Catherine Hardwicke's Lady Issues

Catherine Hardwicke has decided to play the vagina card, whining about how the Big Bad Men wouldn't let her direct an Oscar-nominated Man Movie.
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So, Catherine Hardwicke has decided to play the vagina card. Great. Another whiny lady, whining about how the Big Bad Men wouldn't let her direct an Oscar-nominated Man Movie, even though her Super Successful Girl Movie made a whole buttload of money. Maybe she does have a right to whine... but not about this.

Ms. Hardwicke, this wildly successful moneymaker you made was Twilight. If, in my portfolio, I had a bunch of articles about celebrity cellulite and stars without makeup, I would not expect to find a job with The New Yorker. Using your Twilight success as the reason why you should have been considered to direct the The Fighter (which would kick Twilight's ass if it didn't scare it away by winking at it first) is like saying you can scream the loudest so you should be a sound engineer. And also, you were fired from directing another Twilight, so maybe stop bragging about that one.

This was her quote:

I couldn't get an interview even though my last movie made $400 million... I was told it had to be directed by a man -- am I crazy? It's about action, it's about boxing, so a man has to direct it... But they'll let a man direct 'Sex in the City' or any girly movie you've ever heard of.

Something tells me this isn't the whole story. Something also tells me that since Mark Wahlberg was the producer of The Fighter and had a good relationship with director David O. Russell, this job was probably going to go to The Guy the Producer Trusted. If anyone thinks that the director of a simpering, pandering, saccharine tween vampire saga (which, um, sucked -- little vampire joke) had a shot at directing a gritty true story about a boxer past his prime and struggling with an insane family then I'd be kind of surprised.

But mostly, what was Catherine Hardwicke doing during last year's Oscars, when Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director for her worldwide box office success, Womyn Womyn Womyn: Girly Girly Womyn? Oh wait, no. That's incorrect. She actually won for The Hurt Locker, a small, low-budget movie about the current war that didn't get a wide release and made about $50 million. Lots of people considered it a "Man Movie," even though Kathryn "Not a Dude" Bigelow directed it. And actually, Avatar star Sigourney Weaver kinda thought that she only won because of her glorious lady breasts.

Oh, I know what she was doing: she was not directing Twilight: New Moon.

Here, however, is why Hardwicke has a right to whine about not being considered for this job: Before she directed Twilight, she did have experience directing grittier, smaller, less blatantly tween-scream projects. Thirteen, for example, was the movie written partly by then-13-year-old Nikki Reed about middle-schoolers having sex, doing drugs, and cutting themselves. This was meant to be a comedy, by the way. (And not even about vibrating panties!) It was shot in six days and on super 16 mm film. In other words, this was no Twilight. Hardwicke also directed Lords of Dogtown, the skateboarding movie based on the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. Not a lot of ladies in this movie, mostly guys on skateboards, finding out the real price of fame...

Hmmm. Ironically, this sentence appears in the Wikipedia entry for Lords of Dogtown:

The two boys quickly become rich and famous... Their lives have changed: they are now skating for money rather than passion as they did before.

Catherine Hardwicke -- clearly directing for money rather than passion, as she did before. Unless this is the career she wants back. In which case, she should still stop whining and start taking on different projects. And give some of her Twilight money to real victims of sexism.

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