It read to me like the common '80s pop-culture struggle between nouveau-riche yuppies and old-money WASPs. The yuppies are typically given the soft-criticism of self-criticism in a movie targeted towards settling Baby Boomers.
Have you seen Albert Brooks’ Lost in America? At 1985 it can’t really be said to predict this cultural cul-de-sac but it sees it clearly, and the cushier and faker route this aesthetic would take as it moved into the '90s and its audience turned into Spielberg’s overworked lawyer Peter Pan and married Julia Roberts Stepmoms when they first experienced mortality as their ex-wives developed cancer and made their estranged children sad.
Yeah, that’s a good comparison point - I think one of the interesting things to me about both movies is that transition point where they can be about boomer malaise but haven’t yet settled into feeling under attack by younger generations. Everyone in Lost In America’s watched Easy Rider, I don’t recall any scenes where somebody jumps out and starts playing heavy metal or Pong at them.
Likewise in Pretty Woman, the culture shock is all one way - there are absolutely no scenes where the upper-class male lead is nonplussed or thrown off by pop culture or similar. The only TV show anyone’s shown watching is I Love Lucy (1951-57). The title song’s from 1964. There IS a scene where Julia Roberts sings along to Prince’s “Kiss”, but by Richard Gere’s reaction it seems to be presented as a tolerable novelty and the song was four years old by then anyway. Not yet flagged as threat by the terminator lens of AOR hegemony.
I guess having kids would be the point where these characters are thrown into uneasy acknowledgement of youth culture (the babysitter from Sleepless In Seattle) as well as feeling more locked into their life decisions. In Pretty Woman the Richard Gere character at one point pledges to turn his back on the speculative capital of the finance industry and start making things again, get back to a life that feels real. Unfortunately the specific things he plans to help make are battleships for the US military, but oh well - a small price to pay for authenticity!!
Two Weeks Notice (2002) - Sandra Bullock is a crusading public lawyer; she meets a wealthy, philandering New York real estate tycoon played by Hugh Grant, who immediately offers her a job; she accepts on the basis that she can use his vast resources for good. Immediately she instead finds herself working as personal assistant and general toady, being called out of bed at 3am to help him put on a shirt, etc. So it sort of seems like the setup to one of those stories about making a deal with the devil, perils of entryism, that one season of Angel where they join a law firm, the history of game studies as an academic discipline or similar morality tales.
But as it turns out - the moral is the opposite! She ends up saving the inevitable community centre at the end through the personal good graces of the rich guy she’s been working for, and her big speech at the end is about the value of learning to compromise and not alienating people with high standards like “expecting them not to be a huge piece of shit 100% of the time”. And in return, they will do good things, occasionally, perhaps. But don’t push them to!!
The most notable thing about this one for me was the weird use of time - at the start, in the course of 20 minutes or so, they meet up and she starts to work for him. After what seems like a few days of movie time, she quits, but then mentions it’s already been a year! And then the rest of the movie I guess takes place over her two-week notice period, but it seems much longer especially since the movie has just established that scenes with identical pacing were used to represent a much longer stretch of time. It was disorienting but I kind of liked the discrepancy, especially since the two week notice thing was apparently seen as structurally important enough to be used as the title. There should be one of these movies called A Single Day and after a full runtime’s worth of people travelling and talking and falling asleep the characters turn to each other at the end and go “wow, i can’t believe all that happened in the course of… A Single Day.”
Other things:
Like Tom Hanks in You Got Mail the bratty tycoon type has a black friend / employee who appears at random and who nobody else seems to be able to see or interact with (well, in fairness, he does exchange a single line with the Sandra Bullock character). But in this case he seems to be more of a sinister influence, like Mr Grady in The Shining, delivering speeches about how the man should always be in control in a relationship and so on. I don’t think he appears at all in the entire last half of the movie, which is possibly meant to represent the loosening of his evil grip by the power of love. May his restless spirit find peace…
At one point we see poster asking a mysterious question:
At one point she needs to go to the bathroom and they’re stuck in traffic so they ask to go in a nearby family’s RV, there’s a shot of the kids simultaneously playing videogames - what looks like Pokemon Gold on a GBA and, I think, a yellow Game Boy Colour.
Since it’s set in the world of NY property development at one point we get A Very Special Guest Appearance. There’s also a joke about playing tennis with Ed Koch.
The Counting Crows cover of Big Yellow Taxi plays twice in this movie so if you really like that line about paving paradise to put up a parking lot, don’t worry, since you’ll get to hear it about 50 times.
This is pretty much limited to Antepodean cinema but yeah, it’s a standard NZ joke that Australians are mercantile dickheads. Not a NZ film or a rom-com so don’t watch it, but the antagonist from Crackerjack (2002) is a perfect example of the character (also, played by a New Zealander).
