romm comm tuum

Holy shit.

Well she wrote the bases of both of them too

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it’s like hero with a thousand faces but for white women

I believe you’re referring to The Momomyth

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:kissing_heart:

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Jerry Maguire (1996) - i hate cameron crowe films but feel compelled to watch them for some awful psychological reason. something about that looseness and willingness to be distracted by location and detail always seems like it might turn into a genuinely refreshing twist on the studio romcom format but the end result is invariably the worst possible version of same. the meandering structure turns into endless sludge, the stylised dialogue seems like it could just keep going for eternity, the attitude of vague humanism curdles into something even more unreal than the traditional representations of character in these things. he’s like the evil himbo version of richard linklater (or more so??).

Anyway this one is like a cross between a romcom and a sports movie, and also between a death of a salesman type broad critique of the business hustling lifestyle and a bland celebration of same. something for everybody. we start off with tom cruise walking around quickly slapping backs and reeling off generic patter, which is international movie language for someone good at his job. yet all is not well, he is dissatisfied with his status as a sports agent. in a flurry of inspiration he sits down and slams out a 25-page memo or “mission statement” (in contemorary terms I guess a tweetstorm or Medium post) about… agents giving players more personal attention, or how smaller is better, or something, it’s not clear and he never talks about or seems to give it much thought again. but it’s apparently revolutionary enough to get an approving dap from the guy at the copy center, to get tom cruise fired from his job and to get renee zellweger to both come work for AND fall in love with him. he turns up drunk at her house to make a pass at her within like a day but it’s ok because i guess she regards him as a catch that she’s lucky enough to swoop in and grab while he’s going through some kind of breakdown.

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it’s weird because at this point it seems like the movie is gonna veer into explicitly being about these two kind of grotesque peepshow-esque characters, the lady so directionless she falls in love with someone on the basis of a passionate memo and the guy so blandly obsessed with seeming likeable that he marries her seemingly out of wanting to avoid an awkward conversation and/or wanting to befriend her small son that dresses like an NYT columnist for some reason. and in fact the movie DOES seem to recognise this, so you may wonder if it’s possible for the movie to still veer towards a standard romantic ending given the two leads in fact marry unhappily 2/3rds of the way through the film. but don’t worry as we have not yet talked about the movie’s other major preoccupation, which is… sports!!

cuba gooding jr is tom cruise’s only client and a welcome source of bitterness and discontent inside the movie, the sports industry parts tend towards pretty broad comedy but there’s a good depiction of it as essentially a meatgrinder that chews up human bodies for profit while expecting an attitude of bland, supplicant positivity and “passion” from everyone involved. and it also touches on the creepy racial aspects of black players having to smile and play entertainer to mostly white agents/owners. but as it happens the solution to these tricky problems is to… narrowly escape being rendered comatose by a sports injury and attain something like meme status by a momentary unguarded flash of enthusiasm after the fact, which is what finally gets him press attention and attendent rewards, and also somehow gets tom cruise to remember the three-word activation phrase he needs to tell his wife to fix their problems somehow. and then at the end it cuts back to the old man who was supposedly his Business Mentor and who recites some bromides about how the key to both business and life is love and positivity and being a good businessman makes you a good person and vice versa and so forth. all of the business men are never more enthused than when they’re doing business but I guess the moral of the story is that sometimes you also require “wife” for when business man feels tired or sad.

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i watched this movie almost a month ago and it took me this long to write about it in part because just the thought of trying to describe all this stuff made me feel very tired. but in fairness i did kind of get what i wanted. the thing that finally made me gave in and watch it was hearing that the tom cruise part was originally meant for tom hanks, a perfect study in tom contrasts - and in fact it is interesting to compare the two! i think if hanks had been in it it would have been easier to assume… some level of decency or thoughtfulness beyond what the script actually entails. tom cruise’s weird nervy depthlessness ends up feeling far more true to the real spirit of the film, such as it is.

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my favorite romcom starring cuba gooding jr is chill factor. cuba gooding jr x skeet ulrich. skuba.

