Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013)

[warren oates]

I don't see what's so funny about this, Matt. Warren, your implication that a good looking woman who exercises and may or may not get plastic surgery or apply makeup skillfully can't be incredibly intelligent, well-educated and well-trained for a high risk, high demand job is grade-A misogynist bullshit.

It's not my implication. I haven't generalized about all woman. Just about Jolie. Who herself, had she, in some parallel life, intended to pursue a career in science and spaceflight, almost certainly wouldn't look like she does now, as she would have spent her time, attention and money on building up less visible assets. She'd still be stunning, but less unnaturally so. Anyhow, she's done numerous admirable things with her fame and in her private life. And she's a great movie star in plenty of films that require less verisimilitude. So how is a contention that somebody just doesn't look right for a given part in a visual medium sexist? If they had cast (or seriously considered) a cartoon pretty boy like Tom Cruise in Gravity's Clooney role, I'd be crying the exact same foul with much less PC backlash.*

*Which I almost kind of did anyway in that Jack Reacher thread.

[Zot!]

Shoehorning in marquee stars is always an issue in Hollywood. It's less even about looks than about building a known commodity that people want. Works the same way as stars shilling for a shampoo or whatever. To me it looks like Clooney and Bullock are both out of place as astronauts, and I never understood their charms, but stars are what gets the commoners to the cinema.

[mfunk9786]

And I don't see why you're getting so outraged about it. warren oates made one more moronic comment on the Internet and he's being roundly mocked for it. If you want to be a white knight for pretty women, might I direct you to some comic book or video game forums where there are seriously hateful things being said?

It's not a white knight thing, and it's insulting to imply that it is - I don't stand to benefit in the slightest by pointing out that what Oates said is wrong. But it doesn't make it less wrong even if I did. The idea that a person needs to push success to the side to "build up" their physical appearance is laughable.

[Mr Sausage]

Nor does anyone else stand to benefit from your taking a stand, here, now. All it really does is let everybody know, loudly and clearly, what side you're on.

[matrixschmatrix]

I think the issue isn't so much suggesting that Jolie doesn't 'look' right- though I think that could be phrased better- as tying the way in which she seems off directly to her attractiveness, as though there was some inherent relationship there. I don't want to get into a whole rank-the-stars-looks thing, but certainly I think it would be odd to suggest that Jolie exists in a class of radiant beauty far beyond that of a Naomi Watts or whomever. She does, on the other hand, look almost inhumanly frail and thin. It was intensely difficult to believe her as an action star in Salt, in part because she kept looking like she would break whenever she hit something.

Physical vulnerability is obviously a factor in Gravity, but unless Jolie did intensive workouts for however long or whatever, it'd be difficult to believe she made it through the extremely challenging NASA training. One of the things I liked about Bullock is that her trepidation never seemed particularly unprofessional, and she seemed physically fit and confident throughout- just shocked by events that would be shocking to pretty much anybody. Jolie, without significant alteration, would have come off very differently.

(Separate from any question of attractiveness, there's something about her that always suggests something slightly alien, as with David Bowie- Bullock's always had an everyman quality that seems perfectly appropriate for this role, whereas Jolie seems more like a Martian princess who would be right at home in space.)

It is pretty sexist to describe someone's suitability for a role- looks or otherwise- purely in terms of how attractive they are to you, though. The 'it happens to men too' defense doesn't hold up for the normal reason those arguments don't hold up in discussions of gender, which is that society doesn't expect men to be valued exclusively on the basis of their attractiveness in the first place, so the context is wildly different.

[Zot!]

And I don't see why you're getting so outraged about it. warren oates made one more moronic comment on the Internet and he's being roundly mocked for it. If you want to be a white knight for pretty women, might I direct you to some comic book or video game forums where there are seriously hateful things being said?

It's not a white knight thing, and it's insulting to imply that it is - I don't stand to benefit in the slightest by pointing out that what Oates said is wrong. But it doesn't make it less wrong even if I did. The idea that a person needs to push success to the side to "build up" their physical appearance is laughable.

Oh come on, stars spend considerable amounts of time training, primping, grooming and dressing, and have a chefs, trainers, attendants and doctors who they pay to help with this. Astronauts have better things to do.

[mfunk9786]

Nor does anyone else stand to benefit from your taking a stand, here, now.