Oh c’mon, not A Fish Called Wanda?? Those are the only two Kevin Kline movies I have watched.
Requesting you watch some of the finest attempts at rom-coms to come out of Australia and watch Muriel’s Wedding & Strictly Ballroom.
I was convinced this was a John Mayer song for some reason, and also the only John Mayer song I had heard, and really the entire basis for my opinions, etc. My younger brother loves John Mayer, watches his instagram vids, tells me about his guitar licks, merits of his endorsed products, etc. Once, I was clowning him/John, and started singing it a little, like the mmm bop bop bop parts, really stepped in it, and maybe John Mayer actually is good what the fuck do I know, life is a dangerous game, etc.
My girlfriend in the late 90s, early 00s was a huge Counting Crows fan, and the first version of their cover of this song did not have the MMMMMM BOP BOP BOPS and it was much more tolerable, while never being good.
update: I went to a zine fair yesterday and one of the things I made for it was a compressed zine’s worth of romcom reviews.vwas mostly written from scratch bc I didn’t have reference to the site at the time, so does have some new text, and is organized categorically by theme including Ghosts, Technology, Bad Boys and Imperial Politics.
here if anybody wants it: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dzwo6gl4lubehrl/RommCommTuum.pdf?dl=0
The Spirit Of Christmas (2015) - I wanted to do some Halloween romcoms while they were in season, unfortunately that would probably be a little too pagan for eg Hallmark who have replaced any mention of that holiday with an invented secular tradition of “harvest” themed movies… Luckily the Christmas season retains some traditional connection to the occult. So while early, I felt this one would be the best shot at bridging the gap.
The plot involves a highflying lawyer lady who has to sell a haunted house, the twist is that the ghost is a moderately hunkshaped ex-bootlegger who assumes physical form for the 12 days of Christmas every year. So instead of invisibly rattling chains and stuff he just kind of turns up looking like a completely ordinary human and starts being rude to you. In the movie he’s been doing this for 95 consecutive years and so they traditionally leave the inn vacant for that time while he, I guess, mopes around and eats whatever’s left in the fridge. Like a Phantom Teen. The ghost’s knowledge of our time is kind of spotty, he knows how to use security codes to deactivate modern alarms but will only refer to someone’s smartphone as “your device”. At one point he actually uses a smartphone to call someone but continues his policy of only ever referring to it as a “device”. So he’s less like a guy out of time than a grouchy dad who refuses to admit he knows what Fortnite is.
The lawyer lead is a little more pleasantly high energy than usual, there’s a good scene at the start where her bf breaks up with her and she just blandly picks up his plate and starts eating his food while making direct eye contact. Unfortunately I really can’t overemphasise just how much the ghost in this sucks. Not only is he just an ordinary non-glowing humanoid but the clothes and hair they chose to give him an old timey vibe just make him look like writes remaindered giftbooks called The Gentleman’s Guide To Manliness or something. He looks like he died in 2005 while contributing to Vice Fashion. Humans Of New York looking, Ezra Pound cosplay, wearing a waistcoat in a chamber folk band motherfucker. At one point another lady mentions hiring a bartender for a Christmas party and he scoffs loudly and insists on being able to impress everybody with his old timey cocktail mixology skills. Also to show he’s from the past all his lines are written in Tobias Funke speak like “In truth it would be a fine transaction.” Just completely sucks.
Anyway in an interesting twist there turn out to be TWO ghosts on the premises. The other one is the immaterial spookily-closing-doors kind, and the main ghost was somehow totally unaware of its existence despite the fact that they’ve been spiritually cohabiting for 95 years. Also - it turns out the reason the first ghost has been hanging around after death is not due to a “curse”, but a “miracle” requested by his dead wife. So already we have two different attempts to make the ghost thing a bit more palatable to holiday audiences, first by making a distinction between good and bad ghosts, second by a distinction between bad supernaturalism (curses) and good supernaturalism (christmas miracles). In the end his dead wife comes back too and gives him the choice between going with her to, I guess heaven?, or staying on earth with the lawyer. Considering he’s spent the last 95 years being sad about missing his wife, and has known the lawyer for a total of 12 days, naturally he chooses the latter. This seems kind of inconsiderate to me but I’ve never been dead and don’t know the etiquette.
I watched this movie on a shady streaming site and the below popup appeared midway through, given the plot I’ve decided that this is actually an official part of the movie’s cosmology. When you die you see this screen and have to choose which side you’re on, the male lead of this film became trapped on earth as a ghost because he was unable to make up his mind in time to move on to the incredible world of Fap Titans. I hope his restless spirit now knows peace.
