Monkeybone

This review is NOT approved for all audiences.
I'm not sure there's much to be said for a movie about a guy who animates his phallus. I'll keep it short.

Although the physical acting was solid, and Brendan Frasier and Bridget Fonda both offered entertaining performances (if somewhat unexciting), the images were too much Roger Rabbit and not enough Tim Burton, although the sets and effects were often full of potential. I mean it was necessarily juvenile, but that fact itself made the story unemotional. It became impossible to identify with the characters, which is a huge tragedy, because Bridget Fonda. She always oozes sympathy and wit, and in this role, though we clearly took her side, she merely filled a generic "girlfriend" slot.

Let's talk about the gender issues. Clearly, if you're going to turn your penis into a cheeky monkey (so many things wrong with that sentence), you have to be a guy, right? Because Freud was right: women don't have one.

Dude.

This becomes a problem when you are equating your external sex organs with your internal personality struggles. Basically, the movie is claiming that a man has two sides: his traumatized, loving, responsible side that wants to sleep and propose, and the evil, mischievous, fun side that just wants to squeeze or penetrate anything it's attracted to. The film also points out that women might be attracted to both sides of a man.

It doesn't, however, even begin to talk about the complexity of women until the concluding animations, when everybody is basically turned into an animated monkey. Despite the fact that it's not really complexity, it is pretty gender-neutral in those moments. But not until then. Until then, women are left as accessories to a man's internal struggle. They are the object of adoration, and the reason to repress the monkey, and educated spectators of the masculine internal struggle, but they don't have the same struggles themselves. None of the women show the least amount of depth or internality, and in the moment when Fonda does dream, she dreams of her wedding. With the man.

I'm sorry, but despite the imagination, this film gets pissed on by my feminist side.