The XX Factor: What women really think.

Clinton/Lewinsky Scandal To Become HBO Movie

Just when you thought it was safe to channel surf, it turns out HBO is making a movie out of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal of yesteryear. The title? The Special Relationship. Special, indeed. The casting is just plain odd. Dennis Quaid is Wild Bill. Hillary Clinton? Julianne Moore. Apparently, the film focuses less on Slick Willy's hijinks and more on the president's relationship with Tony Blair (played by Michael Sheen), which devolved purportedly due to the sex scandal. Peter Morgan, who scored with Frost/Nixon, wrote the screenplay and is set to direct. Supposedly, Quaid beat out some actual A-listers for the role—Russell Crowe, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins. I wonder if he truly eclipsed them or if the actors were steered away from taking the part of a man tasked with running the country who couldn't keep his hands off the help. Who'll play Lewinsky? Mia Kirshner? Megan Fox? Jessica Simpson? Nope. "Morgan has decided to use only archive footage of her culled from TV news bulletins and video of her closed-door testimony to Congress." Well, maybe the real Lewinsky will sell a few handbags out of it.

Still More Reason to Lock Up Your Daughters

The talk of teacups and helicopters has me thinking about Taken, the fourth most popular movie in America and a film engineered to play on the worst, most irrational fears of American fathers—think Babel plus white slavery. A former CIA agent played by Liam Neeson is trying to spend more quality time with his 17-year-old daughter. She announces that she is going to spend the summer in Paris with a friend. "Paris!" he exclaims, "Paris is very dangerous." (Spoiler alert!) There is much talk of a seedy Gallic underworld. She persists, and he gives in despite his better, CIA-trained instincts. When she arrives in Paris she is immediately sex-trafficked by crafty Albanians. The Parisian police are in on it; Paris, it turns out, really is an amoral anarchic sexually perverse dystopia. Leaving U.S. jurisidiction sure was a mistake!

Liam Neeson tortures and kills some non-Americans and saves his daughter before anyone can touch her virginity, the loss of which is obviously the worst thing that could ever happen to an American 17-year-old female. Morals include: 1) Never let your virgin daughters leave the soft, warm womb of the United States and 2) The CIA is an omniscient, omnipresent organization whose competence and essential goodness should never, ever be in doubt.

Old Spice

Susannah. The headline here is actually kind of worse than “Julia Roberts is OLD.” The headline—or subhed—is the coy suggestion that “Julia Roberts is a superstar, but her box-office reign might be over.” Then the piece is packed with arguments (as Dana points out, without any actual evidence) about how Roberts is old. I suppose you could read this piece as a comment on the punishing standards of beauty and youth in Hollywood. If, say, you skipped every other sentence. But I read it as a faux-defense, not unlike Maureen Dowd’s efforts to both celebrate and send up Michelle Obama this past weekend. Maybe this is some new form of double-lutz ironic journalism, in which we pretend to bemoan some appalling societal trend (strong arms, shallow Hollywood ageism ... ) while still wallowing in its every last cliché.

One Wedding, Three Children and ... a Funeral?

More for Susannah on Julia Roberts: I don't think either Dahlia or I were motivated to tear into that Newsweek piece on her by our undying love for America's sweetheart. Rather, we were struck by the article's disingenuousness, what I called its "eyelash-batting" quality. I get that by using the phrase "Hollywood ancient," the author is distancing himself from the assertion that the 41-year-old Roberts is hopelessly superannuated. But by never refuting, or indeed questioning, that assertion, he winds up simply reinforcing it, while also getting to wipe away a tear for JR's poor lost career.

Your comparison of Roberts' "comeback" with Mickey Rourke's is telling, in terms of what it reveals about our (unconscious?) presumptions about women, children, and work. On the one hand, there's Rourke, who made horribly self-destructive choices, alienated every director he worked with, then spent 10 to 15 years spiraling into addiction and despair before resurrecting his career with The Wrestler. Then there's Roberts, who took a planned five-year break at the height of her career to raise a pair of twins and a younger son. Mind you, this is no attack on Rourke, whom I love as both an actor and a public personality—I was delighted to welcome him back from obscurity, I wish he'd won the Oscar, and I'd far rather hang out with him than with Julia Roberts. But to compare his decade of darkness with Roberts' extended maternity leave—hey, they both stopped working, then started again!—is to reinforce the belief (held at a semiconscious level by many working mothers, including, at times, me) that opting out of the work force for a time is somehow a source of shame.

That's Hollywood Ancient

Count me out on crying "sexism!" when it comes to Newsweek's characterization of Julia Roberts as "Hollywood ancient." And that's exactly what the author said—Hollywood ancient—and you know what? He's absolutely right. By the response here, you'd think he'd written a headline that read:"Julia Roberts is OLD!!!" But that's not what he wrote. He stated the truth when he proclaimed that at 41, Roberts is old for a leading lady—by Hollywood standards. I guess you can call it sexist, but in Hollywood, it's a reality. And I'd beg to differ with those who see a poke at her taking years off to raise her kids is sexist, too. We heard more about Mickey Rourke's so-called comeback than his acting chops after he got nominated for an Academy Award. Living in Hollywood, you kind of come to understand the movie industry has its own version of dog years, and you learn that men and women have it equally rough when it comes to getting ahead in the business. It's not like guys get a free pass. Me? I've never liked Roberts. I've always found her gummy grin more fake than endearing, and the tales I've heard from those reporters who've interviewed her suggest she's more viper in the grass than girl next door. Here's to her comeback flop.

Pretty (Old) Woman

Yuck. Like Dahlia, I hate the way this Newsweek article on Julia Roberts perpetuates sexist assumptions—41-year-old women are "ancient"! Time off to raise children = career suicide!—while batting its eyelashes innocently. The author is effectively saying, gee, what a shame that people might think Roberts was a washed-up old hag ... just because I'm publishing a Newsweek article to that effect! Dahlia points to a few actors exactly Roberts' age, all of whose careers are currently at their white-hot peak: Jamie Foxx, Benicio del Toro, Philip Seymour Hoffman. And what about Clive "Methuselah" Owen, who's cast opposite Roberts in next week's Duplicity? He's 47, poor thing, just like our enfeebled, half-senile new president.

There are other, non-gender-related things that bug me about this article—for example, calling Roberts' massive, toothy grin a "Mona Lisa smile" seems simply off. Isn't the whole point of a Mona Lisa smile that it's the subtlest of expressions, almost not a smile at all? Then there's the fact that the author resignedly eulogizes Roberts' career without having yet seen her new movie. Duplicity, a corporate-spy thriller that's the second film from exciting new director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) stands an excellent chance of being both a critical and box-office success, and even if it's not, both Roberts and Owen have survived other flops. Before we declare Julia Roberts' "comeback" a failure, can we let her actually come back?

Hollywood Ancient

Jamie Foxx. Paul Giamatti. Benicio Del Toro. Liev Schreiber. Guy Pearce. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Pretty safe bet that if any one of these 41-year-old actors had been the subject of this Newsweek piece they wouldn’t have been run through the gender double-standard meat grinder—the one that permits Julia Roberts to be declared “Hollywood ancient” at the advanced age of 41. Oh, and those five years she took off to raise her kids? An unfortunate  “dry spell.”

I’m thinking it’s a pretty safe bet that if it was Philip Seymour Hoffman who had taken five years off in his mid-30s—even if it was to work on his rare African beetle collection—he’d be acclaimed upon his return as fresher, younger, and crackling with new energy.