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Falling Inn Love (2019) - A rich San Francisco executive lady wins a rustic New Zealand inn by replying to a spam email (after drinking two bottles of wine first, to keep it believable). Inevitably the inn is past its prime and she is forced to enlist the services of a rugged country hunk to fix it up.

Basically, this is the same movie as the one about the fancy city lady who inherits a pumpkin farm, and the one about the fancy city lady who ends up in rural ireland. There are the same jokes about inappropriate shoes, lack of wifi, and for some reason about those suitcases with wheels on the bottom (are these felt to be prissy in the states?). In each movie the male love interest had a girlfriend/wife who died a few years back, which puts them in what I guess is some perfect movie balance between promiscuous and virginal. Fixer-upper country husbands.

The main distinction of THIS movie is that it takes place in New Zealand, which is kind of interesting in that it gives me a chance to try to reverse engineer whatever expectations or desires the presumably northamerican audience even has about New Zealand. Based on this movie, those are: the people are friendly, the country is pretty, it’s remote but not rustic, there’s a lot of slang which is never explained, there’s exactly one joke about hobbits, and everyone loves football. At one point the main couple find some love letters from WW1 in an old wall (prompting a quick definition of “immurement” from the hunk!), I dunno if this is a particularly NZ-associated idea, it actually sort of feels like a different rejected romantic comedy pitch was recycled into being a subplot.

Anyway the most interesting NZ-specific things about the movie to me are:

  1. The villain being this kind of fussy high-tea tory homesteader lady, which is a “type” I vaguely recognized from novels but was surprised to see turn up here
  2. The depiction of Australians as cold-blooded, corporate, big business types in contrast to the earthy authenticity of New Zealand. At one point the villain complains about the idea of the historic inn being sold on to an AUSTRALIAN chain, and it initially seems like this is meant to be a joke about her incomprehensible snobbery, but it’s actually something the movie kind of co-signs! When the deal falls through and the main lady decides to stay after all the stuffy realtor lady from Melbourne sneers “I knew New Zealand would be a waste of our time” as she swooshes off. The thing is I’m sure this is playing on a real differential of power between the two countries, it’s just funny to see in this context. The wellknown film cliche of soullessly urbane Australians.

What else? Since the main lady lives in San Francisco at the start there are a few jokes about jock venture capitalists and also a part where she rides an exercise bike with a VR helmet on. The VR countryside comes with a little emoji lady who talks to her and seems to know whatever’s happening in her life, so I wasn’t sure if she was meant to be a part of the app or a representation of inner consciousness in emoji form.

Some other minor details:

  • I think this is the only piece of media I’ve seen outside cartoons which actually uses the morning theme from Peer Gynt to soundtrack someone’s waking up. Twice!!
  • The home renovation setup eventually pays off in the form of a romantic tile grouting sequence.
  • At the start of the movie there’s an inspirational pop song with lyrics about being unstoppable and unbreakable, but also “unshrinkable”.
  • Romantic dialogue sample:

“I am being won over, despite the deafening cicada choir”
(nodding wisely) “That’s their mating love sound”

Eventually the main couple end up renovating the inn but also modernising it: they add a solar flower in the garden for clean energy (solar flower power hour), put in a water recycling system, and also remove all the TVs from the bedrooms - instead “we’ll provide ipads on request for streaming”. Incidentally, the movie is produced by Netflix.

Finally, it has some good examples of multiscreen video call effects when her boss phones her up looking like he’s about to enlist her into a laserdisc game.

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bless you and this thread forever

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kind of into this

this is hilarious though

it was kind of like those scenes in action movies where somebody gets their wounds cleaned in a sexually charged way, except with tiles

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yeah like the unbelievably hot kathryn hahn tub cleaning scene in private life

what’s the title on this

“Leap Year”! I thought I wrote it up but I guess I forgot to? here’s a list of everything I remember about it.

