Terrific

[Content Note: Gender essentialism; fat bias; appropriation.]

Mrs. Doubtfire is getting a sequel, because innovating is hard.

"Helloooo there! Again!" as Robin Williams' Mrs. Doubtfire might say. The Hollywood Reporter announced on Wednesday that a sequel to the 1993 comedy is a go, with the actor and original director Christopher Columbus attached, along with "Elf" writer David Berenbaum.

The original film, about a newly divorced and out-of-work dad who dressed up as a Scottish nanny to trick his ex and spend time with his kids, earned more than $400 million worldwide and won two Golden Globes (including one for Williams) and an Oscar for makeup.

I don't even know how there could possibly be a sequel to that piece-of-shit film, what absurd premise they've conceived to put Williams back in Doubtfire drag, but whatever.

I hate basically every single thing about that movie. The whole premise of trickery. The gender essentialist trope that he couldn't really understand his wife until he knew her as a woman. The treating a man dressed as a woman as a punchline. The evident belief that an actor in a fat suit is acceptable; that a man in a "woman suit" is acceptable. The shitty Scottish accent. The fact that the nanny is a "little old Scottish lady" in the first place, part of the winning combination of random attributes that makes his wife, with her posh English boyfriend, hire him.

That's hardly a comprehensive list.

This movie needs a sequel like I need a second butthole.