Saturday, June 13, 2009

There's nothing wrong with me!

One of my coworkers - I'll call him "Bill C." - directed my attention to a horror movie, Orphan, that opens next month and, coincidentally, has a character with the same first name as mine.

Right away, I'm thinking this is going to be a problem. I hate horror movies. I don't find anything remotely entertaining in being scared. Then I read about the plot. This is one that's definitely not going in the Netflix queue.

It was one thing when Madonna became interested in Jewish mysticism and started studying Kabbalah and picked "Esther" as her Hebrew name. That was kind of flattering.

The "Esther" in this movie is a 9-year-old who (Spoiler alert!) turns out not to be as angelic as she seemed when her new parents were smitten with her at the local orphanage. (I had no idea you could just head down to the local orphanage and pick out a kid!)

Apparently, Esther is some kind of demon child - as if you couldn't tell from those deep-set eyes, that creepy stare and the perfectly symmetrical pigtails.

Just so there's no misunderstanding, the tag line makes it perfectly clear: "There's something wrong with Esther." I want to make one thing perfectly clear: There's nothing wrong with me! Behind my sweet facade is - more sweetness, I swear!

And all joking aside, the movie has drawn the ire of advocates for adoption for a another tag line that was removed: "It must be hard to love an adopted child as much as your own." Really, Warner Bros., what were you thinking?

At least the studio admitted its error. "We made a mistake," said Scott Rowe, a company spokesman. "We get complaints about virtually every movie ... but in this case, we went back and said, 'You're right ... and we're sorry.'"

2 comments:

Amanda said...

Woah. That was a BAD line. I'm so glad they retracted it. Wow.

Esther said...

Yeah, I know. It was pretty insensitive.