This just in via e-mail, director Dan Ireland’s counterpoint to my Jolene review:
Subject: Lindy West’s review of JOLENE
To the editor: Dan Savage
TITTY TITTY BANG BANG
Re Lindy West’s vile hypocritical excuse for a review of my film Jolene… what can I do but laugh, and perhaps projectile vomit in her face at the same time. For you guys to keep such a lame brained single-minded, ill informed, frustrated moron employed says it all, anything for controversy, even at the cost of journalism. And we’re not even talking bad journalism here, but the word journalism itself. Sad state, but hey, what ever makes ’em read the papers, right, Dan? And she’s your film editor? In a city like Seattle? You’re selling your paper (and your audience) short.
More battle of the sexes (RAWR!) after the jump!
I was incredibly curious what The Stranger would say on this particular film, as I’m usually a pretty easy target for you guys in the first place. And then I found out that Ms. West was (sic) “reviewing” yet again another of my films. After her “the youth of today reject the saccharine Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont” review that I garnished on my last film, I could hardly wait to see what she’d do with this one.
So, at the end of the screening when our publicist asked Ms. West what she thought about the film, she replied, “I liked it for the most part”. Direct quote. There were even witnesses. Well, blow me over with a tear sheet from The Stranger. We were all kind of stunned that after her last ‘youthful’ attack on my manipulative sugar lacquered granny film (one of the more entertaining reviews of my career) that maybe Ms. West enjoyed the fact that my new cast was under 60.
So, we waited for the review to appear. And waited, and waited and waited. Then, finally, last night on the final evening of the films run in Seattle, Ms. West’s self proclaimed procrastination period of writing the actual review ended.
But a funny thing happened (aside from her endless blogging) on the way to her Mac Book Pro. She read some positive reviews by some male chauvinist pig reviewers (aren’t they all), like Rex Reed, Tom Keogh, Charles Taylor, Wade Majors, David Edelstein, Stephen Farber, Bill Arnold, Armond White – all members of The New York Film Critics Circle, or The National Society of Film Critics or The L.A. Film Critics, and suddenly decided to take a new tact – HATE the film, proclaim it’s vulgarity, center on its exploitation of women, but more than that, insinuate the only reason the other reviewers liked the film was that they were infatuated by “titties, titties, titties, titties, titties, and more titties”. Good angle, right? Let’s take on the other critics.
Well, if that was the case with the other critics, why bother when you can go on line and get more mojo by typing in on a web site that’ll show you more in ten seconds than my film does during it’s two hour running time. Hey, did Ms. West ever consider that one of these reviewers might be gay… but more to the point, maybe even the filmmaker might be gay, too. Imagine what she could do with that… titties, titties and more titties in a film by a gay director who was secretly using those titties to hide behind his latent subtext of really wanting to put… Willies, willies and more willies in the frame. Now there’s an angle you could really run with, Dan, and get a few more readers to respond. It makes about as much sense as Ms West’s issue.
Perhaps when the Blu Ray/DVD comes out in March 2011 (another fact Ms W got wrong) you can have another go at it. Why not? In fact, let’s burn every DVD we can get ahold of before we damage the tender moral fiber of “The Stranger’s” readers. Right.
In closing, I’m glad that Ms. West got to work out her angst/rage, and rouse her troops to common decency, and even get paid the 40 bucks she probably got paid for writing her blog disguised as a review. And even though it has absolutely nothing to do with my film, or E.L. Doctorow’s story, which she obviously never read, your vicious dismissal was beyond dishonest, exploitive, cowardly and lame. If there was an ounce of journalism in Ms. West’s body, it might have stuck with people, or me even. Perhaps as Ms. West suggested to potential future male customers, rent the DVD in the privacy of your own home, pull out your “Johnsons” and do your business. Perhaps Ms. West might well consider doing likewise, and while she’s down there, she might consider going one step further, having an overdue enema to remove the 37 piece luggage set that seem to have been stuck up there a mighty long time. She’s a little long in the tooth to be playing the angry young girl from The Stranger anymore.
And for the record, our film opened in New York, Los Angeles, Santa Fe and Seattle, and to date has only played one Landmark Theatre. So the insinuation that my film played because I have some kind of hold over Landmark in Seattle is yet another fabrication in Ms. West’s “review”, and I use that term loosely.
I never writer reviewers or editors about my films reviews, good or bad, but in this case, I’ll make an exception because considering the source, Ms. West doesn’t qualify as a reviewer.
She’s a self-proclaimed blogger, at best, (and a hateful, spiteful little one at that) with deep issues that almost every single one of her reviews addresses.
Your paper, your readers and Seattle deserve better.
Dan Ireland
I don’t have time to respond to all of Ireland’s many “points” here (there were “witnesses”? Curses!!!), so I’ll just let them stand. But it’s great to learn that gay men are categorically incapable of demeaning women. Except, apparently, in letters-to-the-editor.
