Cross-dressing?
Disclaimer: Ok, so I know that the title of this post is probably more interesting than the content, I just didn't know what else to call it.
Has anyone else seen the previews for that new Amanda Bines movie? For those who haven't, it's about her pretending to be a boy and going to high school, but not in a Boys Don't Cry kind of way. I mean really, it's Amanda Bines. She might always be stuck in the typecast of an eccentric, immature teenage girl.
However, I just wanted to say that I thought it was timely that a movie such as this would enter the scenes just after we had all discussed the lack of comedies in the female transgender vein. It seems to actually be THAT movie that we couldn't think of, the typical humorous escapades of a character forced to conceal her identity by dressing as the opposite sex.
More of an FYI than anything, sorry to disappoint!
Has anyone else seen the previews for that new Amanda Bines movie? For those who haven't, it's about her pretending to be a boy and going to high school, but not in a Boys Don't Cry kind of way. I mean really, it's Amanda Bines. She might always be stuck in the typecast of an eccentric, immature teenage girl.
However, I just wanted to say that I thought it was timely that a movie such as this would enter the scenes just after we had all discussed the lack of comedies in the female transgender vein. It seems to actually be THAT movie that we couldn't think of, the typical humorous escapades of a character forced to conceal her identity by dressing as the opposite sex.
More of an FYI than anything, sorry to disappoint!
posted by Anonymous at 2:11 PM
4 Comments:
The Amanda Bynes movie is titled She's the Man, and it's based on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. More info here. We didn't mention it earlier, but cross-dressing abounds in Shakespeare, including women dressing as men. Portia in The Merchant of Venice comes to mind.
I thought exactly the same thing when I saw the ads. It would have been nice to point to an example of a comedic woman cross-dresser role in film.
There's a Victor-Victoria type joke in Miss Congeniality 2, but that isn't quite the same. It's really reinforcing humor in the idea of a man trying to be a woman than finding a woman trying to be a man humorous.
The only good example of a woman pretending to be a man I can think of is Twelfth Night, which incidentally is what "She's the Man" is based on. And not just loosely, Amanda is playing Viola who is pretending to be her brother Sebastian and falls in love with a guy named Duke. Sound familiar? This is more of a modern telling of Twelfth Night than a original piece. That could be a good thing for movie goers since, one would hope, they can't mess up Shakespeare too badly.
I was hoping that someone in Hollywood was actually taking a risk, but since the writers stuck so close to the author's work, they obviously weren't feeling bold enough to write a story like this without the protection of his name.
Another movie on this topic that has been airing on Showtime recently is "Stage Beauty," which tells the tale of an "actress" in Shakespearean drama who loses his roles as Desdemona to a woman when the laws in England change. Here too the plot is safely within the protective shadow of Shakespeare's legacy since any critics would much sooner take on the Bible than the Bard.
Darn, Andy beat me to it. That's what I get for being so longwinded.
Stephen reminds me that in our class discussion of cross-dressing comedies, we also forgot the obvious example of Shakespeare in Love, in which Gwyneth Paltrow plays an aspiring Elizabethan actress who pretends to be a man in order to audition for the role of Romeo. The Paltrow character, like the Amanda Bynes character, is also named Viola. Shakespeare in Love won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench) and Best Actress (Paltrow). But this movie certainly fits within Stephen's "protective shadow of Shakespeare's legacy."
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