Spike Jonze’s Being Meg Ryan
Sex & The City The Movie (2008): This felt like watching porn made for a totally alien sexuality. Like, I could sort of follow it from scene to scene, but also felt like the narrative I was watching was ultimately just the surface-level framing structure for some other kind of content I was totally oblivious to. And which actually consisted in all the scenes of people just walking around fancy buildings at a party, or trying on designer wedding dresses. And maybe the rest of the movie was written in the same code, and what seemed like a completely unnecessary scene was actually full of secret significance if you only understood the signals that were being put across with eg someone’s bag, someone’s shoes. But since I didn’t I was stuck going, like, “So when is the shirtless repairman actually going to fix the TV?”
Beyond that it does have some interesting period details of the pre-crash American economy, where writing a blog meant you earned enough to afford a penthouse apartment in New York. My other favourite one was when she sees a magazine with HOW LONG TIL THE BUBBLE POPS on the cover and exclaims “oh my god” and reaches underneath it to pull out a Vogue.
PS A few years ago I watched Sex And The City 2, “the one where they go to Abu Dhabi”, and the only scene I remember from it are like where the gals are on the run from the repressive religious authorities and then suddenly a lady in a full body burqa slyly lifts her hem a few inches to reveal a pair of designer heels and then whisks them away into a secret market where they can get name brand fashion goods at rock bottom prices.
Love In Store (2020): This is a Hallmark movie about QVC hosts falling in love and I’m delighted to say that it fully delivers on that premise. There’s a marriage proposal that happens live on air in the middle of a segment on discount rings. There’s a romantic getaway in order to test out the products which will be used in the next Monthly Pick (“the Superbowl” of shopping network segments, apparently). The big love declaration at the climax happens, again live on air, via the two hosts earnestly describing their feelings for each other in terms of the vacuum cleaner that they’re trying to sell. And all this takes place in some kind of Pentagon-shaped mall complex, where shopping network hosts are famous and admired enough to have regular autograph sessions with studio tour groups and to earnestly be able to describe how being a QVC host was their life-long dream. And where they’re both being shipped together by their own fanbases! Unfortunately I suspect this reality is in fact secretly our own.
There’s a part where they go to an ancient egypt themed escape room and the main lady pushes halfheartedly against one of the walls and then immediately gives up, which is more or less how I feel whenever I play a puzzle game.
15 Likes
they just did that one on David Roth’s hallmark movie podcast and they were equally charmed by it
disappointed this is not the david (lee) roth i was thinking of
2 Likes
my dad once called the gem shopping network to get this guy’s autograph:
his name is Marvin and he’s definitely the best host on the network. it was very funny to hear him go off the air to deny my dad’s request to get an autograph.
7 Likes
this was unfortunately never true and has always been a point of contention
Just My Type (2020) - A pop culture blogger bumps into a famous reclusive author and finangles her way into shadowing him around for an article. Salinger is mentioned but it just made me wonder when they’re finally gonna make one of these about a knockoff Pynchon equivalent instead. “Conspiracy of Love.”
This one was strangely frictionless! There are no points where the learning-to-open-up author hears an out of context phone conversation that makes him believe his trust has been betrayed, or where the heroine has to nervously confess to not really being a widowed italian contessa or something like that. There’s actually no real conflict at all, which is fine, but it does have one horrific scene: where the main lady injures her hands on a poisonous plant, and has to have them bandaged up and have socks put on them so she won’t use. And then the main guy spoonfeeds her soup like a baby!! This was a case when I wished the characters were if anything less comfortable with each other.
Actually, there is one other conflict in the movie: in the course of her shadowing she follows him to a small town council meeting, where the first item on the agenda is whether Taco Tuesday can be moved to Wednesday next week. Everyone agrees except for a single old guy named Gus who votes No, no reason given. This unexpected, Bartleby-like negation is never explained or dwelt upon but for that reason is slightly more compelling than anything else that happens in the movie.