I <3 you, Canadian Nurse! Let me second you on #4 in particular.
To #43 & 47: Im not a robot like you said I am (??) and I do not know the movie’s director. So I don’t understand any of you meanings.
I’m just commenting that me and my family (the female members) enjoyed this movie very very much and we are real normal normal. So I do not understand all these attacks on the director, except to say that I uderstand this is “The Lindy Show” and you are all of Lindy’s fans. So if the director attacks Lindy becaus Lindt attacked the director, then for sure you all would attack the director like piranhas in the water that smell blood.
@52: Mmm, I wanna be attacked by Lindt! The 72% please!
Not true, @52. I would feel the same about critics I disagreed with. It’s the nature of a movie review. Even though the person is getting paid, it’s still just one person’s opinion so it’s really nothing to get bent out of shape about. In fact, I don’t always agree with Lindy’s reviews either. But I never feel compelled to write her an angry letter about it and I certainly wouldn’t insult her personally.
I don’t buy it, Miss Peachy @ 52. Not one bit.
You’ve never commented here before 8:32 last night, when you signed up on Stranger Face. You commented on the review, and then felt compelled to repeat that same comment on this thread shortly after Dan Ireland. And we’re supposed to believe you have no connection? Uh-huh.
All your bizarre faux-English-is-not-my-first-language locutions, and then in 40 you close with that ridiculous last line with its complicated sentence structure? Nope, not buying it.
I didn’t want to get into this, but I’ve read the Doctorow story. Jolene the character is a truly sad case who, starting in her teens, leads a career of schtupping her way through life, more exploited than exploiting. She winds up dreaming of being a movie star so she can get back the child she lost. (!!) And to this movie you took your mother and your niece? Not my first choice of movies to take a young woman to. Nor my mother, even though my mother is fairly enlightened. And this is the character you think accurately represents all womankind, including your “normal normal” family?
Right.
Yo D.I., see if you can complete this sentence: Give ’em enough rope…
To #54: Okay, thank you, I think I understand now. But also too I was thinking about this a few minutes ago. (And seriously thinking about this)
[And to the person who called me a robot before, all I did was copy and paste from what I wrote on the review page. It’s not that hard really. Some people may call it lazy but I call it practical and it does not make me a robot.]
And so I was thinking that, after reading everything that people wrote, it really is for the most part “Lindy Fans” jumping to Lindy’s defense because they love her. And I get that.
But I think that if people were to divorce their thoughts and their feelings from everything that has transpired so far. Forget about Lindy. Forget about Dan Ireland. And just watch the movie. That’s it! Watch the movie!
I feel that actually more people would actually really like the movie. But then from that point, they would want to keep it a secret that they liked it, because they don’t want to be considered a “traitor”. And if that were to happen, I would understand that too. So my opinion? Just see the movie! It really is a good movie. Me & my family actually loved it.
Hint: The correct answer is not “…was the totally sophomore-slump-avoiding second album by The Clash.”
I have really enjoyed watching all this play out, in the review and its comments and now here.
I hadn’t even watched the trailer or knew anything about the film except from West’s review and then the Ireland’s letter and thread trolling.
I just watched the trailer. This one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XDuIaZpK…
Wow. West was funny AND right. Talk about skeevy. Why would I, a woman who’s 26, liberal, progressive, democrat, feminist, want to watch YET ANOTHER movie about a hot too-young thang who is not only sexually assaulted from childhood onward, but then, only takes from that experience the hackneyed “damaged goods” journey to stripperdom and prostitution. All I can glean from all that is: sweet, pretty Jessica Chastain and her character Jolene, along with myself and every other young woman, are only worth our fuckability and how DUDES see us.
@40. Her sexuality? What? She’s exuding male-gazitude. For fuck’s sake.
My review?: What a wankfest.
Oh, attitude devant, you make me smile.
@57: Honestly, the trailer makes my skin crawl. I know nothing of Dan Ireland, I’m capable of disagreeing with Lindy, and I’m completely unwilling to watch a 120 minute film when the 2 minute trailer made my stomach roll.
I had -no idea- Rex Reed was infatuated by “titties, titties, titties, titties, titties, and more titties”. Hunh. You learn sumthin ever day.
This is one of the best Slog battles I’ve seen in a long time.
OK, 59, I watched the trailer. Indeed, I watched the trailer in the spirit of “Trailers are not the movie, they’re the commercial for the movie.” After all, a good trailer can make a mediocre movie look great, and a bad movie seem passable.
But this looks execrable. Am I the only one who gets a whiff of Forrest Gump, that this girl bounces around with no ghost of an understanding of what’s happening all around her (e.g., she doesn’t get that she’s being kept by a mobster)? How very charming! Gee, thanks Dan Ireland for delivering this oh-so-spot-on fable on the soul of womanhood!
