So I picked up School of Rock on DVD this week (fun movie btw), and on it was a teaser for the new movie based on The Stepford Wives. It was sufficiently intrigued that I la-de-da’d down to Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of the book. Very cool! I breezed through it in two sittings because (a) it’s short and (b) it’s a page-turner.
Of course, now I’m anticipating that the movie will suck. First of all - the cast? Yikes. Nicole Kidman as Joanna – Noooo! I don’t like Kidman that much anyway, but she is not at all how I pictured Joanna. Matthew Broderick as Walter (Joanna’s husband) – Like him, can’t see him in this role though. Who knows.
Also - it looks like it’s set in the present time. Isn’t part of the point of this story the era it was presented it?
Anyway, any fans of the book here? How was the first movie? How do you think this one will be?
And while I’m on the subject, for those of you who have read the book, a couple of questions (I’m sitting at work thinking about these and I don’t have the book to look 'em up):
Spoilers if you haven’t read the book or seen the original movie!
[spoiler]Do the Stepford Women eat? Thinking back now, it seems like they always dodged invitations for meals with polite excuses.
Also - am I missing anything subtle in part three? Obviously they got Joanna. Does her friend (I forget her name - the black woman) notice something amiss aside from the obvious change in demeanor and appearance?
Finally, did she send her husband away with the kids so she could escape?[/spoiler]
A great read overall. It was a little disturbing though… as I spent the better part of my Sunday afternoon finishing the book, my wife was scooting around the house dusting and vacuuming. :eek:
Nobody was in the same league with Ira Levin. A Kiss Before Dying, his first book, is especially good. Contains one of the greatest plot twists of all time.
Point Two: It didn’t seem that she noticed anything disturbing. Bear in mind that Ruthanne arrived in Stepford the same week that Bobbie (Joanna’s decidedly non-Stepfordian friend, and the only other remaining human woman) was being “changed over”. Joanna didn’t have a chance to warn her about what at the time she thought was “something in the water”, or to get to her house when she herself was trying to escape. Then, during and after Joanna’s changeover, Ruthanne isolated herself writing her book. So Ruthanne was essentially clueless: she hadn’t witnessed the dramatic changes that Joanna had seen in Charmaine and Bobbie, and therefore thought Joanna was merely brushing her off.
Point Three:
See above: as far as I could tell, she didn’t realize there was anything to escape from. OTOH, I wonder if she gave up enough of her writing time to be sketched by the illustrator and give her voice samples. Without that, it would have been more difficult to construct a faux-Ruthanne.
What I wonder is, how come nobody’s kid ever did a “That’s not my mommy!” Do you remember Bobbie’s son saying, “I hope it lasts…but I bet it doesn’t”? Like the kids wanted their moms to just be cooking and laundering machines, the same as husbands wanted their wives to be?
I’m having trouble with the notion that you CAN remake the Stepford Wives and get the same level of creepiness from it. It strikes me as very much a product of its times. Perfect for when it came out, with feminism still new enough that the theme has some shock value. But nowadays? I don’t think so. The shock value just won’t be there.
I think if they want to remake it, they’ll have to redo it as straight horror or come up with some new twist for the storyline. In either event, I don’t think it’ll work the way the original did, no matter how well done it is.
I gotta say that I thought the original was pretty dumb, and I don’t understand why they’re remaking it. Of course, they’re remaking a lot of older films for no good reason today, as if they’ve run out of ideas, or investors won’t back anything but a proven horse.
It was an old, overused SF cliche when Ira Levin wriote the first book, and, while you can get extra mileage out of the social satire of “the perfect wife” and anti-feminism, it seems kinda obvious.
Of course, the original movie gave us Katherine Ross with enhanced cleavage , thanks to makeup artist Dick Smith, so there’s some good that came out of it.
(Trivia : Smith says that he originally made the foam-rubber breast prostheses that Ross wore for another actress, for another film – they were done for **Carnal Knowledge" before Ann Margaret – who didn’t need 'em – was cast)
Read the book when it first came out (God, I’m old) and saw the movie—didn’t much care for the film; remember, it didn’t gain camp value till years later. But it did have a good role for one of my very favorite actresses, Paula Prentiss (“Why did you do that? I was just going to make us coffee. I thought we were friends.”). I think Bette Midler plays her role in the new film, which could be either very good or very bad.
Thinking about it, setting “The Stepford Wives” in some Middle Eastern country would add a little … authenticity to it. Never happen of course, and would probably run counter to the “perfect suburbia” theme of the original. Not that suburbia is what it was in the old days.
Would be cool to have a scene set in an “Old Wives’ Storage Room.” Sorta like the closing scene in the anime Fragile Hearts 2, where the sex droid is dumped in factory full of other discarded sex droids.
The original was definitely a product of its time: a feverish reaction to The Women’s Lib Movement. It tapped into the darkest fears of the smallest-minded men of the day, who were just beginning to come to terms with the, um, social market share they were losing to blacks, and now were having to give up even more to their goddamn ungrateful wives. It was a precursor to atrocious films such as Falling Down. The difference was, Ira Levin was making fun of the fear–*Stepford Wives * is essentially a comedy; a satire; like most of Levin’s stuff (cf Rosemary’s Baby)–while *Falling Down * is self-righteous twaddle.
Ira Levin’s brand of horror-as-social satire was a lot more polished than, say, Romero’s. His stories have a kind of palatable slickness that makes the satire, IMHO, all the more subverse.
First clue to where The Stepford Wives is gonna take you: opening credits, or shortly thereafter: Joanna (IIRC name?), not at home darning her husband’s socks but out in the world being a successful professional photographer, photographs a man who, in a hamhanded but funny bit of foreshadowing, is carrying a female mannequin across the street. .
It was- essentially. On the surface, it was an eerie thriller, and the overall humor of the situation only glinted through in choice spots (the mannequin scene [a brilliant little foreshadowing, as lissener points out], K. Ross and her husband overhearing a Stepford man boffing his fembot upstairs- “Oh, Frank! You’re the champ!” etc.)
But this new one seems to be playing to the camp to an extreme. It doesn’t look unsettling or creepy at all, which, if that’s the route they chose to take, I guess is fine. They circumvent being endlessly compared to the original that way.
I’m keeping my hopes up. For one thing, it is a black comedy, very different from the original (which I liked, because I’m a huge fan of Katherine Ross). Also, I love Nicole Kidman, and she’s great at comedy, especially black comedy (see To Die For).
The marketing department for the movie seem to be Stepfordized. I haven’t liked the teaser, the posters or the trailer, so if Nicole weren’t in it I probably wouldn’t give it much thought. Because of her, I’ll be there opening day.
The movie really didn’t address what happened – and not addressing it was probably creepier than anything they could have shown. I bet the new version WILL come up with something (and it probably will be underwhelming).
I always thought the original was making fun of the women’s libbers not the men.
Yeah, after college everybody has these big dreams but you get married, settle down and have a few kids and suddenly you are not so concerned with winning the big case or writing the great american novel but wth soccer practice and how your kids do in school.
But instead of that being a natural course to take in life, get this, it’s a huge conspiracy! They’re out to us!
An update can be good because now moms are expected to look like super models and raise the kids and have their own damn career.*
*I work for the company distrubiting the film so you may take my endorsement with a grain of salt. I haven’t seen the film yet.
