 Romantic Cotton Candy
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Feb. 16th, 2008 @ 08:03 pm 
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Warning: Today's post is devoid of any technical or useful content. It is primarily a rant about the state of movies today.
I'm annoyed at romantic comedies.
I like lightweight entertainment. My various avocations are rather intellect-heavy. Even my down-time is heavily on the brain than most - this blog, various video podcasts, lots of hobby programming, fixing the errors in the universe... it never ends. Servers to maintain for business, servers to maintain for hobby. Fighting PCs, Macs, iPhones, RAZRs, Nokia internet tables and even the occasional Commodore 64 because I am a romantic.
So my entertainment reading and watching tends towards the brainless. Things like rollerderby, comics (Zits, User Friendly, Dilbert, Mutts, Foxtrot, Calvin & Hobbes - a comic named after dead economists, what could be better?!?) My favorite movies are, well, unlikely. My top five would probably be:
- Oblivion and Backlash, a cowboys-and-aliens tongue-in-cheek movie with loads of sarcasm. And Meg Foster. And Lurch playing an undertaker, Cat Woman playing Miss Kitty who sells Pussy, George Takei (Sulu) talking to Captain Kirk through a bottle of "Jim, Beam Me Up", and more.
Oh yeah, and the guy gets the girl.
- Cherry 2000, with Melanie Griffith (who hasn't done that much great stuff, but I did like in Working Girl, which also fits the motif of this entry except it's not as light. But it does have Hans Solo and Ellen Ripley in it) as a futuristic Mad Max kind of character. In a quest for a sex robot body. It's off beat, and the best use of a Mustang since Gone In 60 Seconds, both versions of which really sucked.
Oh yeah, and the guy gets the (human, not robot) girl.
- Fifth Element, where Bruce Willis plays, well, Bruce Willis (He's like Chevy Chase, Martin Short and how Bill Murray started out that way), trying to help a space alien babe save the world in a Sci-Fi shooter.
Oh yeah, and the guy gets the (alien, not human) girl.
- Casablanca. Actually I like a lot of older films. All kinds. The original Mummy, Topper, most Preston Sturges flicks. But this is the only black-and-white to make my top ten probably. Except for Blazing Saddles, but that's not as rewatchable as the next entry.
Oh yeah, and the guy, well, can have any girl he wants.
- SpaceBalls, which is a Mel Brooks movie. More popular than the first two on this list, although with my twisted sensibilities, I view it as less well known. Simply because the first two are so far ahead of it in my mind.
This just barely beats Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome for me. But actually The Man Who Knew Too Little beats Thunderdome, on the evidence that I have Man and not Thunderdome on DVD. Yes, I also have Toy Story, which I never rewatch, so maybe that's not a good metric.
My point is, SpaceBalls is fun and I watch it probably several times a year. And it is a romantic comedy. Or perhaps a comedy with a bit of romance. But the Hans Solo character does get Princess Druidia. Which means...
Oh yeah, and the guy gets the druish girl.
Five is a hard number to make. But the first two are both a bit uncommon, unique views onto alternate hard-but-funny worlds. And none have the, well, depth of, say, Chocolat (and which had Johnny Depp), but sometimes "accessible" is a good thing.
All of which is to say that I like my movies to be a bit on the light fluffy side.
But why, oh why, does this mean romantic? I'm not much of a romantic. Romantic isn't really my niche. I'd rather have action-comedies. The significant other likes leather-clad gun-weilding vampires. (She has bookcases, plural, and no, not something so minor as merely bookshelves, dedicated to them.) Romance in a movie is fine, but ideally it's peripheral. And if romance is involved, it should have tension. Remington Steele was far better than Moonlighting (Bruce Willis makes a callback, for those of you keeping score), although both were better than Dharma & Greg, which ironically starred Jenna Elfman, niece of Danny Elfman, who is married to Brigit Fonda, who represents all that is wrong with this category, in less than six degrees of inebrieated seperation!), is what I'm saying.
Maybe I should clarify.
- I know way too much about Hollywood. Won't tell you why here, but it wasn't a hobby.
