So last night I watched Maggie Moore(s), the new movie with Tina Fey. Normally, her stuff makes me feel pretty good. I like her. She’s good. But this time, idk. This movie scared me, which is weird, because I’m almost never scared. Of anything. At all. But the bone-chillingly blasé way the bad guy kills everyone is just frightening, and afterwards, I locked my doors for nearly the first time ever.
There are several reasons why I feel that that this movie
was a miss for Ms. Fey. First, her character, Rita Grace, while somewhat
rounded out, is ultimately diminutive, self-effacing, and “nosey”. Also, her
love interest is Jon Hamm, who did Mad Men which we all know was demon shit
(but, to his credit, he seems to have turned around a bit since, i.e.
Unbreakable Kimmy Shmidt [even though he still plays a bad guy]). Jon’s
character is annoyingly fastidious, self-righteous, and rigid. He’s just a
little too “good”: he was weird about Rita’s sleeping with her ex, even
though they weren’t involved more than conversationally. (Also, weird that Rita/Tina
would sleep with her ex as she complains that he like “broke her down”
or whatever.) Idk, Jon is just too much “good dude” to Tina’s “weak woman.”
Also, the movie is produced by about a billion dudes. Like, why? Why so many,
and why mostly men? There’s also this weird hooker love story that can only come
about in the film because the dude’s wife, Maggie Moore, dies. In addition, Jon
Hamm’s cop partner, this irreverent, French, Indian guy dies, which is jarring
and seems unfair (even with the set-up of his “irreverence”). Also, one of the
bad guys is into kiddie porn and is a fat, Asian guy. Idk. I’ve read some stuff
about pedophiles and it seems pretty harrowing on their end; and this guy was
just looking at pictures. I mean, yes, someone took advantage of children to
make those pictures, and yes, this guy is propagating that and possibly doing
worse, but does he deserve to have his balls chopped off in prison with a rusty
knife just because he, himself, was probably molested at an early age and never
started maturing and is indefinitely stuck at the age he was attacked and so
craves…idk. Whatever, he just doesn’t have to be fat, or Asian.
But my biggest problem with the film is the way it ends. The
bad guy dies, alright, but it’s fucked up how he dies, we don’t see it, and we
barely see him when he’s dead. How he dies goes something like this: Tina/Rita
sees the bad guy kill her neighbor, she runs into her car, which is lacking a passenger-side
airbag. The bad guy hops in, tells her where to go so he can kill her alone,
and in the process she decides to crash the car in the hopes that he will die
and she will be saved by her intact airbag. This happens. However, the
symbolism here is a bit off. A car is symbolically a “body” and
intentionally crashing your car is a bit like suicide. So, in some ways, this
is like saying if you have an enemy, try to kill yourself and hope that they
die. Idk. Its just not conceptually authentic, or symbolically sound. Idk.
Also, after all the gruesome shots of the dead Maggie Moores we don’t even see
the bad guy all mangled, dead, and fucked up. The most we see of the dead bad
guy is like his arm, on the ground, with a little blood? It’s a gyp. I wanna
see this son of a bitch torn the fuck up, and maybe that’s my sickness, but
this guy lies to his victims, telling them he’s going to let them go, and then
kills them. Or he lies to them, and tells them that their husbands hope they
suffer, when their husbands never said anything of the sort.
Now, I know Tina, who is a writer, did not write this film;
but she did act in it. And so she chose the role, meaning she
read the script and decided it aligned with her principles and she would become
this Rita Grace person opposite this Jon Hamm character in this story of two
dead Maggie Moores. First of all, Maggie is another name for the Magdalene and
Moore happens to be a very important name to me, personally. So, when not one,
but two Maggie Moores die in a film, I feel weird. Not just because the
Magdalene is supposed to survive, but because it feels a bit like dark magic: like
acting out/calling on my death more than once.
So why would Tina take this role? First of all, it’s a bit weird that Ms. Fey even took a role she, herself, did not write. So I assume she was paid for her work, leading me to wonder how much did she make? Was it more than usual? Suspiciously more? If so, wouldn’t someone as bright as Tina have thought to herself, why are these people paying me so much for this role? The role seems like it was designed for her (maybe it was) and she and Jon Hamm do go way back. And I know it seems to align with her agenda, but does it? Does it really? It’s hardly feminist, with two underdeveloped, undeservingly dead women characters and her character being such a nosey, wilting, wimp.
I did a little research on the film, which was directed by John Slattery and written by Paul Bernbaum and made by Screen Media, or rather its parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. Screen Media is the largest independent supplier of motion pictures to the U.S. broadcast market. Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment is owned by Jack Canfield, an old, anodyne-looking, "inspirational speaker", white guy. The book has a big green field on the left of the cover (red flag), the numerology surrounding him is dubious, and chicken is a symbol of sex slave stuff so idk. Paul Bernbaum, the writer, looks kinda creepy, is born on 9.15.1957, which is all kinds of crazy, and appears to have stopped working in 2007, only to "make a comeback" with his writing career on Maggie Moore(s) in 2023? He once made two movies under the concept of rent-a-kid (wtf), wrote for the original tv show 21 Jump Street (who knew?), and worked on a tv show in the 90's called Deadly Games about some antimatter sciencey guy who makes a video game that becomes real? All in all, who knows? Nicolas Cage was in a movie he wrote, so that's not so good. John Slattery, the director, is interesting. He was born on the 13th of August, which is a whole thing, he's Irish (traditionally a Freemason thing), and wears a green shirt in his IMDB photo (green=Freemasons). He was Roger Sterling in Mad Men, so has worked with Jon Hamm, as well as a man named Greenberg (GREEN). I recall his saying in Mad Men once that Jon Hamm was "looking the wrong way" or something when he was thanking whatever deity had just protected their latest venture. So, that's a problem. Also, he's married to, and has a child with, a woman who was once married to George Clooney, who I happen to know is gay. Soooo, um, judgement calls all around? In interviews he's not particularly eloquent and commented that upon his entrance into the industry he just took whatever was offered him because he was so surprised anyone wanted him at all. So, yeah, perhaps lacking in judgement. Collectively, not a great foundation for a film, I must admit.
I have always thought of Tina Fey as a paragon, but I’ve had my
doubts as well. I read her book, and she mentions some petty girl-on-girl
social crime in her youth (which is totally understandable). But she also has
those kinda dead, shark eyes, like she says; which is also fine, we can’t all
have sparkling eyes (even though eyes do represent how we view the world
[but even this is ok, because in the oeuvre of feminism, someone has to
be the shark-eyed bitch]). So my only real caveat with Ms. Fey is that she made
Donald Glover feel bad and have stress dreams. And while all she did was tell him the truth, it does make me think. It does make me doubt. And all these
small, nothing things have come to a head in Maggie Moore(s) and make me
wonder: did someone use Tina Fey? It seems impossible, and I
don’t want to believe it’s true, but did it happen? I just don’t know. I
was so excited to watch Maggie Moore(s) and thought it would open my eyes as
her other works have done; but, in reality, I was only left feeling afraid,
doubting my friend Joseph, and wondering if the only point of the plot was to
impart to me the platitude that I should control my own destiny and stop
viewing myself as a victim? I guess that’s pertinent and important but, really?
That’s all? Idk, Tina, I just expected more.
