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At issue was his New York Observer review of the comedy "Identity Thief." Reed hated the movie a sentiment shared with a good many movie critics, going by the lowly 24 percent score the movie received on Rotten Tomatoes. (I am agnostic on this point, since I didn't see the film. I was on vacation, remember?)
Other critics railed against Reed for his harsh and personal attack. McCarthy was also <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/15/jenny-mccarthy-melissa-mccarthy-rex-reed-weight_n_2695959.html">defended by her cousina>, the actress Jenny McCarthy, and by her "Bridesmaids" director Paul Feig a man so gentlemanly he wears a suit on the set, but who was prompted <a href="https://twitter.com/paulfeig">to go on Twittera> to say this: "For his catty and school bully name-calling of the supremely talented Melissa McCarthy, I cordially invite Mr. Rex Reed to go f- himself."
Reed <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/rex-reed-defends-melissa-mccarthy-421352">went on the defensivea> a few days after the review was published, appearing on New York's WOR-AM to tell host Mark Simone, "Don't make me the villain." Reed blamed the controversy not on his insults but "the big publicity machine called Universal Pictures." ("Identity Thief" did win the weekend, with $36.6 million.) He also claimed he was trying to raise the issue of obesity, arguing "I object to using health issues like obesity as comedy talking points" which is a crass revisionism of what he originally wrote.
Note that this list is all men. McCarthy is one of the few female comic actors who haven't starved themselves to fit into a (usually male) Hollywood executive's stereotype of beauty. (Check out Margaret Cho's concert film "I'm the One That I Want" for a hilarious screed about her encounters with weight expectations in Hollywood.)
That's the other half of the issue: the double standard. Kevin James, to use a recent example, can be cast with attractive leading ladies such as Salma Hayek, Maria Bello, Rosario Dawson and Amber Valletta and no one takes notice of the mismatch. (To be fair, James' real-life wife, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0478518/">Steffiana De La Cruza>, is a stunner.)
Sean P. Means writes The Cricket in daily blog form at <a target="_blank" href="http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket">http://www.sltrib.com/blogs/moviecricket. Follow him on Twitter @moviecricket, and on Facebook: <a target="_blank" href="http://www.facebook.com/seanpmeans">http://www.facebook.com/seanpmeans. Email him at ailto:spmeans@sltrib.com">spmeans@sltrib.com.