• Screen Time

    Ozark, Bird Box, Kidding

    Sometimes I have knee-jerk reactions that aren’t immediately sensical. I want to see older women on screen. Obviously, it’s absurd that male leads require considerably younger actresses to be cast as love interests. When I do see age-appropriate casting it’s practically jarring.

    Here is the non-sensical part. Sometimes it even goes too far and and I’m left questioning if it’s equality and I should be happy or if it’s unbelievable and we shouldn’t be casting older women in clearly younger roles because…I’m not sure why exactly. I need to get to the bottom of these feelings. I also tend to be literal about actress’s ages relative to characters they play, which maybe isn’t fair since, duh, it’s acting.

    For instance, on Breaking Bad, it never made sense to me that a woman in her early 40s married to a high school science teacher in his 50s, living in New Mexico on their first marriage (presumably) and had a teenage son would decide to have a new baby at that point in their lives.

    Laura Linney in Ozark

    Jason Bateman (50) being married to an actress days away from 55 is great and conceivably realistic despite seeming radical to me when I first watched Ozark just because it’s so unusual to see. I want to believe that Marty Byrd could be attracted to a woman five years older than he and they didn’t have kids until her late 30s/early 40s, though that doesn’t quite make sense for their characters.

    Sandra Bullock in Birdbox

    There is no way that I’m buying a 52-year-old woman being pregnant, even with strangely smooth skin.

    Catherine Keener in Kidding

    I actually thought Catherine Keener was a few years younger than 59. I love her and she looks really good (and even if she didn’t, so what) but I seriously couldn’t tell if she was supposed to be Maddy’s mom or what in Kidding.