  1. there’s a fancy city lady who ends up in rural Ireland
  2. the thing of having the leading actress be comically clumsy and accident prone is taken to alarming extremes, so at one point she destroys an entire hotel room and at another she spends a few minutes just kind of writhing around a muddy field. I think she also knocks a handmaiden unconscious at somebody’s wedding (might be dreaming this?)
  3. the romantic lead irish guy is played by somebody from England (like the romantic lead New Zealand guy from Falling Inn Love is played by an Australian)
  4. there’s a part where they have to spend the night at a farmer’s house, and the farmer and his wife are very friendly, but turn startlingly sullen and angry at the memory of a previous pair of visitors who turned out to be having sex outside marriage. so the two leads have to pretend they’re married in order to stay the night, and make out in front of the farmer, etc. but what’s weird about it is I don’t think there’s anywhere else the movie mentions Catholicism or conservative social attitudes, and the farmer couple are otherwise portrayed as very nice, but I guess they also need to be exaggeratedly menacing about this one thing in order for the plot to function. so it feels sort of like those videogames where characters immediately turn hostile if you step on an invisible boundary.
  5. at one point they’re waiting for the last train when they decide to explore a nearby ancient castle in the meantime and so end up missing it. this is rule #1 of things to watch out for if you’re visiting Ireland.
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Strawberry Summer (2012) - I hope there’s a database somewhere of fictitious country stars. This movie gives us one “Jason Keith”, who dresses sort like a porn version of the terminator and is currently riding high on the back of the hit crossover song “Easy Heart” (sample lyric: “don’t break my easy heart / I wear it on my sleeve”. Also, the chorus includes people softly harmonising on the words “yee haw”!) Despite being reportedly a bad-boy with a reputation for bailing on his own concerts he is engaged by a small town to come help emcee their big yearly strawberry festival.

I wonder if there’s a study somewhere that tries to pinpoint the exact degree of bad behaviour that the love interest in a Hallmark movie is allowed to get away with. But I don’t think this one could prove the case much either way - evidently nervous of reawakening memories of George Jones, the writers hedged their bets with perhaps the most tepidly manageable brooding pop star I’ve ever seen. Every so often he acts like a mildly sullen teenager, is immediately called out as an idiot child + coward by the female protagonist, sheepishly admits all his faults and tries to make more of an effort, and then the cycle repeats over and over for 30 minutes to increasingly pliant result. This character is so meekly acquiescent to somebody telling him what to do that you have to wonder if nobody had tried it before or if he was just grown fullsize in a tube or what. At one point the main lady is yelling at him for not being grateful for the fantastic PR opportunity that is showing up to host this smalltown strawberry festival, and the contest of wills between the two was so lopsided that I half expected the scene to end with her picking a cigarette butt up off the floor and forcing him to eat it.

Some minor details as the story progresses:

  • Since he’s a country music star and she’s a country girl the writers have to jump through some hoops to provide the kind of culture-shock comedy reactions traditional to the setting. In this case the male lead at the strawberry festival is revealed to have never eaten a strawberry in his entire life. Of course he turns out to be allergic - I kind of wish the filmmakers had saved that for a dramatic hospital based conclusion of some kind, but it does lead to a scene where the two leads exchange romantic looks as she gently dabs his hives.

  • The lead lady is also involved with coaching a highschool glee club for the festival talent show. There’s a weirdly unremarked-on cynicism in the scene where the kids are trying to think of a song to do and she just tells them to do “When The Saints Come Marching In” because talent show judges eat it shit up when kids play an old song and just mildly jazz it up in a respectful way. They also end up changing the lyrics to “When The Strawberry Fest Hits Town”.

  • Raw chemistry as the leads discuss their contrasting lifestyles:

“Superman and kryptonite.”
“Which one am I?”
“It’s a metaphor…”

  • The main lady needs a full four hats for when she’s looking up information on the Internet Encyclopedia Search:


As the film goes on we find out that the country star’s background includes a stint at NYU and that his true musical ambition is to be “a folk rock guy like a young James Taylor”. Never before has a bad-boy reputation been so coldbloodedly put to rest. Also, there’s a big reveal where we find out that the reason he skips concerts is… because he has panic attacks at his own lack of authenticity!! Rather than anything prosaic, like cocaine. Anyway, his artistic inhibitions can only be overcome when the female lead gives him the novel advice to try writing songs about his own life - immediate cut to him waking up in the middle of the night to grab his guitar and notebook in a flurry of ideas. His eventual artistic maturation takes the form of a Pearl Jam-esque ballad called “Ridin’ The Horse” (“my head says to go, my heart says to stay / wish I could put off decidin’ til another day” - even his big musical number is passive)

There’s a good line in weird background extras throughout, including a whole series of people dressed in large strawberry costumes - my favourite were the two slow-dancing in the background for the entirety of the big romantic conclusion.


