![]() ![]() When I graduated from high school, I was chosen to be part of this PBS documentary program called ‘The Ride.’ It was four young aspiring directors, and we traveled around the country filming portraits of young Americans.” “So, I decided to become a filmmaker instead. “I always wanted to be an actress-I was in all the school plays at my high school in Los Angeles-but I was shy, and acting did not seem like a solid profession,” she said. In a 2007 New York Times profile, Patton discussed the filmmaking interests she’d pursued before going after her childhood dream of acting. If only there was a way to give Patton a do-over. Being trapped in this toxic morass is a fate no actress deserves, let alone one who was eyed for a Best Supporting Actress nomination not terribly long ago for her turn as a life-changing schoolteacher in Lee Daniels’ Precious. “Look her in the eyes, grab the back of her neck, say nothing,” Sandler advises, “and then fuck her in the mouth a few times.”Īnd even later, when he does just that before bedding Patton’s character, you don’t find yourself rooting for true love so much as mourning Patton’s descent into such dark, destructive depths. It’s hard to imagine any actress easily shaking off the grime of sharing a scene in which Sandler and Spade, walking 10 paces behind her into a biker bar, trade lines like “I bet she needs a nice dick to cry on” or “She’s grieving, which makes her vulnerable, which means you have a shot.” Later, Sandler takes Spade aside and imparts some blowhard douchebro advice unto his mild-mannered friend. For all the sketchy sexism that spews out of Sandler’s mouth, it’s Spade whose “hero” moment comes, essentially, as he pummels a woman in the stomach and screams, “I’m so tired of women lying to me and fucking me over!” The Do-Over is an MRA wet dream in which Sandler and Spade justify grossly misogynist posturing with cheap twists and plot turns, firing a flare gun at women in bikinis for laughing at their junk (after flashing their breasts), and worse. And Patton, the nice lady whose dead husband’s identity Spade’s dorky bank manager has unwittingly taken over, finds herself more than anyone else subjected to one degrading line after another. ![]() ![]() Every single female character is oversexed, shrewish, or secretly scheming against them. That’s the Adam Sandler version of a meet cute in a movie in which two middle-aged men are emboldened to act out their horny douchebag fantasies for two hours because their shitty lives, and the women in them, owe them that much. When she does, finding herself in the sights of Sandler and Spade’s amateur con men in the middle of a terminally convoluted plot that only gets exponentially dumber, the pair stalk her from afar, drooling over her physique before intentionally running her over with a Winnebago. It takes nearly 50 minutes for Patton to even show up in The Do-Over, the latest in Sandler’s four-picture Netflix film deal after The Ridiculous Six-a comedy so laden with offensive Native American caricatures that actors walked off the set in protest. This month, in addition to donning emerald skin and cumbersome fangs in the critically panned video game epic Warcraft, the actress finds herself in the unenviable position of being ogled, sexually objectified, physically attacked, and generally abused in a host of ugly ways as David Spade’s love interest in an Adam Sandler action-comedy. Her first film roles came in supporting turns in the 2005 Will Smith hit Hitch and ensemble coke party dramedy London, but within just a year she would made her film debut proper opposite Washington in Déjà Vu, months after playing her first leading lady role in the Outkast period musical Idlewild.įast-forward through a decade that’s seen little traction gained on the big screen for women-let alone women of color. Patton landed her first acting gigs at 28, getting a relatively late start for good reason: She’d gone to USC film school to start a career behind the camera, not in front of it. ![]()
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