Sunday, March 18, 2012

Hollywood's Fascination with Man Gravy

Still from The Babymakers (2012) opened this year at SXSW
This is a brave new world we're entering where everything that happened in Gattaca is coming true. There's nothing that defines a 'traditional family' anymore, and if your little swimmers are confused or your ovaries are shriveled up like a pair of raisins in Death Valley, it doesn't matter because science can solve your problem.
Hollywood has become obsessed with this notion of eugenics stemming from the idea that in these modern times we as a species can decide which first class man juice we want to eventually inhabit the DNA of our unborn children. The movie business in all of its maturity has converted this into crude semen jokes driving the point home that man gravy is fundamentally disgusting.
Clever use of semen hasn't been utilized since the days of There's Something About Mary (1999) but now it's splattered all over the place. No pun intended. 
The Babymakers (2012) recently premiered at SXSW, starring former Parks & Rec principal Paul Schneider and professional do-nothing hot-chick Olivia Munn. Here's the remarkably bland and predictable story: They are a happily married couple who just can't make natural babies no matter how many times they accentuate just how supple Olivia's tits are. Paul Schneider's little Phelpses just refuse to swim damn it. He then suddenly remembers that he donated sperm about a bazillion times to get her a Tiffany's diamond and now wants it back because those batches were the 'good ones'. Ergo, he decides to pull a bank job...a sperm bank job. Hiiiilarious.
Filmmakers explored this 'risque' avenues with last year's The Switch (2010) because it's completely not-obnoxius to imagine what would happen if you accidentally had your sperm mixed up and your best friend decided to donate his creating a child that was strangely exactly like him in every way. Apparently people who work at sperm banks are highly incompetent.

The visual displeasure as accentuated by everyone's general discomfort with the sticky white substance. On the poster work for The Switch, it's half Jennifer Aniston staring at something at a far off distance and half Jason Bateman looking repulsively at a donation cup appearing to be sniffing it. In The BabyMakers, it is pretty predictable that someone, doesn't matter who, is eventually going to be comically covered in slimy baby batter, getting it all over his face, into his eye, making a sperm angel and slipping in it, causing him to be enveloped in it even more. And that's exactly what happens, serving as the comedic climax of the film. I was sitting in the third row, if that had been in 3-D I don't think I would have been very happy. 

No comments: