romm comm tuum

[thecatamites]

For The Love Of George (2018) - A british woman finds out her husband has been cheating on her when he accidentally calls both her and his mistress on the same call (I guess in conference mode?). She is distraught, her life is upside down. Then she turns on the television and sees a news story about George Clooney adopting a kitten or similar. Instantly she looks as though she’s been injected with a powerful sedative, she is smiling and content. Her sassy gay best friend has just invited her to come visit in L.A… George Clooney lives in L.A… could it be…? The next day she is on a flight.

This one starts out on a weird knife edge in that it has this kind of high concept, magical realist adjacent premise about a middle aged married lady’s attempt to meet and seduce George Clooney, yet it remains close enough to the kind of baseline emotional tenor of the romcom format that not even this character seems that convinced by her own ambition. So in practice what it looks like is that, like, she just hangs out and does normal romcom things until someone says “George Clooney” in her vicinity, whereupon she immediately turns to stare at them like a Terminator before heading out her new sidequest. The parts of the movie where she has relaxed conversations with friends are disconnected from the parts where e.g. she sees George Clooney is getting married on TV and immediately screams as though she’s being stabbed. I guess you could argue this is emotional realism in its way.

Also, it’s worth noting that there aren’t really any other celebrities mentioned, only George Clooney, whose comings and goings perpetually come up in the most unrelated conversations, who is always either just about to arrive somewhere or just having left, taking on a kind of creepy The Man Who Was Thursday ubiquity inside the movie’s universe.

Anyway other than that it’s kind of a shaggy dog tale about various unrelated activities in LA. She dates a buff young jock guy who sells juice and feeds her kale until his special romantic present to her turns out to be a threesome with the Russian housekeeper (a weirdly intense but enjoyable character who then objects that she didn’t care about sleeping with the guy - “I do this for YOU”). She meets a sleazy movie producer at a bar. She makes friends with a Texan lady who enlists her to help out at a fancy diplomatic party (“I’m a Texas girl… I got a big mouth and big hair but not the biggest knowledge of what’s going on.”) She sees a psychic and a celebrity therapist to no particular end. There are a lot of jokes about Americans misinterpreting UK accents, confusing it with Australia or thinking Downton Abbey is real, etc, of the type the British use to convince themselves that the mild regional particularities of their decrepit empire still hold an international import. My favourite subplot was the one where she gets inspired by George Clooney’s charitable efforts and decides to raise money for charity by selling pumpkins at the side of the road while dressed as a turkey. The moment that the gay friend character asked “what’s with all the pumpkins?” was the point I knew the movie could no longer be contained within the standard genre template.

In the end, and despite the late reappearance of the husband ("@BritishStephen"??) this one turned out to be the rare romcom in which the main character does not end up being paired up with anyone by the end! Instead the figure of George Clooney has become a kind of aspirational message for straight women not to settle, that good men really are out there somewhere. But does she ever meet him? Well… I feel like the filmmakers were sort of banking on being able to grab at least a few minutes of stunt casting from Clooney himself, enough to appear at the end and prove that miracles do really happen, etc, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have panned out - the “George Clooney” who appears very briefly at the end of the movie, shot from behind, instead sort of just looks and talks like the Jack Nicholson gambler character from Mars Attacks. I guess that’s sometimes how it goes.

I think this is the first of these movies where a character was inspired to feel better about her life by comparing it to that of Sudanese war orphans.

[u_u]

I don’t know how I missed this when you posted it, but it seems like this is the apex example of another romantic comedy staple, in which everyone involved with making the film is bending over backwards to try to imagine what life is like for normal, non-celebrity people, or even like any kind of job that does not involve being a celebrity, but are too far removed from that world to think of any problems that a person might have that aren’t just weird contrivances to inflict celebrity problems onto normal people.

[thecatamites]

The Switch (2010) - the plot of this one is that Jennifer Aniston intends to use artificial insemination to get a baby, but a wacky accident means her best friend Jason Bateman ends up ruining the donor sperm and secretly replacing it with his own. My main interest in this movie was how they were gonna handle the sperm switching instance itself. Was there gonna be a wacky Young Frankenstein-esque scene where he comically fumbles the jar, possibly while yelling “Wh-wh-wh-whoa!!”?? Actually, the answer is even worse! It takes place at a kind of artificial insemination party, he gets plastered on herbal pills, liquor and resentment about having his own prime sperm turned down in favour of that of a muscular professor of feminist literature at Columbia. When he gets into the bathroom and idly picks up the tub of homunculi I was all primed to have him accidentally drop it - instead he takes the lid off, sniffs it, and then spends an unspecified amount of time waving the open jar to and fro in front of a turned on tap while saying “oh no, watch out, ahhh” before a knock on the door means he finally wipes out. Happy to report that we get a fisheye shot from the perspective of the sperm looking up out of the sink. The replacement happens pretty much immediately, or at least after he spends some time rifling through the magazine rack in search of pornography (eventually settling for a big photograph of Good Morning America host Diane Sawyer). The next day he is too hungover to remember what happened, while Jennifer Aniston announces she’s pregnant and leaves New York. Seven years pass…