Baby Boot Camp (2014) - A fitness instructor pretends to be a qualified nanny to get closer to a single dad, and also to make money, because her uninsured off-the-books workout group for pregnant moms in the park is constantly being busted by the police. This one has TWO of those scenes where somebody has to unexpectedly help deliver a baby, one for him and one for her, I guess for reasons of parity. The second one takes place in a swimming pool and there are some weird underwater POV shots from what appear to be the perspective of the baby coming out. These have a slight fisheye effect, sort of like the “alien vision” scenes from Alien3.
My favourite character was the male lead’s guy friend, who spends all his conversations ambiently throwing basketballs around and yelling “Boo yah!” and calling people “smoking hot”. Just guy things!! At one point the friend goes on a date with the female lead and when asked his hobbies replies “Feeding beautiful women” and tries to stick a spoonful of food in her mouth. Man, I don’t know what’s with the movies this week. Maybe it’s me.
12 Likes
Seems like a fully realized character pulled straight from real life to me
2 Likes
I want one of these where the lady is like “oh? I know that name…” but is otherwise unfamiliar with The Work and spends 2/3 of the movie romcomming with them until the fatal moment she decides to read his book and discovers he’s like a Tom Wolfe. Just this alien presence writing the absolute worst sex happenings from the pov of what he thinks A Modern Woman In This Fucked Up Society! is.
The last act is one long scene, stuck in what was supposed to be a romantic bungalow, during a thunderstorm, him trying to evade her insistence that he explain why every chapter opens with at least one full page genuflecting on the exact shape and feeling of the narrator’s breasts in a given outfit and environment.
6 Likes
imagining the scene from American Psycho where his secretary discovers the notebook except she opens it up and it’s just “Chapter One. Sandra examined her body in the mirror and frowned. Though still the most attractive member of the college’s psychology department” worriedly skips to next page “pert” skipping page “nubile” skipping page “throb of her womanhood” frantically skimming past whole chapters now while silently behind her, oh shit, the door opens----
every time I watch one of these about a writer I always hope there’ll be at least one tiny hint of aesthetic judgement buried deep about what any of these characters thinks is good writing. IIRC the closest they’ve gotten is the scene in Baby Bootcamp where the lady tries to bond with the precocious kid daughter by talking about her favourite girl detective series, Not Nancy Drew, only to be rudely rebuffed when the kid essentially replies that she has shit tier taste and that SHE only reads the competing and far superior series, Other Not Nancy Drew. we never find out any more about it but it’s one of the very few cases i can think of in these movies where a harsh aesthetic opinion is allowed to stand without comment. (I guess the other is when McFly make fun of the touring drummer for Whitesnake).
6 Likes
I just watched Destination Wedding and hollllly shit. Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder are a pair of broken cynics who get dragged to a destination wedding and fall in love over the course of a weekend.
But like. There’s no arc. No real conflict, no character development, nada. It’s just 86 minutes of them snarking at each other, making cynical jokes and philsophizin’ bleakly. They self-deprecate and insult each other in a way that turns affectionate but it feels hollow. The script is also pretty damn insensitive to the concept of familial trauma and has a few throwaway jokes at the expense of queer/trans people that could have probably been excised completely? There’s a lot of edge for the sake of edge and much of it is not particularly funny.
They’ve got a few good quips, and I think it’s fairly true to the spirit of two people who form an unlikely bond through shared misery/inconvenience but romance seems like a stretch. I’d have believed it more if our protagonists just had a nice fling and then return to their dreary lives with a new fuckbuddy or something.
It’s sort of a train wreck. I think they only had one camera to work with, because almost every scene is like an 8 minute long static shot of the two of them sitting/standing somewhere and talking. The angle hardly ever changes! I feel like Keanu was just doing this one as a favor to someone so they shot the whole shebang over a long weekend and called it a wrap. I don’t see how you read this script and go YES TIME TO SHOW MY RANGE.
