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I was a little surprised to see a booth devoted to the remake of The Stepford Wives at Cincinnati's Pride Festival last weekend. I had seen the original, long long ago, and didn't recall anything in it that would have warranted a booth at Gay Pride, so I figured they must have made a few changes to the story and decided to see for myself what the fuss was about.
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of telling a couple people I was going to see it and write something about it, so I felt obligated to sit through the whole thing. Otherwise, I would have gone out to use the restroom or something during the washing machine aerobics scene and "accidentally" wandered back into one of the other movies. (Hey, I gotta get my money's worth!)
It wasn't really a remake of the original movie which, as I recall, had a serious tone and something to say. Someone had the bright idea to turn this thing into a comedy. That might have worked if they had actually put something funny in it. It was mostly silly, but not very funny.
There were a couple of funny spots, and even a bit of good acting (mainly by Christopher Walken), but they were all towards the end of the movie. You could have walked in during the last half hour or so and seen everything worth seeing in it.
There were a couple of gay characters. One of the "wives" was a campy gay man named Roger, whose straight acting partner joined the Stepford club and got him fixed. Poor Roger turned into a Republican senatorial candidate. I can picture the ex-gay ministries lining up to buy one of those machines.
I still don't know why they had a booth at Pride. A couple of gay characters in a movie is not big news anymore. Especially when the characters are stereotyped and thrown in only for comic relief.
I suppose you can't blame them for wanting to advertise their movie, but it somehow just doesn't sit right with me. To have a booth about a movie at a Gay Pride Festival would, to me at least, imply that the movie had some sort of gay theme or was in some way uplifting or enlightening to LGBT sensibilities. Since they had a booth at Pride, I was looking for at least something like that. Instead, they had a couple minor characters who were only gay so they could wring out a few laughs.
Maybe if the movie had actually been good I would feel differently about it. The booth at Pride was just a gimmick, and, since they managed to get six bucks out of me, I have to say I fell for it.
I feel so used.