Indeed, if, as Love Lee Peach has told me (twice!), “at some point in our lives, as women, we are all Jolene,” I may just need to turn in my doctorate, get some (higher) heels and find myself a pole, or a lesbian prison guard to hoodwink, or a rich guy to beat me. I finally see the light. I will accept my feminine destiny. Dan Ireland, the scales have fallen from my eyes and I owe it all to you.
Attitude devant: exactly!
It’d be one thing to be sold this as a movie about the horrors of womanhood if we buy into the cultural preconceptions of a patriarchal society. I’d still say it’s too filled with the male gaze, but if it was sold as a tragedy, perhaps I’d let that go. But a movie about the deep truths of womanhood? I want to throw up, and then stab myself. And then perhaps find someone who liked the film and stab them as well.
@63 & @64: isn’t great when guys try to make art/films/write about “the depths of womanhood”? All you ever get is shallow, celluloid objectification and lots of having-a-vagina=cumdumpstertude. SO BORING.
For some reason, I give ’em the benefit of the doubt and usually end up unsurprised, yet again.
Well, yeah, 64 and 65! Can you imagine the shitstorm that would occur if a WOMAN made art about the essence of manhood?
One of the big New York reviewers said the poor female lead is only going to escape being associated with this turkey for life because 1) the film died in the theatres and 2) she’s just wrapped one with Terence Malick. Lucky things those….
Baci to you both, and to Lindy most of all. Linds, never stop, OK? We are cravenly grateful to your mind and your wit.
@66. Haha, isn’t every film that’s not purposely trying NOT to be about the essence of manhood pretty much every film ever made? & to the rest of your post: Fuck yeah!
@66: Haha, isn’t every film that’s not purposely trying NOT to be about the essence of manhood every film ever made? And to the rest of your post: hells yeah!
(effin’ hell–stupid SLOG was updating and didn’t show my 67 post so I had to reword–please ignore 68. And SLOG–you should make it possible for members to delete posts; sheesh, awkward!) Sorry y’all, ^_^)
I just watched the trailer, and have come to the conclusion that this movie is simply a “classy” version of SHOWGIRLS. Except ‘Showgirls’ is so spectacularly bad it’s great, and ‘Jolene’ could almost get that endorsement but it is earnest enough in its shameful, pre-feminism portrayal of the main character to make this 31 year old woman feel quite literally queasy.
Increasing the readership of scathing reviews of your work: UR DOIN IT RITE!
So this is the promised Showgirls sequel, yes?
Dan Ireland is an asshole. I’m gay. I love Lindy. And I especially love what @50 said. Mostly because I’m a journalist who works online and I’m sick as fuck of out-of-touch people trying to demean online journalists by calling us “bloggers.” Um, to help educate you, D.I., media consists of many different ways of delivering information … getting that information to you via print, television and online. It’s all the same. The only difference is the delivery mechanism. People get their information when and where they want it. And these days, the tide is moving online. So, fuck off.
Just realized I should have said “broadcast” instead of “television.” Apologies, radio peers. I worked in television news for a few years, so I went there first.
OMG! I’ve seen trailers that make bad movies look good – I mean, c’mon – there has to be 2 interesting minutes out of 120, doesn’t there? But I have never seen a trailer that made a movie look this bad. I was bored by it – I couldn’t finish it. This thing could be the Mona Lisa of movies and I wouldn’t watch it if you paid me a million dollars per minute.
And then there is the premise, which I find revolting. Gee, I left home early, too, and I was sexually abused as a child – but I put myself through college and became an engineer. I see no connect in my life – or the lives of any women I know – with this slutty cumbucket, Jolene. Jolene is supposed to tell me what it is like to be a woman? Sorry, as a woman I already know what it is like.
I have to agree that Dan Ireland is an ass.
I’m not going to read all that or comment on any of this “controversy,” I just want to say that I love you, Lindy West.
@40- Nice try, Mr. Ireland.
@30, @34
I apologize for that, really. Our bosses make us do it. The strangest thing is the large proportion of reviewers who answer the question honestly and review the film in a way that corresponds accurately with what they said to me. Old people are so weird.
hee hee! i watched this movie, hated it, and THEN read this review.
If all I have to look forward to as a “normal” woman is that kind of lifestyle, i’m doing something REALLY wrong! I’m young, liberal, successful, and un-abused!
When do I find my “prince charming” to strip me of my dignity and happiness so that I may become normal like Jolene?
Well, 79, Love Lee Peach (40) assures us that at some point it our lives we are all Jolene. I guess some of us just have to wait longer to reach that blessedly abused level of babe-iliciousness.
Bad form, Lindy.
Bad form, The Stranger.
Inspiring pissing matches online is not journalism, and posting a review of a film on the eve of it leaving theaters makes me wonder why this reviewer is still employed.