When I describe this it sounds like a raunchy college comedy, so in truth it’s a little offputting when mostly the tone of the film is saccharine to a fault. The movie starts with a sped-up shot of people rushing around a train station while a voiceover muses that “People are always in a hurry… guess that’s why they call it the human race.” The Jason Bateman character is a private equities manager who I guess is intended as too cynical and raw for most of the normies around him, but most of what he says is just generic movie advice or platitudes (act crazy to scare off a bully, neurotics are actually just very introverted, etc). I was sort of hoping he’d make a speech about the sardonic yet penetrating nature of the INTJ Stare but I guess this was 10 years too early, alas.

Unfortunately once the seven year interlude has passed the movie just becomes about this character’s growing bond with his secret child, portrayed as the kind of movie kid who reels off random statistics and says cutely morbid stuff while at the same time remaining emotionally open enough to form a deep bond with his mom’s weird adult friend who he hangs out with for like two days. To facilitate this the Jennifer Aniston character mostly stays out of the film for long sequences, which is also good because it means we spend less time wondering why these characters are meant to be friends in the first place. I’m pretty sure that every conversation they have leads to her storming off in disgust…?

Anyway, in the end he confesses in the middle of the original intended donor’s marriage proposal speech, she slaps him and says she never wants to see him again but then shows up outside his office the next day and they kiss. That’s it!! And then there’s another montage, in which we get a voiceover delivering the film’s last line of dialogue: “The truth is, what I’m struggling to think, and what I’m struggling to feel, is that maybe the human race isn’t a race at all.” You heard it here first. There is also a shot of Jason Bateman’s evil identical twin brother, presumably a teaser for an action packed sequel.

[Felix]

this was a Jeffrey Eugenides adaptation I think

[thecatamites]

yeah i guess the source text was a 1996 new yorker story, so start getting excited now for the 2030 romcom adaptation of ‘cat person’ starring chet hanks and probably some kind of ageless hologram replica of meg ryan

[shrug]

@thecatamites

I was sort of hoping he’d make a speech about the sardonic yet penetrating nature of the INTJ Stare

every day I learn something new about why I spend every day trying very hard to not learn anything new about Myers-Briggs and its acolytes

[Felix]

I still enjoy testing as an ENTJ because it basically isn’t a definable personality type at all so much as “an INTJ, but psychotic”

[VastleCania]

I stumbled onto this film again in a wikihole because the guy who directed it also directed a film called Age of the Dragons where Danny Glover is Captain Ahab and Moby Dick is a fucking dragon. This is what i got when i searched for Captain Ahab (I can’t remember why i did that)

[thecatamites]

Accidental Love (2015) - It’s been a while since I watched one of these, because Halloween season starts in summer, but something about the plot synopsis pulled me back in: “A small town waitress gets a nail accidentally lodged in her head causing unpredictable behavior that leads her to Washington, D.C., where sparks fly when she meets a clueless young senator who takes up her cause - but what happens when love interferes with what you stand for?”
Mostly violent brain trauma is not an explicit part of these kinds of films, but it turns out that there is an interesting reason for it: apparently this movie started out as a 2008 David Russell (the I Heart Huckabees guy) political satire type film about the american healthcare system. A few years after they ran out of money while shooting, it was eventually bought and finished up and released under an Alan Smithee credit as a romantic comedy, hence the title. This is probably the reason for one of the more engaging stylistic features of the film: scenes which suddenly cut to black before a different scene starts without comment, Windows Movie Maker style.

Anyway, as mentioned the film is about Jessica Biel getting a violent nailgun brain injury which gives her manic/horny episodes whenever it’s convenient to the plot. She goes to Washington DC to plead for socialist healthcare and falls in love with a himbo senator who weirdly resembles Beto O’Rourke (key quote: “I know I have natural charisma, but I can’t get anything done around here!”). Maybe worth noting that both the initial times she has sex with him are immediately preceded by further head injuries, including once getting hit by a metal eagle sculpture. Beyond that there are various topical 2015 mishaps involving a politician choking to death on a brownie, a big proposal involving a military base on the moon, etc. If you enjoy speculating then it can be fun to guess at which parts were the ones where “romantic comedy” signifiers were bolted on after the fact, for example through a weirdly superfluous romance arc featuring Tracy Morgan as the eternal Tracy Morgan character. The script is credited both to the showrunners of Drawn Together and to Tipper Gore’s daughter, who wrote the souce material, and I guess is sufficiently recovered from the experience of hearing Darling Nikki at an early age to have worked on a movie where the main character refers to herself as a “nailslut”. So there are some interesting tonal switches throughout as the various parties fight for dominance.

