys uncomfortable to see physically attractive men objectified and treated like nothing but decorative sex objects in a movie about female nerds on a quest to get laid?

^^^a fair amount of the House Bunny meets this criteria

the difference is the nerdy girls are being coached/cheerled by ex-Playboy Bunny airhead Anna Faris

i saw bad teacher and it was a turd.

Aw, I missed that you'd revived this thread, horseshoe. I like when you do that.

There was some interesting commentary in that Molly Lambert article, but mainly more the background hum stuff because I confess I've not seen either Bridesmaids (even though every feminist blog in the universe tried to make out like it was some kind of feminist ~duty~ to see this film) or Bad Teacher because, basically, I don't really like comedies, and maybe the thing I like even less than a comedy is a *raunch* comedy - because I am Britishes and squeamish perhaps - or maybe more because so much raunch is so male oriented and, well, anti-woman - which is the thing that she starts to get at in that article.

I don't know that I want to see a film about nerdy girls treating one-dimensional males as objects, so I guess maybe I'm in agreement with her? But I have, since the start of this thread, wanted to see films about, well, nerdy girls. Ach, even when I start threads like this, I realise I just don't really ~understand~ cinema enough to participate in threads like this.

because I am Britishes and squeamish perhaps

Huh. I've always that you were an American just living in England.

I feel like I've explained my nationality a hundred times on ILX, but I was a Britishes living in the US for many years, who moved back to the UK. I get that that's kinda confusing sometimes. :-)

Oh see yeah I was confused then. Sorry!

Sigh.

So either the Guardian needs to stop stealing op/Ed pieces off ILX or this might be a Thing now?

http://m.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/mar/25/slacker-back-female-lena-dunham?cat=culture&type=article

think it is a thing now. lot of commentary in recent years about liz lemon as a novel female slacker archetype, and similar talk last year about bridesmaids clearing space for women's stories in the slacker-buddy gross-out comedy genre. idea whose time has come, imo.

what a long way we've come since Reality Bites?

My cooperating teacher told me the other day she was glad I grew out of my "slacker lifestyle," and I thought heh heh heh, inside, to myself.

Now that I'm not married it's back stronger than ever.

so much of that article seems like it could have been written in the early-mid 90s, complete with contrasts with the high-heeled go-getter type, which had so many 80s associations. I know the news are about novelty and contemporaneity, but I just wish articles like this would address the fact that we've "been there" or in a very similar place, like, less than 20 years ago.

Yeah now I'm not employed any more I'm slacker than slack... and oddly not that interested in slacker humour any more.

like, I'd be more interested in reading about the perceived differences between now and then, as opposed to what feels like historical ignorance or just solipsism -- but maybe we are supposed to read that into it, that that is an element the reader is supposed to provide?

http://www.movieactors.com/photos-stars/bridget-fonda-jackie7.jpg

her hair looks way too tidy to be slacking

like, I'd be more interested in reading about the perceived differences between now and then, as opposed to what feels like historical ignorance or just solipsism

i think a lot of this recent talk comes in unstated response to the rise of dude slacker comedy (it's always sunny in philadelphia) and the persistence of the "lazy stupid dad" archetype on TV, coupled with the huge cinematic success of judd apatow's "shlubby slacker dude hooks up with gorgeous high achiever" formula (plus stuff like harold and kumar). in recent years, the slacker/buddy formula has been a huge hit, but significant female characters have tended to be objects of reformative desire, or simply nonexistent.

her hair looks way too tidy to be slacking

it's true, plus the steely gaze

xp yeah but there was quite a bit of that in the 80s too! I feel like this is less of a new phenomenon than a stage in a cycle that has already gone around at least once.

"dude slacker comedy (it's always sunny in philadelphia)"

these guys always have some scheme cooking -- sure they don't follow through half the time, but they are way too motivated and full of hustle to be slackers. how is liz lemon a slacker? because she likes sandwiches?? sounds like some slack-shaming going on.

also Dee Reynolds

how is liz lemon a slacker? because she likes sandwiches?? sounds like some slack-shaming going on.

she's this weirdly self-contradictory high-achieving slacker. star wars references, stained sweats, farts, love of sandwiches & pizza on the one hand, den mother to a bunch of loser dudes on the other. re: sunny in philly, i figure that lazy scrubs with a bunch of ridiculous & unworkable schemes still equals slackerz.

Trying to "have it all," buying a second apartment, worrying about waning chances of motherhood – slacky slack city.

yeah, i know, but it's like they tried to find a way to hybridize "aging slacker" and "successful working girl"

plus i'm talking more about how she's occasionally been described than really trying to make the "lemon = slacker" case myself

Liz Lemon is almost the opposite of a slacker: a socially awkward workaholic. Tracy and the writers are the slackers, surely.
3xpost Ha, OK, the point seems to have been made.

(Weird, my page had apparently not been refreshed since yesterday.)

Just saw this on TV. Not bad!