- Briget Fonda has a cute face but is a lousy actress in very short dresses playing emotionally distant and dysfunctional characters. Not much fun.
- Jenna Elfman mostly plays breezy characters. Her major heavy was against Bugs Bunny, seriously, in Loony Tunes Back In Action. Which I have on DVD.
Oh yeah, and the guy gets the (non-animated) girl.
- I often can't remember the names of my co-workers of two years. But meaningless trivia from a decade ago, no problem!
- Kevin Bacon once said something to the effect that pretty much everyone in Hollywood he's either worked with or worked with someone who has worked with. He has been prolific (and good.) And this will make more, or maybe less, sense as you read on.
There's no special kind of help available for people like me. But I would be digressing were that possible.
Back to those vampire movies... ever noticed that Blade wept over Nyssa at the end of Blade II? That Selene rescued and ran off with Michael in Underworld? It wasn't just the first vampires that were seductive; now the blood suckers believe in love!
Romantic Comedies. The point is, they can be mindless fun. For example, Hitch and Music and Lyrics are recent fluffy romantic comedies. Mr & Mrs Smith is a romantic action movie. Meaning a hateful action movie with an inevitable romantic conclusion. Focused on sex. Wedding Crashers, in contrast, merely uses sex as the duex ex machina; it's not the point, just a way to get there.
Hugh Grant has been referred to as a leading romantic actor for our time, along with Tom Hanks (who got saddled with Meg Ryan in many of his.) Part of this is on the back of "Four Weddings", but lets go the route less travelled (and less than 14 years old) and look at...
- Music & Lyrics (romantic comedy with Drew Barrymore, a skank who plays nice girls), as a writer in what is purely a fluffy romance/comedy
- About A Boy in the niche called heart-warming, meaning it's primarily a character movie about a kid. But Hugh gets a girl, but not the main girl - Toni Collette, as an unbalanced type, who was also wonderful in the dark Little Miss Sunshine and equally dark Abba's Greatest Hits movie, as well as in The Sixth Sense, a good non-romantic brain-bender with... he's everywhere! Bruce Willis! Where's Kevin Bacon when we need him?)
- Two Weeks Notice, which really has no pretence beyond being one of those romances where we know how it will end five minutes in, but they apparently don't, or at least a five minute movie wouldn't sell enough popcorn.
If you want this kind of movie, Just Like Heaven at least gives them a few reasons to be apart... likes she's dead! And doesn't know it! (kinda)
So back to my gripe with Brigit Fonda. She's got a pretty face, but she doesn't use it. No emotion. Disney built more realistic people out of plastic! She's the opposite of Meg Ryan - whose characters always seem on the verge of falling apart due to too much going on. Reese Witherspoon, who is in Just Like Heaven referenced above, seems a bit floaty, but better than Brigit. Alicia Silverstone, who generally played floaty characters in the very few films she did, at least played them with gusto. There seems to be a bit of a lack of good female comedy actresses. Cameron Diaz comes to mind, and Joan Cusack (which takes us also back to Looney Tunes - she was the secret lab head, to Jenna Elfman, to Danny to Brigit! And oh yeah, she's John Cusack's sister, was in Grosse Pointe and many others with him, and he was in Being John Malkovich with Cameron Diaz, so maybe they're almost the same person? And Alan Arkin was in both Grosse Pointe with Joan and in Little Miss Sunshine with Toni Collette mentioned above. And Joan was in Toys (a very quirky film with Robin Williams), costarring with Robin Wright Penn who was also in Unbreakable with Bruce Willis, closing our little circle! Kevin Bacon is so amazing!)
On the guy side, it's a bit easier. The movies seem kinder to some men. For example, Adam Sandler had done some truly awful stuff... but most of his movies end with a cute romantic end and a few are pretty good - 50 First Dates, Wedding Singer come to mind.
Which raises the question of, what does it take for a movie to not be romantic? As I mentioned, Mr & Mrs Smith ends as a romance. So does Ben Stiller's A Night At The Museum, which really is more of a kid movie. Heck, even the Lion King ended that way. And Cars. It's kind of annoying. Action flicks don't do this to us, why do comedies? |
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