On Boozing Grannies and the News-Stations who Love them

Written by Ryan AnthonycloseAuthor: Ryan Anthony Name: Ryan Anthony
Email: mica1884@gmail.com
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About: 25 year old Tennessee resident and small government conservative. I first discovered my love of writing while working for a high school newspaper; that was eight years ago. Now I'm studying for an Associate's Degree in journalism. My favorite topics to cover for Parcbench include contact sports and television.See Authors Posts (34) on January 7, 2010

Last week, the news network that for some unholy reason still employs Rick Sanchez decided to give us all a taste of what life would be like with relatives we’d rather forget. No, we didn’t get to sit through a retelling of Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation in which the Griswolds were portrayed as heartless tax cheats and embezzlers.

Grandma did, however, get iced by the Hollywood Zamboni – which deserves ten demerits for running over cardboard cutouts of old ladies.

Susan Sarandon, Tinseltown’s 63-year old left-wing darling and recent divorcee, is due to fill the role of Grandma Lynn in a movie remix of The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold’s bound collection of pages dealing with the events surrounding and taking shape from pedophilia.

More precisely, the savage rape and murder of the buzzed matriarch’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter by a neighbor.

In doing so, she takes a role which calls for a feigned love of shopping and (not surprisingly) alcohol. Such things are mainstays of life in Hollywood, which should result in Ms. Sarandon hitting this one out of the park.

University of Michigan alumna Breeanna Hare, in CNN’s recent review of drunk grandmothers, isolated them as a “paint-by-numbers” role; consequently, they require some good acting to keep from veering into cliche territory. It is our honest opinion that great acting doesn’t stop an archetype from becoming cliche: John Travolta played an extremely well-acted Catholic hypocrite in last year’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 123.

Also, that the reverse is true.

Tired roles can stifle, and in some cases fully inoculate viewers to, great acting by going all-in on the first hand. With this latest portrayal, the boozing grandma is plodding further along toward becoming another in the grab bag of Hollywood stock characters, right up there with the incestuous Southerners and the inept law enforcement officers. No one bats an eyelid should such blatant and ridiculous stereotypes be milked for all they’re worth. The recipe for what has been TV’s and now will be Hollywood’s Lancome-wearing lush calls for one more ingredient: The grandmother in question is “nearly always” white.

Excuse me?

What would have happened if alcoholic grandmas were featured on 1970s TV series Good Times alongside J.J. Evans? This comic character, played by James Walker, was itself the subject of speculative crusades against stereotyping on the airwaves. Critics viewed the character as a minstrel show parody; the Mr. Tambo of the paintbrush, despite the fact that even today plenty of American blacks cannot read and write. Truth of reflection takes many forms, and had it been implied that the children of 963 North Gilbert were born out of wedlock, the very firmament would have been shaken. Bill Cosby learned this with the “Pound Cake Speech” that he would give long after Good Times went off the air.

This, of course, is why some of us at Parcbench were surprised at what seemed to be another giant double standard on the part of the liberal media – as if enough don’t come down the pike already.

The role of Grandma Lynn, with her many associated quirks, shows us that feminism hasn’t yet died: rather, just sat back with a martini in one wizened hand and cigarette in the other. Ready to drive old ladies over the boundary between working past sixty and being typecast, “boozing granny” remains as yet another role for which it isn’t really necessary to think outside the box.

Big mistake for a movie industry that still falls back on remakes of every film imaginable.

Much has been said about another paper-to-film adaptation receiving its own remake in 2012 – Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 – with regard to truth. Or, more specifically, censorship of the truth. Albeit unintentionally on the novelist’s part, the mid-90s totalitarian society of Fahrenheit coincided with the advent of political correctness in America. It is in this civilization and a not-too-distant future that Sebold’s book would find itself at the business end of a flamethrower, should alcoholic grandmothers take umbrage to its contents like the “colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo.”

Mainstream media, Hollywood elite and company can extol Grandma’s wasted ways to next week for all I care. They can do a double dive in the face of their ideals every step of the way. That doesn’t mean I’ll pay to see H’town dish out the results.

No, not this time.

The only 400-year-old Bloody Mary addict I want to see is in Daybreakers.