Last weekend, the Katwoman shared her excellent review of Wonder Woman while themis wrote about the “controversy” (among the usual mens-rights crowd) over an all-female showing of the movie in Austin, benefiting Planned Parenthood. But around the same time, a well-known professional movie reviewer — David Edelstein of New York magazine and their Vulture website — issued one of the worst and most misogynistic movie reviews I have ever seen.
Edelstein panned the movie overall while calling it a “star turn” for Gal Godot as Diana — apparently because he found her attractive. In his opening paragraph, he refers to her as “the perfect blend of superbabe-in-the-woods innocence and mouthiness.” And it goes downhill from there.
Referring to Diana’s origin story — her mother sculpted her from clay and Zeus then brought her to life — Edelstein can’t help but tell us “I’d like to have seen that.” In describing Gadot, an Israeli model-actress, he then states: “Israeli women are a breed unto themselves, which I say with both admiration and trepidation.” OK … I’m not going to touch that one.
So what next? Oh, right, he notes that the absence of kinkiness will disappoint viewers:
While this Wonder Woman is still into ropes (Diana’s lasso both catches bad guys and squeezes the truth out of them), fans might be disappointed that there’s no trace of the comic’s well-documented S&M kinkiness. With a female director, Patty Jenkins, at the helm, Diana isn’t even photographed to elicit slobbers.
After all, what good is a female superhero if she doesn’t make male moviegoers slobber? Clearly we were ripped off by that damned female director!
Edelstein goes on to suggest that other critics who have praised the movie (and that is most critics - the movie is rated 93% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) must be “grading on a big curve.” Presumably they are giving good reviews only because it is politically correct to praise a movie with a strong woman lead and a female director. Then comes some very curious word choice that somehow made it past his editor:
the limpness of the storytelling is certainly preferable to the whacking pacing of other movies of its ilk.
Yes, he really wrote that (though the italicized emphasis is mine). He then noted that the "climax” of the movie sent him out happy. How special for him.
The review was so over-the-top sexist that Jezebel promptly published a hilarious parody of it: Wonder Woman — Gal Gadot Did Not Give Me a Hard Enough Boner which frankly is more worth reading than Edelstein’s “serious” review.
Amidst everything else going on today in the war on women, a stupid, misogynistic movie review is pretty trivial, I know. But what does it say about the state of our society and culture when a major magazine and its website publish this kind of sexist crap?