3 Likes
the trailer for this movie felt longer than most movies
1 Like
A Country Wedding (2015) - A famous country music star announces his impending marriage, gets a letter of congratulations from his childhood friend from Texas, and decides to spend the full month before his wedding just hanging out down there balling wire or whatever instead. I like that his publicist is just like “oh, you got a letter from some random fan” and hands it over and he opens and reads it right then and there. Wow, this is exactly what I imagined playing out when I tried writing to Fiona Apple.
I’m always kind of fascinated with these movies about an engaged person falling in love with someone new just before their impending wedding, because there’s always the question of what hoops the screenwriters will have to jump through to make it romantic instead of just kind of flaky and creepy. (In hindsight I think The Runaway Bride’s backstory of “yeah, she just runs off from EVERY wedding” is at least an inventive solution to the problem). In this one the route they settle on seems to just be that the country guy’s fiancee is a showbiz type from Los Angeles and so she’s obviously just not real and it doesn’t matter what happens to her.
The country vs city dynamics are very strong here, maybe because the protagonist is sort of meant to be caught between the two. Unfortunately that just means that he comes off as kind of average and the mandatory countryfication he must endure seems even pettier and more bizarre than usual. There are many scenes that play out along the lines of “you want ‘lunch’? sorry, slick - out here we only eat hammers and wire”. Expressing mild desire for sushi and immediately being taken fishing, while a wry slide guitar sting plays, etc. At one point the main lady invites him to the movies, “cowboy style”, which involves lying on the ground and imagining an exciting movie happening in the stars, which they both tolerate for approximately three seconds. I would say that stuff is c20% of the movie, with another 20% being scenes where he sings autobiographical Adult Contemporary songs on his porch while she secretly listens in and sometimes harmonizes upon(!).
There’s a pretty funny section where the country lady asks him his fiancee’s favourite flower, colour, and icecream flavor in order to demonstrate that he knows nothing about her. Oh shit, you failed the wife copy protection test and now she’s locked you out!! Otherwise my favourite parts of the movie were the shots of the country lady’s home, because it turns out that every single room she lived in contained either Horse Portraits or Horse Statuettes. Environmental storytelling.
9 Likes
i put together this list recently of, not my favourite rom coms, but films that have a certain sort of comforting chill to them. mostly rom coms though.
i think the only one I’ve watched was Julie & Julia a few years ago and tbh mostly remember for the detail that julia childs apparently hated that lady in real life, hahah. but I should rewatch, to see how it relates to the rest of the nora ephron canon.
She’s Out Of My League (2010) - I guess this one is a romcom for the fellas so it’s sort of like a cross between a Will Ferrell movie and the romance subplot in a 2000s gamer webcomic. A Frankie Muniz looking fellow ends up dating a wealthy blonde lady prompting spit takes, incredulity, multiple scenes where people assume he’s a valet, etc. There is much discussion of numeric rating systems and how for a lowly “5” to date a “10” is a violation of the forces of nature (although he never gets attacked by a dolphin or anything). And in fact a lot of the movie is dedicated to presenting this vision of, like, an attractiveness-based class society…? 5s and 6s work dayjobs and live with their parents, 9s and 10s are paid six figures to organize gallery openings, etc, but it’s sort of treated as if it’s just this natural birthright? There are a lot of culture clash jokes but instead of “oh, those are the Rich” or “oh, those are WASPs” or whatever it’s presented as “oh, those are the Attractive”. And it’s kind of disorienting, like all the actresses are basically the same degree of movie handsome but one of them is wearing all-white country club gear for some reason and the others are wearing sweatpants, but this discrepancy is only ever ever presented in terms of inherent Attractiveness levels, etc. The overall effect is sort of like those 19th century novels where a character’s aristocratic status is signalled through discussions of their exquisitely tapered fingers or something.
