In 2014, The Other Woman will take a swipe at unfair stereotypes about women in a mistress-confronts-wife situation. A comedy from newbie screenwriter Melissa Stack, The Other Woman's first trailer features Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, and Brooklyn Decker as three women unknowingly involved with the same man (Game of Thrones' handsome devil Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). When these ladies find out they've been played, rather than reacting with comedy's favorite detrimental catty reactions (hair-pulling and clawing coupled with screeching "hilarious" one-liners about what a "slut" the other woman is or how the wife just isn't "giving it up" enough), they team up to take the bastard down. Refreshing, right?
Sure it is. Until Diaz's sidekick, her assistant played by Nicki Minaj, comes into play — or rather, doesn't come into play. Minaj, known for her incredible outspokenness both in lyrics and in life, is the typical sassy sidekick detached from the main plot: she's there to field the comedy heroine's exasperated comments at the story's outset — she responds to "He's got a wife" with salty one-liners like "And you can't take her?" While Minaj, as an inexperienced actress, might not be ready for a ton of dialogue, the film has only one black woman in a cast that focuses on three blond-haired, blue-eyed white women, and it's relegated her to a character that reeks of the "Sassy Black Friend" stereotype that we recognized as an issue years ago.
Now, this is only a trailer, so maybe when we get the chance to see the movie in full, we'll find another subplot in which Minaj is a fully-realized character who wasn't conceived solely to give the film's exposition moments a little more zing. But from what we can see now, while the film industry is a limiting place for women (it shouldn't be exciting that The Other Woman, a film about women, is written by a woman, but it is), it's even more limiting for women of color.
The Other Woman hits theaters in April 2014. Hopefully, it won't disappoint us when the time comes.
Image: 20th Century Fox
