Our summer without women…

In theaters Wednesday: The Rocker
In theaters Friday: Death Race, The House Bunny, The Longshots

New on DVD: Prom Night

In the span of six hours last Saturday afternoon I saw the two most hyped comedies of the summer, Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder. And as the credits rolled on the latter, and Tom Cruise — yes, he appears as a heartless, foul-mouthed studio executive — shook his groove thing in the ridiculous way only a balding, middle-aged white man miming younger hip-hop stars in an ill-advised show of bravado can, I realized that not only were there no lead roles from women in either movie, but that neither even attempted a romantic subplot. My first thought was one of appreciation simply because those almost always feel so forced and cheesy. Then I started thinking that maybe the lack of women as love interests in these comedies, and others of late, means something more, that it is a willful act for better or worse.

What we can’t do as an audience is take the void of female presence in either movie and chalk it up to a lack of talent on the YY side of the chromosome tracks. Women have been among the funniest, edgiest and most successful purveyors of comedy for several years running. In April, Vanity Fair tipped its designer hat to the likes of Tina Fey, Amy Sedaris, Sarah Silverman and Kristin Wiig with a piece championing them as nothing less than icons, talented writers and performers empowered by their total command and transcendence of the “funny girl” stereotype.

No, these movies are on about something. And it is nothing if not intentional.

Call them crude. Call them outlandish, obnoxious, vile. Call them bromantic comedies. These are thoroughly modern, though subjectively funny movies, made by men unabashedly for men. Almost to a fault, one could argue, at least in terms of box office success. These movies speak to the modern male who is disconnected from himself, his friends, even from nature (I contend that Thoreau would really dig Tropic Thunder). But women, one step ahead, are always in better touch with their emotions. So while guys may make a surprising connection with the characters in these movies, most girlfriends and wives will think they are merely “cute.”

The set ups may be different, but the themes are identical. In Pineapple Express, two stoners played by Seth Rogen and James Franco go on the run from corrupt cops after one sees a murder. The rambling chase morphs into an absurd American version of the great Hot Fuzz via Scorsese’s After Hours. But the film doesn’t close in a puff of smoke or a garish explosion. It closes on Rogen, Franco and the still-underrated Danny McBride bonding in a diner and reliving the movie’s misadventures like brothers or college buddies would do. “That was a great fight we had,” says McBride, who also appears as a maverick explosives effects expert in Tropic Thunder. Then they vow to be best friends forever. No kidding.

Underneath layers of beefed-up ego and personality artifice, Tropic Thunder leads Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black crave an emotional connection and a bonding with something real and reliable even more than their younger counterparts in Pineapple Express. Their self-constructed predicament is so definitively male, the fact that there is not one woman in the movie with significant dialogue seems less sexist and more beside the point. They built up these walls themselves and are the only ones who can break them down.

So it is hard to criticize the use of up-and-comer Amber Heard as an almost non-existent character in Pineapple Express — for the record, she plays Rogen’s very loyal and very high school-aged girlfriend — when the screenplay doesn’t even try to focus on any other relationships beside the three male leads. Heard is only there to set up two of the funniest scenes in the movie, and for that she should be commended rather than critiqued. To wit, when Heard’s character suggests that she and Rogen get married, Rogen, knowing his myriad faults, doubts her judgment and balks. But when McBride asks him for lifelong brotherly allegiance, he’s all in.

These movies are not for everyone — and based on the language alone, certainly not for children — but I do think women can enjoy them for what they are, and most significantly, I think they might signal a kind of new standard for better, smarter adult comedies, ones that satirize what needs to be satirized, and even tap into the mainline of the modern American psyche. That, and you’re going to laugh more than you have in a long, long time.