Anyway it’s all good because as it turns out the lady herself is weirdly passive and mostly just exists to provide an opportunity for self-reflection on behalf of the male character, so that eventually his third eye can open and he can realise he is a 10 unto himself and that it is therefore his sovereign right to have a blandly loyal gf who will watch him play mass effect or whatever. His day job is with the TSA but there are fortunately not as many horny jokes about that as you’d expect. He meets the main lady after stopping a coworker from sexually harassing her via the medium of airport security searches, whereupon she gratefully replies that wow, she never thought anyone like THAT would be working for the TSA. Yes… The partial airport setting also explains what I believe is the first reference in any of these movies to the existence of Guantanamo Bay.
One minor weird thing is that the main lady is an event planner, but when the guy suggests that he throw her sister a 21st birthday party she’s blown away like she never considered the notion. And then she books her boyfriend’s coworker’s Hall & Oates tribute band to play at it! I couldn’t tell if this was meant to represent introducing rowdy down-home values to a genteel environment or if it just meant that she’s a bad sister, but it was interesting either way. I wish the movie gave me more information to triangulate the attitudes of the various characters towards Hall and/or Oates.
12 Likes
The pretzel shapes American twisted themselves into from 1990 to 2015 to not have to talk about class are still remarkable to me even though that period of time is, like, the majority of my life
1 Like
Everything You Want (2005) - I will quote the synopsis: “A visionary and artistic young woman finds her love torn between her imaginary boyfriend and a real boy from one of her classes.” So obviously I had to find out how they handled the imaginary boyfriend, was he invisible, a cartoon dragon, did he only communicate via ouija board or similar, etc. As it turns out he’s just a british guy who looks like of like a mall caricature version of Colin Firth and nobody can see him except the protagonist. But it’s weird because even though it’s played very mildly, from the premise alone it’s hard to avoid watching these scenes without feeling like they’re the opening segments of a horror film about someone’s childhood invisible friend returning as a possessive and murderous spirit or a haunted doll or something. Especially since her room is full of dozens of paintings of his face, and he appears manifested enough to be capable of making her breakfast in bed.
It’s also strange because most of the movie has nothing to do with this!! It’s a standard opposites-attract thing where she’s a quirky art girl and the real boy is a boorish law student and things play out in standard fashion from there. But then every so often there are scenes of the imaginary boyfriend getting jealous and acting out in a ghosts-from-Beetlejuice type fashion, like she opens an ice cooler and he’s standing inside covered in icicles and stuff. He causes the real boy to get a head injury by suddenly startling her while they’re on one of those playground spinner things. And then they have a big argument in her bedroom and the imaginary boyfriend reveals that in fact she’s NOT the only person who can see him, that he’s already been an imaginary boyfriend for hundreds or thousands of other lonely young women and that he can go and find a new one whenever he wants! I’m pretty sure we’re meant to take it as empty bullshitting, but it’s an interesting thing to just drop in the middle of a movie. I don’t know many other romantic comedies that toy with the idea of one of the characters being some sort of interdimensional dream parasite, with the possible exception of Elizabethtown.
In terms of cultural background, all the corporeal characters work at a Borders and a good part of the movie takes place in a Borders so based on my partner’s reaction you might find it very nostalgic if you were a suburban American teenager in 2005. My understanding is that working at Borders and shopping at Borders constituted 80% of American economic output in that era, with the other remaining 20% based around recording songs like this. There is also a scene where the main lady wears capris with little tassel cords coming out the bottom, while the main guy drives some kind of Humvee-esque vehicle.