When did I say they did? Since when can we not respond to things we find off-base and offensive here?

[Gregory]

And I don't see why you're getting so outraged about it. warren oates made one more moronic comment on the Internet and he's being roundly mocked for it. If you want to be a white knight for pretty women, might I direct you to some comic book or video game forums where there are seriously hateful things being said?

It's not a white knight thing, and it's insulting to imply that it is - I don't stand to benefit in the slightest by pointing out that what Oates said is wrong. But it doesn't make it less wrong even if I did. The idea that a person needs to push success to the side to "build up" their physical appearance is laughable.

Oh come on, stars spend considerable amounts of time training, primping, grooming and dressing, and have a chefs, trainers, attendants and doctors who they pay to help with this. Astronauts have better things to do.

How is that anything worth remarking? That's generally the case, and actors as a class are more conventionally attractive than other professions, and so an actor playing a professional, especially in a film distributed by a major Hollywood studio, will tend to be more conventionally attractive than the average real-life counterpart.
Someone I know once scoffed at the film North Country (without having seen it and without knowing what the real-life protagonist Lois Jenson looked like) simply because Theron was far too attractive to be playing a mine worker. I found that claim silly not only because of what I've pointed out above but because I doubt he would have made the same criticism if the film had been about most other professions—say a writer or a veterinarian—so it seemed like there was a prejudice that women who work in mines are pretty unattractive and so the role should have been cast that way. Putting aside the first claim, regarding the latter, that's not how the Hollywood studios have ever done their casting—especially not with female roles. People generally pay to see glamorous stars with familiar names, even if the role requires the kind of transformation seen with Theron in Monster for example.

[mfunk9786]

And quite frankly, I don't know what's so different about Jolie and Bullock. They've attained a similar level of success, of access to these sorts of looks-alteration resources Zot! mentioned, etc. So what makes Jolie unfit for the role while Bullock is fit for it?

[swo17]

Need I remind all of you that Bullock has not once but twice played a model?

[Mr Sausage]

It is pretty sexist to describe someone's suitability for a role- looks or otherwise- purely in terms of how attractive they are to you, though. The 'it happens to men too' defense doesn't hold up for the normal reason those arguments don't hold up in discussions of gender, which is that society doesn't expect men to be valued exclusively on the basis of their attractiveness in the first place, so the context is wildly different.

It's a bit different when someone's asking for the woman to be less conventionally attractive, tho', and more resemble how people who really have that job tend to look.

I've heard this complaint a bunch of times before, that an actor's movie-star looks make them unsuitable for a character with this or that job. Off the top of my head, I've heard people say that Alain Delon in Rocco and His Brothers plain doesn't look like a boxer, and indeed he doesn't (analogous to your Salt complaint--something Soderbergh ingeniously side-stepped when making a similar film by hiring a professional fighter who, improbably enough, also had movie star looks).

[Matt]

Need I remind all of you that Bullock has not once but twice played a model?

And Angelina Jolie has played an archaeologist, a reporter, and a hacker.

[Gregory]

The profession of "archaeologist" must be among the things with the biggest differences between the movies and reality, which is really saying a lot. There's barely any real relation between the two.
"Really old stuff!" [brandishes weapon at everyone in the vicinity]
It points up how trivial realistic casting is in comparison to basic story elements.

[flyonthewall2983]

Which movie would you say got archaeology right?

[knives]

The Royal Tenebaums

[Gregory]

I don't know of any, other than a couple of marginal documentaries about the field. But the accuracy and public understanding isn't even a real concern. It's one of those things that mass entertainment media picked up and ran with, like how "mad scientist" chemists vastly outnumber portrayals of actual chemists in cinema. And I think most other really existing things are somewhere a scale of such fictional portrayals even if they don't come across that way to viewers, thus we have many people who think they know something real about history, wars, cultures other than their own, etc. based on fictional films.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

We could just as easily say it's sexist that Bullock requires Clooney's cool, hyper-masculine unflappability

Spoiler

(even after he's dead!)

in order to summon the will, intelligence, and concentration in order to survive. There's no need to get outraged by these unintentional lapses in perfect gender parity if they can be reasonably reflected in the real world (assuming the filmmaker intends some level of verisimilitude). Similarly, I think warren oates was simply wondering about casting in the same way one wonders about period furniture: does it more or less fit my own experiences with this profession? This kind of viewer assessment mostly works from unquantifiable hunches, the limits of human experience, gut feelings (and, yes, occasionally sexism), but while I think that in order to combat ingrained societal belief systems, it's good to point out where subjective judgments don't suit our own progressive politics, I don't think warren oates is saying that only ugly women can be astronauts. And even if we do unconsciously abide by masculinist assumptions, there's no need to be shamed for it in the process of having it called out. We're all participating in/enjoying things now that will seem unspeakably ignorant to our descendants.

