I tried, honestly. I gave The Women another shot. I hated the movie -- despised it -- when I saw it before its theatrical release earlier this year, and I wasn't expecting to have my opinion of it change much now that it's on DVD from New Line Cinema. But I was open to the prospect.

But ... bah. I still can't believe that this was actually written and directed by a woman -- Murphy Brown's Diane English -- because it reeks of hatred for the female gender. Every awful stereotype of women is put to use here, from every possible angle: Whether you think women are all lesbian bitches who hate men, or overly fecund maternal types, or man-stealing bitches, or too-ambitious career women, or nosy bimbos, or materialistic knuckleheads, or absurdly saintly doormats, you will find your assumptions catered to here. If I didn't know better, I'd have sworn this bile was created by a man who doesn't know any actual, real, genuine women but hates us all anyway.

DVD releases are all screwy this week, what with the holidays coming up, I think: Whereas DVDs are typically released on Tuesdays, this one was released on Friday, December 19. I think New Line is hoping to catch the last-minute shoppers looking for stocking-stuffers or something. But I beg you: If there's a woman on your gift-giving list you'd like to buy something special for, don't buy her this DVD, unless you think she might get a kick out of flinging it across the room or burning it.

Damn, do I hate this movie. And the DVD makes me hate it more, partly because of the making-of featurette called "The Women, The Legacy," in which English talks about her odyssey in getting this thing onto the screen and how she chose to "update" the classic 1939 movie upon which this is based. She claims that the original -- which was about, as this one is, a woman who discovers that her husband is cheating on her and must decide what if anything to do about it -- was "ripe for a remake because women have changed so much," but there's little indication in her new screenplay that she understands this. She apparently thinks that her update is not the "catty bitchfest" the original was, even though she liked the "strong, wisecracking, clever women" of movies of that bygone era. Perhaps it was entirely to her plan, then, to have these women -- played by Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Debra Messing and Jada Pinkett Smith as a group of BFFs who have absolutely nothing in common and don't even seem to like one another -- be entirely unpleasant so-and-so's who mistake being mean with being strong and being shallow with being clever. "I don't think you should remake a movie unless you have something very new to say," English says in the featurette, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how this movie has anything to say at all beyond "If you think women are awful, you're probably right."

There's another making-of called "The Women Behind The Women," which features a teenage girl reporter going on the set of the movie to investigate whether all those gorgeous gals in the cast realize that they're damaging young girls' self-esteem by being so gorgeous. The girl reporter learns that it takes hours and hours of hard makeup-ing and constant touch-ups to maintain, say, Meg Ryan's annoyingly artfully messed-up hair, and that even the most beautiful women in the world don't actually look like that without their armies of stylists. Not that we ever see (even in this supposedly candid behind-the-scenes footage) Ryan or Smith or Eva Mendes (who plays the sexbomb Ryan's husband is cheating with) looking less than perfect.

The best thing about the DVD is the deleted scenes -- in one of them, Annette Bening turns an apology to Meg Ryan into a bitchy self-centered rant about herself, which, you know, is the perfect encapsulation of this movie. The deleted scenes make me realize the movie could have been even worse than it is, and let me speculate how much nicer this year at the movies could have been if only every scene had been deleted.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
MaryAnn Johanson, a mocking wench (email me)

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