{"id":4033,"date":"2018-10-03T05:36:42","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T09:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=4033"},"modified":"2018-10-05T09:24:42","modified_gmt":"2018-10-05T13:24:42","slug":"are-you-tired-of-femjep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/are-you-tired-of-femjep\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You Tired of “Femjep”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Characters in thrillers\u2013especially the women\u2013seem to live in a parallel universe. A universe where they\u2019ve never read a thriller or seen one on TV or in a movie theater. Because otherwise they wouldn\u2019t behave like idiots….<\/p>\n

Take Jennifer Lopez in the recent erotic thriller The Boy Next Door. <\/em>She plays a high school teacher of classics\u2013that\u2019s right, and in a school offering a year-long course in Homer (the poet, not the Simpson). It\u2019s one helluva well-paid job because she drives what looks like a Cadillac SUV.<\/p>\n

Of course, who cares about reality since you\u2019re either ogling Lopez looking gorgeous in every scene or drooling over ripped Ryan Guzman, the sociopath who moves in next door.\u00a0 He befriends her nebbishy son, displays his body for Lopez at night in a well-lit bedroom across the way, seduces her, and then stalks her in escalating scenes of nightmarish threat and violence.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It all ends with bizarre family togetherness, but before that, Lopez goes dumb in major ways aside from having humped a high school sociopath. Her bestie phones Lopez to come over right away because she\u2019s in trouble. When Lopez pulls up and the house is totally dark, is she cautious? Nope. Does she call first? No again. She rushes inside. When the lights don\u2019t work, does she back out and dial 911? Well, you guessed it. She proceeds alone and unarmed into the large dark house, calling out her friend\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

And in her final confrontation with the psycho hunk, when she gets a chance to take him down, she clunks him on the head just once. When he\u2019s knocked out, she doesn\u2019t finish the job or even kick him a few times to further incapacitate him, despite knowing how dangerous and twisted he is. He\u2019s tied up her husband and son, threatened to kill them both, killed her best friend, and was going to turn the barn they\u2019re all in into a giant funeral pyre. So of course she turns her back on him.<\/p>\n

And of course that one blow doesn\u2019t do the trick. He predictably rises up and attacks her again, like one of those monsters in a horror or sci-fi movie that just won’t die. More mayhem ensues\u2026and Lopez shrieks enough to win a Yoko Ono Award.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d think that after Scream<\/em> had eviscerated this kind of plotting years ago, writers would be embarrassed to have their characters behave like dummies, but Hollywood keeps churning out femjep films. Sadly, this one was co-produced by Lopez herself.<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael is the author of 25 other books in many genres, including the novel of suspense Assault With a Deadly Lie<\/a>.\u00a0 He teaches creative writing workshops online at writewithoutborders.com<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Characters in thrillers\u2013especially the women\u2013seem to live in a parallel universe. A universe where they\u2019ve never read a thriller or seen one on TV or in a movie theater. Because otherwise they wouldn\u2019t behave like idiots…. Take Jennifer Lopez in the recent erotic thriller The Boy Next Door. She plays a high school teacher of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[369,219,1522,314,1259,317,1523,1543,122,501,1219],"class_list":["post-4033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thrillers","tag-assault-with-a-deadly-lie","tag-crime-fiction","tag-crime-movies","tag-femjep","tag-http-writewithoutborders-com","tag-jennifer-lopez","tag-ryan-guzman","tag-scream","tag-suspense","tag-thrillers","tag-writewithoutborders-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4033"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8231,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions\/8231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}