IMO the good parts were the subplot about an attack ad claiming the girl scouts are promoting “child lesbianism”, Paul Reubens repeatedly appearing for a very distracting minor role, and the brain surgeons at the start who are constantly eating hamburgers in the hospital for unexplained reasons. There’s a part at the end where a senator says Jessica Biel should get to give a speech because “even the most partisan battles demand fairness!” and then after her speech she falls over and gives a fist salute. If it had ended there immediately I would have given it 100 stars for entertainment value. But unfortunately it turns out to be a feint before (a) an unhappy ending to make fun of sentimental frank capra type films (b) a happy ending which is not actually noticeably different to that of frank capra type films and then (c ) footage of all the characters joyously dancing at Tracy Morgan’s wedding, set to “Move On Up”.

[thecatamites]

The Art Of Us (2017) - An art history professor at the Cambridge Institute of Fine Art (not that Cambridge, since it’s filmed in Vancouver, but I guess someone felt the name gave things some extra pizzazz) has an artist pull out of the big show she was planning. To keep face in front of department rivals, she decides to pretend the amateur painter who walks her dog is the long-lost descendent of Vincent Van Gogh so that he can take the spot instead. This naturally works well with no complications.

I’m always interested in art-themed romcoms since the subject matter is kind of touchy: the in-universe art has to read as “good” in such an all-purpose and immediate way that it won’t be totally unbelievable when people swoon about it, but also anything snobby, alien or negative about the value or interpretation of that art has to be chopped off. Also, a male love interest who’s an artist needs to be carefully presented in such a way that we know this doesn’t mean he’s effette or unserious. In the case of this movie, that means being an ex-Marine who started taking art therapy classes while volunteering at the veteran’s hospital and who remains demurely skeptical about the value of his own work even as every other character in the movie lines up to announce him as a genius, a bold new talent, etc. The paintings themselves are very much, like, stock art used to advertise a photo printing studio, big pictures of flowers which are just abstract enough to be artsy but not so much it’d be discomfiting. It’s pretty much what you’d expect, although there is a good moment later on when a painting meant to be a beautiful likeness of another character in the film intead makes her look like an unidentifiable squat, grinning gremlin.

Otherwise the main interest is one of those romcom plots that crosses the invisible line from Quirky to Actionably Criminal. The writers seem aware of this because the first time the Van Gogh thing comes up, it’s presented as though it actually might be the case: it’s an old family legend that was passed down and has never been conclusively disproven, etc. But then as soon as they start telling people both the main characters seemingly just accept that it’s a total lie, and the possibility it’s not never comes up again. Maybe the intention was just to take the edge off a bit. Anyway, a funny thing about the grifterish quality of the plot is that it kind of absorbs a lot of the usual romcom stuff - the movie isn’t really about the two main characters reaching an uneasy accord, they more or less admit attraction to each other right away and then the rest of the drama is just tied up in their weird scam thing. The ending is less triumphant than is usual for a Hallmark movie, too - the main lady gets fired from her professorship, but it’s OK because she wants to return to painting now while just helping out at the local art college. The main guy’s big show and art dealership both fall through but he does sell enough paintings to do home repairs and is offered the chance to display them on the walls of a local flower shop. It’s not exactly a bummer but it’s interesting that they felt dubiously enough about these characters to deny them the expected success story ending (in which it’s OK that the guy isn’t related to Van Gogh because his paintings are so good, etc).

Minor character callouts: the rival art professor who we’re encouraged throughout to think of as a bad guy, even though he’s presumably better at the job than the protagonist (or at least hasn’t been caught yet). He also looks weirdly like that one art critic who got all his coffee from the gas station and then stored it in the fridge. I also liked the Dean’s wife who responds to all the paintings with a slightly frenzied level of enthusiasm and who pronounces “peonies” like it’s the name of a swiss mountain range.

[BustedAstromech]

@thecatamites

The main guy’s big show and art dealership both fall through but he does sell enough paintings to do home repairs and is offered the chance to display them on the walls of a local flower shop. It’s not exactly a bummer but it’s interesting that they felt dubiously enough about these characters to deny them the expected success story ending

2017? I wonder if the pastoralist values will start absorbing more traditional markers of success like ‘paid for what you’re good at’ and start to turn towards accepting humble stability. The return of the Gen X selling-out narrative as salve for lowered social climbing

[Victor]

@thecatamites

He also looks weirdly like that one art critic who got all his coffee from the gas station and then stored it in the fridge.

fuck off, Jerry

[Felix]

he actually wrote a really nice personal history in response to that photo going viral

My Appetites

[thecatamites]

i actually did find that part of the fantasy kind of engaging but it sits side by side with the bit where the early career academic teaching community college on the side lives by herself in a two-storey city-suburb manse, complete with both a garage and a little guest house where she stores her paints. maybe the chaotic mix of economic signifiers in these movies will end up feeling like the most prescient thing about them? delayed cultural reflection of the subprime crisis.