But even they can’t approach my affection for the one guy who chooses to act natural in the background of one scene by standing in place, repeatedly tossing a lemon a short distance into the air and then catching it. My friend… thank you for your service

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A Novel Romance (2015) - This one has one of those synopses that SOUND like romantic comedy until you try to figure out how it would deliver on the kinds of obstacle and drama sufficient to fill an 80 minute running time. In this case, a guy writes popular romance novels under a pseudonym, he meets Amy Acker on a plane and they end up dating but he doesn’t tell her his secret profession. To turn this into something that couldn’t be solved through a five minute conversation we have some complicating factors added in:

  1. The writer is not just anonymous, but has the kind of cartoonish super-anonymity where the true identity of the author is implied to be an issue of heated national discussion. We find this out in part because his own publisher apparently puts out bookmarks reading “Who is Gabriel August?” with a mysterious black silhouette of a headshot.

  2. The love interest is a book reviewer. But, they can’t do the obvious thing of having her hate his books, because that’d imply he was actually sort of a hack instead of a visionary struggling novelist. So this strand is kind of left hanging.

  3. Most importantly - it turns out she can’t date a famous person because she just had an upsetting breakup with a different famous person in the form of a celebrity football player called BadBoy James.


    Unfortunately that’s the last we see of this character. In this case the won’t-date-a-famous-person thing is interesting because it’d sound plausible if she actually just stated it directly, but instead it’s something the author infers and acts on himself without talking to her about it, which makes it seem slightly crazed as a set of assumptions. Can’t let her know I have Celeb Disease.

This one largely takes place in Portland Oregon, which is interesting in that the movie never acknowledges or seems aware of the city’s Portlandia-type reputation. In this movie the only things to know about Portland are that it’s small (compared to NYC), it has a dock, and it has… an airport. I guess the woodsy associations are implied by the fact the author originally goes here to get some peace and quiet in his family’s “cabin”:


I wasn’t able to find out if at least some of the nonspecificity was down to it being filmed in Vancouver or something (probably). But did find an interesting post that mentioned one of the locations being recycled through multiple Hallmark movies, one step closer to understanding this world’s eerie cosmology: https://www.ivesceneitonhallmark.com/jacks-house-cedar-cove/

Misc:

  • Charles S Dutton (Alien 3) appears as a friendly bartender in one of those guest turns you know is a guest turn because otherwise why would they include this character

  • We know the main guy is a novellist because the opening shot of his work desk includes: 3 books, some yellow legal paper, and an old-time magnifying glass.

  • The characters don’t exactly meet cute - the main guy is apparently the kind of annoying person who says things like “seems like you’re trying to work” when someone’s trying to work and “seems like you’re in a hurry” when someone’s in a hurry. After that he runs through the airport so he can ‘accidentally’ bump into her again outside and invite her for a ride in his limo (she accepts on the later stated basis that “He was in first class, how dangerous could he be?”)

  • After the initial meeting he tries to find her by typing “Sophie Portland” into offbrand google.

  • Amy Acker’s book review job gets cut down because “they want more space for videogames and movies”. She eventually quits to start her own website, RivetingReads.com.

  • Ambient influence of business culture: when the main guy finally gets inspired to write his new novel, the way you know it’s gonna be a good one is not just by the traditional scenes of having people tell him, showing people frantically reading it on the street etc - in this case his agent tells everyone that she conducted a market research survey for it and that engagement levels were off the charts! And everyone looks suitably impressed.

