​One of the eureka moments to come out of the MeToo Hollywood revelations was that so much of how the public approaches male-female dynamics is informed by the creations of sex pests and rapists.  Hollywood romances seep into brains, convincing people that they’re the protagonists in their own sunny representation of love lost and found on the sidewalks of a Canadian city masquerading as New York.  Once it’s discovered that the executives, producers, and directors who sculpt these stories have exploitative approaches to women in their own lives, one has to consider what they’ve been putting into the world for popular consumption.  Richard Curtis does not belong to the gross fraternity of MeToo villains, but the depiction of women and the male pursuit of them in his movies could easily have come from the jaundiced mind of a serial abuser.  The sentimental drivel of his films combined with aw-shucks protagonists whose clumsy obliviousness doesn’t stop them from getting the girl makes him one of my most hated writers/directors, and his high-concept About Time is yet another example of what makes Curtis such an irritating figure, albeit not a criminal one.

​Movies used to be weirder.  The highest-grossing film of 1985 centers on the lead accidentally making his teenage mom fall in erotic love with him, up to the point where he finds himself in a car with her during a high school dance.  Several years earlier, Luke Skywalker made out with his sister.  These kinds of moments would never make it past Vin Diesel, Tom Cruise, or Kevin Feige, obsessed as they are with franchise management at the cost of anything potentially alienating.  Director Robert Zemeckis wasn’t afraid of risks when making Back to the Future, a film with mass appeal that still has the confidence to mess with its audience.  Zemeckis has fallen far from his 80’s and 90’s heights thanks to a 21st century obsession with heavily CGI’d messes that no one asks for and few remember, but there was a time when he could really make a mom horny for her son.

​Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, my favorite book, doesn’t introduce its protagonist or any of its main characters for its first sixty pages.  As is typical of sprawling 19th century novels, the lengthy prologue is given over to historical scene-setting through the eyes of a minor character, the bishop who will set Jean Valjean on his path to redemption.  One of these early chapters is given over to the bishop’s encounter with a dying revolutionary who was present at the major events of the French Revolution some decades earlier.  The bishop starts off indignant about all the crimes of the Reign of Terror, especially against Queen Marie Antoinette and her children, but the revolutionary grants him sympathy for them if he’ll extend the same sympathy to the millions who suffered under absolute monarchy.  Focusing on well-known sufferers is a choice that lacks scope and imagination, memorably described by Hugo as taking in the thunderbolt and ignoring the storm clouds that made it possible.  Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is all thunderbolt, a fatally flawed film whose considerable style and technical mastery cannot overshadow how perverse it is to frame Madame Deficit as any kind of victim of the patriarchy.  History or feminism owes this person nothing, and no small amount of pleasure is taken from knowing that many of the people onscreen , including her, are going to get theirs.  However, if a film is going to be this unnecessary, it may as well be as fun as this one is.