Unequal equivalency: Why 'girls can do anything boys can do' sends a harmful, not positive, message to girls and women.

"Why is this okay?"  It was a random thought that I had while watching the final twenty minutes of Snow White and the Huntsman.  I suppose I should put a spoiler warning, but if you've seen even a single commercial or trailer you know that during the third act Snow White dons a suit of armor and rides into battle on horseback.  It's not that I took any offense at the notion, but I sat in the theater last night wondering why this kind of revisionism was completely acceptable for Snow White but not for James Bond.  Simply put, if someone tried to make an 'Elseworlds' version of James Bond where he was a British (or American?) spy during the 1880s and engaged in action-fueled espionage in a wild-west setting, I'd imagine the film punditry world would be in a tizzy.  And let's not even try to imagine what would happen if someone tried to make a Superman movie where Krypton didn't explode, Lex Luthor was a CIA agent who was actually an alien, and Superman wore a spacesuit from which he received most of his powers, because J.J. Abrams wrote wrote just such a script that sent the Internet into pandemonium back in 2003.  The geek community (and arguably the mainstream media outlets in a desperate attempt to be 'down' with the geeks) explodes with outrage at any alleged deviation from their beloved source material.  Spider-Man has organic web shooters... horror!  The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might actually be from outer-space in their next movie... shock!  James Bond drinks a beer Skyfall... gasp!  But Alice (in Wonderland) dons armor and kills a dragon and no one cares.  Snow White dons armor and rides on horseback into a medieval battle scenario and no one cares.

Weekend Box Office (05/20/12): Battleship sinks, The Dictator and What To Expect When You're Expecting stumble, while The Avengers charges on.

Most box office write-ups written today or tomorrow will exclaim that 'The Avengers sunk Battleship!'.  The truth is that Battleship (review) sunk itself.  The film was terrible, a mishmash of a thousand prior blockbuster films all meshed into a generic template that seemed like producers checking off a list of ingredients on a sciencitic formula.  More importantly, the marketing accurately conveyed this and audiences decided to either stay home or see something else.  The assumption of global success, based on an arbitrary connection to a board game and $220 million worth of special effects surrounded by a stale concoction of used parts, was cynicism of the highest order.  The fact domestic audiences soundly rejected it has to be cause for optimism.  With John Carter and now Battleship (pity Taylor Kitsch, who stars in both but bears little responsibility), it appears that movie studios run the risk of indeed going broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

Why I'd rather see What to Expect When You're Expecting than Battleship.

I'd imagine I'm one of the few 'geek bloggers' who would rather see What To Expect When You're Expecting more than a number of the 'big summer tentpoles'. Aside from perhaps my advancing age, part of this is that a number of the summer films just-plain don't look very good. Aside from the fact that most of us are film nerds and anticipate the new releases as a matter of course, are any of us all that psyched to see Battleship, Men In Black 3, or Total Recall?  Is there a reason we pretend to be excited about ever bigger would-be blockbusters that all-but flaunt their lack of substance at us like a badge of pride?  At the very least, the Lionsgate adaptation of the classic self-help book for pregnant parents promises to actually be 'about something' and have a certain emphasis on human relationships and what-not.  And, as a participatory father forever irked by a popular culture that presumes that dads don't do jack-shit to help raise their kids ("I'd love to change that diaper, but there's no changing table in the men's restroom."), I am at least somewhat pleased by the recent ad campaign.  Lionsgate knows it has female audiences in the bag already, so as noted in the poster above and the trailer after the jump, it's aggressively pitching to men.