  • Includes the line “She’s not like other women. She’s… interesting”

  • The main guy is on the plane back to NYC when a different lady comes to sit next to him in a taunting mirror of the opening scenes. Newly inspired by Real Life Experience he immediately starts writing the opening sentences to his new book: “One moment he was alone and lost. And then she was there, filling the empty seat beside him”. And all I could think of was, what if the lady next to him on that flight happened to glance over and see what he was writing down??

  • The big reconciliation at the end comes in the form of a press meeting where the two leads talk under the veiled form of a Q&A session, leading to the line “My fans can rest assured that I would never do anything to hurt them”.

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I like Mannequin! Have seen it many times.

He’s also the military/security lead guy in Short Circuit. His name is Skroeder. (and its real tough to find decent pics/footage of his character.)


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Cuba Gooding Jr. won an Oscar for Jerry McGuire.

Pretty Woman (1990) - watching this I was reminded of David Thomas’s claim that the central figure in “Heartbreak Hotel” is not the Elvis Presley character, but the “bellhop dressed in black” who silently watches the proceedings - this character being a weird POV intrusion that unsettles the song from being either an individual subjective expression or a collective formal mode, and into some strange narrativised space in between. In this movie the bellhop character is probably the hotel manager played by Hector Elizondo in his customary role of being the best thing in every Garry Marshall picture.

I mostly enjoyed this one, I think because I didn’t feel like the movie’s real interest was the central couple or the premise or its plausability or lack thereof - they’re paired up and shown to like each other pretty quickly and there’s not much conflict subsequently. Most of the movie is sort of taken up with being a travelogue of class distinctions and settings instead - here’s a fancy hotel! here’s a polo match! here’s a snooty store! here are some of the customs and people presiding in each and here’s how they each react to, then accept, an outside presence. I’m sure a lot of those settings are kind of spurious in a Hollywood way - like, we see a fancy lawyer’s desk, it’s completely covered in baubles including three different miniature toy cars, does that mean it’s pulled form some particular observation about this person or milieu or is it just an extrapolation of the vague common knowledge that executives love buying ritzy desk shit? So I don’t know if it was accurate but it was interesting and reminded me that what I really like about rom-coms is how they all take place in this kind of weird half-invented half-quotidian space, and then tell you it’s “real life”.

I absolutely do not want to unpack what Pretty Woman really has to say about sex work or politics or whatever as I’m sure it’s pretty hellish, but I’m also not sure the movie itself is very interested in (aware of??) these things. The obligatory comparison between business and prostitution passes in the movie without drawing any blood. I feel like if anything it’s more about the idea of money as community, money as something which brings together different circles and acts as an agent of sympathy between them. The two leads initially meet by bargaining over the price of directions, the movie gives us cash amounts for hourly/nightly/weeky rates from there, the hotel staff get drawn in because they need to please an important client, same with the staff of a fancy dress store while ANOTHER fancy dress store is humbled by being reminded that money outweighs social snobbery. The distinction the movie gives us is less that between those who have money and those who don’t, than those who recognise the importance of money and those who don’t. The former are business people, sex workers, store clerks, waiters and hotel staff, the latter are the innumerable walk-on WASPs who pop up to get briefly scandalised and then disappear. At best this can give a pleasant sense of unspoken complicity between the different groups in the movie. But it’s also completely bogus - nearly every character in the film is shown as hungry not just for money but specifically for Richard Gere’s enormous, unspecified reserves of inherited stockbroker wealth. But he’s shown as being on their side because he still knows the value of a dollar, and part of how the movie shows us this is by a scene where he bargains a hungry-for-rent-money sex worker down to a comparatively cheaper weekly rate. Who gives a shit about a canny millionaire?

Other things I remember about this movie: there’s a part where he drives a Lexus around while listening to new jack swing and in the background of one of the shots you can see a big poster for Dianetics. In my opinion the absolute nastiest part of the movie is when he tells all the hotel night staff to clear out of the dining room so that he can eat Julia Robert’s pussy on a grand piano. First, those guys are on their break so leave them in peace! Secondly, other people play that piano!! This is unhygienic!!! The rich are freaks! That’s my review.

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