[BustedAstromech]

I can’t foresee them changing the characters’ material conditions even if or as the status signifiers change; the moving pictures’ tradition of the professional class crafting the populist voice isn’t going anywhere

[thecatamites]

i will grant that hallmark movies where everybody lives in David Decoteau all-purpose mcmansions are actually slightly less alien feeling than the higher budget ones where people hang out in studio apartments the size of a professional ice skating rink

honestly the haphazard way these things relate to the concept of money is definitely part of the appeal to me, the gold standard in my head is still the wedding planner movie where the two competing wedding planners (frugal vs opulent) learn the importance of compromise and settle on borrowing a friend’s yacht.

[u_u]

‘rom com middle class’ is a very special demographic, another consequence of

@u_u

everyone involved with making the film is bending over backwards to try to imagine what life is like for normal, non-celebrity people

imo

[thecatamites]

The Knight Before Christmas (2019) - yes, it is the season… This one’s about a 14th century english knight teleported forward to 2019 Ohio after an encounter with someone only ever referred to as “Old Crone”. As you can imagine, all kinds of fish-out-of-water situations result - but actually they don’t!! It turns out the 14th century knight has no real problem acclimatising to cars, electric lights, voice-activated technology or whatever, apart from referring to them as like “yon metal steed” (car) or “the box that makes merry” (TV). Even though they all think he’s just a confused christmas faire actor he gets on well with everybody in the movie and they give him minimal hassle about, like, carrying a sword around or demanding to be known as Sir Cole. Rather than being hounded by authority figures as is typical he actually gets an offer to join the police force by the end of the film. The closest we get to culture clash is a Heated Knight Moment where he calls the table server a wench, but this too is resolved without incident.

He DOES get hit by a car driven by Vanessa Hudgens but that’s essentially a meet-cute and causes no lasting damage (explained in the movie as being because he was covered in metal armor at the time…? eat shit ralph nader). It’s refreshing that they gloss over so many of the inevitable scenes of explaining things but there are times I wish they bit that bullet - at one point she refers to him as “a real renaissance man”, and I was hoping he’d ask “a what man?” and they’d have to have an awkward run-through of the Diet of Worms, et cetera. If anything he seems more at home than the weirdly credulous Hudgens character, who not only lets him move into her house indefinitely but also GIVES HIM THE KEYS TO HER CAR and lets him drive around by himself even though he constantly refers to it as a kind of horse and doesn’t know what buttons or stop signals are. No one is killed…? Also, every 20 minutes or so she tries saying to a different friend “but maybe he really is a knight… what if time travel is real…? do we really have all the answers…?” and they uniformly react by asking if she’s dumb or something.

Interestingly it feels like they don’t really go that heavily into the romantic fantasy of dating an actual knight or whatever - it’s more like the fantasy of a dumb but amiable foreign man who you can have fun showing your house off to. The past as foreign and unglobalized country. He does get a scene of going full Oblivion Guard on a pickpocket, and another one where he cuts down a christmas tree in one blow - this inspires a different unnamed guy in the background behind him to ALSO cut down a christmas tree in one blow and impress his previously disinterested wife. So I guess having a knight nearby just generally spreads the love around for everyone. He also apparently knows how to bake bread and make candles! The full package.

Other miscellaneous stuff:

• Since this is a netflix movie there are a few of the expected attempts to sneak through a pro-netflix agenda. This includes a part where the medieval knight asks “what say you and i binge watch together, m’lady” and maybe also the heartwarming finale where everyone bands together to get christmas gifts for the token poor family. Boy, maybe private charity is the solution and we don’t need to tax big media companies after all.
• The way they illustrate that he’s travelled in time from Ancient to Modern christmas is by playing a version of the nutcracker theme set to a “hip-hop” beat.
• At one point the lady’s sister drops by to hand them a Potion. Also, what are these pajama pants?

[offalynne]

important to note that following the grand tradition of bloggers occupying large manhattan flats, as a well to do single suburban high school teacher, she doesn’t actually permit the impropriety of allowing him staying in her home but rather her “guest home out back” which though apparently unoccupied is fully furnished.

[BLUE_BLACK_PURPLE]

I’ve seen this one with my girlfriend, yeah. It was pretty alright! She watches all these cheesy Christmas movies when she needs background noise and doesn’t want to think about what’s on