So they’re remaking Overboard, but gender-swapped.
Now let me clear the air: I liked Overboard. I still like Overboard. But every year that passes and every time I catch it on TV, I get a little more uneasy watching it because of how much we’ve lost our cultural sense of humor in terms of a man blatantly manipulating a woman in any fashion while simultaneously serving as our protagonist, no matter how awful the woman may have been at the beginning of the movie. It gets a little creepy in tiptoes into the neighborhood of rapey, though it backpedals pretty quickly into a marginally safer space as we all breathe a sigh of relief.
I still like the movie, but I also understand that it could never get made today. We’re too sensitive, and we’re humorless about our sensitivities. That’s just how we’ve evolved to deal with sensitive issues. There are major ups and a handful of downs to that.
But the fact that the same movie CAN get made today simply by just gender-swapping gets the whole thing a bit stuck in my craw.
That said, I can talk myself off the ledge relatively quickly. Anna Faris is an expert in frantic antics, and I can see the script lending itself more toward her character sort of backing into the situation without knowing how to get out of it, as opposed to Russel’s “I got an idea, burp, let’s just kidnap this broad” motivations of the original. But even if the whole con unfolds as more of a snowball effect, I still don’t see anyone in Hollywood being able to write even THAT for the original gender assignments. “After all, how could a man not simply stop the charade if he wanted to?” – someone in a suit, probably.
It seems like this whole thing is the result of some bigwig conversation over club sandwiches and Perrier…
“You know what I saw last night? Overboard.”
“We should remake that.”
“Nah. Couldn’t get away with it. The feminists would have kittens!”
“True, but uh, what if it was the gal what cons the guy?”
“Too easy. They’d see right through it.”
“Yeah, but what if it’s your normal kind of Kristin-Wiig-esque spiral out-of-control sorta thing?”
“Oh, like she can’t figure out how she got herself into this mess kind of thing?”
“Yeah, like a Lucy situation. A real fine mess kind of thing.”
“You don’t think that’ll make the fems mad?”
“Nah, we can write in some kind of power montage for her in the end where she cleans it all up herself, nice and pretty-like.”
“You’re right. Lemme make a call after I do this here line of blow…”
They still do blow in Hollywood, right? Is it even called blow anymore? I probably need to update my drug references.
