| Entertainment |
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| weaver_comment: dangerous liasons is entertaining, even though the literary heritage is totally disguised. |
Among the strangest remakes in recent years is Cruel Intentions, a teen reworking of Dangerous Liaisons. Just what the world needs: a Just-17 version of one of the great pieces of Western literature. It seems a pathetic concept, the point being that you simply don't play those sort of cynical, manipulative games until you have some mileage on you. But Cruel Intentions is reckoned, by Hollywood insiders, to be one of the New Year's surefire successes. If the film industry has learned anything in 1998 it's that whilst giant lizards and even Oprah are no guarantee of big box-office, cram a medium-budget film with a cast of unknown adolescents and you have a hit. The studios have now realised that the term 'box-office clout' is a misnomer. Demi Moore and Sharon Stone are no guarantee that a film will make back its money. No, the best way to see profit is to cast female television starlets. Scream featured Neve Campbell from the American TV series Party Of Five; I Know What You Did Last Summer starred her Party Of Five co-star, Jennifer Love Hewitt. Cruel Intentions stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, the teen heroine of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I Know What You Did Last Summer raked in a surprise $72 million at the box-office and held the number one spot for three weeks. Scream made over $100 million. Neve Campbell's other horror venture, The Craft, about teenage witches, was also massively successful, spawning the hit Aaron Spelling series, Charmed. Coming in the new year are the next instalments of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, as well as Killing Mrs Tingle, the directorial debut of Scream creator Kevin Williamson. There was a time when the motor of the US film industry was boys aged 16-30. Scream and Titanic changed all that. Half of all American women under the age of 25 have seen Titanic twice and teenagers now account for 27 per cent of all movie tickets sold at adult ticket prices in the US. After years of targeting adolescent males with testosterone-fuelled cinema, Hollywood has reacquainted itself with the young, female audience. | ||||||
| Half of all American women under the age of 25 have seen Titanic twice. | Despite what the emotional bullies might tell you, Titanic was the trite piece of fluff that happened to have the right star at the right time. Scream, on the other hand, was a masterpiece of good dialogue, good direction and good intentions. Wes Craven seems to instinctively understand young women. From the time he helmed the Nightmare On Elm Street films, they have always been his heroines, the only ones with the power to beat evil. Teenage boys drop like flies, often for laughs, but the girls are suburban goddesses. Because of the rise of feminism and the increasing economic power of women, it became politically correct to depict women as strong. So men like Wes Craven and Joss Wheedon, creator of 16-year-old vampire killer Buffy, can safely indulge the male fantasy of the dominatrix and combine it with the Lolita fixation. They get away with it because both Craven and Wheedon are immense talents who, if they were working in any other genre but horror, would be recognised more seriously. weaver_comment: BTVS aired in the 6:45 kiddy slot. Damn and blast. | Buffy The Vampire Slayer is one of the great television shows of all time, the writing as good as that for Hill Street Blues, The Simpsons or, if you think he deserves to be in the same category, Alan Bleasdale at his very best. Using the supernatural as an allegory for the inner emotional turmoil of the adolescent female, Buffy's high school is, literally, a gateway to hell. Luscious, pouting Sarah Michelle Gellar kickboxes and wisecracks her way through each episode. BBC2, who have bought it for 1999, shouldn't put Buffy in a 'kiddie' time slot the way Channel 4 did with My So Called Life. | At the moment, all the excitement in American pop culture is being generated by young women. The charts are awash not with bubblegum bands, but with spit-out-the-bubblegum bands. Brandy and Monica's chart-topping The Boy Is Mine, in which the teen divas scrap over a boy before making friends and dumping him, is either a soul classic or the first Jerry Springer anthem, depending on how you look at it. Jennifer Paige's Crush dominates radio airplay with the stirring chorus 'It's just a little crush, not like I faint with every single touch'. And waving the flag for angst is Fiona Apple, a 19-year-old prodigy acclaimed as Tori Amos meets Billie Holliday. links: warner brothers: targetting teens pays dividends (2/9/99) | claire danes on les mis, and fanatic fans. the lillith fair and part 2. girl groups. As well as Buffy, the WB channel has Charmed, Felicity and Dawsons Creek, all teen-centred, all the discussed shows of the new season. Warner Brothers have given over the fledgling channel entirely to teen-themed programmes and they promote them heavily, as if they were movies. Teen People, an adolescent offshoot of People magazine, is the magazine sensation of the year - and no wonder: every year for the next 10 years approximately 10 million US kids will turn 13. | A source at Teen People explains: "At other times when there's been a huge adolescent audience, it's been for one thing: pop or cinema or television. Right now all three things are very strong. A lot of the stars are big in the three different media. The teenage soul singer Usher is starring in the new Kevin Williamson film. Brandy has a record career, her own sitcom and now a film franchise." The Teen People source confidently predicts that his magazine will be selling 3 million copies a month within the year. Young women of the nineties are so strong that Hollywood simply can't behave the way they did to Judy Garland. | Hugely popular with young women, 22-year-old singer-songwriter Jewel makes her film debut next year, and her heroically bad poetry has sold over a million copies. Aware that the future is female, the major US publishing houses are scouting for the literary version of the Buffy effect. Michael Lynton, head of Penguin Books, says: "At the moment, we are the only part of the media yet to be affected, but the minute we have a breakout hit, all of that will change. We have all these figures telling us that teenage girls think it's cool to read and what we're hoping is that someone is going to do for the teen market what Bridget Jones did for 30-something women." It has taken the teenager 40 years to reach full power. In the process, they have evolved from the miniature adult of the fifties. In 1957's Peyton Place, all the teenagers were 30 and if they had a genuinely young talent, like Judy Garland, they'd strap her breasts down and have her playing a 12 year old. | Young women of the nineties are so strong that Hollywood simply can't behave the way they did to Judy Garland. And in a stunning example of emotional networking, the power starlets even have their own mother figures watching out for them. Diane Keaton scouts scripts for Drew Barrymore and Sally Field does the same for Minnie Driver. The real pity is to ponder which great, lost actresses would have a three-picture production deal with Miramax if they were making it today? Tatum O'Neal, one of the most startling talents and beauties of her generation, deserved the kind of career that only Jodie Foster (a theory unto herself) was able to forge. Tuesday Weld was so sexy that, as a fifties starlet, she could only ever be cult. |
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