It’s a little ironic that the plot of the upcoming Ron Howard film The Dilemma centers on whether Vince Vaughn’s character should tell his friend Kevin James that he knows James’s wife, Winona Ryder, has been cheating on him, since behind the scenes, one can imagine dozens of people wondering whether they should tell Howard, “Maybe it’s not the best idea to open your movie trailer in the year 2010 with the Vince Vaughn line, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, electric cars are gay.’†Alas, the questionable bit stayed and continues to sound a discordant note in a season marked by gay suicides, and so it fell to CNN newsman Anderson Cooper to call the film out (though not by name) on Ellen DeGeneres’s show this week.
Said Cooper:
Too true! (And while he’s at it, can Cooper open up meaningful discussions about the movie’s pernicious fat guy/hot wife double standard, which threatens to skew the expectations of our nation’s children that they, too, may land a starving actress as a wife by overdoing it on the spaghetti tacos?)
“I was sitting in a movie theater over the weekend and there was a preview of a movie, and in it, the actor said, ‘That’s so gay,’ and I was shocked that not only that they put it in the movie, but that they thought that it was okay to put that in a preview for the movie to get people to go and see it. I just find those words, those terms, we’ve got to do something to make those words unacceptable cause those words are hurting kids. Someone else I talked to recently said that the words people use and the things people say about other kids online, it enters into their internal dialogue. And when you’re a kid, it can change the way you see yourself and the way you think about yourself, and the worth that you give to yourself. I think we need to really focus on what language we’re using and how we’re treating these kids.â€
Too true! (And while he’s at it, can Cooper open up meaningful discussions about the movie’s pernicious fat guy/hot wife double standard, which threatens to skew the expectations of our nation’s children that they, too, may land a starving actress as a wife by overdoing it on the spaghetti tacos?)