Christmas Wedding Planner (2017) - it’s been a while since I saw this cuz I got sick but in memory it was like an extended L.A. Noire machinima inexplicably cast with real people, like, it had that weird AAA-mirroring-cinema feeling in the strangely drawn-out pacing, continual music stings, variety of lulls in conversation where people are just standing around silently for full seconds until it’s time for them to walk into another room and do something else. The kind of minor character casting where everyone in a secondary role is just inexplicably a lot more garrulous and weirder than they really needed to be. Lot of the plotline just being to carry out missions for characters who reside in various themed empty locations, the aunt (kelly rutherford from the adventures of brisco county jr) in her fancy house, the detective love interest guy in… some kind of totally empty bar which plays the same looping carousel music in the background over and over. And which I guess he owns? There’s a thing where he gets her to order for him and she chooses the lobster (for lunch!) and the waiter comes over and says something about being “ay, italiano” and then brings back a whole lobster and the detective guy says he can’t eat it because he’s allergic and then the main lady looks thoughtful. Just lots of stuff like that.
They’re trying to investigate her sister’s fiance and the way the PI does this is to go around the guy’s house at a party openly passing out detective cards to everyone and telling them to visit his bar if they see anything suspicious. Then they sneak upstairs to hack his dad’s computer after guessing the password from a picture of a yacht and the dad catches them but they pretend to have just snuck into his private home office to have sex so he smiles and leaves them to it.
Ultimately the titular christmas wedding falls apart after the detective bursts in mid-ceremony yelling “STOP” and towing Fiance Todd’s heavily pregnant housekeeper. The wedding is over, unless…? suddenly the aunt throws him a ring and he gets down in front of the main wedding planner girl who he’s known for like a week!! and i guess she accepts and gets married with her sister’s wedding ceremony and guests and priests. and then she throws the bouquet and the sister catches it! I feel like there’s already been at least one movie here where a wedding planner has to take over someone else’s ceremony as a cost-saving exercise or something, it’s a weird plotline to me at any time but i appreciate that this one made it even more contrived and preposterous than usual. Definitely in the higher tier of movies that seem to have been hastily assembled for SEO purposes.
A Christmas Prince (2017): This one starts off with a legally distinct copyleft version of “rockin’ around the christmas tree” (“kids from two to 92 all have eyes aglow / Christmas time at last is here and the stars put on a show”), which i guess is appropriate in that the rest of the movie is set within a legally distinct copyleft version of Ruritania. I mainly watched this movie to find out what the deal was within the picturesque monarchial nation of “Aldovia” and here is my report:
Everybody speaks with a british accent for some reason
Surprisingly large airport
No other visible buildings besides “Castle” and “Orphanage”
Snow, horses, carriages etc. At one point the heroine gets lost and is attacked by a wolf
V lax palace security; enterprising journalist able to gain direct access to royal family for several days by masquerading as a tutor despite possessing no form of identification and also knowing no math
large statue outside palace of previous king or possibly Lenin
hunkish wastrel heir to throne spends days either practicing archery alone or sadly playing christmas songs to himself on a piano. Castle also houses one (1) sickly yet precocious moppet who learns to have fun and develop self esteem via association with supportive commoner
political structure of country: sassy queen, prime minister, unexpectedly diverse seeming parliament for obscure central european country
general impression of characters living inside a giant hidden object game reinforced by previous king’s practice of hiding important plot-relevant documents inside secret desk drawers and papier-mache christmas tree decorations, hinting at their locations by means of cryptic poems inside his journal.
also driving this home is that the heroine keeps notes throughout which are written exactly like one of those automatic journals in Nancy Drew games which tell you what objectives you have to follow up next.
In the end the embedded journalist gets discovered when someone finds her passport; but she can’t write the big tell-all expose that she planned because after meeting the prince it turns out he’s just a nice and surprisingly chaste guy. After getting fired from her job as a big city churnalist she decides to go indie and just puts it on her website instead, where it goes viral but not enough for her to stop working at her dad’s restaurant I guess. I wonder if we’re reaching the end of the period where even romcoms could portray somebody making a living from their personal website with a straight face? Well, more likely it’s just treated as besides the point in this case, she does end up marrying a royal and getting to live in a big castle so maybe trying to become a career blogger too would just be pushing it. One thing at a time. Don’t be greedy!
i read the plot for last christmas and holy shit its just the first joke you think of
A WOMAN WHO HAD A HEART TRANSPLANT FALLS IN LOVE WITH A MAN, BRINGING MEANING TO HER LIFE. BUT SAID MAN IS A FUCKING GHOST. THE MAN IS THE GHOST OF THE PERSON WHO GOT IN A CAR ACCIDENT AND DONATED HIS HEART TO MEDICINE, AKA THE WOMANS CHEST
‘LAST CHRISTMAS I GAVE YOU MY HEART’
this isnt a good wordy review it just seemed like the most appropriate place to say it
