More Unnecessary Animal Roughness in Movie Trailers


I'm putting on my outraged consumer hat today over a despicable trend that just doesn't seem to end. I'm sick of seeing movie trailers where animals are casually bashed, run over and now shot dead for a cheap laugh -- only I'm not sure that audiences really are laughing that much. You might remember that the Along Came Polly trailer prominently featured a hapless elderly blind ferret character running into a wall, and then being pulled along on a leash and crashing into a metal trash can. Fun-ny, right? The movie bombed; nobody would be naive enough to think that the ferret treatment had anything to do with the dismal reception, but at least it's just rewards.

And though Adam Sandler's 50 First Dates pulled in over 40 million at the box office this past weekend, surely it could have been a success without the inexcusably vicious scene, prominently featured in the trailer, where Sandler's veterinarian (!!!) character launches a little besuited penguin to the path of Drew Barrymore's speeding car, thinking she'll stop to help it. Well, she runs over it instead. Har-de-har-har. Sadistic vets who abuse and torture their patients are out there in the real world and deserve our horrified scrutiny, and I sure as hell don't want to see one played for laughs on the big screen. It's disgusting, plain and simple, and you don't have to be a animal rights fanatic to figure that out.

The trailer for the upcoming Ben Stiller/Owen Wilson screen version of 1970s TV favorite Starsky and Hutch is the latest culprit, and it's a doozy. The movie looks like great goofy retro-fun until there's a scene set at a children's birthday party. Starsky (Stiller) shoots into a garage, and when the door is lifted, a gift pony is standing there, and it promptly falls dead from gunshot wounds. Laugh it up, right? Just a sour note to muck up what looks like a delightful romp.

Are the promo departments at the studios betting that half the audience -- the teenage boys who are already out out in their neighborhoods, torturing animals as prep work for their careers as wife abusers and serial murderers, along with other folks, the kind you see on Animal Planet being nabbed for letting dogs starve in their backyards, or throwing kittens out of speeding cars -- will find this stuff funny, while the other half -- little girls, old ladies or bleeding hearts -- will be appalled? It's probably a safe bet, and that's a sad thought. We all should be appalled. Perhaps Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Jennifer Anniston, and Drew Barrymore need to take a look at their own pets and consider what kind of message they're sending out when they include careless depictions of animal mistreatment in their movies. And dare we suggest that somebody needs some serious therapy out there in Hollywood?

Am I over-sensitive? Can I not take a joke? No, I guess I can't, not when it involves peddling animal cruelty for profit, or passing off animal abuse as light entertainment. It stinks, that's all.



Lest you think I was exaggerating about the sadistic vets, take a few moments and lose your lunch at the S.A.V.E. -- Stop Abusive Veterinarians Everywhere -- website. Just shocking stuff, and they deserve your support.

 
Follow-Up


Yesterday I expressed the hope that HBO's Iron Jawed Angels might motivate today's women to get out the vote (and there are several links to voting orgs on the movie's website). On this same subject, there's a good article up today on AlterNet -- Why Single Women Must Vote. Well worth reading if you are concerned about the state of America under the present administration.

 
What's On Tonight


If A & E's docusoap series Airline hasn't already put you off flying, an hour spent with this evening's Crash of Flight 111 on PBS' Nova just might. On September 2, 1998, Swissair Flight 111 crashed into the ocean off the coast of idyllic Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia, killing more than two hundred passengers and crew. The exhaustive investigation of this fire-fueled disaster is the focus of the show. Though it may be more comfortable to just pretend that planes never ever fall out of the sky, unfortunately they do, and thank goodness somebody goes in later and tries to find out why. Highly recommended viewing; Nova is consistently intelligent and fascinating. It's easy to forget how good PBS can be, in a world where it's much more chichi to be an up-and-coming niche cable network with the latest gimmick.

At nine tonight on Fox, 24 continues its multilayered excitement, what with some kind of deadly biotoxin in the hands of the bad guys, the President's ex-wife making like Lady Macbeth, and lil' Kim finding out her boyfriend has a baby. Things are never dull on the show, still so much better than most of what's out there. I'll always put in my plug for Bravo's Keen Eddie, preciously perched as it is at 9pm between plays of Queer Eye, but even I catch it during one of the encore plays, so you should too.

I also trust it's not to late to put in a word for HBO's latest TV Movie Iron Jawed Angels, which premiered Sunday night and will repeat many more times over the next couple of weeks. There's never a bad time to watch Hilary Swank in anything; she's got an intense and genuine quality that's refreshing. The more I watched her I wished her resemblance to Judy Garland (young Judy, at least: Swank's got the same sweet little semi-overbite thing going) had landed her in the TV biopic a few years back instead of an overwrought Judy Davis.

As for Iron Jawed Angels itself, a little history lesson never hurt anybody, and in that sense it's always a good thing to get something like this on the air. Succeeding marginally better as history than entertainment, IJA unfortunately insisted on contemporizing this band of intrepid American suffragettes to excess, such as the scene with a sexually awakened Alice Paul (Swank) having a bit of a soaky wank in her bathhtub, to a soundtrack tune straight from a Lillith Fair concert. It's bad enough that we have to suffer through rock ballads on every TV show with a teenage character, but now it seems that even history must go down with a bit of Sarah McLachlan. Has the audience become so self-absorbed that it can't understand the notion of contemporary period music? "Oh You Beautiful Doll" -- which was used when Alice walked into a restaurant, a quaint little bistro that looked more 2004 Village than 1912 -- was the popular music of the time; translating everything through the filter of this year's taste steals away some of the magic of the past. Living in 1912 wasn't like today, nor should it sound like it. How much more effective to bring the women to life and allow them to inhabit their own world, not one made more palatable or recognizable to us. I grant that you can sell cars and other consumer crap through popular music and its ridiculously effective pull on susceptible viewers, but leave it out of history, please.

Once again taking the risk of sounding like an old hag with a very long memory, does anybody else remember the amazing BBC miniseries Shoulder to Shoulder, which played on PBS' Masterpiece Theater back in 1975? StS did in six harrowing hours what IJA tried to do in 123 minutes, that is, tell one nation's story of women's suffrage. And if you thought that the force feeding scenes were rough in IJA, StS' were much, much more harrowing. The whole suffragette scene was more dramatic over there in England, infused with a tremendous amount of violence, including, of course, Emily Wilding Davidson's horrific dash onto the racetrack at the 1913 Derby where she attempted to intercept King George's horse but instead ended up trampled to death. Somehow even the prison scenes in IJA didn't quite engender the same outrage, not even close (at least not for me), but then again perhaps I'm made of sterner stuff than viewers who need Mclachlan to cue their emotions.

Despite the pandering to contemporary tastes and a slight tendency to make us never forget that these ladies were cute and feminine -- fondness for hats -- despite their brains and mission, I'd take a million Iron Jawed Angels over much of what we're seeing on TV this season. Alice Paul and her cohorts weren't, as director Katja von Garnier mused, quite the Women's Suffrage version of Butch and Sundance, nor were they playing out a kicky WWI-era sorta Suffrage and the City with Woodrow Wilson as Big (Bad). Maybe Iron Jawed Angels inspires today's ladies out there to get out and vote this year, and that would be a wonderful afterglow. Scored, no doubt, to a soft rock ballad....



Nova's Crash of Flight 111 airs tonight on most PBS stations. Check your local listings for time and encore plays. Visit the Nova website for more information and resources on the Swissair tragedy.

Visit the HBO Iron Jawed Angels website for background information and the complete encore schedule.