Anyway, in the end the imaginary boyfriend disappears as the protagonist chooses real life rather than imagination, as I guess also symbolised by her apparent veer away from abstract art in favor of paintings that look like the below. The real life boy eventually reveals he has a warm heart, etc, but it’s always funny to me that these movies never feel the need to explain why these guys are always such pricks to begin with. Like, just after they kiss have him say something like “BTW i’m sorry if i was rude last semester, it turns out i have coeliac and that gluten was making me crabby.” Problem solved. My favourite character was the stoner canadian roommate who tries to turn out the light by just throwing things at the lightswitch from his bed and who when asked why he keeps playing Pong on Atari instead of other games replies “there are OTHER games?!”. Perhaps he was the real dream boyfriend all along…
8 Likes
Drop Dead Fred? Just Like Heaven?
I was actually wondering earlier if Just Like Heaven could count towards this or if there was a reading of the movie where like, the ghost that appears to Mark Ruffalo is in fact just some kind of unrelated invasive entity that needs his assistance to possess a human form or something. But then I felt like this would if anything be less creepy and depressing than the movie’s implication that coma victims are really just conscious and trapped in the spirit world and have to stand around helplessly while well-meaning relatives turn off their life support.
An Uncommon Grace (2017) - a US army nurse returns home from Afghanistan and falls in love with her handsome Amish next door neighbour, while helping him to solve his stepfather’s murder. If you have ever entertained romantic fantasies about this same extremely specific situation then here is a movie for you. This one is part of Hallmark’s “Movies & Mysteries” line which means it’s I guess the solitary pocket of the Hallmark universe in which the concept of murder exists. Consequently the tone is a little more brooding and anxious, there are crimes and near-fatal car accidents and shunnings and teenagers(?) that stay out late after dark and don’t reply to text messages. Interestingly this sense that the characters are trapped without their consent in a doomed and sinful universe is echoed by the Amish theology that appears in the film itself, in which things of “the world” are inherently corrupted and untrustworthy. UFO is nurse for our sin planet.
For the most part the Amish sections of the movie pretty much play out like a Star Trek episode where they meet yet another humanoid alien species which is pretty much like us but dresses different and doesn’t use contractions. Can Amish Man reconcile his specific denomination’s conservative theology with his desire to find out more about… the stars?? It is interesting to see how they sort of render him acceptable as a love interest by doing things like revealing he has a secret, forbidden stack of non-biblical books under his bed (the only one we see is the Odyssey, unfortunately we don’t find out that he’s really into Animorphs or something). He also refers to his little brother as a “little pile of hay” and his romantic interest in the protagonist is signalled by the scene where he hand-crafts her a large woven basket with “many compartments on the inside”. I admit that this would turn my head as well. My favourite character in the movie was probably the pastor’s evil, horny daughter Zilla (dutch for “american godzilla”) who I guess is the Amish version of a Mean Girl and who falsely accuses the male lead of “bundling” with her after failing to win his attentions with a demonstration of her new hand-crafted nightgown. This puts him on thin ice with the congregation, but the tipping point is when they find out he’s carrying around a mobile phone for mystery-solving purposes. I mean OK, that one does seem to be breaking the rules a bit.
The weirdest character is the main lady’s younger sister, who is one of those minor characters that’s written to be like 16 and seemingly played by someone in their early 30s. This gives all her appearances a very strange, videogame-NPC-esque quality as she will immediately escalate the emotional tenor of any given conversation to 11 before abruptly ending it by like saying “OK” and then rotating 180 degrees and walking away. At one point she walks in from the fields at night saying there’s nothing like “midnight dessert” but this comment is never investigated.
Anyway, in the end it turns out the killer is the corrupt town sherriff, whose fate is sealed when he ends up fighting Amish Man in the barn with a farming implement. A rookie mistake!! Amish Man ends up joining a slightly more liberal congregation so he can do things like put reflectors on his buggy, the protagonist decides against re-enlisting in Afghanistan, there’s a marriage proposal and presumably much bundling to come. And she gets him a library card as a present, so that this buff Amish himbo can finally read Thomas Pynchon and evolve into the ultimate forums poster. Maybe catch up on the Animorphs as well.
9 Likes