On the other hand, I think Naomi Watts is far more attractive than Angelina Jolie, and George Clooney more attractive than Tom Cruise; no one is going to agree, so it's definitely a mug's game to say that someone is too primped/too shabby to play the part.

Here's a real-life gorgeous female astronaut dressed in what a 1993 photographer thought was cool:

Ditch the hideous jacket, the earrings, and the weird attempt at bangs, and I think she's quite adorable. Here are the first two lines accompanying the image: "Are those stars twinkling in Mae Jemison's brown eyes? Could be. She did, after all, come within kissing distance of the celestial spheres as one of seven astronauts on last year's shuttle Endeavour and the first black woman in space [in 1992]." That's like Tiger Beat text; I bet there was an offer to win one of Fred Savage's denim jackets on the opposite page.

I think Wang Yaping is pretty dreamy, too, if we're going to rate the sex appeal of female astronauts. She just hasn't found the right photographer.

On a more somber note, one of the original astronauts--and quite an attractive man in his own right--has just passed away: Scott Carpenter

[Zot!]

Although fantastical, I think Alien had some brilliant casting. Everybody looked like proper space truckers, and Sigourney is perfect.

[Gregory]

We're all participating in/enjoying things now that will seem unspeakably ignorant to our descendants.

Foremost among these will surely be "the NFL's Concussion Crisis."

[onedimension]

1. According to my informal survey of OkCupid at various times over the last few years, one does encounter exceptionally attractive people in a variety of professions. It is a kind of look-ism to suggest that anyone good-looking necessarily gets funneled into a career which capitalizes on his or her good looks and not other qualities. But there are probably real pressures of gender, class and occupation involved, too, in how much primping or self-care or just raw self-preservation a person can manage. Alain Delon punched in the face for several years routinely won't come out looking the same. Hands are a good index of hard physical labor v. cubicle work, also.

2. The movie certainly was well-crafted and "thrilling" and/or "suspenseful" but seemed like a basic wilderness survival plot, like out of Jack London, except the wilderness was space. That's not a small shift- the sense of isolation and emptiness is very profound. And the lack of gravity adds a degree of visual novelty, but it seems like the sort of novelty that will stale quickly. I liked, too, how space seemed to be a sort of limbo for Bullock's character, so that her return to earth was a return to life and vulnerability..

3. I couldn't help thinking of Buzz Lightyear whenever Clooney talked in his spacesuit.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

Foremost among these will surely be "the NFL's Concussion Crisis."

Hey, man, I post a hot picture of Mae Jemison, provide all these crazy deep thoughts regarding sexism and Gravity, come to the defense of a fellow poster, and wind up with a notice of a heroic astronaut's passing, and your only response is to leave a little snark fart about something that is destroying human lives for our entertainment? More of my thoughts here on the silly little concussion crisis, since it's a wee bit off-topic.

[Mr Sausage]

Alain Delon punched in the face for several years routinely won't come out looking the same.

To be fair, it wasn't just his face, but his whole body-type that put people off. Didn't bother me, personally, but I can see how someone would be skeptical of a man with his body-type quickly becoming a champion boxer.

[Gregory]

gcgiles1dollarbin: My intention was really not to be snarky. The issue just seemed so random to me that I thought that story could have been linked by mistake. On second thought it's not so random, considering the new film about the subject and the fact that it's currently in the news. And I don't mean to make light of what's a serious issue concerning people's safety.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

Yeah, it was rather random at that! Understood. I have been overbearingly obsessed with the subject recently; it even infects this thread. Meanwhile, you're a class act and one of the more helpful contributors on this site, so I should have gone with my first impulse and let it slide. Back to hot astronauts...

[flyonthewall2983]

Looks like it's going to top this weekend's Box Office as well